Steppenwolf
to some extent, to understand them, and even to appreciate them. I
should hesitate to share them with others if I saw in them nothing but
the pathological fancies of a single and isolated case of a diseased
temperament. But I see something more in them. I see them as a document
of the times, for Haller’s sickness of the soul, as I now know, is not
the eccentricity of a single individual, but the sickness of the times
themselves, the neurosis of that generation to which Haller belongs,
a sickness, it seems, that by no means attacks the weak and worthless
only but, rather, precisely those who are strongest in spirit and
richest in gifts.
These records, however much or however little of real life may lie at
the back of them, are not an attempt to disguise or to palliate this
widespread sickness of our times. They are an attempt to present the
sickness itself in its actual manifestation. They mean, literally, a
journey through hell, a sometimes fearful, sometimes courageous journey
through the chaos of a world whose souls dwell in darkness, a journey
undertaken with the determination to go through hell from one end to
the other, to give battle to chaos, and to suffer torture to the full.
It was some remembered conversation with Haller that gave me the key
to this interpretation. He said to me once when we were talking of
the so-called horrors of the Middle Ages: “These horrors were really
non-existent. A man of the Middle Ages would detest the whole mode of
our present day life as something far more than horrible, far more than
barbarous. Every age, every culture, every custom and tradition has its
own character, its own weakness and its own strength, its beauties and
ugliness; accepts certain sufferings as matters of course, puts up
patiently with certain evils. Human life is reduced to real suffering,
to hell, only when two ages, two cultures and religions overlap. A man
of the Classical Age who had to live in medieval times would suffocate
miserably just as a savage does in the midst of our civilisation. Now
there are times when a whole generation is caught in this way between
two ages, two modes of life, with the consequence that it loses all
power to understand itself and has no standard, no security, no
simple acquiescence. Naturally, every one does not feel this equally
strongly. A nature such as Nietzsche’s had to suffer our present ills
more than a generation in advance. What he had to go through alone and
misunderstood, thousands suffer to-day.”
I often had to think of these words while reading the records. Haller
belongs to those who have been caught between two ages, who are outside
of all security and simple acquiescence. He belongs to those whose fate
it is to live the whole riddle of human destiny heightened to the pitch
of a personal torture, a personal hell.
There, as it seems to me, lies the meaning these records can have for
us, and because of this I decided to publish them. For the rest, I
neither approve nor condemn them. Let every reader do as his conscience
bids him.
HARRY HALLER’S RECORDS
“FOR MADMEN ONLY”
The day had gone by just as days go by. I had killed it in accordance
with my primitive and retiring way of life. I had worked for an hour or
two and perused the pages of old books. I had had pains for two hours,
as elderly people do. I had taken a powder and been very glad when the
pains consented to disappear. I had lain in a hot bath and absorbed its
kindly warmth. Three times the post had come with undesired letters and
circulars to look through. I had done my breathing exercises, but found
it convenient to-day to omit the thought exercises. I had been for an
hour’s walk and seen the loveliest feathery cloud patterns pencilled
against the sky. That was very delightful. So was the reading of the
old books. So was the lying in the warm bath. But, taken all in all,
it had not been exactly a day of rapture. No, it had not even been a
day brightened with happiness and joy. Rather, it had been just one
of those days which for a long while now had fallen to my lot; the
moderately pleasant, the wholly bearable and tolerable, lukewarm days
of a discontented middle-aged man; days without special pains, without
special cares, without particular worry, without despair; days which
put the question quietly of their own accord whether the time has
not come to follow the example of Adalbert Stifter and have a fatal
accident while shaving.
He who has known the other days, the angry ones of gout attacks, or
those with that wicked headache rooted behind the eyeballs that casts a
spell on every nerve of eye and ear with a fiendish delight in torture,
or soul-destroying, evil days of inward vacancy and despair, when,
on this distracted earth, sucked dry by the vampires of finance, the
world of men and of so-called culture grins back at us with the lying,
vulgar, brazen glamour of a Fair and dogs us with the persistence of
an emetic, and when all is concentrated and focussed to the last pitch
of the intolerable upon your own sick self--he who has known these
days of hell may be content indeed with normal half-and-half days like
to-day. Thankfully you sit by the warm stove, thankfully you assure
yourself as you read your morning paper that another day has come and
no war broken out, no new dictatorship has been set up, no peculiarly
disgusting scandal been unveiled in the worlds of politics or finance.
Thankfully you tune the strings of your mouldering lyre to a moderated,
to a passably joyful, nay, to an even delighted psalm of thanksgiving
and with it bore your quiet, flabby and slightly muzzy half-and-half
god of contentment; and in the thick warm air of a contented boredom
and very welcome painlessness the nodding mandarin of a half-and-half
god and the nodding middle-aged gentleman who sings his muffled psalm
look as like each other as two peas.
There is much to be said for contentment and painlessness, for these
bearable and submissive days, on which neither pain nor pleasure is
audible, but pass by whispering and on tip-toe. But the worst of it is
that it is just this contentment that I cannot endure. After a short
time it fills me with irrepressible hatred and nausea. In desperation
I have to escape and throw myself on the road to pleasure, or, if that
cannot be, on the road to pain. When I have neither pleasure nor pain
and have been breathing for a while the lukewarm insipid air of these
so-called good and tolerable days, I feel so bad in my childish soul
that I smash my mouldering lyre of thanksgiving in the face of the
slumbering god of contentment and would rather feel the very devil burn
in me than this warmth of a well-heated room. A wild longing for strong
emotions and sensations seethes in me, a rage against this toneless,
flat, normal and sterile life. I have a mad impulse to smash something,
a warehouse, perhaps, or a cathedral, or myself, to commit outrages, to
pull off the wigs of a few revered idols, to provide a few rebellious
schoolboys with the longed-for ticket to Hamburg, or to stand one
or two representatives of the established order on their heads. For
what I always hated and detested and cursed above all things was this
contentment, this healthiness and comfort, this carefully preserved
optimism of the middle classes, this fat and prosperous brood of
mediocrity.
It was in such a mood then that I finished this not intolerable and
very ordinary day as dusk set in. I did not end it in a manner becoming
a rather ailing man and go to bed tempted by a hot water bottle.
Instead I put on my shoes ill-humouredly, discontented and disgusted
with the little work I had done, and went out into the dark and foggy
streets to drink what men according to an old convention call “a glass
of wine,” at the sign of the Steel Helmet.
In this plight then, I went down the steep stairs from my attic-cell
among strangers, those smug and well-brushed stairs of a three-storey
house, let as three flats to highly respectable families. I don’t know
how it comes about, but I, the homeless Steppenwolf, the solitary, the
hater of life’s petty conventions, always take up my quarters in just
such houses as this. It is an old weakness of mine. I live neither
in palatial houses nor in those of the humble poor, but instead and
deliberately in these respectable and wearisome and spotless middle
class homes, which smell of turpentine and soap and where there is
a panic if you bang the door or come in with dirty shoes. The love
of this atmosphere comes, no doubt, from the days of my childhood,
and a secret yearning I have for something homelike drives me, though
with little hope, to follow the same old stupid road. Then again, I
like the contrast between my lonely, loveless, hunted, and thoroughly
disorderly existence and this middle-class family-life. I like to
breathe in on the stairs this odour of quiet and order, of cleanliness
and respectable domesticity. There is something in it that touches me
in spite of my hatred for all it stands for. I like to step across the
threshold of my room and leave it suddenly behind; to see, instead,
cigar-ash and wine-bottles among the heaped-up books and there is
nothing but disorder and neglect; and where everything--books,
manuscript, thoughts--is marked and saturated with the plight of lonely
men, with the problem of existence and with the yearning after a new
orientation for an age that has lost its bearings.
And now I came to the araucaria. I must tell you that on the first
floor of this house the stairs pass by a little vestibule at the
entrance to a flat which, I am convinced, is even more spotlessly swept
and garnished than the others; for this little vestibule shines with a
super-human housewifery. It is a little temple of order. On the parquet
floor, where it seems desecration to tread, are two elegant stands and
on each a large pot. In the one grows an azalea. In the other a stately
araucaria, a thriving, straight-grown baby-tree, a perfect specimen,
which to the last needle of the topmost twig reflects the pride of
frequent ablutions. Sometimes, when I know that I am unobserved, I use
this place as a temple. I take my seat on a step of the stairs above
the araucaria and, resting awhile with folded hands, I contemplate
this little garden of order and let the touching air it has and its
somewhat ridiculous loneliness move me to the depths of my soul. I
imagine behind this vestibule, in the sacred shadow, one may say, of
the araucaria, a home full of shining mahogany, and a life full of
sound respectability--early rising, attention to duty, restrained but
cheerful family gatherings, Sunday church-going, early to bed.
Affecting lightheartedness, I trod the moist pavements of the narrow
streets. As though in tears and veiled, the lamps glimmered through the
chill gloom and sucked their reflections slowly from the wet ground.
The forgotten years of my youth came back to me. How I used to love the
dark, sad evenings of late autumn and winter, how eagerly I imbibed
their moods of loneliness and melancholy when wrapped in my cloak I
strode for half the night through rain and storm, through the leafless
winter landscape, lonely enough then too, but full of deep joy, and
full of poetry which later I wrote down by candle-light sitting on
the edge of my bed! All that was past now. The cup was emptied and
would never be filled again. Was that a matter for regret? No, I did
not regret the past. My regret was for the present day, for all the
countless hours and days that I lost in mere passivity and that brought
me nothing, not even the shocks of awakening. But, thank God, there
were exceptions. There were now and then, though rarely, the hours that
brought the welcome shock, pulled down the walls and brought me back