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