The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Hermann Hesse · Der Steppenwolf · a novel in three voices, without numbered chapters: an editor’s preface, the papers of Harry Haller headed “Nur für Verrückte”, and the Treatise on the Steppenwolf bound into them · published by S. Fischer, Berlin, in 1927, when its author was fifty · scored as the novel as published in 1927, on Hesse’s German, read from knowledge; no text in hand, German quoted only where its words are certain, with the desk’s own English beneath, and Basil Creighton’s translation as revised by Joseph Mileck and Horst Frenz for sense
Mode
Confessional novel of the artist turned psychological fantasy; a record, a frame and a mock-scholarly treatise set against one another
Mythos
The man who is half wolf, made load-bearing and then dissolved; Hermine as a guide of souls with a Hermetic name; a descent through a masked ball into a theatre, a trial and a sentence to return; Mozart and Goethe as laughing Immortals
Phase
From the editor’s account of the lodger on the clean staircase, through Haller’s solitary evenings, the door in the wall and the Treatise, the professor’s dinner and the lessons in dancing, to the masked ball, the Magic Theatre, the trial and the resolve to play the game again
Presentation
Fiction; three textual layers: a preface by the nephew of Haller’s landlady, Haller’s own papers, and the Treatise reproduced whole within them; not divided into numbered chapters; short for its reputation, some two hundred to two hundred and fifty pages in common editions
Register
From the preface’s prim decency, through Haller’s fevered and often self-pitying lyric and the Treatise’s amused authority, to the phantasmagoria of the theatre and the cold, high laughter of the Immortals
Scale
One mind in depth; eros and the body; the high tradition of Bach and Mozart against jazz and the foxtrot; the bourgeois economy and its outsider; the war article and the nationalist professor; a sacred order in the Immortals: held in one structure, within a city of bars and rented rooms
Governing Proposition
A man near fifty who calls himself a wolf of the steppes lives as a lodger in a respectable house, despises the order that keeps him, and leaves behind a record of his last months, found and published by his landlady’s nephew. Into that record is bound a treatise that tells him he is not two, man and wolf, but many. The wager of the novel is that three partial views of one man, none sufficient, can show what no single voice could: that the outsider lives on the world he scorns, that the dual self is a flattering fiction, and that the cure for an earnest despair may be to learn the laughter of the Immortals.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The book opens not with its hero but with a witness. A respectable young man, the nephew of Haller’s landlady, tells how a lodger came to the house, kept to his rooms, and left behind a bundle of papers, which he now publishes. His preface is decent, bewildered and exactly pitched. It sets the bourgeois view of Harry Haller before Haller has said a word, and it shows a man who scorns order and is nonetheless moved by a clean stairwell: the outsider seen from the staircase he despises and depends on.
Then the papers, under their heading: “Nur für Verrückte”
“For madmen only”. Haller’s record runs from his solitary evenings to the masked ball and the Magic Theatre, and bound into it, reproduced whole, is a pamphlet in a third voice, the Treatise on the Steppenwolf. The book is not divided into numbered chapters; it is short for its reputation. Its three layers, the preface, the record and the Treatise, are its architecture, and none of them is sufficient on its own.
Der Steppenwolf was published by S. Fischer in Berlin in 1927, when Hesse was fifty, after his years in Basel and Zurich from 1924 to 1926 and his psychoanalysis with J. B. Lang, a pupil of Jung. The hero’s initials are the author’s, H. H. The unit scored is the novel as published in 1927: preface, papers and Treatise. Hesse’s later note to readers, printed in later editions, is context and is not scored.
Movement II
Haller’s evenings are solitary and bitter: the night streets, the old music in which he catches for a moment a trace of the eternal, the disgust at gramophones and newspapers. Much of this is mood rather than disclosure, and the record is often prolix, lyric in a way that turns at length to self-pity. But the passage from the realist evening into something else is prepared with care. There is a door in a wall, and a sign: “Magisches Theater. Eintritt nicht für jedermann”
“Magic Theatre. Entrance not for everybody”.
A stranger with a placard hands Haller a pamphlet, and the pamphlet is the Treatise. Its voice is third person, faintly ironic and authoritative, a tone of amused authority that is one of the book’s clever inventions. It tells the Steppenwolf what he is: not two, man and wolf, but many, and the dual picture he suffers under is a simplification he clings to because it flatters him. It tells him, too, that the outsider lives on the bourgeois world he despises, within its tolerance and on its money.
That second finding is the book’s truest and least sentimental. Haller lives on investments, loves the order of the house he scorns, and cannot leave the world he condemns. The Treatise is required: it supplies the law the theatre will stage. It is also the book’s chief cost. It explains in advance what the ending enacts, so that the thesis is said twice, once as essay and once as phantasmagoria, and the second loses some of its force by being foreseen.
Movement III
Haller has written an article against the nationalist fever for war, and the world of the professor is hostile to him for it. At the professor’s house he meets an engraving of Goethe, a prettified Goethe, and insults it, and flees the house. The scene is exact and necessary: the outsider’s contempt for the bourgeois picture of greatness, and the bourgeois order’s contempt for the man who has broken with its politics. The war theme is present but stated more than uncovered.
Hermine leads him from there. Her name is a feminine of Hermann, and it carries Hermes, the guide of souls; she knows Haller as a mirror knows him. She teaches him to dance. Through her come Maria, and Pablo the saxophonist, and the jazz and the foxtrot that Haller has despised. The middle of the book is its education of the senses, eros and the body set against the high tradition he has lived by, and it earns its place.
It also runs long. Its one lesson, that life must be taken lightly, is repeated in several keys, and a careful editor could cut perhaps a tenth of the book without loss. Here the scheme beneath the figures, anima, shadow and the integration of the self, is most visible: Hermine and Pablo are diagrammed as much as they are lived. The book quickens again only as the masked ball comes on.
Movement IV
At the masked ball Haller loses himself in a crowd for the first time, and the book reaches one of its true heights. Then the theatre opens: a corridor of doors, each giving on a scene. The theory of the many selves becomes a stage. In a game of chess the pieces of a personality are set up and can be played again; behind another door Haller and his old friend Gustav sit in a tree and shoot at motorists. The hunt and the chess are the theatre at its most brilliant.
Other doors are thin. The run of scenes is as often a set of illustrations as a rising action, and the frame is episodic: it could hold more doors or fewer. The descent itself, though, is built: through the ball into the theatre, toward a judgement and a return, an underworld journey on which the archetypes carry the plot. The man who is half wolf, older than Hesse, is made load-bearing and then dissolved; the archetype turns out to be the protagonist’s error.
The theatre has event and cost. Haller kills Hermine with a knife. Whether Hermine is a person or a projection, whether the killing is real, the book does not settle; its answer is that it does not matter, which binds the realist opening and the fantastic close under one law and leaves some readers with a sense of evasion. The opening on a clean staircase and a knife in a theatre of the psyche obey the rule the Treatise laid down between them.
Movement V
Haller is tried before the Immortals and sentenced to live and to learn to laugh. Their laughter, Mozart’s and Goethe’s, is the book’s best image: cold and high, icy and liberating at once, a judgement on Haller’s earnestness and on the reader’s. Goethe appears in a dream not as the bust of the professor’s engraving but as a mocking old immortal. Mozart listens to Handel through a radio, and the music that runs through the whole book, from Haller’s Bach and Mozart to Pablo’s saxophone, is reconciled in that absurd and exact figure.
Pablo becomes at the last a figure of Mozart. Haller resolves to play the game of the figures again, and the record ends: “Mozart wartete auf mich”
“Mozart was waiting for me”. Critics still dispute whether this is a cure or an evasion, and what the laughter finally means. The book has been read through two great waves, the Weimar years and the counterculture of the 1960s, and it gives most to a reader of twenty: its theory, once grasped, does not deepen.
Its ancestor on this desk is Notes from Underground, at 8.9, the original confession of the outsider who scorns and needs the order around him, harder and less self-pitying. The Magic Mountain, of the same field three years before, stands at 8.9, above it on every axis but The Imperishable, where the two are level. Fifth Business, at 7.6, takes the same depth psychology as a proven path where Hesse made a form of it, and stands below; Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, at 8.2, an ageing man’s reckoning through dream with a young guide, stands level with it within a tenth.
Act III · The Twelve
Much is required. The preface sets the bourgeois view of Haller beside his own, and the book’s argument is that he is a product of the order he despises. The Treatise is required in principle, since it supplies the theory of the many selves that the Magic Theatre will stage; the scene at the professor’s, with the Goethe engraving, is exact and necessary. What holds the axis here is that the Treatise explains in advance what the ending enacts, so that the book says its thesis twice, once as essay and once as phantasmagoria, and the second loses force by being foreseen. The middle, the dance lessons and the evenings with Maria and Pablo, earns its place but runs long and repeats its one lesson in several keys. A careful editor could cut perhaps a tenth without loss.
Score: 7.8 / 10
Two disclosures can be stated and hold. The first is that the self is not two, man and wolf, but many, and that the dual picture is a simplification a suffering man clings to because it flatters him: the Treatise says so outright, and the theatre’s chess of the pieces of a personality shows it. The second is sharper and less sentimental: the outsider who despises the bourgeois lives within its tolerance and on its money. Haller loves the clean stairwell, lives on investments, and cannot leave the world he scorns. Against these, much of what he discloses of his despair is mood, the night streets and the disgust at gramophones and newspapers, and the war theme is stated more than uncovered. Real and holding, but narrower than a world’s condition.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The book reaches elevation several times and knows how. A trace of the eternal caught in a phrase of old music; the night of the masked ball, when Haller loses himself in a crowd for the first time; and above all the laughter of the Immortals, Mozart and Goethe, cold and high, which the book sets against Haller’s earnestness: icy and liberating at once, it is the book’s best image. The doors of the Magic Theatre give strange and sometimes terrible scenes, the hunt in which Haller and his old friend Gustav shoot at motorists from a tree, the killing of Hermine with a knife. But the heights are uneven. Some lyric passages tip into the inflated, and the run of doors is as often a set of illustrations as a rising action.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Myth is built, not merely evoked. The man who is half wolf is a figure older than Hesse, and the book makes it load-bearing and then dissolves it: the archetype is the protagonist’s error. Hermine, whose name is a feminine of Hermann and carries Hermes in it, is a guide of souls who knows Haller as a mirror knows him; Pablo, the saxophonist, keeps the theatre and becomes at the last a figure of Mozart. The descent through the ball into the theatre, the trial before the Immortals and the sentence to live and learn to laugh make an underworld journey with its judgement and its return. Held below the gate because the scheme is Jungian, anima, shadow, the integration of the self, and at moments its machinery shows: the figures are diagrammed as much as lived.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The book departs hard from what it inherits: the German novel of education and the confessional novel of the artist, Hesse’s own earlier mode among them. It breaks its narrative into three voices, binds a mock-scholarly treatise into a novel, and ends neither in maturity nor in death but in a fantastic theatre of the psyche, with a saxophone set beside Mozart, in 1927. The turn had a cost, against a tradition and against its author’s own idiom; a later note by Hesse to readers complains of its misreading. It was not without precedent: Novalis, Hoffmann’s fantasies and the frame tales of German Romanticism stand behind it, and part of the swerve is a return to them. It does not break the sentence or the novel’s grammar as Joyce or Döblin did in the same decade. It meets the bar exactly.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The form is the instrument of the knowledge. The book’s claim is that a man is many and that each partial view of him is a fiction, and its form is three partial views: the editor’s decent bewilderment, Haller’s fevered record, the Treatise’s cool diagnosis, none sufficient, each correcting the others. The Magic Theatre then turns the theory of the many selves into a stage on which the pieces can be set up and played again. Make it a single first person and the book loses its irony against Haller; give it a realist close and it loses its thesis. Held below the top because the Treatise’s explicitness lets the form explain itself, and because the theatre’s doors are an episodic frame that could hold more scenes or fewer.
Score: 8.5 / 10
The evidence is mixed. The book has been read for ninety-nine years, through two great waves, the Weimar years and the counterculture of the 1960s in America and Europe, and it has sustained psychological, Jungian, musical, political and autobiographical readings. Critics still dispute whether the ending is a cure or an evasion, whether Hermine is a person or a projection, and what the laughter of the Immortals finally means. That is real yield on return. But a common experience of the book is that it gives most to a reader of twenty and less to a reader of fifty, the age of its hero: the Treatise’s theory is clear, and once grasped it does not deepen; the theatre’s symbols open and then close. A deep well, with a bottom.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The intrinsic force is a real reorganisation: the confessional novel made into a psychological fantasy with a theoretical insert, and depth psychology and modern popular music brought into the German novel at once. The field is the German novel of the 1920s, which also holds The Magic Mountain (1924), Kafka’s posthumous novels and Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929); against them the reorganisation is less, since the book remakes neither the novel’s language nor its scale. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: Colin Wilson built The Outsider (1956) in part on Haller; the counterculture of the 1960s took up the Magic Theatre; and the rock band Steppenwolf took its name from the book in 1967. That reach runs mostly into culture and readers rather than into later novels, and is credited only where named.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The text survives whole as Hesse published it, ninety-nine years ago, with no question of form or transmission. Its presence is continuous and wide: translated into many languages, read across two separate generations’ revivals and still widely read now, and taught, though less centrally in the academy than Mann or Kafka. The jazz and the foxtrots are dated surfaces the book has outlived. It sits at the foot of the usual figure for its span and not above it because much of its presence is the reading of the young and of one cultural moment, the 1960s, which carries its own fixity.
Score: 9.0 / 10
The command of the means is real. The three voices are handled with assurance: the preface’s prim decency is exactly pitched, and the Treatise’s tone of amused authority is a clever invention. The passages from realist evening to fantasy are prepared with care, the stranger with the placard, the door in the wall, the sign of the Magic Theatre; and the second half quickens well into the ball. Charged: Haller’s record is often prolix, lyric in a way that turns at length to self-pity, and the doors of the theatre vary in finish, some brilliant, the hunt and the game of chess, some thin. The German is weighed here mainly by its structure and its known clarity, and is neither charged nor credited beyond what is clear.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: the opening, a realist account of a lodger on a clean staircase seen by a respectable nephew, and the close, a theatre in which a man kills a woman with a knife, is tried before the Immortals and is laughed at. They obey one law because the book lays it down between them: the Treatise has said that the self is a theatre of many figures, and the theatre is that law made visible. The music runs through all of it, from Haller’s Bach and Mozart to Pablo’s saxophone, and is reconciled by Mozart himself listening to Handel through a radio. The strain is at the level of event: is Hermine real, is the killing real? The book’s answer, that it does not matter, is a choice some will find evasive.
Score: 8.3 / 10
The orders are held in one structure, not listed: consciousness above all, in depth; eros and the body, in the dance lessons and Maria; art and the high tradition against popular music; the bourgeois economy and its outsider; politics, in the war article and the nationalist professor; and a kind of sacred order in the Immortals and their laughter. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is range. The book is short and centred on a single mind: one man, his few acquaintances, a city of bars and rented rooms. The family, labour, the state and history appear only as Haller’s views of them, and it does not hold the world the large novels hold.
Score: 7.6 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.3 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 9.0, then The Swerve and The Living Form at 8.5. A text whole for ninety-nine years and read across two generations’ revivals; a turn away from the novel of education and the artist’s confession into three voices, a bound treatise and a fantastic theatre of the psyche; and a form that is itself the knowledge, three partial views of one man, none sufficient, each correcting the others.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.6, for a short book centred on a single mind in a city of bars and rented rooms. Then The Inevitable at 7.8, since the Treatise says in advance what the theatre enacts and the dance lessons repeat their one lesson; and The Sublime and The Bottomless Well at 8.0, for heights that come often but unevenly and a theory that, once grasped, does not deepen.
The Necessity Cap clears at 7.8 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.5, The Made at 8.3, The Inner Law at 8.3, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 9.0 clears the bar of 8.5 and The Swerve meets it exactly at 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 falls short, since its disclosures of the many selves and of the outsider living on the order he scorns are real but narrower than a world’s condition; The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 falls short, since its Jungian machinery shows and the figures are diagrammed as much as lived; and Pressure on Tradition at 8.2 falls short, since the book remakes neither the novel’s language nor its scale and its reach runs into culture more than into later novels. The Universal Minimum is met (no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.8, against 7.5) and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.6. The aggregate, 8.3, holds the work in Tier IV of itself; the unmet gate would hold it there in any case.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of Hermann Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf, published by S. Fischer, Berlin, in 1927: the editor’s preface, the papers of Harry Haller headed “Nur für Verrückte”, and the Treatise on the Steppenwolf bound into them, without numbered chapters. The unit is the novel as published in 1927; Hesse’s later note to readers, printed in later editions, is context and is not scored. Every axis is judged on Hesse’s German. No text was in hand; nothing was measured on a text, and no quotation was checked against a file. German is quoted only where its words are certain, briefly, with the desk’s own English beneath: the heading of the papers, the sign of the Magic Theatre and the last line. Everything else is paraphrased. The structure, the persons and the turns of the book are known closely; its German is known only in a few famous phrases, and its sentence music is not judged closely. Translation · Basil Creighton’s English (1929), as revised by Joseph Mileck and Horst Frenz (1963), was used for sense; David Horrocks’s later Penguin version is named as context only. Neither is quoted, and nothing in either is charged or credited to the novel. Facts that could not be verified are not given, among them the kind of plant on the landing of the house, the share of the book the Treatise takes, the first readers’ taking of it as a sick man’s confession, the date of Hesse’s later note, the citing of Hesse by Timothy Leary and his colleagues, and whether the book has been in print in German without a break.