Steppenwolf
house with araucarias. But though I am a shabby old Steppenwolf, still
I’m the son of a mother and my mother too was a middle-class man’s wife
and raised plants and took care to have her house and home as clean and
neat and tidy as ever she could make it. All that is brought back to me
by this breath of turpentine and by the araucaria, and so here I sat me
down then and there; and I look into this quiet little garden of order
and rejoice that such things still are.”
He wanted to get up, but found it difficult; and he did not repulse me
when I offered him a little help. I was silent, but I submitted just
as my aunt had done before me to a certain charm the strange man could
sometimes exercise. We went slowly up the stairs together, and at his
door, the key in his hand, he looked me once more in the eyes in a
friendly way and said: “You’ve come from business? Well, of course,
I know little of all that. I live a bit to one side, on the edge of
things, you see. But you too, I believe, interest yourself in books and
such matters. Your aunt told me one day that you had been through the
Gymnasium and were a good Greek scholar. Now, this morning I came on a
passage in Novalis. May I show it you? It would delight you, I know.”
He took me into his room, which smelt strongly of tobacco, and took
out a book from one of the heaps, turned the leaves and looked for the
passage.
“This is good too, very good,” he said, “listen to this: ‘A man
should be proud of suffering. All suffering is a reminder of our high
estate.’ Fine! Eighty years before Nietzsche. But that is not the
sentence I meant. Wait a moment, here I have it. This: ‘Most men will
not swim before they are able to.’ Is not that witty? Naturally, they
won’t swim! They are born for the solid earth, not for the water. And
naturally they won’t think. They are made for life, not for thought.
Yes, and he who thinks, what’s more, he who makes thought his business,
he may go far in it, but he has bartered the solid earth for the water
all the same, and one day he will drown.”
He had got hold of me now. I was interested; and I stayed on a short
while with him; and after that we often talked when we met on the
stairs or in the street. On such occasions I always had at first the
feeling that he was being ironical with me. But it was not so. He had
a real respect for me, just as he had for the araucaria. He was so
convinced and conscious of his isolation, his swimming in the water,
his uprootedness, that a glimpse now and then of the orderly daily
round--the punctuality, for example, that kept me to my office hours,
or an expression let fall by a servant or tramway-conductor--acted on
him literally as a stimulus without in the least arousing his scorn. At
first all this seemed to me a ridiculous exaggeration, the affectation
of a gentleman of leisure, a playful sentimentality. But I came to
see more and more that from the empty spaces of his lone wolfishness
he actually really admired and loved our little bourgeois world as
something solid and secure, as the home and peace which must ever
remain far and unattainable, with no road leading from him to them. He
took off his hat to our charwoman, a worthy person, every time he met
her, with genuine respect; and when my aunt had any little occasion to
talk to him, to draw his attention, it might be, to some mending of his
linen or to warn him of a button hanging loose on his coat, he listened
to her with an air of great attention and consequence, as though it
were only with an extreme and desperate effort that he could force his
way through any crack into our little peaceful world and be at home
there if only for an hour.
During that very first conversation, about the araucaria, he called
himself the Steppenwolf, and this too estranged and disturbed me a
little. What an expression! However, custom did not only reconcile me
to it, but soon I never thought of him by any other name; nor could I
to-day hit on a better description of him. A wolf of the Steppes that
had lost its way and strayed into the towns and the life of the herd,
a more striking image could not be found for his shy loneliness, his
savagery, his restlessness, his homesickness, his homelessness.
I was able once to observe him for a whole evening. It was at a
Symphony concert, where to my surprise I found him seated near me. He
did not see me. First some Handel was played, noble and lovely music.
But the Steppenwolf sat absorbed in his own thoughts, detached alike
from the music and his surroundings. Unheeding and alone, he sat with
downcast eyes, and a cold but sorrowful expression. After the Handel
came a little Symphony of Friedman Bach and after a few notes I was
astonished to see him begin to smile and give himself up to the music.
He was abstracted--but happily so--and lost in such pleasant dreams,
that for at least ten minutes I paid more attention to him than to the
music. When the piece ended he woke up, and made a movement to go;
but after all he kept his seat and heard the last piece too. It was
_Variations_ by Reger, a composition that many found rather long
and tiresome. The Steppenwolf, too, who at first made up his mind to
listen, wandered again, put his hands into his pockets and sank once
more into his own thoughts, not happily and dreamily as before, but
sadly and finally irritated. His face was once more vacant and grey.
The light in it was quenched and he looked old, ill and discontented.
I saw him again after the concert in the street and walked along behind
him. Wrapped in his cloak he went his way joylessly and wearily in the
direction of our quarter, but stopped in front of a small old-fashioned
inn, and after looking irresolutely at the time, went in. I obeyed a
momentary impulse and followed him; and there he sat at a table in the
backroom of the bar, greeted by hostess and waitress as a well-known
guest. Greeting him, too, I took my seat beside him. We sat there for
an hour, and while I drank two glasses of mineral water, he accounted
for a pint of red wine and then called for another half. I remarked
that I had been to the concert, but he did not follow up this topic. He
read the label on my bottle and asked whether I would not drink some
wine. When I declined his offer and said that I never drank it, the old
helpless expression came over his face.
“You’re quite right there,” he said. “I have practised abstinence
myself for years, and had my time of fasting, too, but now I find
myself once more beneath the sign of Aquarius, a dark and humid
constellation.”
And then, when I playfully took up his allusion and remarked how
unlikely it seemed to me that he really believed in astrology, he
promptly resumed the too polite tone which often hurt me and said: “You
are right. Unfortunately, I cannot believe in that science either.”
I took my leave and went. It was very late before he came in, but his
step was as usual, and as always, instead of going straight to bed, he
stayed up an hour longer in his sitting-room, as I from my neighbouring
room could hear plainly enough.
There was another evening which I have not forgotten. My aunt was out
and I was alone in the house, when the doorbell rang. I opened the door
and there stood a young and very pretty woman, whom, as soon as she
asked for Mr. Haller, I recognised from the photograph in his room.
I showed her his door and withdrew. She stayed a short while above,
but soon I heard them both come down stairs and go out, talking and
laughing together very happily. I was much astonished that the hermit
had his love, and one so young and pretty and elegant; and all my
conjectures about him and his life were upset once more. But before an
hour had gone he came back alone and dragged himself wearily upstairs
with his sad and heavy tread. For hours together he paced softly to and
fro in his sitting-room, exactly like a wolf in its cage. The whole
night till close on morning there was light in his room. I know nothing
at all about this occasion, and have only this to add. On one other
occasion I saw him in this lady’s company. It was in one of the streets
of the town. They were arm in arm and he looked very happy; and again I
wondered to see how much charm--what an even child-like expression--his
care-ridden face had sometimes. It explained the young lady to me,
also the predilection my aunt had for him. That day, too, however, he
came back in the evening, sad and wretched as usual. I met him at the
door and under his cloak, as many a time before, he had the bottle of
Italian wine, and he sat with it half the night in his hell upstairs.
It grieved me. What a comfortless, what a forlorn and shiftless life he
led!
And now I have gossiped enough. No more is needed to show that the
Steppenwolf lived a suicidal existence. But all the same I do not
believe that he took his own life when, after paying all he owed but
without a word of warning or farewell, he left our town one day and
vanished. We have not heard from him since and we are still keeping
some letters that came for him after he had left. He left nothing
behind but his manuscript. It was written during the time he was here,
and he left it with a few lines to say that I might do what I liked
with it.
It was not in my power to verify the truth of the experiences related
in Haller’s manuscript. I have no doubt that they are for the most
part fictitious, not, however, in the sense of arbitrary invention.
They are rather the deeply lived spiritual events which he has
attempted to express by giving them the form of tangible experiences.
The partly fantastic occurrences in Haller’s fiction come presumably
from the later period of his stay here, and I have no doubt that even
they have some basis in real occurrence. At that time our guest did in
fact alter very much in behaviour and in appearance. He was out a great
deal, for whole nights sometimes; and his books lay untouched. On the
rare occasions when I saw him at that time I was very much struck by
his air of vivacity and youth. Sometimes, indeed, he seemed positively
happy. This does not mean that a new and heavy depression did not
follow immediately. All day long he lay in bed. He had no desire for
food. At that time the young lady appeared once more on the scene, and
an extremely violent, I may even say brutal, quarrel occurred which
upset the whole house and for which Haller begged my aunt’s pardon for
days after.
No, I am sure he has not taken his life. He is still alive, and
somewhere wearily goes up and down the stairs of strange houses,
stares somewhere at clean-scoured parquet floors and carefully tended
araucarias, sits for days in libraries and nights in taverns, or lying
on a hired sofa, listens to the world beneath his window and the hum
of human life from which he knows that he is excluded. But he has not
killed himself, for a glimmer of belief still tells him that he is to
drink this frightful suffering in his heart to the dregs, and that it
is of this suffering he must die. I think of him often. He has not made
life lighter for me. He had not the gift of fostering strength and joy
in me. Oh, on the contrary! But I am not he, and I live my own life, a
narrow, middle-class life, but a solid one, filled with duties. And so
we can think of him peacefully and affectionately, my aunt and I. She
would have more to say of him than I have, but that lies buried in her
good heart.
* * * * *
And now that we come to these records of Haller’s, these partly
diseased, partly beautiful and thoughtful fantasies, I must confess
that if they had fallen into my hands by chance and if I had not
known their author, I should most certainly have thrown them away in
disgust. But owing to my acquaintance with Haller I have been able,