Steppenwolf

Hesse published Steppenwolf in 1927, as Europe was still reeling from the devastation of WWI and as rising nationalism in Germany signaled that another conflagration was coming. WWI forms the backdrop of Haller’s experience in a very direct way, as his unpopular opposition to the war has cost him his position as a public intellectual. Feeling alienated by the militant nationalism he sees all around him, Haller initially views the Modernism of the 1920s as a scene of cultural devastation like that described in T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. Millions of people have died in a conflict between dying empires, and the values and beliefs that propped up those empires can no longer be credited. Haller sees the young, fashionable people around him—those who dance and frequent jazz clubs—as trying to build a new culture in the ruins of the old one, and he sees the approach of another war as proof that the project is not working. In his eyes, no jazz musician can compare with Mozart, nor can any modern poet approach the greatness of Goethe. Moreover, very few modern people can understand the greatness of Mozart or Goethe, as evidenced by his disgust with the portrait of Goethe in the professor’s house.