Hermann Hesse’s Der Steppenwolf (1927) belongs to a group of some six novels, all written and/or published within the period 1920 to 1933, which, by common consent, represent the canonical contribution of the German novel to High Modernism. The others are Kafka’s Das Schloss, Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg, Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz, Broch’s Die Schlafwandler, and Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften. All of these works have at least three features in common. One is that they register an urgent sense of cultural transition, a crisis that expresses itself as a virulent collision of old and new values. Another is their need to find — or at least to gesture towards — a conclusion that holds out the promise of some kind of consoling, perhaps even redemptive, solution. The third feature they share is an acute form of novelistic self-consciousness: that is to say, they are novels that thematize their own narrative performance as part of the cultural analysis that they are concerned to offer. All of them are, by any standards, challenging works. Part of the challenge they pose is that they work simultaneously on a number of interpretative levels.

The event sequence of Der Steppenwolf is as follows. The novel consists of three different, but overlapping, narrative texts. It opens with a brief statement by an unnamed and unspecified bourgeois narrator. He lives in a large house belonging to his aunt. A new tenant arrives: one Harry Haller, the “Steppenwolf” of the novel’s title, a man who feels himself to be a radically fractured self, part decent, respectable human being, part violent, instinctual wolf. The bourgeois narrator registers the strangeness and reclusiveness of Haller, and is both alienated by and attracted to him. While he finds it difficult to form a clear picture of the strange lodger’s way of life, he feels with great urgency that this enigmatic figure is symptomatic of contemporary Europe’s troubles. When Haller disappears as mysteriously as he has arrived, he leaves behind a mass of papers. And the bourgeois narrator decides to pass those papers on to us, the readers, by publishing them. They consist for the most part of Harry’s own account of his recent experiences — and, by this token, they have a certain confessional force. We learn that he has private means; while he disapproves of capitalism, he lives off the interest from certain funds and investments.