Steppenwolf Read Free

suffering was masterly, limitless, awesome. At the same time I realized that his pessimism wasn’t based on contempt for the world but on self-contempt, for however ruthlessly critical he could be when condemning institutions or individuals, he never spared himself. He himself was always the first target of his barbed remarks, the prime object of his hatred and rejection.
    At this point I can’t help including a psychological comment. Although I know very little about Steppenwolf’s life, I do have every reason to suppose that he was brought up by loving yet strict and very religious parents and teachers in that spirit which makes ‘breaking of the will’ the foundation of child-rearing and education. In the case of this pupil, however, their attempt to destroy his personality and break his will had not succeeded. He was far too strong and tough, far too proud and mentally alert for that to happen. Instead of destroying his personality they had only succeeded in teaching him to hate himself. Now, for the rest of his life, it was against himself, against this innocent and admirable target, that all his imaginative genius and brainpower was directed. For in one respect he was, despite everything, a Christian through and through, a martyr through and through. That is to say, he
aimed every cutting remark, every criticism, all the malice and hatred he was capable of, first and foremost at himself. As far as others around him were concerned, he made the most heroic and earnest efforts to love them, to be fair to them, not to hurt them; for ‘Love thy neighbour’ had been drummed into him just as deeply as hatred of self. Thus his whole life was an example of how impossible it is to love one’s neighbour without loving oneself, proof that self-hatred is exactly the same thing as crass egotism, and in the end leads to exactly the same terrible isolation and despair.
    But the time has now come to put my own thoughts to one side and speak of actual facts. Well, the first thing I learned about Herr Haller, partly through my snooping, partly from observations made by my aunt, had to do with the way he led his life. It soon became apparent that he was not pursuing any practical profession but was a man of ideas and books. He always stayed in bed very late, often only getting up shortly before midday, when he would walk in his dressing gown the few steps from the bedroom across to his living room. A big, homely attic space with two windows, within a few days this living room already looked different from how it had when occupied by other tenants. It was filling up, and as time went by it got more and more packed with things. Pictures were hung, drawings stuck on the walls, sometimes illustrations cut from magazines, which were frequently replaced by others. There was a southern landscape hanging there,
photographs of a small German country town, evidently Haller’s home, and between them bright watercolours which, as we only discovered later, he had painted himself. Then came the photograph of a pretty young woman, or young girl. For a while there was a Siamese Buddha hanging on the wall, but a reproduction of Michelangelo’s
Night
took its place, and it in turn gave way to a portrait of Mahatma Gandhi. There were books everywhere, not just filling the large bookcase, but lying around on the tables, on the fine old writing desk, on the divan, on the chairs, and on the floor. Slips of paper that constantly changed were inserted in them, marking the pages. And the number of books constantly grew because he brought whole bundles back from the libraries as well as very often receiving parcels of them in the post. The man occupying this room was quite possibly a learned scholar. The cigar smoke that enveloped everything fitted this picture, as did the
ashtrays and cigar stubs that lay around everywhere. Yet a large proportion of the books was not academic in content, but literary. Works by great writers of all periods andnationalities