Her­mann Hes­se’s 1927 nov­el Step­pen­wolf is a curi­ous mix­ture of mys­ti­cism and exis­ten­tial angst. It’s the sto­ry of a strange man who appears one day in an unnamed town and rents an attic apart­ment. By day he stays alone in his rooms, read­ing Goethe and Novalis. By night he wan­ders the dark alley­ways of the Old Town, like “a wolf of the steppes that had lost its way and strayed into the towns and the life of the herd.”

Despite a strong ele­ment of mag­ic in the sto­ry, Step­pen­wolf is essen­tial­ly an auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal book. Hesse wrote it dur­ing a time of acute per­son­al cri­sis, when he had entered mid­dle age and was deal­ing with the fail­ure of his mar­riage to a younger woman. Strug­gling against thoughts of sui­cide, the book­ish Hesse sought to over­come his sense of iso­la­tion and estrange­ment from soci­ety by going out at night to the tav­erns and dance halls. For a sense of his men­tal state, here is a pas­sage from Step­pen­wolf in which the pro­tag­o­nist Har­ry Haller talks in a dream to his “immor­tal” hero, Johann Wolf­gang von Goethe:

Like all great spir­its, Herr von Goethe, you have clear­ly rec­og­nized and felt the rid­dle and the hope­less­ness of human life, with its moments of tran­scen­dence that sink again to wretched­ness, and the impos­si­bil­i­ty of ris­ing to one fair peak of feel­ing except at the cost of many days’ enslave­ment to the dai­ly round; and, then, the ardent long­ing for the realm of the spir­it in eter­nal and dead­ly war with the equal­ly ardent and holy love of the lost inno­cence of nature, the whole fright­ful sus­pense in vacan­cy and uncer­tain­ty, this con­dem­na­tion to the tran­sient that can nev­er be valid, that is ever exper­i­men­tal and dilet­tan­tish; in short, the utter lack of pur­pose to which the human state is condemned–to its con­sum­ing despair.

But Hesse saw Step­pen­wolf as an opti­mistic book. It’s about a man’s jour­ney to self-aware­ness and spir­i­tu­al lib­er­a­tion. As he wrote in the intro­duc­tion, “The ‘Trea­tise’ [see above] and all those spots in the book deal­ing with mat­ters of the spir­it, of the arts and the ‘immor­tal’ men oppose the Step­pen­wolf’s world of suf­fer­ing with a pos­i­tive, serene, super-per­son­al and time­less world of faith. This book, no doubt, tells of griefs and needs; still it is not a book of a man despair­ing, but of a man believ­ing.”

The ani­mat­ed sequence above is from the rarely seen 1974 film of Step­pen­wolf by Fred Haines, in which the Har­ry Haller char­ac­ter played by Max von Sydow reads from the “Trac­tate on the Step­pen­wolf,” a mys­te­ri­ous text that was giv­en to Haller and then left behind by him, describ­ing the Step­pen­wolf’s divid­ed nature. The scene fea­tures imagery by the Czech artist Jaroslav Bradác.

Relat­ed con­tent:

Franz Kaf­ka: The Ani­mat­ed Short Film

Lit­er­ary jour­nal Elec­tric Lit­er­a­ture has a mis­sion, to “use new media and inno­v­a­tive dis­tri­b­u­tion to return the short sto­ry to a place of promi­nence in pop­u­lar cul­ture.” In so doing, they promise to deliv­er their quar­ter­ly, 5‑story anthol­o­gy “in every viable medi­um”: paper­back, enhanced pdf, Kin­dle, and ePub.  One clever way they pro­mote short fic­tion is with a free, week­ly sin­gle-sto­ry fea­ture called “Rec­om­mend­ed Read­ing.” And with the help of an ani­ma­tor and a musi­cian, Elec­tric Jour­nal pro­duces what it calls a “Sin­gle Sen­tence Ani­ma­tion” of each week’s rec­om­mend­ed sto­ry.

As the jour­nal describes these short videos, “Sin­gle Sen­tence Ani­ma­tions are cre­ative col­lab­o­ra­tions. The writer selects a favorite sen­tence from his or her work and the ani­ma­tor cre­ates a short film in response.” The Sin­gle Sen­tence Ani­ma­tion above draws from from A.M. Homes’ “Hel­lo Every­body,” as imag­ined by artist Gret­ta John­son and with music by Michael Asif. The ani­ma­tion cap­tures some­thing of Homes’ “par­tic­u­lar blend of log­ic and unre­al­i­ty” as well as her strange and often unnerv­ing twists of lan­guage.  Homes chose the ser­pen­tine sen­tence:

They are mak­ing their bod­ies their own—renovating, redec­o­rat­ing, the body not just as cor­pus but as object of self-expres­sion, a sym­bi­ot­ic rela­tion between imag­i­na­tion and real­i­ty.

Johnson’s ani­ma­tion imag­ines the body as Play-doh, a mal­leable sub­stance, unre­strict­ed by fixed forms.

In anoth­er “Sin­gle Sen­tence Ani­ma­tion,” Ben Marcus’s intri­cate “Watch­ing Mys­ter­ies with My Moth­er” gets inter­pret­ed by Edwin Ros­tron, with music by Supreme Vagabond Crafts­man. The sen­tence Mar­cus chose is:

We speak of hav­ing one foot in the grave, but we do not speak of hav­ing both feet and both legs and then one’s entire tor­so, arms, and head in the grave, inside a cof­fin, which is cov­ered in dirt, upon which is plant­ed a pret­ty lit­tle stone.

As Marcus’s sen­tence drills through clichéd euphemism into the mor­bid and mun­dane, Rostron’s ani­ma­tion peels back lay­ers of dead metaphor to encounter the pro­sa­ic.

Elec­tric Lit­er­a­ture’s Rec­om­mend­ed Read­ing series also fea­tures free online sto­ries from Mary Gait­skill, Clarice Lispec­tor, Peter Stamm, and many oth­ers, in HTML, Kin­dle, or ePub. You can watch all of the Sin­gle Sen­tence Ani­ma­tions here.

Josh Jones is a doc­tor­al can­di­date in Eng­lish at Ford­ham Uni­ver­si­ty and a co-founder and for­mer man­ag­ing edi­tor of Guer­ni­ca / A Mag­a­zine of Arts and Pol­i­tics.