This book contains the records left us by a man whom, according to
the expression he often used himself, we called the Steppenwolf.
Whether this manuscript needs any introductory remarks may be open to
question. I, however, feel the need of adding a few pages to those of
the Steppenwolf in which I try to record my recollections of him. What
I know of him is little enough. Indeed, of his past life and origins
I know nothing at all. Yet the impression left by his personality has
remained, in spite of all, a deep and sympathetic one.
Some years ago the Steppenwolf, who was then approaching fifty, called
on my aunt to inquire for a furnished room. He took the attic room on
the top floor and the bedroom next it, returned a day or two later with
two trunks and a big case of books and stayed nine or ten months with
us. He lived by himself very quietly, and but for the fact that our
bedrooms were next door to each other--which occasioned a good many
chance encounters on the stairs and in the passage--we should have
remained practically unacquainted. For he was not a sociable man.
Indeed, he was unsociable to a degree I had never before experienced
in anybody. He was, in fact, as he called himself, a real wolf of the
Steppes, a strange, wild, shy--very shy--being from another world
than mine. How deep the loneliness into which his life had drifted on
account of his disposition and destiny and how consciously he accepted
this loneliness as his destiny, I certainly did not know until I read
the records he left behind him. Yet, before that, from our occasional
talks and encounters, I became gradually acquainted with him, and I
found that the portrait in his records was in substantial agreement
with the paler and less complete one that our personal acquaintance had
given me.
By chance I was there at the very moment when the Steppenwolf entered
our house for the first time and became my aunt’s lodger. He came at
noon. The table had not been cleared and I still had half an hour
before going back to the office. I have never forgotten the odd and
very conflicting impressions he made on me at this first encounter. He
came through the glazed door, having just rung the bell and my aunt
asked him in the dim light of the hall what he wanted. The Steppenwolf,
however, first threw up his sharp, closely cropped head and sniffed
around nervously before he either made any answer or announced his
name.
“Oh, it smells good here,” he said, and at that he smiled and my aunt
smiled too. For my part, I found this manner of introducing himself
ridiculous and was not favourably impressed.
“However,” said he, “I’ve come about the room you have to let.”
I did not get a good look at him until we were all three on our way up
to the top floor. Though not very big, he had the bearing of a big man.
He wore a fashionable and comfortable winter overcoat and he was well,
though carelessly, dressed, clean-shaven, and his cropped head showed
here and there a streak of grey. He carried himself in a way I did not
at all like at first. There was something weary and undecided about it
that did not go with his keen and striking profile nor with the tone of
his voice. Later, I found out that his health was poor and that walking
tired him. With a peculiar smile--at that time equally unpleasant to
me--he contemplated the stairs, the walls, and windows, and the tall
old cupboards on the staircase. All this seemed to please and at the
same time to amuse him. Altogether he gave the impression of having
come out of an alien world, from another continent perhaps. He found it
all very charming and a little odd. I cannot deny that he was polite,
even friendly. He agreed at once and without objection to the terms
for lodging and breakfast and so forth, and yet about the whole man
there was a foreign and, as I chose to think, disagreeable or hostile
atmosphere. He took the room and the bedroom too, listened attentively
and amiably to all he was told about the heating, the water, the
service and the rules of the household, agreed to everything, offered
at once to pay a sum in advance--and yet he seemed at the same time
to be outside it all, to find it comic to be doing as he did and not
to take it seriously. It was as though it were a very odd and new
experience for him, occupied as he was with quite other concerns, to
be renting a room and talking to people in German. Such more or less
was my impression and it would certainly not have been a good one if
it had not been revised and corrected by many small instances. Above
all, his face pleased me from the first, in spite of the foreign air it
had. It was a rather original face and perhaps a sad one, but alert,
thoughtful, strongly marked and highly intellectual. And then, to
reconcile me further, there was his polite and friendly manner, which
though it seemed to cost him some pains, was all the same quite without
pretention; on the contrary, there was something almost touching,
imploring in it. The explanation of it I found later, but it disposed
me at once in his favour.
* * * * *
Before we had done inspecting the rooms and going into the
arrangements, my luncheon hour was up and I had to go back to business.
I took my leave and left him to my aunt. When I got back at night,
she told me that he had taken the rooms and was coming in in a day or
two. The only request he had made was that his arrival should not be
notified to the police, as in his poor state of health he found these
formalities and the standing about in official waiting-rooms more than
he could tolerate. I remember very well how this surprised me and how
I warned my aunt against giving in to his stipulation. This fear of
the police seemed to me to agree only too well with the mysterious and
alien air the man had and struck me as suspicious. I explained to my
aunt that she ought not on any account to put herself in this equivocal
and in any case rather peculiar position for a complete stranger; it
might well turn out to have very unpleasant consequences for her. But
it then came out that my aunt had already granted his request, and,
indeed, had let herself be altogether captivated and charmed by the
strange gentleman. For she never took a lodger with whom she did not
contrive to stand in some human, friendly, and as it were auntlike or,
rather, motherly relation; and many a one has made full use of this
weakness of hers. And thus for the first weeks things went on; I had
many a fault to find with the new lodger, while my aunt every time
warmly took his part.
As I was not at all pleased about this business of neglecting to notify
the police, I wanted at least to know what my aunt had learnt about
him; what sort of family he came of and what his intentions were. And,
of course, she had learnt one thing and another, although he had only
stayed a short while after I left at noon. He had told her that he
thought of spending some months in our town to avail himself of the
libraries and to see its antiquities. I may say it did not please my
aunt that he was only taking the rooms for so short a time, but he had
clearly quite won her heart in spite of his rather peculiar way of
presenting himself. In short, the rooms were let and my objections came
too late.
“Why on earth did he say that it smelt so good here?” I asked.
“I know well enough,” she replied, with her usual insight. “There’s
a smell of cleanliness and good order here, of comfort and
respectability. It was that that pleased him. He looks as if he weren’t
used to that of late and missed it.”
Just so, thought I to myself.
“But,” I said aloud, “if he isn’t used to an orderly and respectable
life, what is going to happen? What will you say if he has filthy
habits and makes dirt everywhere, or comes home drunk at all hours of
the night?”
“We shall see, we shall see,” she said, and laughed; and I left it at
that.
And in the upshot my fears proved groundless. The lodger, though he
certainly did not live a very orderly or rational life, was no worry or
trouble to us. Yet my aunt and I bothered our heads a lot about him,
and I confess I have not by a long way done with him even now. I often
dream of him at night, and the mere existence of such a man, much as I
got to like him, has had a thoroughly disturbing and disquieting effect
on me.
* * * * *
Two days after this the stranger’s luggage--his name was Harry
Haller--was brought in by a porter. He had a very fine leather trunk,
which made a good impression on me, and a big flat cabin-trunk that
showed signs of having travelled far--at least it was plastered with
labels of hotels and travel agencies of various countries, some
overseas.
Then he himself appeared, and the time began during which I gradually
got acquainted with this strange man. At first I did nothing on my side
to encourage it. Although Haller interested me from the moment I saw
him I took no steps for the first two or three weeks to run across him
or to get into conversation with him. On the other hand I confess that
I did, all the same and from the very first, keep him under observation
a little and also went into his room now and again when he was out and
my curiosity drove me to do a little spy-work.
I have already given some account of the Steppenwolf’s outward
appearance. He gave at the very first glance the impression of a
significant, an uncommon, and unusually gifted man. His face was
intellectual, and the abnormally delicate and mobile play of his
features reflected a soul of extremely emotional and unusually delicate
sensibility. When one spoke to him and he, as was not always the case,
dropped conventionalities and said personal and individual things that
came out of his own alien world, then a man like myself came under his
spell on the spot. He had thought more than other men, and in matters
of the intellect he had that calm objectivity, that certainty of
thought and knowledge, such as only really intellectual men have, who
have no axe to grind, who never wish to shine, or to talk others down,
or to appear always in the right.
I remember an instance of this in the last days he was here, if I
can call a mere fleeting glance he gave me an example of what I
mean. It was when a celebrated historian and art critic, a man of
European fame, had announced a lecture in the Aula. I had succeeded
in persuading the Steppenwolf to attend it, though at first he had
little desire to do so. We went together and sat next to each other.
When the lecturer ascended the platform and began his address, many
of his hearers, who had expected a sort of prophet, were disappointed
by his rather spruce and conceited air. And when he proceeded, by
way of introduction, to say a few flattering things to the audience,
thanking them for their attendance in such numbers, the Steppenwolf
threw me a quick look, a look which criticised both the words and
the speaker of them--an unforgettable and frightful look which spoke
volumes! It was a look that did not simply criticise that lecturer,
annihilating the celebrated man with its crushing yet delicate irony.
That was the least of it. It was more sad than ironical; it was indeed
utterly and hopelessly sad; it conveyed a quiet despair, born partly
of conviction, partly of a mode of thought which had become habitual
with him. This despair of his not only unmasked the conceited lecturer
and dismissed with its irony the matter at hand, the expectant attitude
of the public, the somewhat presumptuous title under which the lecture
was announced--no, the Steppenwolf’s look pierced our whole epoch,
its whole overwrought activity, the whole surge and strife, the
whole vanity, the whole superficial play of a shallow, opinionated
intellectuality. And alas! the look went still deeper, went far below
the faults, defects and hopelessness of our time, our intellect, our
culture alone. It went right to the heart of all humanity, it bespoke
eloquently in a single second the whole despair of a thinker, of one
who knew the full worth and meaning of man’s life. It said: “See
what monkeys we are! Look, such is man!” and at once all renown, all
intelligence, all the attainments of the spirit, all progress towards
the sublime, the great and the enduring in man fell away and became a
monkey’s trick!
With this I have gone far ahead and, contrary to my actual plan and
intention, already conveyed what Haller essentially meant to me;
whereas my original aim was to uncover his picture by degrees while
telling the course of my gradual acquaintance with him.
Now that I have gone so far ahead it will save time to say a little
more about Haller’s puzzling “strangeness” and to tell in detail how I
gradually guessed and became aware of the causes and meaning of this
strangeness, this extraordinary and frightful loneliness. It will be
better so, for I wish to leave my own personality as far as possible in
the background. I do not want to put down my own confessions, to tell a
story or to write an essay on psychology, but simply as an eye-witness
to contribute something to the picture of the peculiar individual who
left this Steppenwolf manuscript behind him.
At the very first sight of him, when he came into my aunt’s home,
craning his head like a bird and praising the smell of the house, I was
at once astonished by something curious about him; and my first natural
reaction was repugnance. I suspected (and my aunt, who unlike me is the
very reverse of an intellectual person, suspected very much the same
thing)--I suspected that the man was ailing, ailing in the spirit in
some way, or in his temperament or character, and I shrank from him
with the instinct of the healthy. This shrinking was in course of time
replaced by a sympathy inspired by pity for one who had suffered so
long and deeply, and whose loneliness and inward death I witnessed. In
course of time I was more and more conscious, too, that this affliction
was not due to any defects of nature, but rather to a profusion of
gifts and powers which had not attained to harmony. I saw that Haller
was a genius of suffering and that in the meaning of many sayings
of Nietzsche he had created within himself with positive genius a
boundless and frightful capacity for pain. I saw at the same time that
the root of his pessimism was not world-contempt but self-contempt; for
however mercilessly he might annihilate institutions and persons in
his talk he never spared himself. It was always at himself first and
foremost that he aimed the shaft, himself first and foremost whom he
hated and despised.
And here I cannot refrain from a psychological observation. Although I
know very little of the Steppenwolf’s life, I have all the same good
reason to suppose that he was brought up by devoted but severe and very
pious parents and teachers in accordance with that doctrine, that makes
the breaking of the will the corner-stone of education and up-bringing.
But in this case the attempt to destroy the personality and to break
the will did not succeed. He was much too strong and hardy, too proud
and spirited. Instead of destroying his personality they succeeded only
in teaching him to hate himself. It was against himself that, innocent
and noble as he was, he directed during his whole life the whole wealth
of his fancy, the whole of his thought; and in so far as he let loose
upon himself every barbed criticism, every anger and hate he could
command, he was, in spite of all, a real Christian and a real martyr.
As for others and the world around him he never ceased in his heroic
and earnest endeavour to love them, to be just to them, to do them no
harm, for the love of his neighbour was as deeply in him as the hatred
of himself, and so his whole life was an example that love of one’s
neighbour is not possible without love of oneself, and that self-hate
is really the same thing as sheer egoism, and in the long run breeds
the same cruel isolation and despair.
It is now time, however, to put my own thoughts aside and to get
to facts. What I first discovered about Haller, partly through my
espionage, partly from my aunt’s remarks, concerned his way of living.
It was soon obvious that his days were spent with his thoughts and
his books, and that he pursued no practical calling. He lay always
very late in bed. Often he was not up much before noon and went
across from his bedroom to his sitting-room in his dressing-gown.
This sitting-room, a large and comfortable attic room with two
windows, after a few days was not at all the same as when occupied
by other tenants. It filled up; and as time went on it was always
fuller. Pictures were hung on the walls, drawings tacked up--sometimes
illustrations cut out from magazines and often changed. A southern
landscape, photographs of a little German country town, apparently
Haller’s home, hung there, and between them were some brightly painted
water-colours, which, as we discovered later, he had painted himself.
Then there were photographs of a pretty young woman, or--rather--girl.
For a long while a Siamese Buddha hung on the wall, to be replaced
first by Michelangelo’s “Night,” then by a portrait of the Mahatma
Gandhi. Books filled the large book-case and lay everywhere else as
well, on the table, on the pretty old bureau, on the sofa, on the
chairs and all about on the floor, books with notes slipped into them
which were continually changing. The books constantly increased, for
besides bringing whole armfuls back with him from the libraries he
was always getting parcels of them by post. The occupant of this room
might well be a learned man; and to this the all-pervading smell of
cigar-smoke might testify as well as the stumps and ash of cigars all
about the room. A great part of the books, however, were not books
of learning. The majority were works of the poets of all times and
peoples. For a long while there lay about on the sofa where he often
spent whole days all six volumes of a work with the title _Sophia’s
Journey from Memel to Saxony_--a work of the latter part of the
eighteenth century. A complete edition of Goethe and one of Jean
Paul showed signs of wear, also Novalis, while Lessing, Jacobi and
Lichtenberg were in the same condition. A few volumes of Dostoievski
bristled with pencilled slips. On the big table among the books and
papers there was often a vase of flowers. There, too, a paint box,
generally full of dust, reposed among flakes of cigar ash and (to leave
nothing out) sundry bottles of wine. There was a straw-covered bottle
usually containing Italian red wine, which he procured from a little
shop in the neighbourhood; often, too, a bottle of Burgundy as well
as Malaga; and a squat bottle of Cherry brandy was, as I saw, nearly
emptied in a very brief space--after which it disappeared in a corner
of the room, there to collect the dust without further diminution of
its contents. I will not pretend to justify this espionage I carried
on, and I will say openly that all these signs of a life full of
intellectual curiosity, but thoroughly slovenly and disorderly all the
same, inspired me at first with aversion and mistrust. I am not only a
middle-class man, living a regular life, fond of work and punctuality;
I am also an abstainer and non-smoker, and these bottles in Haller’s
room pleased me even less than the rest of his artistic disorder.
He was just as irregular and irresponsible about his meal times as he
was about his hours of sleep and work. There were days when he did not
go out at all and had nothing but his coffee in the morning. Sometimes
my aunt found nothing but a banana peel to show that he had dined.
Other days, however, he took his meals in restaurants, sometimes in the
best and most fashionable, sometimes in little out-lying taverns. His
health did not seem good. Besides his limping gait that often made the
stairs fatiguing to him, he seemed to be plagued with other troubles
and he once said to me that it was years since he had had either a
good digestion or sound sleep. I put it down first and last to his
drinking. When, later on, I accompanied him sometimes to his haunts
I often saw with my own eyes how he drank when the mood was on him,
though neither I nor anyone else ever saw him really drunk.
I have never forgotten our first encounter. We knew each other then
only as fellow-lodgers whose rooms were adjoining ones. Then one
evening I came home from business and to my astonishment found Haller
seated on the landing between the first and second floors. He was
sitting on the top step and he moved to one side to let me pass. I
asked him if he was all right and offered to take him up to the top.
Haller looked at me and I could see that I had awoken him from a kind
of trance. Slowly he began to smile his delightful sad smile that has
so often filled my heart with pity. Then he invited me to sit beside
him. I thanked him, but said it was not my custom to sit on the stairs
at other people’s doors.
“Ah, yes,” he said, and smiled the more. “You’re quite right. But wait
a moment, for I really must tell you what it was made me sit here for a
bit.”
He pointed as he spoke to the entrance of the first floor flat, where
a widow lived. In the little space with parquet flooring between the
stairs, the window and the glazed front door there stood a tall
cupboard of mahogany, with some old pewter on it, and in front of
the cupboard on the floor there were two plants, an azalea and an
araucaria, in large pots which stood on low stands. The plants looked
very pretty and were always kept spotlessly neat and clean, as I had
often noticed with pleasure.
“Look at this little vestibule,” Haller went on, “with the araucaria
and its wonderful smell. Many a time I can’t go by without pausing a
moment. At your aunt’s too, there reigns a wonderful smell of order and
extreme cleanliness, but this little place of the araucaria, why, it’s
so shiningly clean, so dusted and polished and scoured, so inviolably
clean that it positively glitters. I always have to take a deep breath
of it as I go by; don’t you smell it too? What a fragrance there is
here--the scent of floor polish with a fainter echo of turpentine
blending with the mahogany and the washed leaves of the plants, of
superlative bourgeois cleanliness, of care and precision, of duty done
and devotion to little things. I don’t know who lives here, but behind
that glazed door there must be a paradise of cleanliness and spotless
mediocrity, of ordered ways, a touching and anxious devotion to life’s
little habits and tasks.”
“Do not, please, think for a moment,” he went on when I said nothing
in reply, “that I speak with irony. My dear sir, I would not for the
world laugh at the bourgeois life. It is true that I live myself in
another world, and perhaps I could not endure to live a single day in a
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,
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.