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Title: Steppenwolf

Author: Hermann Hesse

Translator: Basil Creighton

Release date: March 30, 2025 [eBook #75756]
Most recently updated: September 28, 2025

Language: English

Original publication: New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1929

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/75756

Credits: Steve Mattern and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
at https://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK STEPPENWOLF
***

STEPPENWOLF
BY
HERMANN HESSE

TRANSLATED FROM THE GERMAN
BY
BASIL CREIGHTON

NEW YORK

HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY

COPYRIGHT, 1929,
BY
HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY, INC.

PRINTED IN THE
UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

PREFACE

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.

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 again from my wanderings to the living heart of the world. Sadly and
yet deeply moved, I set myself to recall the last of these experiences. It was
at a concert of lovely old music. After two or three notes of the piano the
door was opened of a sudden to the other world. I sped through heaven and
saw God at work. I suffered holy pains. I dropped all my defences and was
afraid of nothing in the world. I accepted all things and to all things I gave
up my heart. It did not last very long, a quarter of an hour perhaps; but it
returned to me in a dream at night, and since, through all the barren days, I
caught a glimpse of it now and then. Sometimes for a minute or two I saw it
clearly, threading my life like a divine and golden track. But nearly always
it was blurred in dirt and dust. Then again it gleamed out in golden sparks
as though never to be lost again and yet was soon quite lost once more.
Once it happened, as I lay awake at night, that I suddenly spoke in verses,
in verses so beautiful and strange that I did not venture to think of writing
them down, and then in the morning they vanished; and yet they lay hidden
within me like the hard kernel within an old brittle husk. Once it came to
me while reading a poet, while pondering a thought of Descartes, of Pascal;
again it shone out and drove its gold track far into the sky while I was in the
presence of my beloved. Ah, but it is hard to find this track of the divine in
the midst of this life we lead, in this besotted humdrum age of spiritual
blindness, with its architecture, its business, its politics, its men! How could
I fail to be a lone wolf, and an uncouth hermit, as I did not share one of its

aims nor understand one of its pleasures? I cannot remain for long in either
theatre or picture-house. I can scarcely read a paper, seldom a modern book.
I cannot understand what pleasures and joys they are that drive people to
the overcrowded railways and hotels, into the packed cafés with the
suffocating and oppressive music, to the Bars and variety entertainments, to
World Exhibitions, to the Corsos. I cannot understand nor share these joys,
though they are within my reach, for which thousands of others strive. On
the other hand, what happens to me in my rare hours of joy, what for me is
bliss and life and ecstasy and exaltation, the world in general seeks at most
in imagination; in life it finds it absurd. And in fact, if the world is right, if
this music of the cafés, these mass-enjoyments and these Americanised men
who are pleased with so little are right, then I am wrong, I am crazy. I am in
truth the Steppenwolf that I often call myself; that beast astray who finds
neither home nor joy nor nourishment in a world that is strange and
incomprehensible to him.
With these familiar thoughts I went along the wet street through one of the
quietest and oldest quarters of the town. On the opposite side there stood in
the darkness an old stone wall which I always noticed with pleasure. Old
and serene, it stood between a little church and an old hospital and often
during the day I let my eyes rest on its rough surface. There were few such
quiet and peaceful spaces in the centre of the town where from every square
foot some lawyer, or quack, or doctor, or barber, or chiropodist shouted his
name at you. This time, too, the wall was peaceful, and serene and yet
something was altered in it. I was amazed to see a small and pretty doorway
with a Gothic arch in the middle of the wall, for I could not make up my
mind whether this doorway had always been there or whether it had just
been made. It looked old without a doubt, very old; apparently this closed
portal with its door of blackened wood had opened hundreds of years ago
onto a sleepy convent yard, and did so still, even though the convent was no
longer there. Probably I had seen it a hundred times and simply not noticed
it. Perhaps it had been painted afresh and caught my eye for that reason. I
paused to examine it from where I stood without crossing over, as the street
between was so deep in mud and water. From the sidewalk where I stood
and looked across it seemed to me in the dim light that a garland, or
something gaily coloured, was festooned round the doorway, and now that I
looked more closely I saw over the portal a bright shield, on which, it
seemed to me, there was something written. I strained my eyes and at last,

in spite of the mud and puddles, went across, and there over the door I saw
a stain showing up faintly on the grey-green of the wall, and over the stain
bright letters dancing and then disappearing, returning and vanishing once
more. So that’s it, thought I. They’ve disfigured this good old wall with an
electric sign. Meanwhile I deciphered one or two of the letters as they
appeared again for an instant; but they were hard to read even by guess
work, for they came with very irregular spaces between them and very
faintly, and then abruptly vanished. Whoever hoped for any result from a
display like that was not very smart. He was a Steppenwolf, poor fellow.
Why have his letters playing on this old wall in the darkest alley of the Old
Town on a wet night with not a soul passing by, and why were they so
fleeting, so fitful and illegible? But wait, at last I succeeded in catching
several words on end. They were:

MAGIC THEATRE
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY

I tried to open the door, but the heavy old latch would not stir. The display
too was over. It had suddenly ceased, sadly convinced of its uselessness. I
took a few steps back, landing deep into the mud, but no more letters came.
The display was over. For a long time I stood waiting in the mud, but in
vain.
Then, when I had given up and gone back to the alley, a few coloured letters
were dropped here and there, reflected on the asphalt in front of me. I read:

FOR MADMEN ONLY!

My feet were wet and I was chilled to the bone. Nevertheless, I stood
waiting. Nothing more. But while I waited, thinking how prettily the letters
had danced in their ghostly fashion over the damp wall and the black sheen
of the asphalt, a fragment of my former thoughts came suddenly to my
mind; the similarity to the track of shining gold which suddenly vanishes
and cannot be found.
I was freezing and walked on following that track in my dreams, longing
too for that doorway to an enchanted theatre, which was for madmen only.
Meanwhile I had reached the Market Place, where there is never a lack of

evening entertainments. At every other step were placards and posters with
their various attractions, Ladies’ Orchestra, Variété, Cinema, Ball. But none
of these were for me. They were for “everybody,” for those normal persons
whom I saw crowding every entrance. In spite of that my sadness was a
little lightened. I had had a greeting from another world, and a few dancing,
coloured letters had played upon my soul and sounded its secret strings. A
glimmer of the golden track had been visible once again.
I sought out the little ancient tavern where nothing had altered since my
first visit to this town a good twenty-five years before. Even the landlady
was the same as then and many of the patrons who sat there in those days
sat there still at the same places before the same glasses. There I took
refuge. True, it was only a refuge, something like the one on the stairs
opposite the araucaria. Here, too, I found neither home nor company,
nothing but a seat from which to view a stage where strange people played
strange parts. None the less, the quiet of the place was worth something; no
crowds, no music; only a few peaceful townsfolk at bare wooden tables (no
marble, no enamel, no plush, no brass) and before each his evening glass of
good old wine. Perhaps this company of habitués, all of whom I knew by
sight, were all regular Philistines and had in their Philistine dwellings their
altars of the home dedicated to sheepish idols of contentment; perhaps, too,
they were solitary fellows who had been sidetracked, quiet, thoughtful
topers of bankrupt ideals, lone wolves and poor devils like me. I could not
say. Either homesickness or disappointment, or need of change drew them
there, the married to recover the atmosphere of his bachelor days, the old
official to recall his student years. All of them were silent, and all were
drinkers who would rather, like me, sit before a pint of Elsasser than listen
to a Ladies’ Orchestra. Here I cast anchor, for an hour, or it might be two.
With the first sip of Elsasser I realised that I had eaten nothing that day
since my morning roll.
It is remarkable, all that men can swallow. For a good ten minutes I read a
newspaper. I allowed the spirit of an irresponsible man who chews and
munches another’s words in his mouth, and gives them out again
undigested, to enter into me through my eyes. I absorbed a whole column of
it. And then I devoured a large piece cut from the liver of a slaughtered calf.
Odd indeed! The best was the Elsasser. I am not fond, for every-day at least,
of racy, heady wines that diffuse a potent charm and have their own

particular flavour. What I like the best is a clean, light, modest country
vintage of no special name. One can carry plenty of it and it has the good
and homely flavour of the land, and of earth and sky and woods. A pint of
Elsasser and a piece of good bread is the best of all meals. By this time,
however, I had already eaten my portion of liver (an unusual indulgence for
me, as I seldom eat meat) and the second pint had been set before me. And
this too was odd: that somewhere in a green valley vines were tended by
good, strong fellows and the wine pressed so that here and there in the
world, far away, a few disappointed, quietly drinking townsfolk and
feckless Steppenwolves could sip a little heart and courage from their
glasses.
For me, at least, the charm worked. As I thought again of that newspaper
article and its jumble of words, a refreshing laughter rose in me, and
suddenly the forgotten melody of those notes of the piano came back to me
again. It soared aloft like a soap-bubble, reflecting the whole world in
miniature on its rainbow surface, and then softly burst. Could I be
altogether lost when that heavenly little melody had been secretly rooted
within me and now put forth its lovely bloom with all its tender hues? I
might be a beast astray, with no sense of its environment, yet there was
some meaning in my foolish life, something in me gave an answer and was
the receiver of those distant calls from worlds far above. In my brain were
stored a thousand pictures:
Giotto’s flock of angels from the blue vaulting of a little church in Padua,
and near them walked Hamlet and the garlanded Ophelia, fair similitudes of
all sadness and misunderstanding in the world, and there stood Gianozzo,
the aeronaut, in his burning balloon and blew a blast on his horn, Attila
carrying his new headgear in his hand, and the Borobudur reared its soaring
sculpture in the air. And though all these figures lived in a thousand other
hearts as well, there were ten thousand more unknown pictures and tunes
there which had no dwelling place but in me, no eyes to see, no ears to hear
them but mine. The old hospital wall with its grey-green weathering, its
cracks and stains in which a thousand frescoes could be fancied, who
responded to it, who looked into its soul, who loved it, who found the
charm of its colours ever delicately dying away? The old books of the
monks, softly illumined with their miniatures, and the books of the German
poets of two hundred and a hundred years ago whom their own folk have

forgotten, all the thumbed and dampstained volumes, and the works in print
and manuscripts of the old composers, the stout and yellowing music sheets
dreaming their music through a winter sleep—who heard their spirited, their
roguish and yearning tones, who carried through a world estranged from
them a heart full of their spirit and their charm? Who still remembered that
slender cypress on a hill over Gubbio, that though split and riven by a fall
of stone yet held fast to life and put forth with its last resources a new
sparse tuft at top? Who read by night above the Rhine the cloud-script of
the drifting mists? It was the Steppenwolf. And who over the ruins of his
life pursued its fleeting, fluttering significance, while he suffered its
seeming meaninglessness and lived its seeming madness, and who hoped in
secret at the last turn of the labyrinth of Chaos for revelation and God’s
presence?
I held my hand over my glass when the landlady wanted to fill it once more,
and got up. I needed no more wine. The golden trail was blazed and I was
reminded of the eternal, and of Mozart, and the stars. For an hour I could
breathe once more and live and face existence, without the need to suffer
torment, fear or shame.
A cold wind was sifting the fine rain as I went out into the deserted street. It
drove the drops with a patter against the street-lamps where they glimmered
with a glassy sparkle. And now, whither? If I had had a magic wand at this
moment I should have conjured up a small and charming Louis Seize
music-room where a few musicians would have played me two or three
pieces of Handel and Mozart. I was in the very mood for it, and would have
sipped the cool and noble music as gods sip nectar. Oh, if I had had a friend
at this moment, a friend in an attic room, dreaming by candle light and with
a violin lying ready at his hand! How I should have slipped up to him in his
quiet hour, noiselessly climbing the winding stair to take him by surprise,
and then with talk and music we should have held heavenly festival
throughout the night! Once, in years gone by, I had often known such
happiness, but this too time had taken away. Withered years lay between
those days and now.
I loitered as I wended my way homeward; turned up my collar and struck
my stick on the wet pavement. However long I lingered outside I should
find myself all too soon in my top-floor room, my makeshift home, which I
could neither love nor do without; for the time had gone by when I could

spend a wet winter’s night in the open. And now my prayer was not to let
the good mood the evening had given me be spoilt, neither by the rain, nor
by gout, nor by the araucaria; and though there was no chamber-music to be
had nor a lonely friend with his violin, still that lovely melody was in my
head and I could play it through to myself after a fashion, humming the
rhythm of it as I drew my breath. Reflecting thus, I walked on and on. Yes,
even without the chamber-music and the friend. How foolish to wear
oneself out in vain longing for warmth! Solitude is independence. It had
been my wish and with the years I had attained it. It was cold. Oh, cold
enough! But it was also still, wonderfully still and vast like the cold
stillness of space in which the stars revolve.
From a dance-hall there met me as I passed by the strains of lively jazz
music, hot and raw as the steam of raw flesh. I stopped a moment. This kind
of music, much as I detested it, had always had a secret charm for me. It
was repugnant to me, and yet ten times preferable to all the academic music
of the day. For me too, its raw and savage gaiety reached an underworld of
instinct and breathed a simple honest sensuality.
I stood for a moment on the scent, smelling this shrill and blood-raw music,
sniffing the atmosphere of the hall angrily, and hankering after it a little too.
One half of this music, the melody, was all pomade and sugar and
sentimentality. The other half was savage, temperamental and vigorous. Yet
the two went artlessly well together and made a whole. It was the music of
decline. There must have been such music in Rome under the later
emperors. Compared with Bach and Mozart and real music it was, naturally,
a miserable affair; but so was all our art, all our thought, all our makeshift
culture in comparison with real culture. And this music had the merit of a
great sincerity. Amiably and unblushingly negroid, it had the mood of
childlike happiness. There was something of the nigger in it, something of
the American, who with all his strength seems so boyishly fresh and
childlike to us Europeans. Was Europe to become the same? Was it on the
way already? Were we, the old connoisseurs, the reverers of Europe as it
used to be, of genuine music and poetry as once they were, nothing but a
pigheaded minority suffering from a complex neurosis, whom to-morrow
would forget or deride? Was all that we called culture, spirit, soul, all that
we called beautiful and sacred, nothing but a ghost long dead, which only a
few fools like us took for true and living? Had it perhaps indeed never been

true and living? Had all that we poor fools bothered our heads about never
been anything but a phantom?
I was now in the old quarter of the town. The little church stood up dim and
grey and unreal. At once the experience of the evening came back to me,
the mysterious Gothic doorway, the mysterious tablet above it and the
illuminated letters dancing in mockery. How did the writing run? “Entrance
not for Everybody.” And: “For madmen only.” I scrutinised the old wall
opposite in the secret hope that the magic night might begin again; the
writing invite me, the madman; the little doorway give me admittance.
There perhaps lay my desire, and there perhaps would my music be played.
The dark stone wall looked back at me with composure, shut off in a deep
twilight, sunk in a dream of its own. And there was no gateway anywhere
and no pointed arch; only the dark unbroken masonry. With a smile I went
on, giving it a friendly nod. “Sleep well. I will not awake you. The time will
come when you will be pulled down or plastered with covetous
advertisements. But for the present, there you stand, beautiful and quiet as
ever, and I love you for it.”
From the black mouth of an alley a man appeared with startling suddenness
at my elbow, a lone man going his homeward way with weary step. He
wore a cap and a blue blouse, and above his shoulders he carried a
signboard fixed on a pole, and in front of him an open tray suspended by
straps such as pedlars carry at fairs. He walked on wearily in front of me
without looking round. Otherwise I should have bidden him a good evening
and given him a cigar. I tried to read the device on his standard—a red
signboard on a pole—in the light of the next lamp; but it swayed to and fro
and I could decipher nothing. Then I called out and asked him to let me read
his placard. He stopped and held his pole a little steadier. Then I could read
the dancing reeling letters:

ANARCHIST EVENING ENTERTAINMENT
MAGIC THEATRE
ENTRANCE NOT FOR EVERYBODY

“I’ve been looking for you,” I shouted with delight. “What is this Evening
Entertainment? Where is it? When?”

He was already walking on.
“Not for everybody,” he said dully with a sleepy voice. He had had enough.
He was for home, and on he went.
“Stop,” I cried, and ran after him. “What have you got there in your box? I
want to buy something from you.”
Without stopping, the man felt mechanically in his box, pulled out a little
book and held it out to me. I took it quickly and put it in my pocket. While I
felt for the buttons of my coat to get out some money, he turned in at a
doorway, shut the door behind him and disappeared. His heavy steps rang
on a flagged yard, then on wooden stairs; and then I heard no more. And
suddenly I too felt very tired. It came over me that it must be very late—and
high time to go home. I walked on faster and, following the road to the
suburb, I was soon in my own neighbourhood among the well-kept gardens,
where in clean little apartment houses behind lawn and ivy are the
dwellings of officialdom and people of modest means. Passing the ivy and
the grass and the little fir tree I reached the door of the house, found the
keyhole and the switch, slipped past the glazed doors, and the polished
cupboards and the potted plants and unlocked the door of my room, my
little pretence of a home, where the armchair and the stove, the ink-pot and
the paint-box, Novalis and Dostoievski, awaited me just as do the mother,
or the wife, the children, maids, dogs and cats in the case of more sensible
people.
As I threw off my wet coat I came upon the little book, and took it out. It
was one of those little books wretchedly printed on wretched paper that are
sold at fairs, “Were you born in January?” or “How to be twenty years
younger in a week.”
However, when I settled myself in my armchair and put on my glasses, it
was with great astonishment and a sudden sense of impending fate that I
read the title on the cover of this companion volume to fortune-telling
booklets. “Treatise on the Steppenwolf. Not for Everybody.”
I read the contents at a sitting with an engrossing interest that deepened
page by page.

TREATISE ON THE STEPPENWOLF

There was once a man, Harry, called the Steppenwolf. He went on two legs,
wore clothes and was a human being, but nevertheless he was in reality a
wolf of the Steppes. He had learnt a good deal of all that people of a good
intelligence can, and was a fairly clever fellow. What he had not learnt,
however, was this: to find contentment in himself and his own life. The
cause of this apparently was that at the bottom of his heart he knew all the
time (or thought he knew) that he was in reality not a man, but a wolf of the
Steppes. Clever men might argue the point whether he truly was a wolf,
whether, that is, he had been changed, before birth perhaps, from a wolf into
a human being, or had been given the soul of a wolf, though born as a
human being; or whether, on the other hand, this belief that he was a wolf
was no more than a fancy or a disease of his. It might, for example, be
possible that in his childhood he was a little wild and disobedient and
disorderly, and that those who brought him up had declared a war of
extinction against the beast in him; and precisely this had given him the
idea and the belief that he was in fact actually a beast with only a thin
covering of the human. On this point one could speak at length and
entertainingly, and indeed write a book about it. The Steppenwolf, however,
would be none the better for it, since for him it was all one whether the wolf
had been bewitched or beaten into him, or whether it was merely an idea of
his own. What others chose to think about it or what he chose to think
himself was no good to him at all. It left the wolf inside him just the same.
And so the Steppenwolf had two natures, a human and a wolfish one. This
was his fate, and it may well be that it was not a very exceptional one.
There must have been many men who have had a good deal of the dog or
the fox, of the fish or the serpent in them without experiencing any
extraordinary difficulties on that account. In such cases, the man and the
fish lived on together and neither did the other any harm. The one even
helped the other. Many a man indeed has carried this condition to such
enviable lengths that he has owed his happiness more to the fox or the ape
in him than to the man. So much for common knowledge. In the case of
Harry, however, it was just the opposite. In him the man and the wolf did
not go the same way together, but were in continual and deadly enmity. The
one existed simply and solely to harm the other, and when there are two in
one blood and in one soul who are at deadly enmity, then life fares ill. Well,
to each his lot, and none is light.

Now with our Steppenwolf it was so that in his conscious life he lived now
as a wolf, now as a man, as indeed the case is with all mixed beings. But,
when he was a wolf, the man in him lay in ambush, ever on the watch to
interfere and condemn, while at those times that he was man the wolf did
just the same. For example, if Harry, as man, had a beautiful thought, felt a
fine and noble emotion, or performed a so-called good act, then the wolf
bared his teeth at him and laughed and showed him with bitter scorn how
laughable this whole pantomime was in the eyes of a beast, of a wolf who
knew well enough in his heart what suited him, namely, to trot alone over
the Steppes and now and then to gorge himself with blood or to pursue a
female wolf. Then, wolfishly seen, all human activities became horribly
absurd and misplaced, stupid and vain. But it was exactly the same when
Harry felt and behaved as a wolf and showed others his teeth and felt hatred
and enmity against all human beings and their lying and degenerate
manners and customs. For then the human part of him lay in ambush and
watched the wolf, called him brute and beast, and spoiled and embittered
for him all pleasure in his simple and healthy and wild wolf’s being.
Thus it was then with the Steppenwolf, and one may well imagine that
Harry did not have an exactly pleasant and happy life of it. This does not
mean, however, that he was unhappy in any extraordinary degree (although
it may have seemed so to himself all the same, inasmuch as every man takes
the sufferings that fall to his share as the greatest). That cannot be said of
any man. Even he who has no wolf in him, may be none the happier for
that. And even the unhappiest life has its sunny moments and its little
flowers of happiness between sand and stone. So it was, then, with the
Steppenwolf too. It cannot be denied that he was generally very unhappy;
and he could make others unhappy also, that is, when he loved them or they
him. For all who got to love him, saw always only the one side in him.
Many loved him as a refined and clever and interesting man, and were
horrified and disappointed when they had come upon the wolf in him. And
they had to because Harry wished, as every sentient being does, to be loved
as a whole and therefore it was just with those whose love he most valued
that he could least of all conceal and belie the wolf. There were those,
however, who loved precisely the wolf in him, the free, the savage, the
untamable, the dangerous and strong, and these found it peculiarly
disappointing and deplorable when suddenly the wild and wicked wolf was
also a man, and had hankerings after goodness and refinement, and wanted

to hear Mozart, to read poetry and to cherish human ideals. Usually these
were the most disappointed and angry of all; and so it was that the
Steppenwolf brought his own dual and divided nature into the destinies of
others besides himself whenever he came into contact with them.
Now, whoever thinks that he knows the Steppenwolf and that he can
imagine to himself his lamentably divided life is nevertheless in error. He
does not know all by a long way. He does not know that, as there is no rule
without an exception and as one sinner may under certain circumstances be
dearer to God than ninety and nine righteous persons, with Harry too there
were now and then exceptions and strokes of good luck, and that he could
breathe and think and feel sometimes as the wolf, sometimes as the man,
clearly and without confusion of the two; and even on very rare occasions,
they made peace and lived for one another in such fashion that not merely
did one keep watch whilst the other slept but each strengthened and
confirmed the other. In the life of this man, too, as well as in all things else
in the world, daily use and the accepted and common knowledge seemed
sometimes to have no other aim than to be arrested now and again for an
instant, and broken through, in order to yield the place of honour to the
exceptional and miraculous. Now whether these short and occasional hours
of happiness balanced and alleviated the lot of the Steppenwolf in such a
fashion that in the upshot happiness and suffering held the scales even, or
whether perhaps the short but intense happiness of those few hours
outweighed all suffering and left a balance over is again a question over
which idle persons may meditate to their hearts’ content. Even the wolf
brooded often thereover, and those were his idle and unprofitable days.
In this connection one thing more must be said. There are a good many
people of the same kind as Harry. Many artists are of his kind. These
persons all have two souls, two beings within them. There is God and the
devil in them; the mother’s blood and the father’s; the capacity for
happiness and the capacity for suffering; and in just such a state of enmity
and entanglement towards and within each other as were the wolf and man
in Harry. And these men, for whom life has no repose, live at times in their
rare moments of happiness with such strength and indescribable beauty, the
spray of their moment’s happiness is flung so high and dazzlingly over the
wide sea of suffering, that the light of it, spreading its radiance, touches
others too with its enchantment. Thus, like a precious, fleeting foam over

the sea of suffering arise all those works of art, in which a single individual
lifts himself for an hour so high above his personal destiny that his
happiness shines like a star and appears to all who see it as something
eternal and as a happiness of their own. All these men, whatever their deeds
and works may be, have really no life; that is to say, their lives are not their
own and have no form. They are not heroes, artists or thinkers in the same
way that other men are judges, doctors, shoemakers, or schoolmasters.
Their life consists of a perpetual tide, unhappy and torn with pain, terrible
and meaningless, unless one is ready to see its meaning in just those rare
experiences, acts, thoughts and works that shine out above the chaos of
such a life. To such men the desperate and horrible thought has come that
perhaps the whole of human life is but a bad joke, a violent and ill-fated
abortion of the primal mother, a savage and dismal catastrophe of nature. To
them, too, however, the other thought has come that man is perhaps not
merely a half-rational animal but a child of the gods and destined to
immortality.
Men of every kind have their characteristics, their features, their virtues and
vices and their deadly sins. It was part of the sign manual of the
Steppenwolf that he was a night prowler. The morning was a bad time of
day for him. He feared it and it never brought him any good. On no
morning of his life has he ever been in good spirits nor done any good
before midday, nor ever had a happy idea, nor devised any pleasure for
himself or others. By degrees during the afternoon he warmed and became
alive, and only towards evening, on his good days, was he productive,
active and, sometimes, aglow with joy. With this was bound up his need for
loneliness and independence. There was never a man with a deeper and
more passionate craving for independence than he. In his youth when he
was poor and had difficulty in earning his bread, he preferred to go hungry
and in torn clothes rather than endanger his narrow limit of independence.
He never sold himself for money or an easy life or to women or to those in
power; and had thrown away a hundred times what in the world’s eyes was
his advantage and happiness in order to safeguard his liberty. No prospect
was more hateful and distasteful to him than that he should have to go to an
office and conform to daily and yearly routine and obey others. He hated all
kinds of offices, governmental or commercial, as he hated death, and his
worst nightmare was confinement in barracks. He contrived, often at great
sacrifice, to avoid all such predicaments. It was here that his strength and

his virtue rested. On this point he could neither be bent nor bribed. Here his
character was firm and indeflectable. Only, through this virtue, he was
bound the closer to his destiny of suffering. It happened to him as it does to
all; what he strove for with the deepest and stubbornest instinct of his being
fell to his lot, but more than is good for men. In the beginning his dream
and his happiness, in the end it was his bitter fate. The man of power is
ruined by power, the man of money by money, the submissive man by
subservience, the pleasure seeker by pleasure. He achieved his aim. He was
ever more independent. He took orders from no man and ordered his ways
to suit no man. Independently and alone, he decided what to do and to leave
undone. For every strong man attains to that which a genuine impulse bids
him seek. But in the midst of the freedom he had attained Harry suddenly
became aware that his freedom was a death and that he stood alone. The
world in an uncanny fashion left him in peace. Other men concerned him no
longer. He was not even concerned about himself. He began to suffocate
slowly in the more and more rarefied atmosphere of remoteness and
solitude. For now it was his wish no longer, nor his aim, to be alone and
independent, but rather his lot and his sentence. The magic wish had been
fulfilled and could not be cancelled, and it was no good now to open his
arms with longing and goodwill to welcome the bonds of society. People
left him alone now. It was not, however, that he was an object of hatred and
repugnance. On the contrary, he had many friends. A great many people
liked him. But it was no more than sympathy and friendliness. He received
invitations, presents, pleasant letters; but no more. No one came near to
him. There was no link left, and no one could have had any part in his life
even had any one wished it. For the air of lonely men surrounded him now,
a still atmosphere in which the world around him slipped away, leaving him
incapable of relationship, an atmosphere again which neither will nor
longing availed. This was one of the significant earmarks of his life.
Another was that he was numbered among the suicides. And here it must be
said that to call suicides only those who actually destroy themselves is false.
Among these, indeed, there are many who in a sense are suicides only by
accident and in whose being suicide has no necessary place. Among the
common run of men there are many of little personality and stamped with
no deep impress of fate, who find their end in suicide without belonging on
that account to the type of the suicide by inclination; while on the other
hand, of those who are to be counted as suicides by the very nature of their

beings are many, perhaps a majority, who never in fact lay hands on
themselves. The “suicide,” and Harry was one, need not necessarily live in
a peculiarly close relationship to death. One may do this without being a
suicide. What is peculiar to the suicide is that his ego, rightly or wrongly, is
felt to be an extremely dangerous, dubious, and doomed germ of nature;
that he is always in his own eyes exposed to an extraordinary risk, as
though he stood with the slightest foothold on the peak of a crag whence a
slight push from without or an instant’s weakness from within suffices to
precipitate him into the void. The line of fate in the case of these men is
marked by the belief they have that suicide is their most probable manner of
death. It might be presumed that such temperaments, which usually
manifest themselves in early youth and persist through life, show a singular
defect of vital force. On the contrary, among the “suicides” are to be found
unusually tenacious and eager and also hardy natures. But just as there are
those who at the least indisposition develop a fever, so do those whom we
call suicides, and who are always very emotional and sensitive, develop at
the least shock the notion of suicide. Had we a science with the courage and
authority to concern itself with mankind, instead of with the mechanism
merely of vital phenomena, had we something of the nature of an
anthropology, or a psychology, these matters of fact would be familiar to
every one.
What was said above on the subject of suicides touches obviously nothing
but the surface. It is psychology, and, therefore, partly physics.
Metaphysically considered, the matter has a different and a much clearer
aspect. In this aspect suicides present themselves as those who are
overtaken by the sense of guilt inherent in individuals, those souls that find
the aim of life not in the perfecting and moulding of the self, but in
liberating themselves by going back to the mother, back to God, back to the
all. Many of these natures are wholly incapable of ever having recourse to
real suicide, because they have a profound consciousness of the sin of doing
so. For us they are suicides none the less; for they see death and not life as
the releaser. They are ready to cast themselves away in surrender, to be
extinguished and to go back to the beginning.
As every strength may become a weakness (and under some circumstances
must) so, on the contrary, may the typical suicide find a strength and a
support in his apparent weakness. Indeed, he does so more often than not.

The case of Harry, the Steppenwolf, is one of these. As thousands of his like
do, he found consolation and support, and not merely the melancholy play
of youthful fancy, in the idea that the way to death was open to him at any
moment. It is true that with him, as with all men of his kind, every shock,
every pain, every untoward predicament at once called forth the wish to
find an escape in death. By degrees, however, he fashioned for himself out
of this tendency a philosophy that was actually serviceable to life. He
gained strength through familiarity with the thought that the emergency exit
stood always open, and became curious, too, to taste his suffering to the
dregs. If it went too badly with him he could feel sometimes with a grim
malicious pleasure: “I am curious to see all the same just how much a man
can endure. If the limit of what is bearable is reached, I have only to open
the door to escape.” There are a great many suicides to whom this thought
imparts an uncommon strength.
On the other hand, all suicides have the responsibility of fighting against the
temptation of suicide. Every one of them knows very well in some corner of
his soul that suicide, though a way out, is rather a mean and shabby one,
and that it is nobler and finer to be conquered by life than to fall by one’s
own hand. Knowing this, with a morbid conscience whose source is much
the same as that of the militant conscience of so-called self-contented
persons, the majority of suicides are left to a protracted struggle against
their temptation. They struggle as the kleptomaniac against his own vice.
The Steppenwolf was not unfamiliar with this struggle. He had engaged in
it with many a change of weapons. Finally, at the age of forty-seven or
thereabouts, a happy and not unhumorous idea came to him from which he
often derived some amusement. He appointed his fiftieth birthday as the
day on which he might allow himself to take his own life. On this day,
according to his mood, so he agreed with himself, it should be open to him
to employ the emergency exit or not. Let happen to him what might, illness,
poverty, suffering and bitterness, there was a time-limit. It could not extend
beyond these few years, months, days whose number daily diminished. And
in fact he bore much adversity, which previously would have cost him
severer and longer tortures and shaken him perhaps to the roots of his
being, very much more easily. When for any reason it went particularly
badly with him, when peculiar pains and penalties were added to the
desolateness and loneliness and savagery of his life, he could say to his
tormentors: “Only wait, two years and I am your master.” And with this he

cherished the thought of the morning of his fiftieth birthday. Letters of
congratulation would arrive, while he, relying on his razor, took leave of all
his pains and closed the door behind him. Then gout in the joints,
depression of spirits, and all pains of head and body could look for another
victim.

It still remains to elucidate the Steppenwolf as an isolated phenomenon, in
his relation, for example, to the bourgeois world, so that his symptoms may
be traced to their source. Let us take as a starting point, since it offers itself,
his relation to the bourgeoisie.
To take his own view of the matter, the Steppenwolf stood entirely outside
the world of convention, since he had neither family life nor social
ambitions. He felt himself to be single and alone, whether as a queer fellow
and a hermit in poor health, or as a person removed from the common run
of men by the prerogative of talents that had something of genius in them.
Deliberately, he looked down upon the ordinary man and was proud that he
was not one. Nevertheless his life in many aspects was thoroughly ordinary.
He had money in the bank and supported poor relations. He was dressed
respectably and inconspicuously, even though without particular care. He
was glad to live on good terms with the police and the tax collectors and
other such powers. Besides this, he was secretly and persistently attracted to
the little bourgeois world, to those quiet and respectable homes with tidy
gardens, irreproachable stair-cases and their whole modest air of order and
comfort. It pleased him to set himself outside it, with his little vices and
extravagances, as a queer fellow or a genius, but he never had his domicile
in those provinces of life where the bourgeoisie had ceased to exist. He was
not at ease with violent and exceptional persons nor with criminals and
outlaws, and he took up his abode always among the middle classes, with
whose habits and standards and atmosphere he stood in a constant relation,
even though it might be one of contrast and revolt. Moreover, he had been
brought up in a provincial and conventional home and many of the notions
and much of the examples of those days had never left him. In theory he
had nothing whatever against the servant class; yet in practice it would have
been beyond him to take a servant quite seriously as his equal. He was

capable of loving the political criminal, the revolutionary or intellectual
seducer, the outlaw of state and society, as his brother, but as for theft and
robbery, murder and rape, he would not have known how to deplore them
otherwise than in a thoroughly bourgeois manner.
In this way he was always recognising and affirming with one half of
himself, in thought and act, what with the other half he fought against and
denied. Brought up, as he was, in a cultivated home in the approved
manner, he never tore part of his soul loose from its conventionalities even
after he had long since individualised himself to a degree beyond its scope
and freed himself from the substance of its ideals and beliefs.
Now what we call “bourgeois,” when regarded as an element always to be
found in human life, is nothing else than the search for a balance. It is the
striving after a mean between the countless extremes and opposites that
arise in human conduct. If we take any one of these coupled opposites, such
as piety and profligacy, the analogy is immediately comprehensible. It is
open to a man to give himself up wholly to spiritual views, to seeking after
God, to the ideal of saintliness. On the other hand, he can equally give
himself up entirely to the life of instinct, to the lusts of the flesh, and so
direct all his efforts to the attainment of momentary pleasures. The one path
leads to the saint, to the martyrdom of the spirit and surrender to God. The
other path leads to the profligate, to the martyrdom of the flesh, the
surrender to corruption. Now it is between the two, in the middle of the
road, that the bourgeois seeks to walk. He will never surrender himself
either to lust or to asceticism. He will never be a martyr nor agree to his
own destruction. On the contrary, his ideal is not to give up but to maintain
his own identity. He strives neither for the saintly nor its opposite. The
absolute is his abhorrence. He may be ready to serve God, but not by giving
up the flesh-pots. He is ready to be virtuous, but likes to be easy and
comfortable in this world as well. In short, his aim is to make a home for
himself between two extremes in a temperate zone without violent storms
and tempests; and in this he succeeds though it be at the cost of that
intensity of life and feeling which an extreme life affords. A man cannot
live intensely except at the cost of the self. Now the bourgeois treasures
nothing more highly than the self (rudimentary as his may be). And so at the
cost of intensity he achieves his own preservation and security. His harvest
is a quiet mind which he prefers to being possessed by God, as he does

comfort to pleasure, convenience to liberty, and a pleasant temperature to
that deathly inner consuming fire. The bourgeois is consequently by nature
a creature of weak impulses, anxious, fearful of giving himself away and
easy to rule. Therefore, he has substituted majority for power, law for force,
and the polling booth for responsibility.
It is clear that this weak and anxious being, in whatever numbers he exists,
cannot maintain himself, and that qualities such as his can play no other
rôle in the world than that of a herd of sheep among free roving wolves. Yet
we see that, though in times when commanding natures are uppermost, the
bourgeois goes at once to the wall, he never goes under; indeed at times he
even appears to rule the world. How is this possible? Neither the great
numbers of the herd, nor virtue, nor common sense, nor organisation could
avail to save it from destruction. No medicine in the world can keep a pulse
beating that from the outset was so weak. Nevertheless the bourgeoisie
prospers. Why?
The answer runs: Because of the Steppenwolves. In fact, the vital force of
the bourgeoisie resides by no means in the qualities of its normal members,
but in those of its extremely numerous “outsiders” who by virtue of the
extensiveness and elasticity of its ideals it can embrace. There is always a
large number of strong and wild natures who share the life of the fold. Our
Steppenwolf, Harry, is a characteristic example. He who is developed far
beyond the level possible to the bourgeois, he who knows the bliss of
meditation no less than the gloomy joys of hatred and self-hatred, he who
despises law, virtue and common sense, is nevertheless captive to the
bourgeoisie and cannot escape it. And so all through the mass of the real
bourgeoisie are interposed numerous layers of humanity, many thousands of
lives and minds, every one of whom, it is true, would have outgrown it and
have obeyed the call to unconditioned life, were they not fastened to it by
sentiments of their childhood and infected for the most part with its less
intense life; and so they are kept lingering, obedient and bound by
obligation and service. For with the bourgeoisie the opposite of the formula
for the great is true: He who is not against me is with me.
If we now pause to test the soul of the Steppenwolf, we find him distinct
from the bourgeois in the higher development of his individuality—for all
extensions of the individuality revolve upon the self and tend to destroy it.
We see that he had in him a strong impulse both to the saint and the

profligate; and yet he could not, owing to some weakness or inertia, make
the plunge into the untrammelled realms of space. The parent constellation
of the bourgeoisie binds him with its spell. This is his place in the universe
and this his bondage. Most intellectuals and most artists belong to the same
type. Only the strongest of them force their way through the atmosphere of
the Bourgeois-Earth and attain to the cosmic. The others all resign
themselves, or make compromises. Despising the bourgeoisie, and yet
belonging to it, they add to its strength and glory; for in the last resort they
have to share their beliefs in order to live. The lives of these infinitely
numerous persons make no claim to the tragic; but they live under an evil
star in a quite considerable affliction; and in this hell their talents ripen and
bear fruit. The few who break free seek their reward in the unconditioned
and go down in splendour. They wear the thorn crown and their number is
small. The others, however, who remain in the fold and from whose talents
the bourgeoisie reaps much gain, have a third kingdom left open to them, an
imaginary and yet a sovereign world, humour. The lone wolves who know
no peace, these victims of unceasing pain to whom the urge for tragedy has
been denied and who can never break through the starry space, who feel
themselves summoned thither and yet cannot survive in its atmosphere—for
them is reserved, provided suffering has made their spirits tough and elastic
enough, a way of reconcilement and an escape into humour. Humour has
always something bourgeois in it, although the true bourgeois is incapable
of understanding it. In its imaginary realm the intricate and many-faceted
ideal of all Steppenwolves finds its realisation. Here it is possible not only
to extol the saint and the profligate in one breath and to make the poles
meet, but to include the bourgeois, too, in the same affirmation. Now it is
possible to be possessed by God and to affirm the sinner, and vice versa, but
it is not possible for either saint or sinner (nor for any other of the
unconditioned) to affirm as well that lukewarm mean, the bourgeois.
Humour alone, that magnificent discovery of those who are cut short in
their calling to highest endeavour, those who falling short of tragedy are yet
as rich in gifts as in affliction, humour alone (perhaps the most inborn and
brilliant achievement of the spirit) attains to the impossible and brings every
aspect of human existence within the rays of its prism. To live in the world
as though it were not the world, to respect the law and yet to stand above it,
to have possessions as though “one possessed nothing,” to renounce as
though it were no renunciation, all these favourite and often formulated

propositions of an exalted worldly wisdom, it is in the power of humour
alone to make efficacious.
And supposing the Steppenwolf were to succeed, and he has gifts and
resources in plenty, in decocting this magic draught in the sultry mazes of
his hell, his rescue would be assured. Yet there is much lacking. The
possibility, the hope only are there. Whoever loves him and takes his part
may wish him this rescue. It would, it is true, keep him forever tied to the
bourgeois world, but his suffering would be bearable and productive. His
relation to the bourgeois world would lose its sentimentality both in its love
and its hatred, and his bondage to it would cease to cause him the continual
torture of shame.
To attain to this, or, perhaps it may be, to be able at last to dare the leap into
the unknown, a Steppenwolf must once have a good look at himself. He
must look deeply into the chaos of his own soul and plumb its depths. The
riddle of his existence would then be revealed to him at once in all its
changelessness, and it would be impossible for him ever after to escape first
from the hell of the flesh to the comforts of a sentimental philosophy and
then back to the blind orgy of his wolfishness. Man and wolf would then be
compelled to recognise one another without the masks of false feeling and
to look one another straight in the eye. Then they would either explode and
separate forever, and there would be no more Steppenwolf, or else they
would come to terms in the dawning light of humour.
It is possible that Harry will one day be led to this latter alternative. It is
possible that he will learn one day to know himself. He may get hold of one
of our little mirrors. He may encounter the Immortals. He may find in one
of our magic theatres the very thing that is needed to free his neglected soul.
A thousand such possibilities await him. His fate brings them on, leaving
him no choice; for those outside of the bourgeoisie live in the atmosphere of
these magic possibilities. A mere nothing suffices—and the lightning
strikes.
And all this is very well known to the Steppenwolf, even though his eye
may never fall on this fragment of his inner biography. He has a suspicion
of his allotted place in the world, a suspicion of the Immortals, a suspicion
that he may meet himself face to face; and he is aware of the existence of

that mirror in which he has such bitter need to look and from which he
shrinks in such deathly fear.

For the close of our study there is left one last fiction, a fundamental
delusion to make clear. All interpretation, all psychology, all attempts to
make things comprehensible, require the medium of theories, mythologies
and lies; and a self-respecting author should not omit, at the close of an
exposition, to dissipate these lies so far as may be in his power. If I say
“above” or “below,” that is already a statement that requires explanation,
since an above and a below exist only in thought, only as abstractions. The
world itself knows nothing of above or below.
So too, to come to the point, is the Steppenwolf a fiction. When Harry feels
himself to be a were-wolf, and chooses to consist of two hostile and
opposed beings, he is merely availing himself of a mythological
simplification. He is no were-wolf at all, and if we appeared to accept
without scrutiny this lie which he invented for himself and believes in, and
tried to regard him literally as a two-fold being and a Steppenwolf, and so
designated him, it was merely in the hope of being more easily understood
with the assistance of a delusion, which we must now endeavour to put in
its true light.
The division into wolf and man, flesh and spirit, by means of which Harry
tries to make his destiny more comprehensible to himself is a very great
simplification. It is a forcing of the truth to suit a plausible, but erroneous,
explanation of that contradiction which this man discovers in himself and
which appears to himself to be the source of his by no means negligible
sufferings. Harry finds in himself a “human being,” that is to say, a world of
thoughts and feelings, of culture and tamed or sublimated nature, and
besides this he finds within himself also a “wolf,” that is to say, a dark
world of instinct, of savagery and cruelty, of unsublimated or raw nature. In
spite of this apparently clear division of his being between two spheres,
hostile to one another, he has known happy moments now and then when
the man and the wolf for a short while were reconciled with one another.
Suppose that Harry tried to ascertain in any single moment of his life, any
single act, what part the man had in it and what part the wolf, he would find

himself at once in a dilemma, and his whole beautiful wolf-theory would go
to pieces. For there is not a single human being, not even the primitive
negro, not even the idiot, who is so conveniently simple that his being can
be explained as the sum of two or three principal elements; and to explain
so complex a man as Harry by the artless division into wolf and man is a
hopelessly childish attempt. Harry consists of a hundred or a thousand
selves, not of two. His life oscillates, as everyone’s does, not merely
between two poles, such as the body and the spirit, the saint and the sinner,
but between thousand and thousands.
We need not be surprised that even so intelligent and educated a man as
Harry should take himself for a Steppenwolf and reduce the rich and
complex organism of his life to a formula so simple, so rudimentary and
primitive. Man is not capable of thought in any high degree, and even the
most spiritual and highly cultivated of men habitually sees the world and
himself through the lenses of delusive formulas and artless simplifications
—and most of all himself. For it appears to be an inborn and imperative
need of all men to regard the self as a unit. However often and however
grievously this illusion is shattered, it always mends again. The judge who
sits over the murderer and looks into his face, and at one moment
recognises all the emotions and potentialities and possibilities of the
murderer in his own soul and hears the murderer’s voice as his own is at the
next moment one and indivisible as the judge, and scuttles back into the
shell of his cultivated self and does his duty and condemns the murderer to
death. And if ever the suspicion of their manifold being dawns upon men of
unusual powers and of unusually delicate perceptions, so that, as all genius
must, they break through the illusion of the unity of the personality and
perceive that the self is made up of a bundle of selves, they have only to say
so and at once the majority puts them under lock and key, calls science to
aid, establishes schizomania and protects humanity from the necessity of
hearing the cry of truth from the lips of these unfortunate persons. Why then
waste words, why utter a thing that every thinking man accepts as self-
evident, when the mere utterance of it is a breach of taste? A man, therefore,
who gets so far as making the supposed unity of the self two-fold is already
almost a genius, in any case a most exceptional and interesting person. In
reality, however, every ego, so far from being a unity is in the highest
degree a manifold world, a constellated heaven, a chaos of forms, of states
and stages, of inheritances and potentialities. It appears to be a necessity as

imperative as eating and breathing for everyone to be forced to regard this
chaos as a unity and to speak of his ego as though it were a one-fold and
clearly detached and fixed phenomenon. Even the best of us share the
delusion.
The delusion rests simply upon a false analogy. As a body everyone is
single, as a soul never. In literature, too, even in its ultimate achievement,
we find this customary concern with apparently whole and single
personalities. Of all literature up to our days the drama has been the most
highly prized by writers and critics, and rightly, since it offers (or might
offer) the greatest possibilities of representing the ego as a manifold entity,
but for the optical illusion which makes us believe that the characters of the
play are one-fold entities by lodging each one in an undeniable body, singly,
separately and once and for all. An artless æsthetic criticism, then, keeps its
highest praise for this so-called character-drama in which each character
makes his appearance unmistakably as a separate and single entity. Only
from afar and by degrees the suspicion dawns here and there that all this is
perhaps a cheap and superficial æsthetic philosophy; and that we make a
mistake in attributing to our great dramatists those magnificent conceptions
of beauty that come to us from antiquity. These conceptions are not native
to us, but are merely picked up at second hand, and it is in them, with their
common source in the visible body, that the origin of the fiction of an ego,
an individual, is really to be found. There is no trace of such a notion in the
poems of ancient India. The heroes of the epics of India are not individuals,
but whole reels of individualities in a series incarnations. And in modern
times there are poems, in which, behind the veil of a concern with
individuality and character that is scarcely, indeed, in the author’s mind, the
motive is to present a manifold activity of soul. Whoever wishes to
recognise this must resolve once and for all not to regard the characters of
such a poem as separate beings, but as the various facets and aspects of a
higher unity, in my opinion, of the poet’s soul. If “Faust,” is treated in this
way, Faust, Mephistopheles, Wagner and the rest form a unity and a
supreme individuality; and it is in this higher unity alone, not in the several
characters, that something of the true nature of the soul is revealed. When
Faust, in a line immortalised among schoolmasters and greeted with a
shudder of astonishment by the Philistine, says: “Two souls, alas, inhabit in
my breast!” he has forgotten Mephisto and a whole crowd of other souls
that he has in his breast likewise. The Steppenwolf, too, believes that he

bears two souls (wolf and man) in his breast and even so finds his breast
disagreeably cramped because of them. The breast and the body are indeed
one, but the souls that dwell in it are not two, nor five, but countless in
number. Man is an onion made up of a hundred integuments, a texture made
up of many threads. The ancient Asiatics knew this well enough, and in the
Buddhist Yoga an exact technique was devised for unmasking the illusion
of the personality. The human merry-go-round sees many changes: the
illusion that cost India the efforts of thousands of years to unmask is the
same illusion that the West has laboured just as hard to maintain and
strengthen.
If we consider the Steppenwolf from this standpoint it will be clear to us
why he suffered so much under his ludicrous dual personality. He believes,
like Faust, that two souls are far too many for a single breast and must tear
the breast asunder. They are on the contrary far too few, and Harry does
shocking violence to his poor soul when he endeavours to apprehend it by
means of so primitive an image. Although he is a most cultivated person, he
proceeds like a savage that cannot count further than two. He calls himself
part wolf, part man, and with that he thinks he has come to an end and
exhausted the matter. With the “man” he packs in everything spiritual and
sublimated or even cultivated to be found in himself, and with the wolf all
that is instinctive, savage and chaotic. But things are not so simple in life as
in our thoughts, nor so rough and ready as in our poor idiotic language; and
Harry lies about himself twice over when he employs this niggardly wolf-
theory. He assigns, we fear, whole provinces of his soul to the “man” which
are a long way from being human, and parts of his being to the wolf that
long ago have left the wolf behind.
Like all men Harry believes that he knows very well what man is and yet
does not know at all, although in dreams and other states not subject to
control he often has his suspicions. If only he might not forget them, but
keep them, as far as possible at least, for his own. Man is not by any means
of fixed and enduring form (this, in spite of suspicions to the contrary on
the part of their wise men, was the ideal of the ancients). He is much more
an experiment and a transition. He is nothing else than the narrow and
perilous bridge between nature and spirit. His innermost destiny drives him
on to the spirit and to God. His innermost longing draws him back to
nature, the mother. Between the two forces his life hangs tremulous and

irresolute. What is commonly meant, meanwhile, by the word “man” is
never anything more than a transient agreement, a bourgeois compromise.
Certain of the more naked instincts are excluded and penalised by this
concordat; a degree of human consciousness and culture are won from the
beast; and a small modicum of spirit is not only permitted but even
encouraged. The “man” of this concordat, like every other bourgeois ideal,
is a compromise, a timid and artlessly sly experiment, with the aim of
cheating both the angry primal mother Nature and the troublesome primal
father Spirit of their pressing claims, and of living in a temperate zone
between the two of them. For this reason the bourgeois to-day burns as
heretics and hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments to-
morrow.
That man is not yet a finished creation but rather a challenge of the spirit; a
distant possibility dreaded as much as it is desired; that the way towards it
has only been covered for a very short distance and with terrible agonies
and ecstasies even by those few for whom it is the scaffold to-day and the
monument to-morrow—all this the Steppenwolf, too, suspected. What,
however, he calls the “man” in himself, as opposed to the wolf, is to a great
extent nothing else than this very same average man of the bourgeois
convention.
As for the way to true manhood, the way to the immortals, he has, it is true,
an inkling of it and starts upon it now and then for a few hesitating steps
and pays for them with much suffering and many pangs of loneliness. But
as for striving with assurance, in response to that supreme demand, towards
the genuine manhood of the spirit, and going the one narrow way to
immortality, he is deeply afraid of it. He knows too well that it leads to still
greater sufferings, to proscription, to the last renunciation, perhaps to the
scaffold, and even though the enticement of immortality lies at the journey’s
end, he is still unwilling to suffer all these sufferings and to die all these
deaths. Though the end of manhood is better known to him than to the
bourgeois, still he shuts his eyes. He is resolved to forget that the desperate
clinging to the self and the desperate clinging to life are the surest way to
eternal death, while the power to die, to strip one’s self naked, and the
eternal surrender of the self bring immortality with them. When he worships
his favourites among the immortals, Mozart, it may be, he regards him
always in the long run with the bourgeois eye. His tendency is to explain

Mozart’s perfected being, just as a schoolmaster would, as a supreme and
special gift rather than as the outcome of his immense powers of surrender
and suffering, of his indifference to the ideals of the bourgeois, and of his
patience under that last extremity of loneliness which rarefies the
atmosphere of the bourgeois world to an ice-cold ether, around those who
suffer to become men, that loneliness of the garden of Gethsemane.
This Steppenwolf of ours has always been aware of at least the Faustian
two-fold nature within him. He has discovered that the one-fold of the body
is not inhabited by a one-fold of the soul, and that at best he is only at the
beginning of a long pilgrimage towards this ideal harmony. He would like
either to overcome the wolf and become wholly man or to renounce
mankind and at last to live wholly a wolf’s life. It may be presumed that he
has never carefully watched a real wolf. Had he done so he would have
seen, perhaps, that even animals are not undivided in spirit. With them, too,
the well-knit beauty of the body hides a being of manifold states and
strivings. The wolf, too, has his abysses. The wolf, too, suffers. No, back to
nature is a false track that leads nowhere but to suffering and despair. Harry
can never turn back again and become wholly wolf, and could he do so he
would find that even the wolf is not of primeval simplicity, but already a
creature of manifold complexity. Even the wolf has two, and more than two,
souls in his wolf’s breast, and he who desires to be a wolf falls into the
same forgetfulness as the man who sings: “If I could be a child once more!”
He who sentimentally sings of blessed childhood is thinking of the return to
nature and innocence and the origin of things, and has quite forgotten that
these blessed children are beset with conflict and complexities and capable
of all suffering.
There is, in fact, no way back either to the wolf or to the child. From the
very start there is no innocence and no singleness. Every created thing, even
the simplest, is already guilty, already multiple. It has been thrown into the
muddy stream of being and may never more swim back again to its source.
The way to innocence, to the uncreated and to God leads on, not back, not
back to the wolf or to the child, but ever further into sin, ever deeper into
human life. Suicide, even, unhappy Steppenwolf, will not seriously serve
your turn. You will find yourself embarked on the longer and wearier and
harder road to human life. You will have to multiply many times your two-
fold being and complicate your complexities still further. Instead of

narrowing your world and simplifying your soul, you will at last take the
whole world into your soul, cost what it may, before you are through and
come to rest. This is the road that Buddha and every great man has gone,
whether consciously or not, in so far as fortune favoured his quest. All
births betoken the parting from the All, the confinement within limitation,
the separation from God, the pangs of being born ever anew. The return into
the All betokens the lifting of the personality through suffering till it reaches
God, the expansion of the soul until it is able once more to embrace the All.
We are not dealing here with man as he is known to economics and
statistics, as he is seen thronging the streets by the million, and of whom no
more account can be made than of the sand of the sea or the spray of its
waves. We are not concerned with the few millions less or more. They are a
stock-in-trade, nothing else. No, we are speaking of man in the highest
sense, of the end of the long road to true manhood, of kingly men, of the
immortals. Genius is not so rare as we sometimes think; nor, certainly, so
frequent as may appear from history books or, indeed, from the newspapers.
Harry has, we should say, genius enough to attempt the quest of true
manhood instead of discoursing pitifully about his stupid Steppenwolf at
every difficulty encountered.
It is as much a matter for surprise and sorrow that men of such possibilities
should fall back on Steppenwolves and “Two souls, alas!” as that they
reveal so often that pitiful love for the bourgeoisie. A man who can
understand Buddha and has an intuition of the heaven and hell of humanity
ought not to live in a world ruled by “common sense” and democracy and
bourgeois standards. It is only from cowardice that he lives in it; and if its
dimensions are too cramping for him and the bourgeois parlour too
confined, he lays it at the wolf’s door, and refuses to see that the wolf is as
often as not the best part of him. All that is wild in himself he calls wolf and
considers it wicked and dangerous and the bugbear of all decent life. He
cannot see, even though he thinks himself an artist and possessed of delicate
perceptions, that a great deal else exists in him besides and behind the wolf.
He cannot see that not all that bites is wolf and that fox, dragon, tiger, ape
and bird of paradise are there also. Yet he allows this whole world, a garden
of Eden in which are manifestations of beauty and terror, of greatness and
meanness, of strength and tenderness, to be huddled together and shut away

by the wolf-legend, just as is the real man in him by the shams and
pretences of a bourgeois existence.
Man designs for himself a garden with a hundred kinds of trees, a thousand
kinds of flowers, a hundred kinds of fruit and vegetables. Suppose, then,
that the gardener of this garden knew no other distinction than between
edible and inedible, nine-tenths of this garden would be useless to him. He
would pull up the most enchanting flowers and hew down the noblest trees
and even regard them with a loathing and envious eye. This is what the
Steppenwolf does with the thousand flowers of his soul. What does not
stand classified as either man or wolf he does not see at all. And consider all
that he imputes to “man”! All that is cowardly and apish, stupid and mean
—while to the wolf, only because he has not succeeded in making himself
its master, is set down all that is strong and noble.
Now we bid Harry good-bye and leave him to go on his way alone. Were he
already among the immortals—were he already there at the goal to which
his difficult path seems to be taking him, with what amazement he would
look back to all this coming and going, all this indecision and wild zig-zag
trail. With what a mixture of encouragement and blame, pity and joy, he
would smile at this Steppenwolf.
When I had read to the end it came to my mind that some weeks before I
had written one night a rather peculiar poem, likewise about the
Steppenwolf. I made a search among the snow-drift of papers on my writing
table, found it, and read:

The Wolf trots to and fro,
The world lies deep in snow,
The raven from the birch tree flies,
But nowhere a hare, nowhere a roe.
The roe—she is so dear, so sweet—
If such a thing I might surprise
In my embrace, my teeth would meet,
What else is there beneath the skies?
The lovely creature I would so treasure,
And feast myself deep on her tender thigh,
I would drink of her red blood full measure,
Then howl till the night went by.

Even a hare I would not despise;
Sweet enough its warm flesh in the night.
Is everything to be denied
That could make life a little bright?
The hair on my brush is getting grey.
The sight is failing from my eyes.
Years ago my dear mate died.
And now I trot and dream of a roe.
I trot and dream of a hare.
I hear the wind of midnight howl.
I cool with the snow my burning jowl,
And on to the devil my wretched soul I bear.
So now I had two portraits of myself before me, one a self-portrait in
doggerel verse, as sad and sorry as myself; the other painted with the air of
a lofty impartiality by one who stood outside and who knew more and yet
less of me than I did myself. And both these pictures of myself, my
dispirited and halting poem and the clever study by an unknown hand,
equally afflicted me. Both were right. Both gave the unvarnished truth
about my shiftless existence. Both showed clearly how unbearable and
untenable my situation was. Death was decreed for this Steppenwolf. He
must with his own hand make an end of his detested existence—unless,
molten in the fire of a renewed self-knowledge, he underwent a change and
passed over to a self, new and undisguised. Alas! this transition was not
unknown to me. I had often experienced it already, and always in times of
the utmost despair. On each occasion of this terribly uprooting experience
myself, as it then was, was shattered to fragments. Each time deep-seated
powers had shaken and destroyed it; each time there had followed the loss
of a cherished and particularly beloved part of my life that was true to me
no more. Once, I had lost my profession and livelihood. I had had to forfeit
the esteem of those who before had touched their caps to me. Next, my
family life fell in ruins over night, when my wife, whose mind was
disordered, drove me from house and home. Love and confidence had
changed of a sudden to hate and deadly enmity and the neighbours saw me
go with pitying scorn. It was then that my solitude had its beginning. Years
of hardship and bitterness went by. I had built up the ideal of a new life,
inspired by the asceticism of the intellect. I had attained a certain serenity
and elevation of life once more, submitting myself to the practice of

abstract thought and to a rule of austere meditation. But this mould, too,
was broken and lost at one blow all its exalted and noble intent. A whirl of
travel drove me afresh over the earth; fresh sufferings were heaped up, and
fresh guilt. And every occasion when a mask was torn off, an ideal broken,
was preceded by this hateful vacancy and stillness, this deathly constriction
and loneliness and unrelatedness, this waste and empty hell of lovelessness
and despair, such as I had now to pass through once more.
It is true that every time my life was shattered in this way I had in the end
gained something, some increase in liberty and in spiritual growth and
depth, but with it went an increased loneliness, an increasing chill of
severance and estrangement. Looked at with the bourgeois eye, my life had
been a continuous descent from one shattering to the next that left me more
remote at every step from all that was normal, permissible and healthful.
The passing years had stripped me of my calling, my family, my home. I
stood outside all social circles, alone, beloved by none, mistrusted by many,
in unceasing and bitter conflict with public opinion and morality; and
though I lived in a bourgeois setting, I was all the same an utter stranger to
this world in all I thought and felt. Religion, country, family, state all lost
their value and meant nothing to me any more. The pomposity of the
sciences, societies, and arts disgusted me. My views and tastes and all that I
thought, once the shining adornments of a gifted and sought-after person,
had run to seed in neglect and were looked at askance. Granting that I had
in the course of all my painful transmutations made some invisible and
unaccountable gain, I had had to pay dearly for it; and at every turn my life
was harsher, more difficult, lonely and perilous. In truth, I had little cause to
wish to continue in that way which led on into ever thinner air, like the
smoke in Nietzsche’s harvest song.
Oh, yes, I had experienced all these changes and transmutations that fate
reserves for her difficult children, her ticklish customers. I knew them only
too well. I knew them as well as a zealous but unsuccessful sportsman
knows the stands at a shoot; as an old gambler on the Exchange knows each
stage of speculation, the scoop, the weakening market, the break and
bankruptcy. Was I really to live through all this again? All this torture, all
this pressing need, all these glimpses into the paltriness and worthlessness
of my own self, the frightful dread lest I succumb, and the fear of death.
Wasn’t it better and simpler to prevent a repetition of so many sufferings

and to quit the stage? Certainly, it was simpler and better. Whatever the
truth of all that was said in the little book on the Steppenwolf about
“suicides,” no one could forbid me the satisfaction of invoking the aid of a
gas-stove or a razor or revolver, and so sparing myself this repetition of a
process whose bitter agony I had had to drink often enough, surely, and to
the dregs. No, in all conscience, there was no power in the world that could
prevail with me to go through the mortal terror of another encounter with
myself, to face another reorganisation, a new incarnation, when at the end
of the road there was no peace or quiet—but forever destroying the self, in
order to renew the self. Let suicide be as stupid, cowardly, shabby as you
please, call it an infamous and ignominious escape; still, any escape, even
the most ignominious, from this treadmill of suffering was the only thing to
wish for. No stage was left for the noble and heroic heart. Nothing was left
but the simple choice between a slight and swift pang and an unthinkable, a
devouring and endless suffering. I had played Don Quixote often enough in
my difficult, crazed life, had put honour before comfort, and heroism before
reason. There was an end of it!
Daylight was dawning through the window panes, the leaden, infernal
daylight of a rainy winter’s day, when at last I got to bed. I took my
resolution to bed with me. At the very last, however, on the last verge of
consciousness in the moment of falling asleep, the remarkable passage in
the Steppenwolf pamphlet which deals with the immortals flashed through
me. With it came the enchanting recollection that several times, the last
quite recently, I had felt near enough to the immortals to share in one
measure of old music their cool, bright, austere and yet smiling wisdom.
The memory of it soared, shone out, then died away; and heavy as a
mountain, sleep descended on my brain.
I woke about midday, and at once the situation, as I had disentangled it,
came back to me. There lay the little book on my bed-side table, and my
poem. My resolution, too, was there. After the night’s sleep it had taken
shape and looked at me out of the confusion of my youth with a calm and
friendly greeting. Haste makes no speed. My resolve to die was not the
whim of an hour. It was the ripe, sound fruit that had grown slowly to full
size, lightly rocked by the winds of fate whose next breath would bring it to
the ground.

I had in my medicine-chest an excellent means of stilling pain—an
unusually strong tincture of laudanum. I indulged very rarely in it and often
refrained from using it for months at a time. I had recourse to the drug only
when physical pain plagued me beyond endurance. Unfortunately, it was of
no use in putting an end to myself. I had proved this some years before.
Once when despair had again got the better of me I had swallowed a big
dose of it—enough to kill six men, and yet it had not killed me. I fell asleep,
it is true, and lay for several hours completely stupefied; but then to my
frightful disappointment I was half awakened by violent convulsions of the
stomach and fell asleep once more. It was the middle of the next day when I
woke up in earnest in a state of dismal sobriety. My empty brain was
burning and I had almost lost my memory. Apart from a spell of insomnia
and severe pains in the stomach no trace of the poison was left.
This expedient, then, was no good. But I put my resolution in this way: the
next time I felt that I must have recourse to the opium, I might allow myself
to use big means instead of small, that is, a death of absolute certainty with
a bullet or a razor. Then I could be sure. As for waiting till my fiftieth
birthday, as the little book wittily prescribed—this seemed to me much too
long a delay. There were still two years till then. Whether it were a year
hence or a month, were it even the following day, the door stood open.
I cannot say that the resolution altered my life very profoundly. It made me
a little more indifferent to my afflictions, a little freer in the use of opium
and wine, a little more inquisitive to know the limits of endurance, but that
was all. The other experiences of that evening had a stronger after-effect. I
read the Steppenwolf treatise through again many times, now submitting
gratefully to an invisible magician because of his wise conduct of my
destiny, now with scorn and contempt for its futility, and the little
understanding it showed of my actual disposition and predicament. All that
was written there of Steppenwolves and suicides was very good, no doubt,
and very clever. It might do for the species, the type; but it was too wide a
mesh to catch my own individual soul, my unique and unexampled destiny.
What, however, occupied my thoughts more than all else was the
hallucination, or vision, of the church wall. The announcement made by the
dancing illuminated letters promised much that was hinted at in the treatise,
and the voices of that strange world had powerfully aroused my curiosity.
For hours I pondered deeply over them. On these occasions I was more and

more impressed by the warning of that inscription—“Not for everybody!”
and “For madmen only!” Madman, then, I must certainly be and far from
the mould of “everybody” if those voices reached me and that world spoke
to me. In heaven’s name, had I not long ago been remote from the life of
everybody and from normal thinking and normal existence? Had I not long
ago given ample margin to isolation and madness? All the same, I
understood the summons well enough in my innermost heart. Yes, I
understood the invitation to madness and the jettison of reason and the
escape from the clogs of convention in surrender to the unbridled surge of
spirit and fantasy.
One day after I had made one more vain search through streets and squares
for the man with the signboard and prowled several times past the wall of
the invisible door with watchful eye, I met a funeral procession in St.
Martin’s. While I was contemplating the faces of the mourners who
followed the hearse with halting step, I thought to myself, “Where in this
town or in the whole world is the man whose death would be a loss to me?
And where is the man to whom my death would mean anything?” There
was Erica, it is true, but for a long while we had lived apart. We rarely saw
one another without quarreling and at the moment I did not even know her
address. She came to see me now and then, or I made the journey to her,
and since both of us were lonely, difficult people related somehow to one
another in soul, and sickness of soul, there was a link between us that held
in spite of all. But would she not perhaps breathe more freely if she heard of
my death? I did not know. I did not know either how far my own feeling for
her was to be relied upon. To know anything of such matters one needs to
live in a world of practical possibilities.
Meanwhile, obeying my fancy, I had fallen in at the rear of the funeral
procession and jogged along behind the mourners to the cemetery, an up-to-
date affair all of concrete, and complete with crematorium. The deceased in
question was not however to be cremated. His coffin was set down before a
simple hole in the ground, and I saw the clergyman and the other vultures
and functionaries of a burial establishment going through their
performances, to which they endeavoured to give all the appearance of
great ceremony and sorrow and with such effect that they outdid themselves
and from pure play-acting they got caught in their own lies and ended by
being comic. I saw how their black professional robes fell in folds, and

what pains they took to work up the company of mourners and to force
them to bend the knee before the majesty of death. It was labour in vain.
Nobody wept. The deceased did not appear to have been indispensable. Nor
could any one be talked into a pious frame of mind; and when the
clergyman addressed the company repeatedly as “dear fellow-Christians,”
all the silent faces of these shop-people and master-bakers and their wives
were turned down in embarrassment and expressed nothing but the wish
that this uncomfortable function might soon be over. When the end came,
the two foremost of the fellow-Christians shook the clergyman’s hand,
scraped the moist clay in which the dead had been laid from their shoes at
the next scraper and without hesitation their faces again showed their
natural expression; and then it was that one of them seemed suddenly
familiar. It was, so it seemed to me, the man who had carried the signboard
and thrust the little book into my hands.
At the moment when I thought I recognised him he stopped and, stooping
down, carefully turned up his black trousers, and then walked away at a
smart pace with his umbrella clipped under his arm. I walked after him, but
when I overtook him and gave him a nod, he did not appear to recognise
me.
“Is there no show to-night?” I asked with an attempt at a wink such as two
conspirators give each other. But it was long ago that such pantomime was
familiar to me. Indeed, living as I did, I had almost lost the habit of speech,
and I felt myself that I only made a silly grimace.
“Show to-night?” he growled, and looked at me as though he had never set
eyes on me before. “Go to the Black Eagle, man, if that’s what you want.”
And, in fact, I was no longer certain it was he. I was disappointed and
feeling the disappointment I walked on aimlessly. I had no motives, no
incentives to exert myself, no duties. Life tasted horribly bitter. I felt that
the long-standing disgust was coming to a crisis and that life pushed me out
and cast me aside. I walked through the grey streets in a rage and
everything smelt of moist earth and burial. I swore that none of these death-
vultures should stand at my grave, with cassocks and fellow-christianly
murmurings. Ah, look where I might and think what I might, there was no
cause for rejoicing and nothing beckoned me. There was nothing to charm
me or tempt me. Everything was old, withered, grey, limp and spent, and

stank of staleness and decay. Dear God, how was it possible? How had I,
with the wings of youth and poetry, come to this? Art and travel and the
glow of ideals—and now this! How had this paralysis of hatred against
myself and every one else, this obstruction of all feeling, this mud-hell of an
empty heart and despair crept over me so softly and so slowly?
Passing by the Library I met a young professor of whom in earlier years I
used occasionally to see a good deal. When I last stayed in the town, some
years before, I had even been several times to his house to talk oriental
mythology, a study in which I was then very much interested. He came in
my direction walking stiffly and with a short-sighted air and only
recognised me at the last moment as I was passing by. In my lamentable
state I was half-thankful for the cordiality with which he threw himself on
me. His pleasure in seeing me became quite lively as he recalled the talks
we had had together and assured me that he owed a great deal to the
stimulus they had given him and that he often thought of me. He had rarely
had such stimulating and productive discussions with any colleague since.
He asked how long I had been in the town (I lied and said “a few days”) and
why I had not looked him up. The learned man held me with his friendly
eye and, though I really found it all ridiculous, I could not help enjoying
these crumbs of warmth and kindliness, and was lapping them up like a
starved dog. Harry, the Steppenwolf, was moved to a grin. Saliva collected
in his parched throat and against his will he bowed down to sentiment. Yes,
zealously piling lie upon lie, I said that I was only here in passing, for the
purpose of research, and should of course have paid him a visit but that I
had not been feeling very fit. And when he went on to invite me very
heartily to spend the evening with him, I accepted with thanks and sent my
greetings to his wife, until my cheeks fairly ached with the unaccustomed
efforts of all these forced smiles and speeches. And while I, Harry Haller,
stood there in the street, flattered and surprised and studiously polite and
smiling into the good fellow’s kindly, short-sighted face, there stood the
other Harry, too, at my elbow and grinned likewise. He stood there and
grinned as he thought what a funny, crazy, dishonest fellow I was to show
my teeth in rage and curse the whole world one moment and, the next, to be
falling all over myself in the eagerness of my response to the first amiable
greeting of the first good honest fellow who came my way, to be wallowing
like a suckling-pig in the luxury of a little pleasant feeling and friendly
esteem. Thus stood the two Harrys, neither playing a very pretty part, over

against the worthy professor, mocking one another, watching one another,
and spitting at one another, while as always in such predicaments, the
eternal question presented itself whether all this was simple stupidity and
human frailty, a common depravity, or whether this sentimental egoism and
perversity, this slovenliness and two-facedness of feeling was merely a
personal idiosyncrasy of the Steppenwolves. And if this nastiness was
common to men in general, I could rebound from it with renewed energy
into hatred of all the world, but if it was a personal frailty, it was good
occasion for an orgy of hatred of myself.
While my two selves were thus locked in conflict, the professor was almost
forgotten; and when the oppressiveness of his presence came suddenly back
to me, I made haste to be relieved of it. I looked after him for a long while
as he disappeared into the distance along the leafless avenue with the good-
natured and slightly comic gait of an ingenuous idealist. Within me, the
battle raged furiously. Mechanically I bent and unbent my stiffened fingers
as though to fight the ravages of a secret poison, and at the same time had to
realise that I had been nicely framed. Round my neck was the invitation for
8:30, with all its obligations of politeness, of talking shop and of
contemplating another’s domestic bliss. And so home—in wrath. Once
there, I poured myself out some brandy and water, swallowed some of my
gout pills with it, and, lying on the sofa, tried to read. No sooner had I
succeeded in losing myself for a moment in Sophia’s Journey from Memel
to Saxony, a delightful old book of the eighteenth century, than the
invitation came over me of a sudden and reminded me that I was neither
shaved nor dressed. Why, in heaven’s name, had I brought all this on
myself? Well, get up, so I told myself, lather yourself, scrape your chin till
it bleeds, dress and show an amiable disposition towards your fellow-men.
And while I lathered my face, I thought of that sordid hole in the clay of the
cemetery into which some unknown person had been lowered that day. I
thought of the pinched faces of the bored fellow-Christians and I could not
even laugh. There in that sordid hole in the clay, I thought, to the
accompaniment of stupid and insincere ministrations and the no less stupid
and insincere demeanour of the group of mourners, in the discomforting
sight of all the metal crosses and marble slabs and artificial flowers of wire
and glass, ended not only that unknown man, and, to-morrow or the day
after, myself as well, buried in the soil with a hypocritical show of sorrow
—no, there and so ended everything; all our striving, all our culture, all our

beliefs, all our joy and pleasure in life—already sick and soon to be buried
there too. Our whole civilization was a cemetery where Jesus Christ and
Socrates, Mozart and Haydn, Dante and Goethe were but the indecipherable
names on mouldering stones; and the mourners who stood round affecting a
pretence of sorrow would give much to believe in these inscriptions which
once were holy, or at least to utter one heart-felt word of grief and despair
about this world that is no more. And nothing was left them but the
embarrassed grimaces of a company round a grave. As I raged on like this I
cut my chin in the usual place and had to apply a caustic to the wound; and
even so there was my clean collar, scarce put on, to change again, and all
this for an invitation that did not give me the slightest pleasure. And yet a
part of me began play-acting again, calling the professor a sympathetic
fellow, yearning after a little talk and intercourse with my fellow men,
reminding me of the professor’s pretty wife, prompting me to believe that
an evening spent with my pleasant host and hostess would be in reality
positively cheering, helping me to clap some court plaster to my chin, to put
on my clothes and tie my tie well, and gently putting me, in fact, far from
my genuine desire of staying at home. Whereupon it occurred to me—so it
is with every one. Just as I dress and go out to visit the professor and
exchange a few more or less insincere compliments with him, without
really wanting to at all, so it is with the majority of men day by day and
hour by hour in their daily lives and affairs. Without really wanting to at all,
they pay calls and carry on conversations, sit out their hours at desks and on
office chairs; and it is all compulsory, mechanical and against the grain, and
it could all be done or left undone just as well by machines; and indeed it is
this never-ceasing machinery that prevents their being, like me, the critics
of their own lives and recognising the stupidity and shallowness, the
hopeless tragedy and waste of the lives they lead, and the awful ambiguity
grinning over it all. And they are right, right a thousand times to live as they
do, playing their games and pursuing their business, instead of resisting the
dreary machine and staring into the void as I do who have left the track. Let
no one think that I blame other men, though now and then in these pages I
scorn and even deride them, or that I accuse them of the responsibility of
my personal misery. But now that I have come so far, and standing as I do
on the extreme verge of life where the ground falls away before me into
bottomless darkness, I should do wrong and I should lie if I pretended to

myself or to others that that machine still revolved for me and that I was
still obedient to the eternal child’s play of that charming world.
On all this the evening before me afforded a remarkable commentary. I
paused a moment in front of the house and looked up at the windows. There
he lives, I thought, and carries on his labours year by year, reads and
annotates texts, seeks for analogies between western Asiatic and Indian
mythologies, and it satisfies him, because he believes in the value of it all.
He believes in the studies whose servant he is; he believes in the value of
mere knowledge and its acquisition, because he believes in progress and
evolution. He has not been through the war, nor is he acquainted with the
shattering of the foundations of thought by Einstein (that, thinks he, only
concerns the mathematicians). He sees nothing of the preparations for the
next war that are going on all round him. He hates Jews and Communists.
He is a good, unthinking, happy child, who takes himself seriously; and, in
fact, he is much to be envied. And so, pulling myself together, I entered the
house. A maid in cap and apron opened the door. Warned by some
premonition, I noticed with care where she laid my hat and coat, and was
then shown into a warm and well-lighted room and requested to wait.
Instead of saying a prayer or taking a nap, I followed a wayward impulse
and picked up the first thing I saw. It chanced to be a small picture in a
frame that stood on the round table leaning back on its paste-board support.
It was an engraving and it represented the poet Goethe as an old man full of
character, with a finely chiseled face and a genius’ mane. Neither the
renowned fire of his eyes nor the lonely and tragic expression beneath the
courtly whitewash was lacking. To this the artist had given special care, and
he had succeeded in combining the elemental force of the old man with a
somewhat professional make-up of self-discipline and righteousness,
without prejudice to his profundity; and had made of him, all in all, a really
charming old gentleman, fit to adorn any drawing room. No doubt this
portrait was no worse than others of its description. It was much the same as
all those representations by careful craftsmen of saviours, apostles, heroes,
thinkers and statesmen. Perhaps I found it exasperating only because of a
certain pretentious virtuosity. In any case, and whatever the cause, this
empty and self-satisfied presentation of the aged Goethe shrieked at me at
once as a fatal discord, exasperated and oppressed as I was already. It told
me that I ought never to have come. Here fine Old Masters and the Nation’s
Great Ones were at home, not Steppenwolves.

If only the master of the house had come in now, I might have had the luck
to find some favourable opportunity for finding my way out. As it was, his
wife came in, and I surrendered to fate though I scented danger. We shook
hands and to the first discord there succeeded nothing but new ones. The
lady complimented me on my looks, though I knew only too well how sadly
the years had aged me since our last meeting. The clasp of her hand on my
gouty fingers had reminded me of it already. Then she went on to ask after
my dear wife, and I had to say that my wife had left me and that we were
divorced. We were glad enough when the professor came in. He too gave
me a hearty welcome and the awkward comedy came to a beautiful climax.
He was holding a newspaper to which he subscribed, an organ of the
militarist and jingoist party, and after shaking hands he pointed to it and
commented on a paragraph about a namesake of mine—a publicist called
Haller, a bad fellow and a rotten patriot—who had been making fun of the
Kaiser and expressing the view that his own country was no less
responsible for the outbreak of war than the enemy nations. There was a
man for you! The editor had given him his deserts and put him in the
pillory. However, when the professor saw that I was not interested, we
passed to other topics, and the possibility that this horrid fellow might be
sitting in front of them did not even remotely occur to either of them. Yet so
it was, I myself was that horrid fellow. Well, why make a fuss and upset
people? I laughed to myself, but gave up all hope now of a pleasant
evening.
I have a clear recollection of the moment when the professor spoke of
Haller as a traitor to his country. It was then that the horrid feeling of
depression and despair which had been mounting in me and growing
stronger and stronger ever since the burial scene condensed to a dreary
dejection. It rose to the pitch of a bodily anguish, arousing within me a
dread and suffocating foreboding. I had the feeling that something lay in
wait for me, that a danger stalked me from behind. Fortunately the
announcement that dinner was on the table supervened. We went into the
dining room, and while I racked my brains again and again for something
harmless to say, I ate more than I was accustomed to do and felt myself
growing more wretched with every moment. Good heavens, I thought all
the while, why do we put ourselves to such exertions? I felt distinctly that
my hosts were not at their ease either and that their liveliness was forced,
whether it was that I had a paralysing effect on them or because of some

other and domestic embarrassment. There was not a question they put to me
that I could answer frankly, and I was soon fairly entangled in my lies and
wrestling with my nausea at every word. At last, for the sake of changing
the subject, I began to tell them of the funeral which I had witnessed earlier
in the day. But I could not hit the right note. My efforts at humour fell
entirely flat and we were more than ever at odds. Within me the
Steppenwolf bared his teeth in a grin. By the time we had reached dessert,
silence had descended on all three of us.
We went back to the room we had come from to invoke the aid of coffee
and cognac. There, however, my eye fell once more on the magnate of
poetry, although he had been put on a chest of drawers at one side of the
room. Unable to get away from him, I took him once more in my hands,
though warning voices were plainly audible, and proceeded to attack him. I
was as though obsessed by the feeling that the situation was intolerable and
that the time had come either to warm my hosts up, to carry them off their
feet and put them in tune with myself, or else to bring about a final
explosion.
“Let us hope,” said I, “that Goethe did not really look like this. This
conceited air of nobility, the great man ogling the distinguished company,
and beneath the manly exterior what a world of charming sentimentality!
Certainly, there is much to be said against him. I have a good deal against
his venerable pomposity myself. But to represent him like this—no, that is
going too far.”
The lady of the house finished pouring out the coffee with a deeply
wounded expression and then hurriedly left the room; and her husband
explained to me with mingled embarrassment and reproach that the picture
of Goethe belonged to his wife and was one of her dearest possessions.
“And even if, objectively speaking, you are right, though I don’t agree with
you, you need not have been so outspoken.”
“There you are right,” I admitted. “Unfortunately it is a habit, a vice of
mine, always to speak my mind as much as possible, as indeed Goethe did,
too, in his better moments. In this chaste drawing-room Goethe would
certainly never have allowed himself to use an outrageous, a genuine and
unqualified expression. I sincerely beg your wife’s pardon and your own.

Tell her, please, that I am a schizomaniac. And now, if you will allow me, I
will take my leave.”
To this he made objections in spite of his perplexity. He even went back to
the subject of our former discussions and said once more how interesting
and stimulating they had been and how deep an impression my theories
about Mithras and Krishna had made on him at the time. He had hoped that
the present occasion would have been an opportunity to renew these
discussions. I thanked him for speaking as he did. Unfortunately, my
interest in Krishna had vanished and also my pleasure in learned
discussions. Further, I had told him several lies that day. For example, I had
been many months in the town, and not a few days, as I had said. I lived,
however, quite by myself, and was no longer fit for decent society; for in
the first place, I was nearly always in a bad temper and afflicted with the
gout, and in the second place, usually drunk. Lastly, to make a clean slate,
and not to go away, at least, as a liar, it was my duty to inform him that he
had grievously insulted me that evening. He had endorsed the attitude taken
up by a reactionary paper towards Haller’s opinions; a stupid bull-necked
paper, fit for an officer on half-pay, not for a man of learning. This bad
fellow and rotten patriot, Haller, however, and myself were one and the
same person, and it would be better for our country and the world in
general, if at least the few people who were capable of thought stood for
reason and the love of peace instead of heading wildly with a blind
obsession for a new war. And so I would bid him good-bye.
With that I got up and took leave of Goethe and of the professor. I seized
my hat and coat from the rack outside and left the house. Loud in my soul
the wolf howled his glee, and between my two selves there opened an
immense field of operations. For it was at once clear to me that this
disagreeable evening had much more significance for me than for the
indignant professor. For him, it was a disillusionment and a petty outrage.
For me, it was a final failure and flight. It was my leave-taking from the
respectable, moral and learned world, and a complete triumph for the
Steppenwolf. I was sent flying and beaten from the field, bankrupt in my
own eyes, dismissed without a shred of credit or a ray of humour to comfort
me. I had taken leave of the world in which I had once found a home, the
world of convention and culture, in the manner of the man with a weak
stomach who has given up pork. In a rage I went on my way beneath the

street lamps, in a rage and sick unto death. What a hideous day of shame
and wretchedness it had been from morning to night, from the cemetery to
the scene with the professor. For what? And why? Was there any sense in
taking up the burden of more such days as this or of sitting out any more
such suppers? There was not. This very night I would make an end of the
comedy, go home and cut my throat. No more tarrying.
I paced the streets in all directions, driven on by wretchedness. Naturally it
was stupid of me to bespatter the drawing-room ornaments of the worthy
folk, stupid and ill-mannered, but I could not help it; and even now I could
not help it. I could not bear this tame, lying, well-mannered life any longer.
And since it appeared that I could not bear my loneliness any longer either,
since my own company had become so unspeakably hateful and nauseous,
since I struggled for breath in a vacuum and suffocated in hell, what way
out was left me? There was none. I thought of my father and mother, of the
sacred flame of my youth long extinct, of the thousand joys and labours and
aims of my life. Nothing of them all was left me, not even repentance,
nothing but agony and nausea. Never had the clinging to mere life seemed
so grievous as now.
I rested a moment in a tavern in an outlying part of the town and drank
some brandy and water; then to the streets once more, with the devil at my
heels, up and down the steep and winding streets of the Old Town, along the
avenues, across the station square. The thought of going somewhere took
me into the station. I scanned the time-tables on the walls; drank some wine
and tried to come to my senses. Then the spectre that I went in dread of
came nearer, till I saw it plain. It was the dread of returning to my room and
coming to a halt there, faced by my despair. There was no escape from this
moment though I walked the streets for hours. Sooner or later I should be at
my door, at the table with my books, on the sofa with the photograph of
Erica above it. Sooner or later the moment would come to take out my razor
and cut my throat. More and more plainly the picture rose before me. More
and more plainly, with a wildly beating heart, I felt the dread of all dreads,
the fear of death. Yes, I was horribly afraid of death. Although I saw no
other way out, although nausea, agony and despair threatened to engulf me;
although life had no allurement and nothing to give me either of joy or
hope, I shuddered all the same with an unspeakable horror of a gaping
wound in a condemned man’s flesh.

I saw no other way of escape from this dreadful spectre. Suppose that to-
day cowardice won a victory over despair, to-morrow and each succeeding
day I would again face despair heightened by self-contempt. It was merely
taking up and throwing down the knife till at last it was done. Better to-day
then. I reasoned with myself as though with a frightened child. But the child
would not listen. It ran away. It wanted to live. I renewed my fitful
wanderings through the town, making many detours not to return to the
house which I had always in my mind and always deferred. Here and there I
came to a stop and lingered, drinking a glass or two, and then, as if pursued,
ran around in a circle whose centre had the razor as a goal, and meant death.
Sometimes from utter weariness I sat on a bench, on a fountain’s rim, or a
curb-stone and wiped the sweat from my forehead and listened to the
beating of my heart. Then on again in mortal dread and an intense yearning
for life.
Thus it was I found myself late at night in a distant and unfamiliar part of
the town; and there I went into a public house from which there came the
lively sound of dance music. Over the entrance as I went in I read “The
Black Eagle” on the old signboard. Within I found it was a free night—
crowds, smoke, the smell of wine, and the clamour of voices, with dancing
in a room at the back, whence issued the frenzy of music. I stayed in the
nearer room where there were none but simple folk, some of them poorly
dressed, whereas behind in the dance-hall smart people were also to be
seen. Carried forward by the crowd, I soon found myself near the bar,
wedged against a table at which sat a pale and pretty girl against the wall.
She wore a thin dance-frock cut very low and a withered flower in her hair.
She gave me a friendly and observant look as I came up and with a smile
moved to one side to make room for me.
“May I?” I asked and sat down beside her.
“Of course, you may,” she said. “But who are you?”
“Thanks,” I replied. “I cannot possibly go home, cannot, cannot. I’ll stay
here with you if you’ll let me. No, I can’t go back home.”
She nodded as though to humour me, and as she nodded I observed the curl
that fell from her temple to her ear, and I saw that the withered flower was a
camellia. From within crashed the music and at the buffet the waitresses
hurriedly shouted their orders.

“Well, stay here then,” she said with a voice that comforted me. “Why can’t
you go home?”
“I can’t. There’s something waiting for me there. No, I can’t—it’s too
frightful.”
“Let it wait then and stay here. First wipe your glasses. You can see nothing
like that. Give me your handkerchief. What shall we drink? Burgundy?”
While she wiped my glasses, I had the first clear impression of her pale,
firm face, with its clear grey eyes and smooth forehead, and the short, tight
curl in front of her ear. Good-naturedly and with a touch of mockery she
began to take me in hand. She ordered the wine, and as she clinked her
glass with mine, her eyes fell on my shoes.
“Good Lord, wherever have you come from? You look as though you had
come from Paris on foot. That’s no state to come to a dance in.”
I answered “yes” and “no,” laughed now and then, and let her talk. I found
her charming, very much to my surprise, for I had always avoided girls of
her kind and regarded them with suspicion. And she treated me exactly in
the way that was best for me at that moment, and so she has since without
an exception. She took me under her wing just as I needed, and mocked me,
too, just as I needed. She ordered me a sandwich and told me to eat it. She
filled my glass and bade me sip it and not drink too fast. Then she
commended my docility.
“That’s fine,” she said to encourage me. “You’re not difficult. I wouldn’t
mind betting it’s a long while since you have had to obey any one.”
“You’d win the bet. How did you know it?”
“Nothing in that. Obeying is like eating and drinking. There’s nothing like it
if you’ve been without it too long. Isn’t it so, you’re glad to do as I tell
you?”
“Very glad. You know everything.”
“You make it easy to. Perhaps, my friend, I could tell you, too, what it is
that’s waiting for you at home and what you dread so much. But you know
that for yourself. We needn’t talk about it, eh? Silly business! Either a man
goes and hangs himself, and then he hangs sure enough, and he’ll have his

reasons for it, or else he goes on living and then he has only living to bother
himself with. Simple enough.”
“Oh,” I cried, “if only it were so simple. I’ve bothered myself enough with
life, God knows, and little use it has been to me. To hang oneself is hard,
perhaps. I don’t know. But to live is far, far harder. God, how hard it is!”
“You’ll see it’s child’s play. We’ve made a start already. You’ve polished
your glasses, eaten something and had a drink. Now we’ll go and give your
shoes and trousers a brush and then you’ll dance a shimmy with me.”
“Now that shows,” I cried in a fluster, “that I was right! Nothing could
grieve me more than not to be able to carry out any command of yours, but
I can dance no shimmy, nor waltz, nor polka, nor any of the rest of them.
I’ve never danced in my life. Now you can see it isn’t all as easy as you
think.”
Her bright red lips smiled and she firmly shook her waved and shingled
head; and as I looked at her, I thought I could see a resemblance to Rosa
Kreisler, with whom I had been in love as a boy. But she had a dark
complexion and dark hair. I could not tell of whom it was she reminded me.
I knew only that it was of someone in my early youth and boyhood.
“Wait a bit,” she cried. “So you can’t dance? Not at all? Not even a one-
step? And yet you talk of the trouble you’ve taken to live? You told a fib
there, my boy, and you shouldn’t do that at your age. How can you say that
you’ve taken any trouble to live when you won’t even dance?”
“But if I can’t—I’ve never learnt!”
She laughed.
“But you learnt reading and writing and arithmetic, I suppose, and French
and Latin and a lot of other things? I don’t mind betting you were ten or
twelve years at school and studied whatever else you could as well. Perhaps
you’ve even got your doctor’s degree and know Chinese or Spanish. Am I
right? Very well then. But you couldn’t find the time and money for a few
dancing lessons! No, indeed!”
“It was my parents,” I said to justify myself. “They let me learn Latin and
Greek and all the rest of it. But they didn’t let me learn to dance. It wasn’t
the thing with us. My parents had never danced themselves.”

She looked at me quite coldly, with real contempt, and again something in
her face reminded me of my youth.
“So your parents must take the blame then. Did you ask them whether you
might spend the evening at the Black Eagle? Did you? They’re dead a long
while ago, you say? So much for that. And now supposing you were too
obedient to learn to dance when you were young (though I don’t believe
you were such a model child), what have you been doing with yourself all
these years?”
“Well,” I confessed, “I scarcely know myself—studied, played music, read
books, written books, travelled—”
“Fine views of life, you have. You have always done the difficult and
complicated things and the simple ones you haven’t even learnt. No time, of
course. More amusing things to do. Well, thank God, I’m not your mother.
But to do as you do and then say you’ve tested life to the bottom and found
nothing in it is going a bit too far.”
“Don’t scold me,” I implored. “It isn’t as if I didn’t know I was mad.”
“Oh, don’t make a song of your sufferings. You are no madman, Professor.
You’re not half mad enough to please me. It seems to me you’re much too
clever in a silly way, just like a professor. Have another roll. You can tell me
some more later.”
She got another roll for me, put a little salt and mustard on it, cut a piece for
herself and told me to eat it. I did all she told me except dance. It did me a
prodigious lot of good to do as I was told and to have some one sitting by
me who asked me things and ordered me about and scolded me. If the
professor or his wife had done so an hour or two earlier, it would have
spared me a lot. But no, it was well as it was. I should have missed much.
“What’s your name?” she asked suddenly.
“Harry.”
“Harry? A babyish sort of name. And a baby you are, Harry, in spite of your
few grey hairs. You’re a baby and you need some one to look after you. I’ll
say no more of dancing. But look at your hair! Have you no wife, no
sweetheart?”

“I haven’t a wife any longer. We are divorced. A sweetheart, yes, but she
doesn’t live here. I don’t see her very often. We don’t get on very well.”
She whistled softly.
“You must be difficult if nobody sticks to you. But now tell me what was up
in particular this evening? What sent you chasing round out of your wits?
Down on your luck? Lost at cards?”
This was not easy to explain.
“Well,” I began, “you see, it was really a small matter. I had an invitation to
dinner with a professor—I’m not one myself, by the way—and really I
ought not to have gone. I’ve lost the habit of being in company and making
conversation. I’ve forgotten how it’s done. As soon as I entered the house I
had the feeling something would go wrong, and when I hung my hat on the
peg I thought to myself that perhaps I should want it sooner than I expected.
Well, at the professor’s there was a picture that stood on the table, a stupid
picture. It annoyed me—”
“What sort of picture? Annoyed you—why?” she broke in.
“Well, it was a picture representing Goethe, the poet Goethe, you know. But
it was not in the least as he really looked. That, of course, nobody can know
exactly. He has been dead a hundred years. However, some artist of to-day
had painted his portrait as he imagined him to have been and prettified him,
and this picture annoyed me. It made me perfectly sick. I don’t know
whether you can understand that.”
“I understand all right. Don’t you worry. Go on.”
“Before this in any case I didn’t see eye to eye with the professor. Like
nearly all professors, he is a great patriot, and during the war did his bit in
the way of deceiving the public, with the best intentions, of course. I,
however, am opposed to war. But that’s all one. To continue my story, there
was not the least need for me to look at the picture—”
“Certainly not.”
“But in the first place it made me sorry because of Goethe, whom I love
very dearly, and then, besides, I thought—well, I had better say just how I
thought, or felt. There I was, sitting with people as one of themselves and
believing that they thought of Goethe as I did and had the same picture of

him in their minds as I, and there stood that tasteless, false and sickly affair
and they thought it lovely and had not the least idea that the spirit of that
picture and the spirit of Goethe were exact opposites. They thought the
picture splendid, and so they might for all I cared, but for me it ended, once
and for all, any confidence, any friendship, any feeling of affinity I could
have for these people. In any case, my friendship with them did not amount
to very much. And so I got furious, and sad, too, when I saw that I was quite
alone with no one to understand me. Do you see what I mean?”
“It is very easy to see. And next? Did you throw the picture at them?”
“No, but I was rather insulting and left the house. I wanted to go home, but
—”
“But you’d have found no mummy there to comfort the silly baby or scold
it. I must say, Harry, you make me almost sorry for you. I never knew such
a baby.”
So it seemed to me, I must own. She gave me a glass of wine to drink. In
fact, she was like a mother to me. In a glimpse, though, now and then I saw
how young and beautiful she was.
“And so,” she began again, “Goethe has been dead a hundred years, and
you’re very fond of him, and you have a wonderful picture in your head of
what he must have looked like, and you have the right to, I suppose. But the
artist who adores Goethe too, and makes a picture of him, has no right to do
it, nor the professor either, nor anybody else—because you don’t like it.
You find it intolerable. You have to be insulting and leave the house. If you
had sense, you would laugh at the artist and the professor—laugh and be
done with it. If you were out of your senses, you’d smash the picture in
their faces. But as you’re only a little baby, you run home and want to hang
yourself. I’ve understood your story very well, Harry. It’s a funny story. You
make me laugh. But don’t drink so fast. Burgundy should be sipped.
Otherwise you’ll get hot. But you have to be told everything—like a little
child.”
She admonished me with the look of a severe governess of sixty.
“Oh, I know,” I said contentedly. “Only tell me everything.”
“What shall I tell you?”

“Whatever you feel like telling me.”
“Good. Then I’ll tell you something. For an hour I’ve been saying ‘thou’ to
you, and you have been saying ‘you’ to me. Always Latin and Greek,
always as complicated as possible. When a girl addresses you intimately
and she isn’t disagreeable to you, then you should address her in the same
way. So now you’ve learnt something. And secondly—for half an hour I’ve
known that you’re called Harry. I know it because I asked you. But you
don’t care to know my name.”
“Oh, but indeed—I’d like to know very much.”
“You’re too late! If we meet again, you can ask me again. To-day I shan’t
tell you. And now I’m going to dance.”
At the first sign she made of getting up, my heart sank like lead. I dreaded
her going and leaving me alone, for then it would all come back as it was
before. In a moment, the old dread and wretchedness took hold of me like a
toothache that has passed off and then comes back of a sudden and burns
like fire. Oh, God, had I forgotten, then, what was waiting for me? Had
anything altered?
“Stop,” I implored, “don’t go. You can dance of course, as much as you
please, but don’t stay away too long. Come back again, come back again.”
She laughed as she got up. I expected that she would have been taller. She
was slender, but not tall. Again I was reminded of some one. Of whom? I
could not make out.
“You’re coming back?”
“I’m coming back, but it may be half an hour or an hour, perhaps. I want to
tell you something. Shut your eyes and sleep for a little. That’s what you
need.”
I made room for her to pass. Her skirt brushed my knees and she looked, as
she went, in a little pocket mirror, lifted her eyebrows, and powdered her
chin; then she disappeared into the dance hall. I looked round me; strange
faces, smoking men, spilt beer on marble-tops, clatter and clamour
everywhere, the dance music in my ear. I was to sleep, she had said. Ah, my
good child, you know a lot about my sleep that is shyer than a weasel. Sleep
in this hurly-burly, sitting at a table, amidst the clatter of beer-pots! I sipped

the wine and, taking out a cigar, looked round for matches, but as I had after
all no inclination to smoke, I put down the cigar on the table in front of me.
“Shut your eyes,” she had said. God knows where the girl got her voice; it
was so deep and good and maternal. It was good to obey such a voice, I had
found that out already. Obediently I shut my eyes, leant my head against the
wall and heard the roar of a hundred mingled noises surge around me and
smiled at the idea of sleep in such a place. I made up my mind to go to the
door of the dance-hall and from there catch a glimpse of my beautiful girl
as she danced. I made a movement to go, then felt at last how unutterably
tired out I was from my hours of wandering and remained seated; and,
thereupon I fell asleep as I had been told. I slept greedily, thankfully, and
dreamt more lightly and pleasantly than I had for a long while.
I dreamt that I was waiting in an old-fashioned ante-room. At first I knew
no more than that my audience was with some Excellency or other. Then it
came to me that it was Goethe who was to receive me. Unfortunately I was
not there quite on a personal call. I was a reporter, and this worried me a
great deal and I could not understand how the devil I had got into such a fix.
Besides this, I was upset by a scorpion that I had seen a moment before
trying to climb up my leg. I had shaken myself free of the black crawling
beast, but I did not know where it had got to next and did not dare make a
grab after it.
Also I was not very sure whether I had been announced by a mistake to
Matthisson instead of to Goethe, and him again I mixed up in my dream
with Bürger, for I took him for the author of the poem to Molly. Moreover I
would have liked extremely to meet Molly. I imagined her wonderful,
tender, musical. If only I were not here at the orders of that cursed
newspaper office. My ill-humour over this increased until by degrees it
extended even to Goethe, whom I suddenly treated to all manner of
reflections and reproaches. It was going to be a lively interview. The
scorpion, however, dangerous though he was and hidden no doubt
somewhere within an inch of me, was all the same not so bad perhaps.
Possibly he might even betoken something friendly. It seemed to me
extremely likely that he had something to do with Molly. He might be a
kind of messenger from her—or an heraldic beast, dangerously and
beautifully emblematic of woman and sin. Might not his name perhaps be

Vulpius? But at that moment a flunkey threw open the door. I rose and went
in.
There stood old Goethe, short and very erect, and on his classic breast, sure
enough, was the corpulent star of some Order. Not for a moment did he
relax his commanding attitude, his air of giving audience, and of controlling
the world from that museum of his at Weimar. Indeed, he had scarcely
looked at me before with a nod and a jerk like an old raven he began
pompously: “Now, you young people have, I believe, very little
appreciation of us and our efforts.”
“You are quite right,” said I, chilled by his ministerial glance. “We young
people have, indeed, very little appreciation of you. You are too pompous
for us, Excellency, too vain and pompous, and not outright enough. That is,
no doubt, at the bottom of it—not outright enough.”
The little old man bent his erect head forward, and as his hard mouth with
its official folds relaxed in a little smile and became enchantingly alive, my
heart gave a sudden bound; for all at once the poem came to my mind
—“The dusk with folding wing”—and I remembered that it was from the
lips of this man that the poem came. Indeed, at this moment I was entirely
disarmed and overwhelmed and would have chosen of all things to kneel
before him. But I held myself erect and heard him say with a smile: “Oh, so
you accuse me of not being outright? What a thing to say! Will you explain
yourself a little more fully?”
I was very glad indeed to do so.
“Like all great spirits, Herr von Goethe, you have clearly recognised 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. You have
known all this, yes, and said as much over and over again; yet you gave up
your whole life to preaching its opposite, giving utterance to faith and

optimism and spreading before yourself and others the illusion that our
spiritual strivings mean something and endure. You have lent a deaf ear to
those that plumbed the depths and suppressed the voices that told the truth
of despair, and not in yourself only, but also in Kleist and Beethoven. Year
after year you lived on at Weimar accumulating knowledge and collecting
objects, writing letters and gathering them in, as though in your old age you
had found the real way to discover the eternal in the momentary, though
you could only mummify it, and to spiritualise nature though you could
only hide it with a pretty mask. This is why we reproach you with
insincerity.”
The old big-wig kept his eyes musingly on mine, smiling as before.
Then to my surprise, he asked, “You must have a strong objection, then, to
the Magic Flute of Mozart?”
And before I could protest, he went on:
“The Magic Flute presents life to us as a wondrous song. It honours our
feelings, transient, as they are, as something eternal and divine. It agrees
neither with Herr von Kleist nor with Herr Beethoven. It preaches optimism
and faith.”
“I know, I know,” I cried in a rage. “God knows why you hit of all things on
the Magic Flute that is dearer to me than anything else in the world. But
Mozart did not live to be eighty-two. He did not make pretensions in his
own life to the enduring and the orderly and to exalted dignity as you did.
He did not think himself so important! He sang his divine melodies and
died. He died young—poor and misunderstood—”
I lost my breath. A thousand things ought to have been said in ten words.
My forehead began to sweat.
Goethe, however, said very amiably: “It may be unforgivable that I lived to
be eighty-two. My satisfaction on that account was, however, less than you
may think. You are right that a great longing for survival possessed me
continually. I was in continual fear of death and continually struggling with
it. I believe that the struggle against death, the unconditional and self-willed
determination to live, is the motive power behind the lives and activities of
all outstanding men. My eighty-two years showed just as conclusively that
we must all die in the end as if I had died as a schoolboy. If it helps to

justify me I should like to say this too: there was much of the child in my
nature—curiosity and love of wasting time in play. Well, and so it went on
and on, till I saw that sooner or later there must be enough of play.”
As he said this, his smile was quite cunning—a downright roguish leer. He
had grown taller and his erect bearing and the constrained dignity of his
face had disappeared. The air, too, around us was now ringing with
melodies, all of them songs of Goethe’s. I heard Mozart’s Violets and
Schubert’s Again thou fillest brake and vale quite distinctly. And Goethe’s
face was rosy and youthful, and he laughed; and now he resembled Mozart
like a brother, now Schubert, and the star on his breast was composed
entirely of wild flowers. A yellow primrose blossomed luxuriantly in the
middle of it.
It did not altogether suit me to have the old gentleman avoid my questions
and accusations in this sportive manner, and I looked at him reproachfully.
At that he bent forward and brought his mouth, which had now become
quite like a child’s, close to my ear and whispered softly into it: “You take
the old Goethe much too seriously, my young friend. You should not take
old people who are already dead seriously. It does them injustice. We
immortals do not like things to be taken seriously. We like joking.
Seriousness, young man, is an accident of time. It consists, I don’t mind
telling you in confidence, in putting too high a value on time. I, too, once
put too high a value on time. For that reason I wished to be a hundred years
old. In eternity, however, there is no time, you see. Eternity is a mere
moment, just long enough for a joke.”
And indeed there was no saying another serious word to the man. He
capered joyfully and nimbly up and down and made the primrose shoot out
from his star like a rocket and then he made it shrink and disappear. While
he flickered to and fro with his dance-steps and figures, it was borne in
upon me that he at least had not neglected learning to dance. He could do it
wonderfully. Then I remembered the scorpion, or Molly, rather, and I called
out to Goethe: “Tell me, is Molly there?”
Goethe laughed aloud. He went to his table and opened a drawer; took out a
handsome leather or velvet box, and held it open under my eyes. There,
small, faultless, and gleaming, lay a diminutive effigy of a woman’s leg on

the dark velvet, an enchanting leg, with the knee a little bent and the foot
pointing downwards to end in the daintiest of toes.
I stretched out my hand, for I had quite fallen in love with the little leg and I
wanted to have it, but just as I was going to take hold of it with my finger
and thumb, the little toy seemed to move with a tiny start and it occurred to
me suddenly that this might be the scorpion. Goethe seemed to read my
thought, and even to have wanted to cause this deep timidity, this hectic
struggle between desire and dread. He held the provoking little scorpion
close to my face and watched me start forward with desire, then start back
with dread; and this seemed to divert him exceedingly. While he was
teasing me with the charming, dangerous thing, he became quite old once
more, very, very old, a thousand years old, with hair as white as snow, and
his withered greybeard’s face laughed a still and soundless laughter that
shook him to the depths with abysmal old man’s humour.
When I woke I had forgotten the dream; it did not come back to me till
later. I had slept for nearly an hour, as I never thought I could possibly have
done at a café-table with the music and the bustle all round me. The dear
girl stood in front of me with one hand on my shoulder.
“Give me two or three marks,” she said. “I’ve spent something in there.”
I gave her my purse. She took it and was soon back again.
“Well, now I can sit with you for a little and then I have to go. I have an
engagement.”
I was alarmed.
“With whom?” I asked quickly.
“With a man, my dear Harry. He has invited me to the Odéon Bar.”
“Oh! I didn’t think you would leave me alone.”
“Then you should have invited me yourself. Some one has got in before
you. Well, there’s good money saved. Do you know the Odéon? Nothing
but champagne after midnight. Armchairs like at a club, nigger band, jolly
fine.”
I had never considered all this.

“But let me invite you,” I entreated her. “I thought it was an understood
thing, now that we’ve made friends. Invite yourself wherever you like. Do,
please, I beg you.”
“That is nice of you. But, you see, a promise is a promise, and I’ve given
my word and I shall keep it and go. Don’t worry any more over that. Have
another drink of wine. There’s still some in the bottle. Drink it up and then
go comfortably home and sleep. Promise me.”
“No, you know that’s just what I can’t do—go home.”
“Oh—you—with your tales! Will you never be done—with your Goethe?”
(The dream about Goethe came back to me at that moment.) “But if you
really can’t go home, stay here. There are bedrooms. Shall I see about one
for you?”
I was satisfied with that and asked where I could find her again? Where did
she live? She would not tell me. I should find her in one place or another if
I looked.
“Mayn’t I invite you somewhere?”
“Where?”
“Where and when you like.”
“Good. Tuesday for dinner at the old Franciscan. First floor. Good-bye.”
She gave me her hand. I noticed for the first time how well it matched her
voice—a beautiful hand, firm and intelligent and good-natured. She laughed
at me when I kissed it.
Then at the last moment she turned once more and said: “I’ll tell you
something else—about Goethe. What you felt about him and finding the
picture of him more than you could put up with, I often feel about the
saints.”
“The saints? Are you so religious?”
“No, I’m not religious, I’m sorry to say. But I was once and shall be again.
There is no time now to be religious.”
“No time. Does it need time to be religious?”

“Oh, yes. To be religious you must have time and, even more, independence
of time. You can’t be religious in earnest and at the same time live in actual
things and still take them seriously, time and money and the Odéon Bar and
all that.”
“Yes, I understand. But what was that you said about the saints?”
“Well, there are many saints I’m particularly fond of—Stephen, St. Francis
and others. I often see pictures of them and of the Saviour and the Virgin—
such utterly lying and false and silly pictures—and I can put up with them
just as little as you could with that picture of Goethe. When I see one of
those sweet and silly Saviours or St. Francises and see how other people
find them beautiful and edifying, I feel it is an insult to the real Saviour and
it makes me think: Why did He live and suffer so terribly if people find a
picture as silly as that satisfactory to them! But in spite of this I know that
my own picture of the Saviour or St. Francis is only a human picture and
falls short of the original, and that the Saviour Himself would find the
picture I have of Him within me just as stupid as I do those sickly
reproductions. I don’t say this to justify you in your ill-temper and rage with
the picture of Goethe. There’s no justification. I say it simply to show you
that I can understand you. You learned people and artists have, no doubt, all
sorts of superior things in your heads; but you’re human beings like the rest
of us, and we, too, have our dreams and fancies. I noticed, for example,
learned sir, that you felt a slight embarrassment when it came to telling me
your Goethe story. You had to make a great effort to make your ideas
comprehensible to a simple girl like me. Well, and so I wanted to show you
that you needn’t have made such an effort. I understand you all right. And
now I’ve finished and your place is in bed.”
She went away and an old house porter took me up two flights of stairs. But
first he asked me where my luggage was, and when he heard that I hadn’t
any, I had to pay down what he called “sleep-money.” Then he took me up
an old dark staircase to a room upstairs and left me alone. There was a bleak
wooden bedstead and on the wall hung a sabre and a coloured print of
Garibaldi and also a withered wreath that had once figured in a club
festival. I would have given much for pyjamas. At any rate there was water
and a small towel and I could wash. Then I lay down on the bed in my
clothes, and, leaving the light on, gave myself up to my reflections. So I had
settled accounts with Goethe. It was splendid that he had come to me in a

dream. And this wonderful girl—if only I had known her name! All of a
sudden there was a human being, a living human being, to shatter the death
that had come down over me like a glass case, and to put out a hand to me,
a good and beautiful and warm hand. All of a sudden there were things that
concerned me again, which I could think of with joy and eagerness. All of a
sudden a door was thrown open through which life came in. Perhaps I could
live once more and once more be a human being. My soul that had fallen
asleep in the cold and nearly frozen breathed once more, and sleepily spread
its weak and tiny wings. Goethe had been with me. A girl had bidden me eat
and drink and sleep, and had shown me friendship and had laughed at me
and had called me a silly little boy. And this wonderful friend had talked to
me of the saints and shown me that even when I had outdone myself in
absurdity I was not alone. I was not an incomprehensible and ailing
exception. There were people akin to me. I was understood. Should I see
her again? Yes, for certain. She could be relied upon. “A promise is a
promise.”
And before I knew, I was asleep once more and slept four or five hours. It
had gone ten when I woke. My clothes were all creases. I felt utterly
exhausted. And in my head was the memory of yesterday’s half-forgotten
horror; but I had life, hope and happy thoughts. As I returned to my room I
experienced nothing of that terror that this return had had for me the day
before. On the stairs above the araucaria I met the “aunt,” my landlady. I
saw her seldom but her kindly nature always delighted me. The meeting
was not very propitious, for I was still unkempt and uncombed after my
night out, and I had not shaved. I greeted her and would have passed on. As
a rule, she always respected my desire to live alone and unobserved. To-day,
however, as it turned out, a veil between me and the outer world seemed to
be torn aside, a barrier fallen. She laughed and stopped.
“You have been on a spree, Mr. Haller. You were not in bed last night. You
must be pretty tired!”
“Yes,” I said, and was forced to laugh too. “There was something lively
going on last night, and as I did not like to shock you, I slept at an hotel. My
respect for the repose and dignity of your house is great. I sometimes feel
like a ‘foreign body’ in it.”
“You are poking fun, Mr. Haller.”

“Only at myself.”
“You ought not to do that even. You ought not to feel like a ‘foreign body’
in my house. You should live as best pleases you and do as best you can. I
have had before now many exceedingly respectable tenants, jewels of
respectability, but not one has been quieter or disturbed us less than you.
And now—would you like some tea?”
I did not refuse. Tea was brought me in her drawing-room with the old-
fashioned pictures and furniture, and we had a little talk. In her friendly way
she elicited this and that about my life and thoughts without actually asking
questions and listened attentively to my confessions, while at the same time
she did not give them more importance than an intelligent and motherly
woman should to the peccadilloes of men. We talked, too, of her nephew
and she showed me in a neighbouring room his latest hobby, a wireless set.
There the industrious young man spent his evenings, fitting together the
apparatus, a victim to the charms of wireless, and kneeling on pious knees
before the god of applied science whose might had made it possible to
discover after thousands of years a fact which every thinker has always
known and put to better use than in this recent and very imperfect
development. We spoke about this, for the aunt had a slight leaning to piety
and religious topics were not unwelcome to her. I told her that the
omnipresence of all forces and facts was well known to ancient India, and
that science had merely brought a small fraction of this fact into general use
by devising for it, that is, for sound waves, a receiver and transmitter which
were still in their first stages and miserably defective. The principal fact
known to that ancient knowledge was, I said, the unreality of time. This
science had not yet observed. Finally, it would, of course, make this
“discovery,” also, and then the inventors would get busy over it. The
discovery would be made—and perhaps very soon—that there were floating
round us not only the pictures and events of the transient present in the
same way that music from Paris or Berlin was now heard in Frankfurt or
Zurich, but that all that had ever happened in the past could be registered
and brought back likewise. We might well look for the day when, with
wires or without, with or without the disturbance of other sounds, we
should hear King Solomon speaking, or Walter von der Vogelweide. And all
this, I said, just as to-day was the case with the beginnings of wireless,
would be of no more service to man than as an escape from himself and his

true aims, and a means of surrounding himself with an ever closer mesh of
distractions and useless activities. But instead of embarking on these
familiar topics with my customary bitterness and scorn for the times and for
science, I made a joke of them; and the aunt smiled, and we sat together for
an hour or so and drank our tea with much content.
It was for Tuesday evening that I had invited the charming and remarkable
girl of the Black Eagle, and I was a good deal put to it to know how to pass
the time till then; and when at last Tuesday came, the importance of my
relation to this unknown girl had become alarmingly clear to me. I thought
of nothing but her. I expected everything from her. I was ready to lay
everything at her feet. I was not in the least in love with her. Yet I had only
to imagine that she might fail to keep the appointment, or forget it, to see
where I stood. Then the world would be a desert once more, one day as
dreary and worthless as the last, and the deathly stillness and wretchedness
would surround me once more on all sides with no way out from this hell of
silence except the razor. And these few days had not made me think any the
more fondly of the razor. It had lost none of its terror. This was indeed the
hateful truth: I dreaded to cut my throat with a dread that crushed my heart.
My fear was as wild and obstinate as though I were the healthiest of men
and my life a paradise. I realised my situation recklessly and without a
single illusion. I realised that it was the unendurable tension between
inability to live and inability to die that made the unknown girl, the pretty
dancer of the Black Eagle, so important to me. She was the one window, the
one tiny crack of light in my black hole of dread. She was my release and
my way to freedom. She had to teach me to live or teach me to die. She had
to touch my deadened heart with her firm and pretty hand, and at the touch
of life it would either leap again to flame or subside in ashes. I could not
imagine whence she derived these powers, what the source of her magic
was, in what secret soil this deep meaning she had for me had grown up;
nor did it matter. I did not care to know. There was no longer the least
importance for me in any knowledge or perception I might have. Indeed it
was just in that line that I was overstocked, for the ignominy under which I
suffered lay just in this—that I saw my own situation so clearly and was so
very conscious, too, of hers. I saw this wretch, this brute beast of a
Steppenwolf as a fly in a web, and saw too the approaching decision of his
fate. Entangled and defenceless he hung in the web. The spider was ready to
devour him, and further off was the rescuing hand. I might have made the

most intelligent and penetrating remarks about the ramifications and the
causes of my sufferings, my sickness of soul, my general bedevilment of
neurosis. The mechanism was transparent to me. But what I needed was not
knowledge and understanding. What I longed for in my despair was life and
resolution, action and reaction, impulse and impetus.
Although during the few days of waiting I never despaired of my friend
keeping her word, this did not prevent my being in a state of acute suspense
when the day arrived. Never in my life have I waited more impatiently for a
day to end. And while the suspense and impatience were almost intolerable,
they were at the same time of wonderful benefit to me. It was unimaginably
beautiful and new for me who for a long while had been too listless to await
anything or to find joy in anything—yes, it was wonderful to be running
here and there all day long in restless anxiety and intense expectation, to be
anticipating the meeting and the talk and the outcome that the evening had
in store, to be shaving and dressing with peculiar care (new linen, new tie,
new laces in my shoes). Whoever this intelligent and mysterious girl might
be and however she got into this relation to myself was all one. She was
there. The miracle had happened. I had found a human being once more and
a new interest in life. All that mattered was that the miracle should go on,
that I should surrender myself to this magnetic power and follow this star.
Unforgettable moment when I saw her once more! I sat in the old-fashioned
and comfortable restaurant at a small table that I had quite unnecessarily
engaged by telephone, and studied the menu. In a tumbler were two orchids
I had bought for my new acquaintance. I had a good while to wait, but I was
sure she would come and was no longer agitated. And then she came. She
stopped for a moment at the cloakroom and greeted me only by an
observant and rather quizzical glance from her clear grey eyes. Distrustful, I
took care to see how the waiter behaved towards her. No, there was nothing
confidential, no lack of distance. He was scrupulously respectful. And yet
they knew each other. She called him Emil.
She laughed with pleasure when I gave her the orchids.
“That’s sweet of you, Harry. You wanted to make me a present, didn’t you,
and weren’t sure what to choose. You weren’t quite sure you would be right
in making me a present. I might be insulted, and so you chose orchids, and
though they’re only flowers they’re dear enough. So I thank you ever so

much. And by the way I’ll tell you now that I won’t take presents from you.
I live on men, but I won’t live on you. But how you have altered! No one
would know you. The other day you looked as if you had been cut down
from a gallows, and now you’re very nearly a man again. And now—have
you carried out my orders?”
“What orders?”
“You’ve never forgotten? I mean, have you learnt the fox-trot? You said you
wished nothing better than to obey my commands, that nothing was dearer
to you than obeying me. Do you remember?”
“Indeed I do, and so it shall be. I meant it.”
“And yet you haven’t learnt to dance yet?”
“Can that be done so quickly—in a day or two?”
“Of course. The fox-trot you can learn in an hour. The Boston in two. The
Tango takes longer, but that you don’t need.”
“But now I really must know your name.”
She looked at me for a moment without speaking.
“Perhaps you can guess it. I should be so glad if you did. Pull yourself
together and take a good look at me. Hasn’t it ever occurred to you that
sometimes my face is just like a boy’s? Now, for example.”
Yes, now that I looked at her face carefully, I had to admit she was right. It
was a boy’s face. And after a moment I saw something in her face that
reminded me of my own boyhood and of my friend of those days. His name
was Herman. For a moment it seemed that she had turned into this Herman.
“If you were a boy,” said I in amazement, “I should say your name was
Herman.”
“Who knows, perhaps I am one and am simply in woman’s clothing,” she
said, joking.
“Is your name Hermine?”
She nodded, beaming, delighted at my guess. At that moment the waiter
brought the food and we began to eat. She was as happy as a child. Of all
the things that pleased and charmed me about her, the prettiest and most

characteristic was her rapid changes from the deepest seriousness to the
drollest merriment, and this without doing herself the least violence, with
the facility of a gifted child. Now for a while she was merry and chaffed me
about the fox-trot, trod on my feet under the table, enthusiastically praised
the meal, remarked on the care I had taken dressing, though she also had
many criticisms to make on my appearance.
Meanwhile I asked her: “How did you manage to look like a boy and make
me guess your name?”
“Oh, you did all that yourself. Doesn’t your learning reveal to you that the
reason why I please you and mean so much to you is because I am a kind of
looking-glass for you, because there’s something in me that answers you
and understands you. Really, we ought all to be such looking-glasses to
each other and answer and correspond to each other, but such owls as you
are a bit peculiar. They give themselves on the slightest provocation over to
the strangest notions that they can see nothing and read nothing any longer
in the eyes of other men and then nothing seems right to them. And then
when an owl like that after all finds a face that looks back into his and gives
him a glimpse of understanding—well, then he’s pleased, naturally.”
“There’s nothing you don’t know, Hermine,” I cried in amazement. “It’s
exactly as you say. And yet you’re so entirely different from me. Why,
you’re my opposite. You have all that I lack.”
“So you think,” she said shortly, “and it’s well you should.”
And now a dark cloud of seriousness spread over her face. It was indeed
like a magic mirror to me. Of a sudden her face bespoke seriousness and
tragedy and it looked as fathomless as the hollow eyes of a mask. Slowly, as
though it were dragged from her word for word, she said:
“Mind, don’t forget what you said to me. You said that I was to command
you and that it would be a joy to you to obey my commands. Don’t forget
that. You must know this, my little Harry—just as something in me
corresponds to you and gives you confidence, so it is with me. The other
day when I saw you come in to the Black Eagle, exhausted and beside
yourself and scarcely in this world any longer, it came to me at once: This
man will obey me. All he wants is that I should command him. And that’s

what I’m going to do. That’s why I spoke to you and why we made
friends.”
She spoke so seriously from a deep impulse of her very soul that I scarcely
liked to encourage her. I tried to calm her down. She shook her head with a
frown and with a compelling look went on: “I tell you, you must keep your
word, my boy. If you don’t you’ll regret it. You will have many commands
from me and you will carry them out. Nice ones and agreeable ones that it
will be a pleasure to you to obey. And at the last you will fulfil my last
command as well, Harry.”
“I will,” I said, half giving in. “What will your last command be?”
I guessed it already—God knows why.
She shivered as though a passing chill went through her and seemed to be
waking slowly from her trance. Her eyes did not release me. Suddenly she
became still more sinister.
“If I were wise, I shouldn’t tell you. But I won’t be wise, Harry, not for this
time. I’ll be just the opposite. So now mind what I say! You will hear it and
forget it again. You will laugh over it, and you will weep over it. So look
out! I am going to play with you for life and death, little brother, and before
we begin the game I’m going to lay my cards on the table.”
How beautiful she looked, how unearthly, when she said that! Cool and
clear, there swam in her eyes a conscious sadness. These eyes of hers
seemed to have suffered all imaginable suffering and to have acquiesced in
it. Her lips spoke with difficulty and as though something hindered them, as
though a keen frost had numbed her face; but between her lips at the
corners of her mouth where the tip of her tongue showed at rare intervals,
there was but sweet sensuality and inward delight that contradicted the
expression of her face and the tone of her voice. A short lock hung down
over the smooth expanse of her forehead, and from this corner of her
forehead whence fell the lock of hair, her boyishness welled up from time to
time like a breath of life and cast the spell of an hermaphrodite. I listened
with an eager anxiety and yet as though dazed and only half aware.
“You like me,” she went on, “for the reason I said before, because I have
broken through your isolation. I have caught you from the very gates of hell
and wakened you to new life. But I want more from you—much more. I

want to make you in love with me. No, don’t interrupt me. Let me speak.
You like me very much. I can see that. And you’re grateful to me. But
you’re not in love with me. I mean to make you fall in love with me, and it
is part of my calling. It is my living to be able to make men fall in love with
me. But mind this, I don’t do it because I find you exactly captivating. I’m
as little in love with you as you with me. But I need you as you do me. You
need me now, for the moment, because you’re desperate. You’re dying just
for the lack of a push to throw you into the water and bring you to life
again. You need me to teach you to dance and to laugh and to live. But I
need you, not to-day—later, for something very important and beautiful too.
When you are in love with me I will give you my last command and you
will obey it, and it will be the better for both of us.”
She pulled one of the brown and purple green-veined orchids up a little in
the glass and bending over stared a moment at the bloom.
“You won’t find it easy, but you will do it. You will carry out my command
and—kill me. There—ask no more.”
When she came to the end her eyes were still on the orchid, and her face
relaxed, losing its strain like a flower-bud unfolding its petals. In an instant
there was an enchanting smile on her lips while her eyes for a moment were
still fixed and spell-bound. Then she gave a shake of her head with its little
boyish lock, took a sip of water, and realising of a sudden that we were at a
meal fell to eating again with appetite and enjoyment.
I had heard her uncanny communication clearly word for word. I had even
guessed what her last command was before she said it and was horrified no
longer. All that she said sounded as convincing to me as a decree of fate. I
accepted it without protest. And yet in spite of the terrifying seriousness
with which she had spoken I did not take it all as fully real and serious.
While part of my soul drank in her words and believed in them, another part
appeased me with a nod and took note that Hermine too, for all her wisdom
and health and assurance, had her fantasies and twilight states. Scarcely was
her last word spoken before a layer of unreality and ineffectuality settled
over the whole scene.
All the same I could not get back to realities and probabilities with the same
lightness as Hermine.

“And so I shall kill you one day?” I asked, still half in a dream while she
laughed, and attacked her fowl with great relish.
“Of course,” she nodded lightly. “Enough of that. It is time to eat. Harry, be
an angel and order me a little more salad. Haven’t you any appetite? It
seems to me you’ve still to learn all the things that come naturally to other
people, even the pleasure of eating. So look, my boy, I must tell you that
this is the celebration of the duck, and when you pick the tender flesh from
the bone it’s a festal occasion and you must be just as eager and glad at
heart and delighted as a lover when he unhooks his lady-love for the first
time. Don’t you understand? Oh, you’re a sheep! Are you ready? I’m going
to give you a piece off the little bone. So open your mouth. Oh, what a
fright you are! There he goes, squinting round the room in case any one
sees him taking a bite from my fork. Don’t be afraid, you prodigal son, I
won’t make a scandal. But it’s a poor fellow who can’t take his pleasure
without asking other people’s permission.”
The scene that had gone before became more and more unreal. I was less
and less able to believe that these were the same eyes that a moment before
had been fixed in a dread obsession. But in this Hermine was like life itself,
one moment succeeding to the next and not one to be foreseen. Now she
was eating, and the duck and the salad, the sweet and the liqueur were the
important thing, and each time the plates were changed a new chapter
began. Yet though she played at being a child she had seen through me
completely, and though she made me her pupil there and then in the game
of living for each fleeting moment, she seemed to know more of life than is
known to the wisest of the wise. It might be the highest wisdom or the
merest artlessness. It is certain in any case that life is quite disarmed by the
gift to live so entirely in the present, to treasure with such eager care every
flower by the wayside and the light that plays on every passing moment.
Was I to believe that this happy child with her hearty appetite and the air of
a gourmet was at the same time a victim of hysterical visions who wished to
die? or a careful calculating woman who, unmoved herself, had the
conscious intention of making me her lover and her slave? I could not
believe it. No, her surrender to the moment was so simple and complete that
the fleeting shadows and agitation to the very depths of the soul came to her
no less than every pleasurable impulse and were lived as fully.

Though I saw Hermine only for the second time that day, she knew
everything about me and it seemed to me quite impossible that I could ever
have a secret from her. Perhaps she might not understand everything of my
spiritual life, might not perhaps follow me in my relation to music, to
Goethe, to Novalis or Baudelaire. This too, however, was open to question.
Probably it would give her as little trouble as the rest. And anyway, what
was there left of my spiritual life? Hadn’t all that gone to atoms and lost its
meaning? As for the rest, my more personal problems and concerns, I had
no doubt that she would understand them all. I should very soon be talking
to her about the Steppenwolf and the treatise and all the rest of it, though till
now it had existed for myself alone and never been mentioned to a single
soul. Indeed, I could not resist the temptation of beginning forthwith.
“Hermine,” I said, “an extraordinary thing happened to me the other day.
An unknown man gave me a little book, the sort of thing you’d buy at a
Fair, and inside I found my whole story and everything about me. Rather
remarkable, don’t you think?”
“What was it called,” she asked lightly.
“Treatise on the Steppenwolf!”
“Oh, ‘Steppenwolf’ is magnificent! And are you the Steppenwolf? Is that
meant for you?”
“Yes, it’s me. I am one who is half-wolf and half-man, or thinks himself so
at least.”
She made no answer. She gave me a searching look in the eyes, then looked
at my hands, and for a moment her face and expression had that deep
seriousness and sinister passion of a few minutes before. Making a guess at
her thoughts I felt she was wondering whether I were wolf enough to carry
out her last command.
“That is, of course, your own fanciful idea,” she said, becoming serene once
more, “or a poetical one, if you like. But there’s something in it. You’re no
wolf to-day, but the other day when you came in as if you had fallen from
the moon there was really something of the beast about you. It is just what
struck me at the time.”
She broke off as though surprised by a sudden idea.

“How absurd those words are, such as beast and beast of prey. One should
not speak of animals in that way. They may be terrible sometimes, but
they’re much more right than men.”
“How do you mean—right?”
“Well, look at an animal, a cat, a dog, or a bird, or one of those beautiful
great beasts in the Zoo, a puma or a giraffe. You can’t help seeing that all of
them are right. They’re never in any embarrassment. They always know
what to do and how to behave themselves. They don’t flatter and they don’t
intrude. They don’t pretend. They are as they are, like stones or flowers or
stars in the sky. Don’t you agree?”
I did.
“Animals are sad as a rule,” she went on. “And when a man is sad—I don’t
mean because he has the toothache or has lost some money, but because he
sees, for once in a way, how it all is with life and everything, and is sad in
earnest—he always looks a little like an animal. He looks not only sad, but
more right and more beautiful than usual. That’s how it is, and that’s how
you looked, Steppenwolf, when I saw you for the first time.”
“Well, Hermine, and what do you think about this book with a description
of me in it?”
“Oh, I can’t always be thinking. We’ll talk about it another time. You can
give it me to read one day. Or, no, if I ever start reading again, give me one
of the books you’ve written yourself.”
She asked for coffee and for a while seemed absent-minded and distraught.
Then she suddenly beamed and seemed to have found the clue to her
speculations.
“Hullo,” she cried, delighted, “now I’ve got it!”
“What have you got?”
“The fox-trot. I’ve been thinking about it all the evening. Now tell me, have
you a room where we two could dance sometimes? It doesn’t matter if it’s
small, but there mustn’t be anybody underneath to come up and play hell if
his ceiling rocks a bit. Well, that’s fine, you can learn to dance at home.”

“Yes,” I said in alarm, “so much the better. But I thought music was
required.”
“Of course it’s required. You’ve got to buy that. At the most it won’t cost as
much as a course of lessons. You save that because I’ll give them myself.
This way we have the music whenever we like and at the end we have the
gramophone into the bargain.”
“The gramophone?”
“Of course. You can buy a small one and a few dance records—”
“Splendid,” I cried, “and if you bring it off and teach me to dance, the
gramophone is yours as an honorarium. Agreed?”
I brought it out very pat, but scarcely from the heart. I could not picture the
detested instrument in my study among my books, and I was by no means
reconciled to the dancing either. It had been in my mind that I might try
how it went for a while, though I was convinced that I was too old and stiff
and would never learn now. And to go at it hammer and tongs as she
proposed seemed to me altogether too sudden and uncompromising. As an
old and fastidious connoisseur of music, I could feel my gorge rising
against the gramophone and jazz and modern dance-music. It was more
than any one could ask of me to have dance tunes that were the latest rage
of America let loose upon the sanctum where I took refuge with Novalis
and Jean Paul and to be made to dance to them. But it was not any one who
asked it of me. It was Hermine, and it was for her to command, and for me
to obey. Of course, I obeyed.
We met at a café on the following afternoon. Hermine was there before me,
drinking tea, and she pointed with a smile to my name which she had found
in a newspaper. It was one of the reactionary jingo papers of my own
district in which from time to time violently abusive references to me were
circulated. During the war I had been opposed to it and, after, I had from
time to time counselled quiet and patience and humanity and a criticism that
began at home; and I had resisted the nationalist jingoism that became
every day more pronounced, more insane and unrestrained. Here, then, was
another attack of this kind, badly written, in part the work of the editor
himself and in part stolen from articles of a similar kind in papers of similar
tendencies to his own. It is common knowledge that no one writes worse

than these defenders of decrepit ideas. No one plies his trade with less of
decency and conscientious care. Hermine had read the article, and it had
informed her that Harry Haller was a noxious insect and a man who
disowned his native land, and that it stood to reason that no good could
come to the country so long as such persons and such ideas were tolerated
and the minds of the young turned to sentimental ideas of humanity instead
of to revenge by arms upon the hereditary foe.
“Is that you?” asked Hermine, pointing to my name. “Well, you’ve made
yourself some enemies and no mistake. Does it annoy you?”
I read a few lines. There was not a single line of stereotyped abuse that had
not been drummed into me for years till I was sick and tired of it.
“No,” I said, “it doesn’t annoy me. I was used to it long ago. Now and again
I have expressed the opinion that every nation, and even every person,
would do better, instead of rocking himself to sleep with political
catchwords about war-guilt, to ask himself how far his own faults and
negligences and evil tendencies are guilty of the war and all the other
wrongs of the world, and that there lies the only possible means of avoiding
the next war. They don’t forgive me that, for, of course, they are themselves
all guiltless, the Kaiser, the generals, the trade magnates, the politicians, the
papers. Not one of them has the least thing to blame himself for. Not one
has any guilt. One might believe that everything was for the best, even
though a few million men lie under the ground. And mind you, Hermine,
even though such abusive articles cannot annoy me any longer, they often
sadden me all the same. Two-thirds of my countrymen read this kind of
newspaper, read things written in this tone every morning and every night,
are every day worked up and admonished and incited, and robbed of their
peace of mind and better feelings by them, and the end and aim of it all is to
have the war over again, the next war that draws nearer and nearer, and it
will be a good deal more horrible than the last. All that is perfectly clear and
simple. Any one could comprehend it and reach the same conclusion after a
moment’s reflection. But nobody wants to. Nobody wants to avoid the next
war, nobody wants to spare himself and his children the next holocaust if
this be the cost. To reflect for one moment, to examine himself for a while
and ask what share he has in the world’s confusion and wickedness—look
you, nobody wants to do that. And so there’s no stopping it, and the next
war is being pushed on with enthusiasm by thousands upon thousands day

by day. It has paralysed me since I knew it, and brought me to despair. I
have no country and no ideals left. All that comes to nothing but
decorations for the gentlemen by whom the next slaughter is ushered in.
There is no sense in thinking or saying or writing anything of human
import, to bother one’s head with thoughts of goodness—for two or three
men who do that, there are thousands of papers, periodicals, speeches,
meetings in public and in private, that make the opposite their daily
endeavour and succeed in it too.”
Hermine had listened attentively.
“Yes,” she said now, “there you’re right enough. Of course, there will be
another war. One doesn’t need to read the papers to know that. And of
course one can be sad about it, but it isn’t any use. It is just the same as
when a man is sad to think that one day, in spite of his utmost efforts to
prevent it, he will inevitably die. The war against death, dear Harry, is
always a beautiful, noble and wonderful and glorious thing, and so, it
follows, is the war against war. But it is always hopeless and quixotic too.”
“That is perhaps true,” I cried heatedly, “but truths like that—that we must
all soon be dead and so it is all one and the same—make the whole of life
flat and stupid. Are we then to throw everything up and renounce the spirit
altogether and all effort and all that is human and let ambition and money
rule forever while we await the next mobilisation over a glass of beer?”
Remarkable the look that Hermine now gave me, a look full of amusement,
full of irony and roguishness and fellow-feeling, and at the same time so
grave, so wise, so unfathomably serious.
“You shan’t do that,” she said in a voice that was quite maternal. “Your life
will not be flat and dull even though you know that your war will never be
victorious. It is far flatter, Harry, to fight for something good and ideal and
to know all the time that you are bound to attain it. Are ideals attainable?
Do we live to abolish death? No—we live to fear it and then again to love
it, and just for death’s sake it is that our spark of life glows for an hour now
and then so brightly. You’re a child, Harry. Now, do as I tell you and come
along. We’ve a lot to get done to-day. I am not going to bother myself any
more to-day about the war or the papers either. What about you?”
Oh, no, I had no wish to.

We went together—it was our first walk in the town—to a music shop and
looked at gramophones. We turned them on and off and heard them play,
and when we had found one that was very suitable and nice and cheap I
wanted to buy it. Hermine, however, was not for such rapid transactions.
She pulled me back and I had to go off with her in search of another shop
and there, too, look at and listen to gramophones of every shape and size,
from the dearest to the cheapest, before she finally agreed to return to the
first shop and buy the machine we first thought of.
“You see,” I said, “it would have been as simple to have taken it at once.”
“Think so? And then perhaps to-morrow we should have seen the very same
one in a shop window at twenty francs less. And besides, it’s fun buying
things and you have to pay for your fun. You’ve a lot to learn yet.”
We got a porter to carry the purchase home.
Hermine made a careful inspection of my room. She commended the stove
and the sofa, tried the chairs, picked up the books, stood a long while in
front of the photograph of Erica. We had put the gramophone on a chest of
drawers among piles of books. And now my instruction began. Hermine
turned on a fox-trot and, after showing me the first steps, began to take me
in hand. I trotted obediently round with her, colliding with chairs, hearing
her directions and failing to understand them, treading on her toes, and
being as clumsy as I was conscientious. After the second dance she threw
herself on the sofa and laughed like a child.
“Oh! how stiff you are! Just go straight ahead as if you were walking.
There’s not the least need to exert yourself. Why, I should think you have
made yourself positively hot, haven’t you? No, let’s rest five minutes!
Dancing, don’t you see, is every bit as easy as thinking, when you can do it,
and much easier to learn. Now you can understand why people won’t get
the habit of thinking and prefer calling Herr Haller a traitor to his country
and waiting quietly for the next war to come along.”
In an hour she was gone, assuring me that it would go better next time. I
had my own thoughts about that, and I was sorely disappointed over my
stupidity and clumsiness. It did not seem to me that I had learnt anything
whatever and I did not believe that it would go better next time. No, one

had to bring certain qualities to dancing that I was entirely without, gaiety,
innocence, frivolity, elasticity. Well, I had always thought so.
But there, the next time it did in fact go better. I even got some fun out of it,
and at the end of the lesson Hermine announced that I was now proficient in
the fox-trot. But when she followed it up by saying that I had to dance with
her the next day at a restaurant, I was thrown into a panic and resisted the
idea with vehemence. She reminded me coolly of my oath of obedience and
arranged a meeting for tea on the following day at the Balance Hotel.
That evening I sat in my room and tried to read; but I could not. I was in
dread of the morrow. It was a most horrible thought that I, an elderly, shy,
touchy crank, was to frequent one of those modern deserts of jazz music, a
thé dansant, and a far more horrible thought that I was to figure there as a
dancer, though I did not in the least know how to dance. And I own I
laughed at myself and felt shame in my own eyes when alone in the quiet of
my studious room I turned on the machine and softly in stockinged feet
went through the steps of my dance.
A small orchestra played every other day at the Balance Hotel and tea and
whisky were served. I made an attempt at bribing Hermine, I put cakes
before her and proposed a bottle of good wine, but she was inflexible.
“You’re not here for your amusement to-day. It is a dancing lesson.”
I had to dance with her two or three times, and during an interval she
introduced me to the saxophone player, a dark and good-looking youth of
Spanish or South American origin, who, she told me, could play on all
instruments and talk every language in the world. This señor appeared to
know Hermine well and to be on excellent terms with her. He had two
saxophones of different sizes in front of him which he played on by turns,
while his darkly gleaming eyes scrutinised the dancers and beamed with
pleasure. I was surprised to feel something like jealousy of this agreeable
and charming musician, not a lover’s jealousy, for there was no question of
love between Hermine and me, but a subtler jealousy of their friendship; for
he did not seem to me so eminently worthy of the interest, and even
reverence, with which she so conspicuously distinguished him. I apparently
was to meet some queer people, I thought to myself in ill-humour. Then
Hermine was asked to dance again, and I was left alone to drink tea and
listen to the music, a kind of music that I had never till that day known how

to endure. Good God, I thought, so now I am to be initiated, and made to
feel at home in this world of idlers and pleasure seekers, a world that is
utterly strange and repugnant to me and that to this day I have always
carefully avoided and utterly despised, a smooth and stereotyped world of
marble-topped tables, jazz music, cocottes and commercial travellers!
Sadly, I swallowed my tea and stared at the crowd of second-rate elegance.
Two beautiful girls caught my eye. They were both good dancers. I
followed their movements with admiration and envy. How elastic, how
beautiful and gay and certain their steps!
Soon Hermine appeared once more. She was not pleased with me. She
scolded me and said that I was not there to wear such a face and sit idling at
tea-tables. I was to pull myself together, please, and dance. What, I knew no
one? That was not necessary. Were there, then, no girls there who met with
my approval?
I pointed out one of the two, and the more attractive, who happened at the
moment to be standing near us. She looked enchanting in her pretty velvet
dress with her short luxuriant blonde hair and her rounded womanly arms.
Hermine insisted that I should go up to her forthwith and ask her to dance. I
shrank back in despair.
“Indeed, I cannot do it,” I said in my misery. “Of course, if I were young
and good-looking—but for a stiff old hack like me who can’t dance for the
life of him—she would laugh at me!”
Hermine looked at me contemptuously.
“And that I should laugh at you, of course, doesn’t matter. What a coward
you are! Every one risks being laughed at when he addresses a girl. That’s
always at stake. So take the risk, Harry, and if the worst come to the worst
let yourself be laughed at. Otherwise it’s all up with my belief in your
obedience....”
She was obdurate. I got up automatically and approached the young beauty
just as the music began again.
“As a matter of fact, I’m engaged for this one,” she said and looked me up
and down with her large clear eyes, “but my partner seems to have got
stranded at the bar over there, so come along.”

I grasped her and performed the first steps, still in amazement that she had
not sent me about my business. She was not long in taking my measure and
in taking charge of me. She danced wonderfully and I caught the infection. I
forgot for the moment all the rules I had conscientiously learnt and simply
floated along. I felt my partner’s taut hips, her quick and pliant knees, and
looking in her young and radiant face I owned to her that this was the first
time in my life that I had ever really danced. She smiled encouragement and
replied to my enchanted gaze and flattering words with a wonderful
compliance, not of words, but of movements whose soft enchantment
brought us more closely and delightfully in touch. My right hand held her
waist firmly and I followed every movement of her feet and arms and
shoulders with eager happiness. Not once, to my astonishment, did I step on
her feet, and when the music stopped, we both stood where we were and
clapped till the dance was played again; and then with all a lover’s zeal I
devoutly performed the rite once more.
When, too soon, the dance came to an end, my beautiful partner in velvet
disappeared and I suddenly saw Hermine standing near me. She had been
watching us.
“Now do you see?” she laughed approvingly. “Have you made the
discovery that women’s legs are not table legs? Well, bravo! You know the
fox-trot now, thank the Lord. To-morrow we’ll get on to the Boston, and in
three weeks there’s the Masked Ball at the Globe Rooms.”
We had taken seats for the interval when the charming young Herr Pablo,
with a friendly nod, sat down beside Hermine. He seemed to be very
intimate with her. As for myself, I must own that I was not by any means
delighted with the gentleman at this first encounter. He was good-looking, I
could not deny, both of face and figure, but I could not discover what
further advantages he had. Even his linguistic accomplishments sat very
lightly on him—to such an extent, indeed, that he did not speak at all
beyond uttering such words as please, thanks, you bet, rather and hallo.
These, certainly, he knew in several languages. No, he said nothing, this
Señor Pablo, nor did he even appear to think much, this charming caballero.
His business was with the saxophone in the jazz-band and to this calling he
appeared to devote himself with love and passion. Often during the course
of the music he would suddenly clap with his hands, or permit himself other
expressions of enthusiasm, such as, singing out “O O O, Ha Ha, Hallo.”

Apart from this, however, he confined himself to being beautiful, to
pleasing women, to wearing collars and ties of the latest fashion and a great
number of rings on his fingers. His manner of entertaining us consisted in
sitting beside us, in smiling upon us, in looking at his wrist watch and in
rolling cigarettes—at which he was an expert. His dark and beautiful Creole
eyes and his black locks hid no romance, no problems, no thoughts. Closely
looked at, this beautiful demigod of love was no more than a complacent
and rather spoilt young man with pleasant manners. I talked to him about
his instrument and about tone-colours in jazz music, and he must have seen
that he was confronted by one who had the enjoyment of a connoisseur for
all that touched on music. But he made no response, and while I, in
compliment to him, or rather, to Hermine, embarked upon a musicianly
justification of jazz, he smiled amiably upon me and my efforts.
Presumably, he had not the least idea that there was any music but jazz or
that any music had ever existed before it. He was pleasant, certainly,
pleasant and polite, and his large, vacant eyes smiled most charmingly.
Between him and me, however, there appeared to be nothing whatever in
common. Nothing of all that was, perhaps, important and sacred to him
could be so for me as well. We came of contrasted races and spoke
languages in which no two words were akin. (Later, nevertheless, Hermine
told me a remarkable thing. She told me that Pablo, after a conversation
about me, had said that she must treat me very nicely, for I was so very
unhappy. And when she asked what brought him to that conclusion, he said:
“Poor, poor fellow. Look at his eyes. Doesn’t know how to laugh.”)
When the dark-eyed young man had taken his leave of us and the music
began again, Hermine stood up. “Now you might have another dance with
me. Or don’t you care to dance any more?”
With her, too, I danced more easily now, in a freer and more sprightly
fashion, even though not so buoyantly and more self-consciously than with
the other. Hermine had me lead, adapting herself as softly and lightly as the
leaf of a flower, and with her, too, I now experienced all these delights that
now advanced and now took wing. She, too, now exhaled the perfume of
woman and love, and her dancing, too, sang with intimate tenderness the
lovely and enchanting song of sex. And yet I could not respond to all this
with warmth and freedom. I could not entirely forget myself in abandon.
Hermine stood in too close a relation to me. She was my comrade and sister

—my double, almost, in her resemblance not to me only, but to Herman, my
boyhood friend, the enthusiast, the poet, who had shared with ardour all my
intellectual pursuits and extravagances.
“I know,” she said when I spoke of it. “I know that well enough. All the
same, I shall make you fall in love with me, but there’s no use hurrying.
First of all we’re comrades, two people who hope to be friends, because we
have recognised each other. For the present we’ll each learn from the other
and amuse ourselves together. I show you my little stage, and teach you to
dance and to have a little pleasure and be silly; and you show me your
thoughts and something of all you know.”
“There’s little there to show you, Hermine, I’m afraid. You know far more
than I do. You’re a most remarkable person—and a woman. But do I mean
anything to you? Don’t I bore you?”
She looked down darkly to the floor.
“That’s how I don’t like to hear you talk. Think of that evening when you
came broken from your despair and loneliness, to cross my path and be my
comrade. Why was it, do you think, I was able to recognise you and
understand you?”
“Why, Hermine? Tell me!”
“Because it’s the same for me as for you, because I am alone exactly as you
are, because I’m as little fond of life and men and myself as you are and can
put up with them as little. There are always a few such people who demand
the utmost of life and yet cannot come to terms with its stupidity and
crudeness.”
“You, you!” I cried in deep amazement. “I understand you, my comrade. No
one understands you better than I. And yet you’re a riddle. You are such a
past-master at life. You have your wonderful reverence for its little details
and enjoyments. You are such an artist in life. How can you suffer at life’s
hands? How can you despair?”
“I don’t despair. As to suffering—oh, yes, I know all about that! You are
surprised that I should be unhappy when I can dance and am so sure of
myself in the superficial things of life. And I, my friend, am surprised that
you are so disillusioned with life when you are at home with the very things
in it that are the deepest and most beautiful, spirit, art, and thought! That is

why we were drawn to one another and why we are brother and sister. I am
going to teach you to dance and play and smile, and still not be happy. And
you are going to teach me to think and to know and yet not be happy. Do
you know that we are both children of the devil?”
“Yes, that is what we are. The devil is the spirit, and we are his unhappy
children. We have fallen out of nature and hang suspended in space. And
that reminds me of something. In the Steppenwolf treatise that I told you
about, there is something to the effect that it is only a fancy of his to believe
that he has one soul, or two, that he is made up of one or two personalities.
Every human being, it says, consists of ten, or a hundred, or a thousand
souls.”
“I like that very much,” cried Hermine. “In your case, for example, the
spiritual part is very highly developed, and so you are very backward in all
the little arts of living. Harry, the thinker, is a hundred years old, but Harry,
the dancer, is scarcely half a day old. It’s he we want to bring on, and all his
little brothers who are just as little and stupid and stunted as he is.”
She looked at me, smiling; and then asked softly in an altered voice:
“And how did you like Maria, then?”
“Maria? Who is she?”
“The girl you danced with. She is a lovely girl, a very lovely girl. You were
a little smitten with her, as far as I could see.”
“You know her then?”
“Oh, yes, we know each other well. Were you very much taken with her?”
“I liked her very much, and I was delighted that she was so indulgent about
my dancing.”
“As if that were the whole story! You ought to make love to her a little,
Harry. She is very pretty and such a good dancer, and you are in love with
her already, I know very well. You’ll succeed with her, I’m sure.”
“Believe me, I have no such aspiration.”
“There you’re lying a little. Of course, I know that you have an attachment.
There is a girl somewhere or other whom you see once or twice a year in
order to have a quarrel with her. Of course, it’s very charming of you to

wish to be true to this estimable friend of yours, but you must permit me not
to take it so very seriously. I suspect you of taking love frightfully seriously.
That is your own affair. You can love as much as you like in your ideal
fashion for all I care. All I have to worry about is that you should learn to
know a little more of the little arts and lighter sides of life. In this sphere, I
am your teacher, and I shall be a better one than your ideal love ever was,
you may be sure of that! It’s high time you slept with a pretty girl again,
Steppenwolf.”
“Hermine,” I cried in torment, “you have only to look at me, I am an old
man!”
“You’re a child. You were too lazy to learn to dance till it was nearly too
late, and in the same way you were too lazy to learn to love. As for ideal
and tragic love, that, I don’t doubt, you can do marvellously—and all
honour to you. Now you will learn to love a little in an ordinary human
way. We have made a start. You will soon be fit to go to a ball, but you must
know the Boston first, and we’ll begin on that to-morrow. I’ll come at three.
How did you like the music, by the way?”
“Very much indeed.”
“Well, there’s another step forward, you see. Up to now you couldn’t stand
all this dance and jazz music. It was too superficial and frivolous for you.
Now you have seen that there’s no need to take it seriously and that it can
all the same be very agreeable and delightful. And, by the way, the whole
orchestra would be nothing without Pablo. He conducts it and puts fire into
it.”

Just as the gramophone contaminated the æsthetic and intellectual
atmosphere of my study and just as the American dances broke in as
strangers and disturbers, yes, and as destroyers, into my carefully tended
garden of music, so, too, from all sides there broke in new and dreaded and
disintegrating influences upon my life that, till now, had been so sharply
marked off and so deeply secluded. The Steppenwolf treatise, and Hermine
too, were right in their doctrine of the thousand souls. Every day new souls
kept springing up beside the host of old ones, making clamorous demands

and creating confusion; and now I saw as clearly as in a picture what an
illusion my former personality had been. The few capacities and pursuits in
which I had happened to be strong had occupied all my attention, and I had
painted a picture of myself as a person who was in fact nothing more than a
most refined and educated specialist in poetry, music and philosophy; and
as such I had lived, leaving all the rest of me to be a chaos of potentialities,
instincts and impulses which I found an encumbrance and gave the label of
Steppenwolf.
Meanwhile, though cured of an illusion, I found this disintegration of the
personality by no means a pleasant and amusing adventure. On the contrary,
it was often exceedingly painful, often almost intolerable. Often the sound
of the gramophone was truly fiendish to my ears in the midst of
surroundings where everything was tuned to so very different a key. And
many a time, when I danced my one-step in a stylish restaurant among
pleasure seekers and elegant rakes, I felt that I was a traitor to all that I was
bound to hold most sacred. Had Hermine left me for one week alone I
should have fled at once from this wearisome and laughable trafficking with
the world of pleasure. Hermine, however, was always there. Though I might
not see her every day, I was all the same continually under her eye, guided,
guarded and counselled—besides, she read all my mad thoughts of rebellion
and escape in my face, and smiled at them.
As the destruction of all that I had called my personality went on, I began to
understand, too, why it was that I had feared death so horribly in spite of all
my despair. I began to perceive that this ignoble horror in the face of death
was a part of my old conventional and lying existence. The late Herr Haller,
gifted writer, student of Mozart and Goethe, author of essays upon the
metaphysics of art, upon genius and tragedy and humanity, the melancholy
hermit in a cell encumbered with books, was given over bit by bit to self-
criticism and at every point was found wanting. This gifted and interesting
Herr Haller had, to be sure, preached reason and humanity and had
protested against the barbarity of the war; but he had not let himself be
stood against a wall and shot, as the proper consequence of his way of
thinking would have been. He had found some way of accommodating
himself; one, of course, that was outwardly reputable and noble, but still a
compromise and no more. He was, further, opposed to the power of capital
and yet he had industrial securities lying at his bank and spent the interest

from them without a pang of conscience. And so it was all through. Harry
Haller had, to be sure, rigged himself out finely as an idealist and
contemner of the world, as a melancholy hermit and growling prophet. At
bottom, however, he was a bourgeois who took exception to a life like
Hermine’s and fretted himself over the nights thrown away in a restaurant
and the money squandered there, and had them on his conscience. Instead
of longing to be freed and completed, he longed, on the contrary, most
earnestly to get back to those happy times when his intellectual trifling had
been his diversion and brought him fame. Just so those newspaper readers
—whom he despised and scorned—longed to get back to the ideal time
before the war, because it was so much more comfortable than taking a
lesson from those who had gone through it. Oh, the devil, he made one sick,
this Herr Haller! And yet I clung to him all the same, or to the mask of him
that was already falling away, clung to his coquetting with the spiritual, to
his bourgeois horror of the disorderly and accidental (to which death, too,
belonged) and compared the new Harry—the somewhat timid and ludicrous
dilettante of the dance rooms—scornfully and enviously with the old one in
whose ideal and lying portrait he had since discovered all those fatal
characteristics which had upset him that night so grievously in the
professor’s print of Goethe. He himself, the old Harry, had been just such a
bourgeoise idealisation of Goethe, a spiritual champion whose all-too-noble
gaze shone with the unction of elevated thought and humanity, until he was
almost overcome by his own nobleness of mind! The devil! Now, at last,
this fine picture stood badly in need of repairs! The ideal Herr Haller had
been lamentably dismantled! He looked like a dignitary who had fallen
among thieves—with his tattered breeches—and he would have shown
sense if he had studied now the rôle that his rags appointed him instead of
wearing them with an air of respectability and carrying on a whining
pretence to lost repute.
I was constantly finding myself in the company of Pablo, the musician, and
my estimate of him had to be revised if only because Hermine liked him so
much and was so eager for his company. Pablo had left on me the
impression of a pretty nonentity, a little beau, and somewhat empty at that,
as happy as a child for whom there are no problems, whose joy it is to
dribble into his toy trumpet and who is kept quiet with praises and
chocolate. Pablo, however, was not interested in my opinions. They were as
indifferent to him as my musical theories. He listened with friendly

courtesy, smiling as he always did; but he refrained all the same from any
actual reply. On the other hand, in spite of this, it seemed that I had aroused
his interest. It was clear that he put himself out to please me and to show me
goodwill. Once when I showed a certain irritation, and even ill-humour,
over one of these fruitless attempts at conversation he looked in my face
with a troubled and sorrowful air and, taking my left hand and stroking it,
he offered me a pinch from his little gold snuff-box. It would do me good. I
looked inquiringly at Hermine. She nodded and I took a pinch. The almost
immediate effect was that I became clearer in the head and more cheerful.
No doubt there was cocaine in the powder. Hermine told me that Pablo had
many such drugs, and that he procured them through secret channels. He
offered them to his friends now and then and was a master in the mixing
and prescribing of them. He had drugs for stilling pain, for inducing sleep,
for begetting beautiful dreams, lively spirits and the passion of love.
One day I met him in the street near the quay and he turned at once to
accompany me. This time I succeeded at last in making him talk.
“Herr Pablo,” I said to him as he played with his slender ebony and silver
walking-stick, “you are a friend of Hermine’s and that is why I take an
interest in you. But I can’t say you make it easy to get on with you. Several
times I have attempted to talk about music with you. It would have
interested me to know your thoughts and opinions, whether they
contradicted mine or not, but you have disdained to make me even the
barest reply.”
He gave me a most amiable smile and this time a reply was accorded me.
“Well,” he said with equanimity, “you see, in my opinion there is no point
at all in talking about music. I never talk about music. What reply, then, was
I to make to your very able and just remarks? You were perfectly right in all
you said. But, you see, I am a musician, not a professor, and I don’t believe
that, as regards music, there is the least point in being right. Music does not
depend on being right, on having good taste and education and all that.”
“Indeed. Then what does it depend on?”
“On making music, Herr Haller, on making music as well and as much as
possible and with all the intensity of which one is capable. That is the point,
Monsieur. Though I carried the complete works of Bach and Haydn in my

head and could say the cleverest things about them not a soul would be the
better for it. But when I take hold of my mouth-piece and play a lively
shimmy, whether the shimmy be good or bad, it will give people pleasure. It
gets into their legs and into their blood. That’s the point and that alone.
Look at the faces in a dance-hall at the moment when the music strikes up
after a longish pause, how eyes sparkle, legs twitch and faces begin to
laugh. That is why one makes music.”
“Very good, Herr Pablo. But there is not only sensual music. There is
spiritual also. Besides the music that is actually played at the moment, there
is the immortal music that lives on even when it is not actually being
played. It can happen to a man to lie alone in bed and to call to mind a
melody from the Magic Flute or the Matthew Passion, and then there is
music without anybody blowing into a flute or passing a bow across a
fiddle.”
“Certainly, Herr Haller. Yearning and Valencia are recalled every night by
many a lonely dreamer. Even the poorest typist in her office has the latest
one-step in her head and taps her keys in time to it. You are right. I don’t
grudge all those lonely persons their mute music, whether it’s Yearning or
the Magic Flute or Valencia. But where do they get their lonely and mute
music from? They get it from us, the musicians. It must first have been
played and heard, it must have got into the blood, before any one at home in
his room can think of it and dream of it.”
“Granted,” I said coolly, “all the same it won’t do to put Mozart and the
latest fox-trot on the same level. And it is not one and the same thing
whether you play people divine and eternal music or cheap stuff of the day
that is forgotten to-morrow.”
When Pablo observed from my tone that I was getting heated, he at once
put on his most amiable expression and touching my arm caressingly he
gave an unbelievable softness to his voice.
“Ah, my dear sir, you may be perfectly right with your levels. I have
nothing to say to your putting Mozart and Haydn and Valencia on what
levels you please. It is all one to me. It is not for me to decide about levels. I
shall never be asked about them. Mozart, perhaps, will still be played in a
hundred years and Valencia in two will be played no more—we can well
leave that, I think, in God’s hands. God is good and has the span of all our

days in his hands and that of every waltz and fox-trot too. He is sure to do
what is right. We musicians, however, we must play our parts according to
our duties and our gifts. We have to play what is actually in demand, and we
have to play it as well and as beautifully and as expressively as ever we
can.”
With a sigh I gave it up. There was no getting past the fellow.
At many moments the old and the new, pain and pleasure, fear and joy were
quite oddly mixed with one another. Now I was in heaven, now in hell,
generally in both at once. The old Harry and the new lived at one moment
in bitter strife, at the next in peace. Many a time the old Harry appeared to
be dead and done with, to have died and been buried, and then of a sudden
there he was again, giving orders and tyrannising and contradictory till the
little new young Harry was silent for very shame and let himself be pushed
to the wall. At other times the young Harry took the old by the throat and
squeezed with all his might. There was many a groan, many a death-
struggle, many a thought of the razor-blade.
Often, however, suffering and happiness broke over me in one wave. One
such moment was when a few days after my first public exhibition of
dancing, I went into my bedroom at night and to my indescribable
astonishment, dismay, horror and enchantment found the lovely Maria lying
in my bed.
Of all the surprises that Hermine had prepared for me this was the most
violent. For I had not a moment’s doubt that it was she who had sent me this
bird of paradise. I had not, as usually, been with Hermine that evening. I
had been to a recital of old church music in the Cathedral, a beautiful,
though melancholy, excursion into my past life, to the fields of my youth,
the territory of my ideal self. Beneath the lofty Gothic of the church whose
netted vaulting swayed with a ghostly life in the play of the sparse lights, I
heard pieces by Buxtehude, Pachelbel, Bach and Haydn. I had gone the old
beloved way once more. I had heard the magnificent voice of a Bach singer
with whom in the old days when we were friends I had enjoyed many a
memorable musical occasion. The notes of the old music with its eternal
dignity and sanctity had called to life all the exalted enchantment and
enthusiasm of youth. I had sat in the lofty choir, sad and abstracted, a guest
for an hour of this noble and blessed world which once had been my home.

During a Haydn duet the tears had come suddenly to my eyes. I had not
waited for the end of the concert. Dropping the thought I had had of seeing
the singer again (what evenings I had once spent with the artistes after such
concerts) and stealing away out of the Cathedral, I had wearily paced the
dark and narrow streets, where here and there behind the windows of the
restaurants jazz orchestras were playing the tunes of the life I had now
come to live. Oh, what a dull maze of error I had made of my life!
For long during this night’s walk I had reflected upon the significance of
my relation to music, and not for the first time recognised this appealing
and fatal relation as the destiny of the entire German spirit. In the German
spirit the matriarchal link with nature rules in the form of the hegemony of
music to an extent unknown in any other people. We intellectuals instead of
opposing ourselves to this tendency like men, and rendering obedience to
the spirit, the Logos, the Word, and gaining a hearing for it, are all dreaming
of a speech without words that utters the inexpressible and gives form to the
formless. Instead of playing his part as truly and honestly as he could, the
German intellectual has constantly rebelled against the word and against
reason and courted music. And so the German spirit, carousing in music, in
wonderful creations of sound, and wonderful beauties of feeling and mood
that were never pressed home to reality, has left the greater part of its
practical gifts to decay. None of us intellectuals is at home in reality. We are
strange to it and hostile. That is why the part played by intellect even in our
own German reality, in our history and politics and public opinion, has been
so lamentable a one. Well, I had often pondered all this, not without an
intense longing sometimes to turn to and do something real for once, to be
seriously and responsibly active instead of occupying myself forever with
nothing but æsthetics and intellectual and artistic pursuits. It always ended,
however, in resignation, in surrender to destiny. The generals and the
captains of industry were quite right. There was nothing to be made of us
intellectuals. We were a superfluous, irresponsible lot of talented
chatterboxes for whom reality had no meaning. With a curse, I came back to
the razor.
So, full of thoughts and the echoes of the music, my heart weighed down
with sadness and the longing of despair for life and reality and sense and all
that was irretrievably lost, I had got home at last; climbed my stairs; put on
the light in my sitting room; tried in vain to read; thought of the

appointment which compelled me to drink whisky and dance at the Cecil
Bar on the following evening; thought with malice and bitterness not only
of myself, but of Hermine too. She might be good and have the best and
kindest intentions and she might be a wonderful person, but she would have
done better all the same to let me go to perdition instead of sweeping me
into this whirligig of frivolities where I should never be any other than an
alien and where the best in me was demoralised and had been lowered.

And so I had sadly put out the light and taken myself to my bedroom and
sadly begun to undress; and then I was surprised by an unaccustomed smell.
There was a faint aroma of scent, and looking round I saw the lovely Maria
lying in my bed, smiling and a little startled, with large blue eyes.
“Maria!” I said. And my first thoughts were that my landlady would give
me notice when she knew of it.
“I’ve come,” she said softly. “Are you angry with me?”
“No, no. I see Hermine gave you the key. Isn’t that it?”
“Oh, it does make you angry. I’ll go again.”
“No, lovely Maria, stay! Only, just to-night, I’m very sad. I can’t be jolly
to-night. Perhaps to-morrow I’ll be better again.”
I was bending over her and she took my head in her large firm hands and
drawing it down gave me a long kiss. Then I sat down on the bed beside her
and took her hands and asked her to speak low in case we were heard, and
looked at her beautiful full rounded face that lay so strangely and
wonderfully on my pillow like a large flower. She drew my hand slowly to
her lips and laid it beneath the clothes on her warm and evenly breathing
breast.
“You don’t need to be jolly,” she said. “Hermine told me that you had
troubles. Any one can understand that. Tell me, then, do I please you still?
The other day, when we were dancing, you were very much in love with
me.”
I kissed her eyes, her mouth and neck and breasts. A moment ago I had
thought of Hermine with bitterness and reproach. Now I held her gift in my
hands and was thankful. Maria’s caresses did not harm the wonderful music
I had heard that evening. They were its worthy fulfilment. Slowly I drew
the clothes from her lovely body till my kisses reached her feet. When I lay
down beside her, her flower-face smiled back at me omniscient and
bountiful.
During this night by Maria’s side I did not sleep much, but my sleep was as
deep and peaceful as a child’s. And between sleeping I drank of her
beautiful warm youth and heard, as we talked softly, a number of curious
tales about her life and Hermine’s. I had never known much of this side of

life. Only in the theatrical world, occasionally, in earlier years had I come
across similar existences—women as well as men who lived half for art and
half for pleasure. Now, for the first time, I had a glimpse into this kind of
life, remarkable alike for its singular innocence and singular corruption.
These girls, mostly from poor homes, but too intelligent and too pretty to
give their whole lives to some ill-paid and joyless way of gaining their
living, all lived sometimes on casual work, sometimes on their charm and
easy virtue. Now and then, for a month or two, they sat at a typewriter; at
times were the mistresses of well-to-do men of the world, receiving pocket
money and presents; lived at times in furs and motor-cars, at other times in
attics, and though a good offer might under some circumstances induce
them to marry, they were not at all eager for it. Many of them had little
inclination for love and gave themselves very unwillingly, and then only for
money and at the highest price. Others, and Maria was one of them, were
unusually gifted in love and unable to do without it. They lived solely for
love and besides their official and lucrative friends had other love affairs as
well. Assiduous and busy, care-ridden and light-hearted, intelligent and yet
thoughtless, these butterflies lived a life at once childlike and raffiné;
independent, not to be bought by every one, finding their account in good
luck and fine weather, in love with life and yet clinging to it far less than the
bourgeois, always ready to follow a fairy prince to his castle, always
certain, though scarcely conscious of it, that a difficult and sad end was in
store for them.
During that wonderful first night and the days that followed Maria taught
me much. She taught me the charming play and delights of the senses, but
she gave me, also, new understanding, new insight, new love. The world of
the dance and pleasure resorts, the cinemas, bars and hotel lounges that for
me, the hermit and æsthete, had always about it something trivial,
forbidden, and degrading, was for Maria and Hermine and their companions
the world pure and simple. It was neither good nor bad, neither loved nor
hated. In this world their brief and eager lives flowered and faded. They
were at home in it and knew all its ways. They loved a champagne or a
special dish at a restaurant as one of us might a composer or poet, and they
lavished the same enthusiasm and rapture and emotion on the latest craze in
dances or the sentimental cloying song of a jazz singer as one of us on
Nietzsche or Hamsun. Maria talked to me about the handsome saxophone
player, Pablo, and spoke of an American song that he had sung them

sometimes, and she was so carried away with admiration and love as she
spoke of it that I was far more moved and impressed than by the ecstasies of
any highly cultured person over artistic pleasures of the rarest and most
distinguished quality. I was ready to enthuse in sympathy, be the song what
it might. Maria’s glowing words and her eager effusive face made large
rents in my æsthetics. There was to be sure a Beauty, one and indivisible,
small and select, that seemed to me, with Mozart at the top, to be above all
dispute and doubt, but where was the limit? Hadn’t we all as connoisseurs
and critics in our youth been consumed with love for works of art and for
artists that to-day we regarded with doubt and dismay? Hadn’t that
happened to us with Liszt and Wagner, and, to many of us, even with
Beethoven? Wasn’t the blossoming of Maria’s childish emotion over the
song from America just as pure and beautiful an artistic experience and
exalted as far beyond doubt as the rapture of any academic big-wig over
Tristan, or the ecstasy of a conductor over the Ninth Symphony? And didn’t
this agree remarkably well with the views of Herr Pablo and prove him
right?
Maria too appeared to love the beautiful Pablo extremely.
“He certainly is a beauty,” said I. “I like him very much too. But tell me,
Maria, how can you have a fondness for me as well, a tiresome old fellow
with no looks, who even has grey hairs and doesn’t play a saxophone and
doesn’t sing any English love-songs?”
“Don’t talk so horribly,” she scolded. “It is quite natural. I like you too.
You, too, have something nice about you that endears you and marks you
out. I wouldn’t have you different. One oughtn’t to talk of these things and
want them accounted for. Listen, when you kiss my neck or my ear, I feel
that I please you, that you like me. You have a way of kissing as though you
were shy, and that tells me: ‘You please him. He is grateful to you for being
pretty.’ That gives me great, great pleasure. And then again with another
man it’s just the opposite that pleases me, that he kisses me as though he
thought little of me and conferred a favour.”
Again we fell asleep and again I woke to find my arm still about her, my
beautiful, beautiful flower.
And this beautiful flower, strange to say, continued to be none the less the
gift that Hermine had made me. Hermine continued to stand in front of her

and to hide her with a mask. Then suddenly the thought of Erica intervened
—my distant, angry love, my poor friend. She was hardly less pretty than
Maria, even though not so blooming; and she was more constrained, and
not so richly endowed in the little arts of making love. She stood a moment
before my eyes, clearly and painfully, loved and deeply woven into my
destiny; then fell away again in a deep oblivion, at a half regretted distance.
And so in the tender beauty of the night many pictures of my life rose
before me who for so long had lived in a poor pictureless vacancy. Now, at
the magic touch of Eros, the source of them was opened up and flowed in
plenty. For moments together my heart stood still between delight and
sorrow to find how rich was the gallery of my life, and how thronged the
soul of the wretched Steppenwolf with high eternal stars and constellations.
My childhood and my mother showed in a tender transfiguration like a
distant glimpse over mountains into the fathomless blue; the litany of my
friendships, beginning with the legendary Herman, soul-brother of
Hermine, rang out as clear as trumpets; the images of many women floated
by me with an unearthly fragrance like moist sea-flowers on the surface of
the water, women whom I had loved, desired and sung, whose love I had
seldom won and seldom striven to win. My wife, too, appeared. I had lived
with her many years and she had taught me comradeship, strife and
resignation. In spite of all the shortcomings of our life, my confidence in
her remained untouched up to the very day when she broke out against me
and deserted me without warning, sick as I was in mind and body. And now,
as I looked back, I saw how deep my love and trust must have been for her
betrayal to have inflicted so deep and lifelong a wound.
These pictures—there were hundreds of them, with names and without—all
came back. They rose fresh and new out of this night of love, and I knew
again, what in my wretchedness I had forgotten, that they were my life’s
possession and all its worth. Indestructible and abiding as the stars, these
experiences, though forgotten, could never be erased. Their series was the
story of my life, their starry light the undying value of my being. My life
had become weariness. It had wandered in a maze of unhappiness that led
to renunciation and nothingness; it was bitter with the salt of all human
things; yet it had laid up riches, riches to be proud of. It had been for all its
wretchedness a princely life. Let the little way to death be as it might, the

kernel of this life of mine was noble. It had purpose and character and
turned not on trifles, but on the stars.
Time has passed and much has happened, much has changed; and I can only
remember a little of all that passed that night, a little of all we said and did
in the deep tenderness of love, a few moments of clear awakening from the
deep sleep of love’s weariness. That night, however, for the first time since
my downfall gave me back the unrelenting radiance of my own life and
made me recognise chance as destiny once more and see the ruins of my
being as fragments of the divine. My soul breathed once more. My eyes
were opened. There were moments when I felt with a glow that I had only
to snatch up my scattered images and raise my life as Harry Haller and as
the Steppenwolf to the unity of one picture, in order to enter myself into the
world of imagination and be immortal. Was not this, then, the goal set for
the progress of every human life?
In the morning, after we had shared breakfast, I had to smuggle Maria from
the house. Later in the same day I took a little room in a neighbouring
quarter which was designed solely for our meetings.
True to her duties, Hermine, my dancing mistress, appeared and I had to
learn the Boston. She was firm and inexorable and would not release me
from a single lesson, for it was decided that I was to attend the Fancy Dress
Ball in her company. She had asked me for money for her costume, but she
refused to tell me anything about it. To visit her, or even to know where she
lived, was still forbidden me.
This time, about three weeks before the Fancy Dress Ball, was remarkable
for its wonderful happiness. Maria seemed to me to be the first woman I
had ever really loved. I had always wanted mind and culture in the women I
had loved, and I had never remarked that even the most intellectual and,
comparatively speaking, educated woman never gave any response to the
Logos in me, but rather constantly opposed it. I took my problems and my
thoughts with me to the company of women and it would have seemed to
me utterly impossible to love a girl for more than an hour who had scarcely
read a book, scarcely knew what reading was, and could not have
distinguished Tschaikovsky from Beethoven. Maria had no education. She
had no need of these circuitous substitutes. Her problems all sprang directly
from the senses. All her art and the whole task she set herself lay in

extracting the utmost delight from the senses she had been endowed with,
and from her particular figure, her colour, her hair, her voice, her skin, her
temperament; and in employing every faculty, every curve and line and
every softest modelling of her body to find responsive perceptions in her
lovers and to conjure up in them an answering quickness of delight. The
first shy dance I had had with her had already told me this much. I had
caught the scent and the charm of a brilliant and carefully cultivated
sensibility and had been enchanted by it. Certainly, too, it was no accident
that Hermine, the all-knowing, introduced me to this Maria. She had the
scent and the very significance of summer and of roses.
It was not my fortune to be Maria’s only lover, nor even her favourite one. I
was one of many. Often she had no time for me, often only an hour at
midday, seldom a night. She took no money from me. Hermine saw to that.
She was glad of presents, however, and when I gave her, perhaps, a new
little purse of red lacquered leather there might be two or three gold pieces
inside it. As a matter of fact, she laughed at me over the red purse. It was
charming, but a bargain, and no longer in fashion. In these matters, about
which up to that time I was as little learned as in any language of the
Esquimaux, I learned a great deal from Maria. Before all else I learned that
these playthings were not mere idle trifles invented by manufacturers and
dealers for the purposes of gain. They were, on the contrary, a little or,
rather, a big world, authoritative and beautiful, many sided, containing a
multiplicity of things all of which had the one and only aim of serving love,
refining the senses, giving life to the dead world around us, endowing it in a
magical way with new instruments of love, from powder and scent to the
dancing-show, from ring to cigarette-case, from waist-buckle to hand-bag.
This bag was no bag, this purse no purse, flowers no flowers, the fan no fan.
All were the plastic material of love, of magic and delight. Each was a
messenger, a smuggler, a weapon, a battle-cry.
I often wondered who it was whom Maria really loved. I think she loved the
young Pablo of the saxophone, with his melancholy black eyes and his
long, white, distinguished, melancholy hands. I should have thought Pablo a
somewhat sleepy lover, spoilt and passive, but Maria assured me that
though it took a long time to wake him up he was then more strenuous and
forward and virile than prize-fighter or riding master.

In this way I got to know many secrets about this person and that, jazz-
musicians, actors and many of the women and girls and men of our circle. I
saw beneath the surface of the various alliances and enmities and by
degrees (though I had been such an entire stranger to this world) I was
drawn in and treated with confidence. I learned a good deal about Hermine,
too. It was of Herr Pablo, however, of whom Maria was fond, that I saw the
most. At times she, too, availed herself of his secret drugs and was for ever
procuring these delights for me also; and Pablo was always most markedly
on the alert to be of service to me. Once he said to me without more ado:
“You are so very unhappy. That is bad. One shouldn’t be like that. It makes
me sorry. Try a mild pipe of opium.” My opinion of this jolly, intelligent,
childlike and, at the same time, unfathomable person gradually changed. We
became friends, and I often took some of his specifics. He looked on at my
affair with Maria with some amusement. Once he entertained us in his room
on the top floor of an hotel in the suburbs. There was only one chair, so
Maria and I had to sit on the bed. He gave us a drink from three little
bottles, a mysterious and wonderful draught. And then when I had got into a
very good humour, he proposed, with beaming eyes, to celebrate a love-
orgy for three. I declined abruptly. Such a thing was inconceivable to me.
Nevertheless I stole a glance at Maria to see how she took it, and though
she at once backed up my refusal I saw the gleam in her eyes and observed
that the renunciation cost her some regret. Pablo was disappointed by my
refusal but not hurt. “Pity,” he said. “Harry is too morally minded. Nothing
to be done. All the same it would have been so beautiful, so very beautiful!
But I’ve got another idea.” He gave us each a little opium to smoke, and
sitting motionless with open eyes we all three lived through the scenes that
he suggested to us while Maria trembled with delight. As I felt a little
unwell after this, Pablo laid me on the bed and gave me some drops, and
while I lay with closed eyes I felt the fleeting breath of a kiss on each
eyelid. I took the kiss as though I believed it came from Maria, but I knew
very well it came from him.
And one evening he surprised me still more. Coming to me in my room he
told me that he needed twenty francs and would I oblige him? In return he
offered that I instead of him should have Maria for the night.
“Pablo,” I said, very much shocked, “you don’t know what you say. Barter
for a woman is counted among us as the last degradation. I have not heard

your proposal, Pablo.”
He looked at me with pity. “You don’t want to, Herr Harry. Very good.
You’re always making difficulties for yourself. Don’t sleep to-night with
Maria if you would rather not. But give me the money all the same. You
shall have it back. I have urgent need of it.”
“What for?”
“For Agostino, the little second violin, you know. He has been ill for a week
and there’s no one to look after him. He hasn’t a son, nor have I at the
moment.”
From curiosity and also partly to punish myself, I went with him to
Agostino. He took milk and medicine to him in his attic, and a wretched
one it was. He made his bed and aired the room and made a most
professional compress for the fevered head, all quickly and gently and
efficiently like a good sick-nurse. The same evening I saw him playing till
dawn in the City Bar.
I often talked at length and in detail about Maria with Hermine, about her
hands and shoulders and hips and her way of laughing and kissing and
dancing.
“Has she shown you this?” asked Hermine on one occasion, describing to
me a peculiar play of the tongue in kissing. I asked her to show it me
herself, but she was most earnest in her refusal. “That is for later. I am not
your love yet.”
I asked her how she was acquainted with Maria’s ways of kissing and with
many secrets as well that could be known only to her lovers.
“Oh,” she cried, “we’re friends, after all. Do you think we’d have secrets
from one another? I must say you’ve got hold of a beautiful girl. There’s no
one like her.”
“All the same, Hermine, I’m sure you have some secrets from each other, or
have you told her everything you know about me?”
“No, that’s another matter. Those are things she would not understand.
Maria is wonderful. You are fortunate. But between you and me there are
things she has not a notion of. Naturally I told her a lot about you, much
more than you would have liked at the time. I had to win her for you, you

see. But neither Maria nor any one else will ever understand you as I
understand you. I’ve learnt something about you from her besides, for she’s
told me all about you as far as she knows you at all. I know you nearly as
well as if we had often slept together.”
It was curious and mysterious to know, when I was with Maria again, that
she had had Hermine in her arms just as she had me.... New, indirect and
complicated relations rose before me, new possibilities in love and life; and
I thought of the thousand souls of the Steppenwolf treatise.

In the short interval between the time that I got to know Maria and the
Fancy Dress Ball I was really happy; and yet I never had the feeling that
this was my release and the attainment of felicity. I had the distinct
impression, rather, that all this was a prelude and a preparation, that
everything was pushing eagerly forward, that the gist of the matter was to
come.
I was now so proficient in dancing that I felt quite equal to playing my part
at the Ball of which everybody was talking. Hermine had a secret. She took
the greatest care not to let out what her costume was to be. I would
recognise her soon enough, she said, and should I fail to do so, she would
help me; but beforehand I was to know nothing. She was not in the least
inquisitive to know my plans for a fancy dress and I decided that I should
not wear a costume at all. Maria, when I asked her to go with me as my
partner, explained that she had a cavalier already and a ticket too, in fact;
and I saw with some disappointment that I should have to attend the
festivity alone. It was the principal Fancy Dress Ball of the town, organised
yearly by the Society of Artists in the Globe Rooms.
During these days I saw little of Hermine, but the day before the Ball she
paid me a brief visit. She came for her ticket, which I had got for her, and
sat quietly with me for a while in my room. We fell into a conversation so
remarkable that it made a deep impression on me.
“You’re really doing splendidly,” she said. “Dancing suits you. Any one
who hadn’t seen you for the last four weeks would scarcely know you.”

“Yes,” I agreed. “Things haven’t gone so well with me for years. That’s all
your doing, Hermine.”
“Oh, not the beautiful Maria’s?”
“No. She is a present from you like all the rest. She is wonderful.”
“She is just the girl you need, Steppenwolf—pretty, young, light hearted, an
expert in love and not to be had every day. If you hadn’t to share her with
others, if she weren’t always merely a fleeting guest, it would be another
matter.”
Yes, I had to concede this too.
“And so have you really got everything you want now?”
“No, Hermine. It is not like that. What I have got is very beautiful and
delightful, a great pleasure, a great consolation. I’m really happy—”
“Well then, what more do you want?”
“I do want more. I am not content with being happy. I was not made for it.
It is not my destiny. My destiny is the opposite.”
“To be unhappy in fact? Well, you’ve had that and to spare, that time when
you couldn’t go home because of the razor.”
“No, Hermine, it is something else. That time, I grant you, I was very
unhappy. But it was a stupid unhappiness that led to nothing.”
“Why?”
“Because I should not have had that fear of death when I wished for it all
the same. The unhappiness that I need and long for is different. It is of the
kind that will let me suffer with eagerness and lust after death. That is the
unhappiness, or happiness, that I am waiting for.”
“I understand that. There we are brother and sister. But what have you got
against the happiness that you have found now with Maria? Why aren’t you
content?”
“I have nothing against it. Oh, no, I love it. I’m grateful for it. It is as lovely
as a sunny day in a wet summer. But I suspect that it can’t last. This
happiness leads to nothing either. It gives content, but content is no food for

me. It lulls the Steppenwolf to sleep and satiates him. But it is not a
happiness to die for.”
“So it’s necessary to be dead, Steppenwolf?”
“I think so, yes. My happiness fills me with content and I can bear it for a
long while yet. But sometimes when happiness leaves a moment’s leisure to
look about me and long for things, the longing I have is not to keep this
happiness forever, but to suffer once again, only more beautifully and less
meanly than before. I long for the sufferings that make me ready and
willing to die.”
Hermine looked tenderly in my eyes with that dark look that could so
suddenly come into her face. Lovely, fearful eyes! Picking her words one
by one and piecing them together, and speaking slowly and so low that it
was an effort to hear her, she said:
“I want to tell you something to-day, something that I have known for a
long while, and you know it too; but perhaps you have never said it to
yourself. I am going to tell you now what it is that I know about you and me
and our fate. You, Harry, have been an artist and a thinker, a man full of joy
and faith, always on the track of what is great and eternal, never content
with the trivial and petty. But the more life has awakened you and brought
you back to yourself, the greater has your need been and the deeper the
sufferings and dread and despair that have overtaken you, till you were up
to the neck in them. And all that you once knew and loved and revered as
beautiful and sacred, all the belief you once had in mankind and our high
destiny, has been of no avail and has lost its worth and gone to pieces. Your
faith found no more air to breathe. And suffocation is a hard death. Is that
true, Harry? Is that your fate?”
I nodded again and again.
“You have a picture of life within you, a faith, a challenge, and you were
ready for deeds and sufferings and sacrifices, and then you became aware
by degrees that the world asked no deeds and no sacrifices of you whatever,
and that life is no poem of heroism with heroic parts to play and so on, but a
comfortable room where people are quite content with eating and drinking,
coffee and knitting, cards and wireless. And whoever wants more and has
got it in him—the heroic and the beautiful, and the reverence for the great

poets or for the saints—is a fool and a Don Quixote. Good. And it has been
just the same for me, my friend. I was a gifted girl. I was meant to live up to
a high standard, to expect much of myself and do great things. I could have
played a great part. I could have been the wife of a king, the beloved of a
revolutionary, the sister of a genius, the mother of a martyr. And life has
allowed me just this, to be a courtesan of fairly good taste, and even that has
been hard enough. That is how things have gone with me. For a while I was
inconsolable and for a long time I put the blame on myself. Life, thought I,
must in the end be in the right, and if life scorned my beautiful dreams, so I
argued, it was my dreams that were stupid and wrong-headed. But that did
not help me at all. And as I had good eyes and ears and was a little
inquisitive too, I took a good look at this so-called life and at my
neighbours and acquaintances, fifty or so of them and their destinies, and
then I saw you. And I knew that my dreams had been right a thousand times
over, just as yours had been. It was life and reality that were wrong. It was
as little right that a woman like me should have no other choice than to
grow old in poverty and in a senseless way at a typewriter in the pay of a
money-maker, or to marry such a man for his money’s sake, or to become
some kind of drudge, as for a man like you to be forced in his loneliness
and despair to have recourse to a razor. Perhaps the trouble with me was
more material and moral and with you more spiritual—but it was the same
road. Do you think I can’t understand your horror of the fox-trot, your
dislike of bars and dancing floors, your loathing of jazz music and the rest
of it? I understand it only too well, and your dislike of politics as well, your
despondence over the chatter and irresponsible antics of the parties and the
press, your despair over the war, the one that has been and the one that is to
be, over all that people nowadays think, read and build, over the music they
play, the celebrations they hold, the education they carry on. You are right,
Steppenwolf, right a thousand times over, and yet you must go to the wall.
You are much too exacting and hungry for this simple, easy-going and
easily contented world of to-day. You have a dimension too many. Whoever
wants to live and enjoy his life to-day must not be like you and me.
Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead
of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds
no home in this trivial world of ours—”
She looked down and fell into meditation.

“Hermine,” I cried tenderly, “sister, how clearly you see! And yet you
taught me the fox-trot! But how do you mean that people like us with a
dimension too many cannot live here? What brings it about? Is it only so in
our days, or was it so always?”
“I don’t know. For the honour of the world, I will suppose it to be in our
time only—a disease, a momentary misfortune. Our leaders strain every
nerve, and with success, to get the next war going, while the rest of us,
meanwhile, dance the fox-trot, earn money and eat pralinées—in such a
time the world must indeed cut a poor figure. Let us hope that other times
were better, and will be better again, richer, broader and deeper. But that is
no help to us now. And perhaps it has always been the same—”
“Always as it is to-day? Always a world only for politicians, profiteers,
waiters and pleasure-seekers, and not a breath of air for men?”
“Well, I don’t know. Nobody knows. Anyway, it is all the same. But I am
thinking now of your favourite of whom you have talked to me sometimes,
and read me, too, some of his letters, of Mozart. How was it with him in his
day? Who controlled things in his times and ruled the roost and gave the
tone and counted for something? Was it Mozart or the business people,
Mozart or the average man? And in what fashion did he come to die and be
buried? And perhaps, I mean, it has always been the same and always will
be, and what is called history at school, and all we learn by heart there
about heroes and geniuses and great deeds and fine emotions, is all nothing
but a swindle invented by the schoolmasters for educational reasons to keep
children occupied for a given number of years. It has always been so and
always will be. Time and the world, money and power belong to the small
people and the shallow people. To the rest, to the real men belongs nothing.
Nothing but death.”
“Nothing else?”
“Yes, eternity.”
“You mean a name, and fame with posterity?”
“No, Steppenwolf, not fame. Has that any value? And do you think that all
true and real men have been famous and known to posterity?”
“No, of course not.”

“Then it isn’t fame. Fame exists in that sense only for the schoolmasters.
No, it isn’t fame. It is what I call eternity. The pious call it the kingdom of
God. I say to myself: all we who ask too much and have a dimension too
many could not contrive to live at all if there were not another air to breathe
outside the air of this world, if there were not eternity at the back of time;
and this is the kingdom of truth. The music of Mozart belongs there and the
poetry of your great poets. The saints, too, belong there, who have worked
wonders and suffered martyrdom and given a great example to men. But the
image of every true act, the strength of every true feeling, belongs to
eternity just as much, even though no one knows of it or sees it or records it
or hands it down to posterity. In eternity there is no posterity.”
“You are right.”
“The pious,” she went on meditatively, “after all know most about this. That
is why they set up the saints and what they call the communion of the
saints. The saints, that is to say, the true men, the younger brothers of the
Saviour. We are with them all our lives long in every good deed, in every
brave thought, in every love. The communion of the saints, in earlier times
it was set by painters in a golden heaven, shining, beautiful and full of
peace, and it is nothing else but what I meant a moment ago when I called it
eternity. It is the kingdom on the other side of time and appearances. It is
there we belong. There is our home. It is that which our heart strives for.
And for that reason, Steppenwolf, we long for death. There you will find
your Goethe again and Novalis and Mozart, and I my saints, Christopher,
Philip of Neri and all. There are many saints who at first were sinners. Even
sin can be a way to saintliness, sin and vice. You will laugh at me, but I
often think that even my friend Pablo might be a saint in hiding. Ah, Harry,
we have to stumble through so much dirt and humbug before we reach
home. And we have no one to guide us. Our only guide is our home-
sickness.”
With the last words her voice had sunk again and now there was a stillness
of peace in the room. The sun was setting; it lit up the gilt lettering on the
back of my books. I took Hermine’s head in my hands and kissed her on the
forehead and leant my cheek to hers as though she were my sister, and so
we stayed for a moment. And so I should have liked best to stay and to have
gone out no more that day. But Maria had promised me this night, the last
before the great Ball.

But on my way to join Maria I thought, not of her, but of what Hermine had
said. It seemed to me that it was not, perhaps, her own thoughts but mine.
She had read them like a clairvoyant, breathed them in and given them
back, so that they had a form of their own and came to me as something
new. I was particularly thankful to her for having expressed the thought of
eternity just at this time. I needed it, for without it I could not live and
neither could I die. The sacred sense of beyond, of timelessness, of a world
which had an eternal value and the substance of which was divine had been
given back to me to-day by this friend of mine who taught me dancing.
I was forced to recall my dream of Goethe and that vision of the old
wiseacre when he laughed so inhumanly and played his joke on me in the
fashion of the immortals. For the first time I understood Goethe’s laughter,
the laughter of the immortals. It was a laughter without an object. It was
simply light and lucidity. It was that which is left over when a true man has
passed through all the sufferings, vices, mistakes, passions and
misunderstandings of men and got through to eternity and the world of
space. And eternity was nothing else than the redemption of time, its return
to innocence, so to say, and its transformation again into space.
I went to meet Maria at the place where we usually dined. However, she
had not arrived, and while I sat waiting at the table in the quiet and secluded
restaurant, my thoughts still ran on the conversation I had had with
Hermine. All these thoughts that had arisen between her and me seemed so
intimate and well known, fashioned from a mythology and an imagery so
entirely my own. The immortals, living their life in timeless space,
enraptured, re-fashioned and immersed in a crystalline eternity like ether,
and the cool starry brightness and radiant serenity of this world outside the
earth—whence was all this so intimately known? As I reflected, passages of
Mozart’s Cassations, of Bach’s Well-tempered Clavier came to my mind
and it seemed to me that all through this music there was the radiance of
this cool starry brightness and the quivering of this clearness of ether. Yes, it
was there. In this music there was a feeling as of time frozen into space, and
above it there quivered a never-ending and superhuman serenity, an eternal,
divine laughter. Yes, and how well the aged Goethe of my dreams fitted in
too! And suddenly I heard this fathomless laughter around me. I heard the
immortals laughing. I sat entranced. Entranced, I felt for a pencil in my
waistcoat pocket, and looking for paper saw the wine card lying on the

table. I turned it over and wrote on the back. I wrote verses and forgot about
them till one day I discovered them in my pocket. They ran:

THE IMMORTALS

Ever reeking from the vales of earth
Ascends to us life’s fevered surge,
Wealth’s excess, the rage of dearth,
Smoke of death-meals on the gallow’s verge;
Greed without end, imprisoned air;
Murderers’ hands, usurers’ hands, hands of prayer;
Exhales in fœtid breath the human swarm
Whipped on by fear and lust, blood raw, blood warm,
Breathing blessedness and savage heats,
Eating itself and spewing what it eats,
Hatching war and lovely art,
Decking out with idiot craze
Bawdy houses while they blaze,
Through the childish fair-time mart
Weltering to its own decay
In the glare of pleasure’s way,
Rising for each new-born and then
Sinking for each to dust again.

But we above you ever more residing
In the ether’s star translumined ice
Know not day nor night nor time’s dividing,
Wear nor age nor sex for our device.
All your sins and anguish self-affrighting,
Your murders and lascivious delighting
Are to us but as a show
Like the suns that circling go
Changing not our day for night;
On your frenzied life we spy,
And refresh ourselves thereafter
With the stars in order fleeing;
Our breath is winter; in our sight

Fawns the dragon of the sky;
Cool and unchanging is our eternal being,
Cool and star bright is our eternal laughter.
Then Maria came and after a cheerful meal I accompanied her to our little
room. She was lovelier that evening, warmer and more intimate than she
had ever been. The love she gave me was so tender that I felt it as the most
complete abandon. “Maria,” said I, “you are as prodigal to-day as a
goddess. Don’t kill us both quite. To-morrow after all is the Ball. Whom
have you got for a cavalier to-morrow? I’m very much afraid it is a fairy
prince who will carry you off and I shall never see you any more. Your love
to-night is almost like that of good lovers who bid each other farewell for
the last time.”
She put her lips close to my ear and whispered:
“Don’t say that, Harry. Any time might be the last time. If Hermine takes
you, you will come no more to me. Perhaps she will take you to-morrow.”
Never did I experience the feeling peculiar to those days, that strange,
bitter-sweet alternation of mood, more powerfully than on that night before
the Ball. It was happiness that I experienced. There was the loveliness of
Maria and her surrender. There was the sweet and subtle sensuous joy of
inhaling and tasting a hundred pleasures of the senses that I had only begun
to know as an elderly man. I was bathed in sweet joy like a rippling pool.
And yet that was only the shell. Within all was significant and tense with
fate, and while, love-lost and tender, I was busied with the little sweet
appealing things of love and sank apparently without a care in the caress of
happiness, I was conscious all the while in my heart how my fate raced on
at breakneck speed, racing and chasing like a frightened horse, straight for
the precipitous abyss, spurred on by dread and longing to the consummation
of death. Just as a short while before I had started aside in fear from the
easy thoughtless pleasure of merely sensual love and felt a dread of Maria’s
beauty that laughingly offered itself, so now I felt a dread of death, a dread,
however, that was already conscious of its approaching change into
surrender and release.
Even while we were lost in the silent and deep preoccupation of our love
and belonged more closely than ever we had to one another, my soul bid
adieu to Maria, and leave of all that she had meant to me. I had learnt from

her, once more before the end, to confide myself like a child to life’s surface
play, to pursue a fleeting joy, and to be both child and beast in the
innocence of sex—a state that (in earlier life) I had only known rarely and
as an exception. The life of the senses and of sex had nearly always had for
me the bitter accompaniment of guilt, the sweet but dread taste of forbidden
fruit that puts a spiritual man on his guard. Now, Hermine and Maria had
shown me this garden in its innocence, and I had been a guest there and
thankfully. But it would soon be time to go on further. It was too agreeable
and too warm in this garden. It was my destiny to make another bid for the
crown of life in the expiation of its endless guilt. An easy life, an easy love,
an easy death—these were not for me.
From what the girls told me I gathered that for the Ball next day, or in
connection with it, quite unusual delights and extravagances were on foot.
Perhaps it was the climax, and perhaps Maria’s suspicion was correct.
Perhaps this was our last night together and perhaps the morning would
bring a new unwinding of fate. I was aflame with longing and breathless
with dread; I clung wildly to Maria; and there flared within me a last burst
of wild desire....

I made up by day for the sleep I had lost at night. After a bath I went home
dead tired. I darkened my bedroom and as I undressed I came on the verses
in my pocket; but I forgot them again and lay down forthwith. I forgot
Maria and Hermine and the Masked Ball and slept the clock round. It was
not till I had got up in the evening and was shaving that I remembered that
the Ball began in an hour and that I had to find a dress shirt. I got myself
ready in very good humour and went out thereafter to have dinner.
It was the first Masked Ball I was to participate in. In earlier days, it is true,
I had now and again attended such festivities and even sometimes found
them very entertaining, but I had never danced. I had been a spectator
merely. As for the enthusiasm with which others had talked and rejoiced
over them in my hearing, it had always struck me as comic. And now the
day had come for me too to find the occasion one of almost painful
suspense. As I had no partner to take, I decided not to go till late. This, too,
Hermine had counselled me.

I had seldom of late been to the Steel Helmet, my former refuge, where the
disappointed men sat out their evenings, soaking in their wine and playing
at bachelor life. It did not suit the life I had come to lead since. This
evening, however, I was drawn to it before I was aware. In the mood
between joy and fear that fate and parting imposed on me just now, all the
stations and shrines of meditation in my life’s pilgrimage caught once more
that gleam of pain and beauty that comes from things past; and so too had
the little tavern, thick with smoke, among whose patrons I had lately been
numbered and whose primitive opiate of a bottle of land-wine had lately
heartened me enough to spend one more night in my lonely bed and to
endure life for one more day. I had tasted other specifics and stronger
stimulus since then, and sipped a sweeter poison. With a smile I entered the
ancient hostel. The landlady greeted me and so, with a nod, did the silent
company of habitués. A roast chicken was commended and soon set before
me. The limpid Elsasser sparkled in the thick peasant glass. The clean white
wooden tables and the old yellow wainscoting had a friendly look. And
while I ate and drank there came over me that feeling of change and decay
and of farewell celebrations, that sweet and inwardly painful feeling of
being a living part of all the scenes and all the things of an earlier life that
has never yet been parted from, and from which the time to part has come.
The modern man calls this sentimentality. He has lost the love of inanimate
objects. He does not even love his most sacred object, his motor-car, but is
ever hoping to exchange it as soon as he can for a later model. This modern
man has energy and ability. He is healthy, cool and strenuous—a splendid
type, and in the next war he will be a miracle of efficiency. But all that was
no concern of mine. I was not a modern man, nor an old-fashioned one
either. I had escaped time altogether, and went my way, with death at my
elbow and death as my resolve. I had no objection to sentimentalities. I was
glad and thankful to find a trace of anything like a feeling still remaining in
my burnt-out heart. So I let my memories of the old tavern and my
attachment to the solid wooden chairs and the smell of smoke and wine and
the air of use and wont and warmth and homeliness that the place had carry
me away. There is beauty in farewells and a gentleness in their very tone.
The hard seat was dear to me, and so was the peasant glass and the cool
racy taste of the Elsasser and my intimacy with all and everything in this
room, and the faces of the bent and dreaming drinkers, those disillusioned
ones, whose brother I had been for so long. All this was bourgeois

sentimentality, lightly seasoned with a touch of the old-fashioned romance
of inns, a romance coming from my boyhood when inns and wine and
cigars were still forbidden things—strange and wonderful. But no
Steppenwolf rose before me baring his teeth to tear my sentiment to pieces.
I sat there in peace in the glow of the past whose setting still shed a faint
after-glow.
A street seller came in and I bought a handful of roasted chestnuts. An old
dame came in with flowers and I bought a bunch of violets and presented
them to the landlady. It was not till I was about to pay my bill and felt in
vain for the pocket of the coat I usually wore that I realised once more than
I was in evening dress. The Masked Ball. And Hermine!
It was still early enough, however. I could not convince myself to go to the
Globe Rooms straight away. I felt too—as I had in the case of all the
pleasures that had lately come my way—a whole array of checks and
resistances. I had no inclination to enter the large and crowded and noisy
rooms. I had a schoolboy’s shyness of the strange atmosphere and the world
of pleasure and dancing.
As I sauntered along I passed by a cinema with its dazzling lights and huge
coloured posters. I went on a few steps, then turned again and went in.
There till eleven I could sit quietly and comfortably in the dark. Following
the attendant with the pocket light I stumbled through the curtains into the
darkened hall, found a seat and was suddenly in the middle of the Old
Testament. The film was one of those that are nominally not shown for
money. Much expense and many refinements are lavished upon them in a
more sacred and nobler cause, and at midday even school-children are
brought to see them by their religious teachers. This one was the story of
Moses and the Israelites in Egypt, with a huge crowd of men, horses,
camels, palaces, splendours of the Pharaohs and tribulations of the Jews in
the desert. I saw Moses, whose hair recalled portraits of Walt Whitman, a
splendidly theatrical Moses, wandering through the desert at the head of the
Jews, with a dark and fiery eye and a long staff and the stride of a Wotan. I
saw him pray to God at the edge of the Red Sea, and I saw the Red Sea
parted to give free passage, a deep road between piled-up mountains of
water (the confirmation classes conducted by the clergy to see this religious
film could argue without end as to how the film people managed this). I saw
the prophet and his awestruck people pass through to the other side, and

behind them I saw the war-chariots of Pharaoh come into sight and the
Egyptians stop and start on the brink of the sea, and then, when they
ventured courageously on, I saw the mountainous waters close over the
heads of Pharaoh in all the splendour of his gold trappings and over all his
chariots and all his men, recalling, as I saw it, Handel’s wonderful duet for
two basses in which this event is magnificently sung. I saw Moses, further,
climbing Sinai, a gloomy hero in a gloomy wilderness of rocks, and I
looked on as Jehovah in the midst of storm and thunder and lightning
imparted the Ten Commandments to him, while his worthless people set up
the golden calf at the foot of the mountain and gave themselves over to
somewhat roisterous celebrations. I found it so strange and incredible to be
looking on at all this, to be seeing the sacred writ, with its heroes and its
wonders, the source in our childhood of the first dawning suspicion of
another world than this, presented for money before a grateful public that
sat quietly eating the provisions brought with it from home. A nice little
picture, indeed, picked up by chance in the huge wholesale clearance of
culture in these days! My God, rather than come to such a pass it would
have been better for the Jews and every one else, let alone the Egyptians, to
have perished in those days and forthwith of a violent and becoming death
instead of this dismal pretence of dying by inches that we go in for to-day.
Yes indeed!
My secret repressions and unconfessed fright in face of the Masked Ball
were by no means lessened by the feelings provoked in me by the cinema.
On the contrary, they had grown to uncomfortable proportions and I had to
shake myself and think of Hermine before I could go to the Globe Rooms
and dared to enter. It was late, and the Ball had been for a long time in full
swing. At once before I had even taken off my things I was caught up, shy
and sober as I was, in the swirl of the masked throng. I was accosted
familiarly. Girls summoned me to the champagne rooms. Clowns slapped
me on the back, and I was addressed on all sides as an old friend. I
responded to none of it, but fought my way through the crowded rooms to
the cloak-room, and when I got my cloak-room ticket I put it in my pocket
with great care, reflecting that I might need it before very long when I had
had enough of the uproar.
Every part of the great building was given over to the festivities. There was
dancing in every room and in the basement as well. Corridors and stairs

were filled to overflowing with masks and dancing and music and laughter
and tumult. Oppressed in heart I stole through the throng, from the nigger
orchestra to the peasant band, from the large and brilliantly lighted principal
room into the passages and on to the stairs, to bars, buffets and champagne
parlours. The walls were mostly hung with wild and cheerful paintings by
the latest artists. All the world was there, artists, journalists, professors,
business men, and of course every adherent of pleasure in the town. In one
of the orchestras sat Pablo, blowing with enthusiasm in his curved mouth-
piece. As soon as he saw me he sang out a greeting. Pushed hither and
thither in the crowd I found myself in one room after another, upstairs here
and downstairs there. A corridor in the basement had been staged as hell by
the artists and there a band of devils played furiously. After a while, I began
to look for Hermine or Maria and strove time after time to reach the
principal room; but either I missed my way or had to meet the current. By
midnight I had found no one, and though I had not danced I was hot and
giddy. I threw myself into the nearest chair among utter strangers and
ordered some wine, and came to the conclusion that joining in such rowdy
festivals was no part for an old man like me. I drank my glass of wine while
I stared at the naked arms and backs of the women, watched the crowd of
grotesquely masked figures drifting by and silently declined the advances of
a few girls who wished to sit on my knee or get me to dance. “Old
Growler,” one called after me; and she was right. I decided to raise my
spirits with the wine, but even the wine went against me and I could
scarcely swallow a second glass. And then the feeling crept over me that the
Steppenwolf was standing behind me with his tongue out. Nothing pleased
me. I was in the wrong place. To be sure, I had come with the best
intentions, but this was no place for me to be merry in; and all this loud
effervescence of pleasure, the laughter and the whole foolery of it on every
side, seemed to me forced and stupid.
Thus it was that, at about one o’clock, in anger and disillusionment I steered
a course for the cloak-room, to put on my coat again and go. It was
surrender and backsliding into my wolfishness, and Hermine would
scarcely forgive it me. But I could not do otherwise. All the way as I
squeezed through the throng to the cloak-room, I still kept a careful look-
out in case I might yet see one of my friends, but in vain. Now I stood at the
counter. Already the attendant was politely extending his hand for my
number. I felt in my waistcoat pocket—the number was no longer there!

The devil was in it if even this failed me. Often enough during my forlorn
wanderings through the rooms and while I sat over my tasteless wine I had
felt in my pocket, fighting back the resolve to go away again, and I had
always found the round flat check in its place. And now it was gone.
Everything was against me.
“Lost your number?” came in a shrill voice from a small red and yellow
devil at my elbow. “Here, comrade, you can take mine,” and he held it out
to me without more ado. While I mechanically took it and turned it over in
my fingers the brisk little fellow rapidly disappeared.
When, however, I examined the pasteboard counter for a number, no
number was to be seen. Instead there was a scribble in a tiny hand. I asked
the attendant to wait and went to the nearest light to read it. There in little
crazy letters that were scarcely legible was scrawled:

TO-NIGHT AT THE MAGIC THEATRE
FOR MADMEN ONLY
PRICE OF ADMITTANCE YOUR MIND.
NOT FOR EVERYBODY. HERMINE IS IN HELL.

As a marionette whose thread the operator has let go for a moment wakes to
new life after a brief paralysis of death and coma and once more plays its
lively part, so did I at this jerk of the magic thread throw myself with the
elasticity and eagerness of youth into the tumult from which I had just
retreated in the listlessness and weariness of elderly years. Never did sinner
show more haste to get to hell. A moment before my patent-leather shoes
had galled me, the heavily scented air disgusted me, and the heat undone
me. Now on my winged feet I nimbly one-stepped through every room on
the way to hell. The very air had a charm. The warmth embedded me and
wafted me on, and so no less did the riotous music, the intoxication of
colours, the perfume of women’s shoulders, the clamour of the hundred
tongues, the laughter, the rhythm of the dance, and the glances of all the
kindled eyes. A Spanish dancing girl flung herself into my arms: “Dance
with me!” “Can’t,” said I. “I’m bound for hell. But I’ll gladly take a kiss
with me.” The red mouth beneath the mask met mine and with the kiss I
recognised Maria. I caught her tight in my arms and like a June rose
bloomed her full lips. By this time we were dancing, our lips still joined.

Past Pablo we danced, who hung like a lover over his softly wailing
instrument. Those lovely animal eyes embraced us with their half-abstracted
radiance. But before we had gone twenty steps the music broke off and
regretfully I let go of Maria.
“I’d have loved to have danced with you again,” I said, intoxicated with her
warmth. “Come with me a step or two, Maria. I’m in love with your
beautiful arm. Let me have it a moment longer! But, you see, Hermine has
summoned me. She is in hell.”
“I thought so. Farewell, Harry. I won’t forget you.” She left me—left me
indeed. Yes, it was autumn, it was fate, that had given the summer rose so
full and ripe a scent.
On I went through the long corridors, luxuriously thronged, and down the
stairs to hell. There, on pitch-black walls shone wicked garish lights, and
the orchestra of devils was playing feverishly. On a high stool at the bar
there was seated a pretty young fellow without a mask and in evening dress
who scrutinised me with a cursory and mocking glance. Pressed to the wall
by the swirl of dancers—about twenty couples were dancing in this very
confined space—I examined all the women with eager suspense. Most were
still in masks and smiled at me, but none was Hermine. The handsome
youth on the high stool glanced mockingly at me. At the next pause, thought
I, she will come and summon me. The dance ended but no one came.
I went over to the bar which was squeezed into a corner of the small and
low room, and taking a seat near the young man ordered a whisky. While I
drank it I saw his profile. It had a familiar charm, like a picture from long
ago, precious for the very dust that has settled on it from the past. Oh, then
it flashed through me. It was Herman, the friend of my youth.
“Herman!” I stammered.
She smiled. “Harry? Have you found me?”
It was Hermine, barely disguised by the make-up of her hair and a little
paint. The stylish collar gave an unfamiliar look to the pallor of her
intelligent face, the wide black sleeves of her dress-coat and the white cuffs
made her hands look curiously small, and the long black trousers gave a
curious elegance to her feet in their black and white silk socks.

“Is this the costume, Hermine, in which you mean to make me fall in love
with you?”
“So far,” she said, “I have contented myself with turning the heads of the
ladies. But now your turn has come. First, let’s have a glass of champagne.”
So we did, perched on our stools, while the dance went on around us to the
lively and fevered strain of the strings. And without Hermine appearing to
give herself the least trouble I was very soon in love with her. As she was
dressed as a boy, I could not dance with her nor allow myself any tender
advances, and while she seemed distant and neutral in her male mask, her
looks and words and gestures encircled me with all her feminine charm.
Without so much as having touched her I surrendered to her spell, and this
spell itself kept within the part she played. It was the spell of a
hermaphrodite. For she talked to me about Herman and about childhood,
mine and her own, and about those years of childhood when the capacity
for love, in its first youth, embraces not only both sexes, but all and
everything, sensuous and spiritual, and endows all things with a spell of
love and a fairy-like ease of transformation such as in later years comes
again only to a chosen few and to poets, and to them rarely. Throughout she
kept up the part of a young man, smoking cigarettes and talking with a
spirited ease that often had a little mockery in it; and yet it was all iridescent
with the rays of desire and transformed, as it reached my senses, into a
charming seduction.
How well and thoroughly I thought I knew Hermine, and yet what a
completely new revelation of herself she opened up to me that night! How
gently and inconspicuously she cast the net I longed for around me, and
how playfully and how like a pixie she gave the sweet poison to drink!
We sat and talked and drank champagne. We strolled through the rooms and
looked about us. We went on voyages of exploration to discover couples
whose love-making it amused us to spy upon. She pointed out women
whom she recommended me to dance with, and gave me advice as to the
methods of attack to be employed with each. We took the floor as rivals and
paid court for a while to the same girl, danced with her by turns and both
tried to win her heart. And yet it was all only a carnival, only a game
between the two of us that caught us more closely together in our own
passion. It was all a fairy tale. Everything had a new dimension, a deeper

meaning. Everything was fanciful and symbolic. There was one girl of great
beauty but looking tragic and unhappy. Herman danced with her and drew
her out. They disappeared to drink champagne together, and she told me
afterwards that she had made a conquest of her not as a man but as a
woman, with the spell of Lesbos. For my part, the whole building,
reverberating everywhere with the sound of dancing, and the whole
intoxicated crowd of masks, became by degrees a wild dream of paradise.
Flower upon flower wooed me with its scent. I toyed with fruit after fruit.
Serpents looked at me from green and leafy shadows with mesmeric eyes.
Lotus blossoms luxuriated over black bogs. Enchanted birds sang
allurement from the trees. Yet all was a progress to one longed-for goal, the
summons of a new yearning for one and one only. Once I was dancing with
a girl I did not know. I had swept her with the ardour of a lover into the
giddy swirl of dancers and while we hung in this unreal world, she suddenly
remarked with a laugh: “One wouldn’t know you. You were so dull and flat
before.” Then I recognised the girl who had called me “Old Growler” a few
hours before. She thought she had got me now, but with the next dance it
was another for whom my ardour glowed. I danced without ceasing for two
hours or more—every dance and some, even, that I had never danced
before. Every now and then Herman was near me, and gave me a nod and a
smile as he disappeared in the throng.
An experience fell to my lot this night of the Ball that I had never known in
all my fifty years, though it is known to every flapper and student—the
intoxication of a general festivity, the mysterious merging of the personality
in the mass, the mystic union of joy. I had often heard it spoken of. It was
known, I knew, to every servant girl. I had often observed the sparkle in the
eye of those who told me of it and I had always treated it with a half-
superior, half-envious smile. A hundred times in my life I had seen
examples of those whom rapture had intoxicated and released from the self,
of that smile, that half-crazed absorption, of those whose heads have been
turned by a common enthusiasm. I had seen it in drunken recruits and
sailors, and also in great artists in the enthusiasm, perhaps, of a musical
festival; and not less in young soldiers going to war. Even in recent days I
had marvelled at and loved and mocked and envied this gleam and this
smile in my friend, Pablo, when he hung over his saxophone in the blissful
intoxication of playing in the orchestra, or when, enraptured and ecstatic, he
looked over to the conductor, the drum, or the man with the banjo. It had

sometimes occurred to me that such a smile, such a childlike radiance could
be possible only to quite young persons or among those peoples whose
customs permitted no marked differences between one individual and
another. But to-day, on this blessed night, I myself, the Steppenwolf, was
radiant with this smile. I myself swam in this deep and childlike happiness
of a fairy-tale. I myself breathed the sweet intoxication of a common dream
and of music and rhythm and wine and women,—I, who had in other days
so often listened with amusement, or dismal superiority, to its panegyric in
the ball-room chatter of some student. I was myself no longer. My
personality was dissolved in the intoxication of the festivity like salt in
water. I danced with this woman or that, but it was not only the one I had in
my arms and whose hair brushed my face that belonged to me. All the other
women who were dancing in the same room and the same dance and to the
same music, and whose radiant faces floated past me like fantastic flowers,
belonged to me, and I to them. All of us had a part in one another. And the
men too. I was with them also. They, too, were no strangers to me. Their
smile was mine, and mine their wooing and theirs mine.
A new dance, a fox-trot, with the title Yearning, had swept the world that
winter. Once we had heard it we could not have enough of it. We were all
soaked in it and intoxicated with it and every one hummed the melody
whenever it was played. I danced without stop and with any one who came
in my way, with quite young girls, with women in their earlier or their latter
prime, and with those who had sadly passed them both; and with them all I
was enraptured—laughing, happy, radiant. And when Pablo saw me so
radiant, me whom he had always looked on as a very lamentable poor devil,
his eyes beamed blissfully upon me and he was so inspired that he got up
from his chair and blowing lustily in his horn climbed up on it. From this
elevation he blew with all his might, while at the same time his whole body,
and his instrument with it, swayed to the tune of Yearning. I and my partner
kissed our hands to him and sang loudly in response. Ah, thought I,
meanwhile, let come to me what may, for once at least, I, too, have been
happy, radiant, released from myself, a brother of Pablo’s, a child.
I had lost the sense of time, and I don’t know how many hours or moments
the intoxication of happiness lasted. I did not observe either that the brighter
the festal fire burned the narrower were the limits within which it was
confined. Most people had already left. The corridors were silent and many

of the lights out. The stairs were deserted and in the rooms above one
orchestra after another had stopped playing and gone away. It was only in
the principal room and in Hell below that the orgy still raged in a crescendo.
Since I could not dance with Hermine as a boy, we had only had fleeting
encounters in the pauses between the dances, and at last I lost sight of her
entirely—and not only sight but thought. There were no thoughts left. I was
lost in the maze and whirl of the dance. Scents and tones and sighs and
words stirred me. I was greeted and kindled by strange eyes, encircled by
strange faces, borne hither and thither in time to the music as though by a
wave.
And then of a sudden I saw, half coming to my senses for a moment, among
the last who still kept it up in one of the smaller rooms, and filled it to
overflowing—the only one in which the music still sounded—of a sudden I
saw a black Pierrette with face painted white. She was fresh and charming,
the only masked figure left and a bewitching apparition that I had never in
the whole course of the night seen before. While in every one else the late
hour showed itself in flushed and heated faces, crushed dresses, limp collars
and crumpled ruffs, the black Pierrette stood there fresh and neat with her
white face beneath her mask. Her costume had not a crease and not a hair
was out of place. Her ruff and pointed cuffs were untouched. I rushed
towards her, put my arms around her, and drew her into the dance. Her
perfumed ruff tickled my chin. Her hair brushed my cheek. The young
vigour of her body answered my movements as no one’s else had done that
night, yielding to them with an inward tenderness and compelling them to
new contacts by the play of her allurements. I bent down to kiss her mouth
as we danced. Its smile was triumphant and long familiar. Of a sudden I
recognised the firm chin, the shoulders, arms and hands. It was Hermine,
Herman no longer. Hermine in a change of dress, fresh, perfumed,
powdered. Our lips met passionately. For a moment her whole body to her
knees clung in longing and surrender to mine. Then she drew her mouth
away and, holding back, fled from me as we danced. When the music broke
off we were still clasped where we stood. All the excited couples round us
clapped, stamped, cried out and urged the exhausted orchestra to play
Yearning over again. And now a feeling that it was morning fell upon us all.
We saw the ashen light behind the curtains. It warned us of pleasure’s
approaching end and gave us symptoms of the weariness to come. Blindly,
with bursts of laughter, we flung ourselves desperately into the dance once

more, into the music, and the light that began to flood the room. Our feet
moved in time to the music as though we were possessed, every couple
touching, and once more we felt the great wave of bliss break over us.
Hermine abandoned her triumphant air, her mockery and coolness. She
knew that there was no more to do to make me in love with her. I was hers,
and her way of dancing, her looks and smiles and kisses all showed that she
gave herself to me. All the women of this fevered night, all that I had
danced with, all whom I had kindled or who had kindled me, all whom I
had courted, all who had clung to me with longing, all whom I had followed
with enraptured eyes were melted together and had become one, the one
whom I held in my arms.
On and on went this nuptial dance. Time after time the music flagged. The
wind let their instruments fall. The pianist got up from the piano. The first
fiddle shook his head. And every time they were won over by the imploring
persistence of the last intoxicated dancers and played once more. They
played faster and more wildly. Then at last, as we stood, still entwined and
breathless after the last eager dance, the piano was closed with a bang, and
our arms fell wearily to our sides like those of the wind and strings and the
flutist, blinking sleepily, put his flute away in its case. Doors opened, the
cold air poured in, attendants appeared with cloaks and the bar-waiter
turned off the light. The whole scene vanished eerily away and the dancers
who a moment ago had been all on fire shivered as they put on coats and
cloaks and turned up their collars. Hermine was pale but smiling. Slowly
she raised her arm and pushed back her hair. As she did so one arm caught
the light and a faint and indescribably tender shadow ran from her arm-pit
to her hidden breast, and this little trembling line of shadow seemed to me
to sum up all the charm and fascination of her body like a smile.
We stood looking at one another, the last in the hall, the last in the whole
building. Somewhere below I heard a door bang, a glass break, a titter of
laughter die away, mixed with the angry hurried noise of motor-cars starting
up. And somewhere, at an indeterminable distance and height, I heard a
laugh ring out, an extraordinarily clear and merry peal of laughter. Yet it
was eerie and strange. It was a laugh, made of crystal and ice, bright and
radiant, but cold and inexorable. Where had I heard this laugh before? I
could not tell.

We stood and looked at one another. For a moment I came to my sober self.
I felt a fearful weariness descend upon me. I felt with repugnance how
moist and limp my clothing hung around me. I saw my hands emerging red
and with swollen veins from my crumpled and wilted cuffs. But all at once
the mood passed, banished by a look from Hermine. At this look that
seemed to come from my own soul all reality fell away, even the reality of
my sensuous love of her. Bewitched we looked at one another, while my
poor little soul looked at me.
“You’re ready?” asked Hermine, and her smile fled away like the shadows
on her breast. Far up in unknown space rang out that strange and eerie
laughter.
I nodded. Oh, yes, I was ready.
At this moment Pablo appeared in the doorway and beamed on us out of his
jolly eyes that really were animal’s eyes except that animal’s eyes are
always serious, while his always laughed, and this laughter turned them into
human eyes. He beckoned to us with his usual friendly cordiality. He had
put on a gorgeous silk smoking-jacket. His limp collar and tired white face
had a withered and pallid look above its red facings; but the impression was
erased by his radiant black eyes. So was reality erased, for they too had the
witchery.
We joined him when he beckoned and in the doorway he said to me in a low
voice: “Brother Harry, I invite you to a little entertainment. For madmen
only, and one price only—your mind. Are you ready?”
Again I nodded.
The dear fellow gave us each an arm with kind solicitude, Hermine his
right, me his left, and conducted us upstairs to a small round room that was
lit from the ceiling with a bluish light and nearly empty. There was nothing
in it but a small round table and three easy chairs in which we sat ourselves.
Where were we? Was I asleep? Was I at home? Was I driving in a car? No, I
was sitting in a blue light in a round room and a rare atmosphere, in a
stratum of reality that had become rarefied in the extreme.
Why then was Hermine so white? Why was Pablo talking so much? Was it
not perhaps I who made him talk, spoke, indeed, with his voice? Was it not,

too, my own soul that contemplated me out of his black eyes like a lost and
frightened bird, just as it had out of Hermine’s grey ones?
Pablo looked at us good-naturedly as ever and with something ceremonious
in his friendliness; and he talked much and long. He whom I had never
heard say two consecutive sentences, whom no discussion nor thesis could
interest, whom I had scarcely credited with a single thought, discoursed
now in his good-natured warm voice fluently and without a fault.
“My friends, I have invited you to an entertainment that Harry has long
wished for and of which he has long dreamed. The hour is a little late and
no doubt we are all slightly fatigued. So, first, we will rest and refresh
ourselves a little.”
From a recess in the wall he took three glasses and a quaint little bottle, also
a small oriental box inlaid with differently coloured woods. He filled the
three glasses from the bottle and taking three long thin yellow cigarettes
from the box and a box of matches from the pocket of his silk jacket he
gave us a light. And now we all slowly smoked the cigarettes whose smoke
was as thick as incense, leaning back in our chairs and slowly sipping the
aromatic liquid whose strange taste was so utterly unfamiliar. Its effect was
immeasurably enlivening and delightful—as though one were filled with
gas and had no longer any gravity. Thus we sat peacefully exhaling small
puffs and taking little sips at our glasses, while every moment we felt
ourselves growing lighter and more serene.
From far away came Pablo’s warm voice.
“It is a pleasure to me, my dear Harry, to have the privilege of being your
host in a small way on this occasion. You have often been sorely weary of
your life. You were striving, were you not, for escape? You have a longing
to forsake this world and its reality and to penetrate to a reality more native
to you, to a world beyond time. You know, of course, where this other world
lies hidden. It is the world of your own soul that you seek. Only within
yourself exists that other reality for which you long. I can give you nothing
that has not already its being within yourself. I can throw open to you no
picture-gallery but your own soul. All I can give you is the opportunity, the
impulse, the key. I help you to make your own world visible. That is all.”

Again he put his hand into the pocket of his gorgeous jacket and drew out a
round looking-glass.
“Look, it is thus that you have so far seen yourself.”
He held the little glass before my eyes (a childish verse came to my mind:
“Little glass, little glass in the hand”) and I saw, though indistinctly and
cloudily, the reflection of an uneasy self-tormented, inwardly labouring and
seething being—myself, Harry Haller. And within him again I saw the
Steppenwolf, a shy, beautiful, dazed wolf with frightened eyes that
smouldered now with anger, now with sadness. This shape of a wolf
coursed through the other in ceaseless movement, as a tributary pours its
cloudy turmoil into a river. In bitter strife, each tried to devour the other so
that his shape might prevail. How unutterably sad was the look this fluid
inchoate figure of the wolf threw from his beautiful shy eyes.
“There you see yourself,” Pablo remarked and put the mirror away in his
pocket. I was thankful to close my eyes and take a sip of the elixir.
“And now,” said Pablo, “we have had our rest. We have had our
refreshment and a little talk. If your fatigue has passed off I will conduct
you to my peep-show and show you my little theatre. Will you come?”
We got up. With a smile Pablo led. He opened a door, and drew a curtain
aside and we found ourselves in the horseshoe-shaped corridor of a theatre,
and exactly in the middle. On either side, the curving passage led past a
large number, indeed an incredible number, of narrow doors into the boxes.
“This,” explained Pablo, “is our theatre, and a jolly one it is. I hope you’ll
find lots to laugh at.” He laughed aloud as he spoke, a short laugh, but it
went through me like a shot. It was the same bright and peculiar laugh that I
had heard before from below.
“This little theatre of mine has as many doors into as many boxes as you
please, ten or a hundred or a thousand, and behind each door exactly what
you seek awaits you. It is a pretty cabinet of pictures, my dear friend; but it
would be quite useless for you to go through it as you are. You would be
checked and blinded at every turn by what you are pleased to call your
personality. You have no doubt guessed long since that the conquest of time
and the escape from reality, or however else it may be that you choose to
describe your longing, means simply the wish to be relieved of your so-

called personality. That is the prison where you lie. And if you were to enter
the theatre as you are, you would see everything through the eyes of Harry
and the old spectacles of the Steppenwolf. You are therefore requested to
lay these spectacles aside and to be so kind as to leave your highly
esteemed personality here in the cloak-room where you will find it again
when you wish. The pleasant dance from which you have just come, the
treatise on the Steppenwolf, and the little stimulant that we have only this
moment partaken of may have sufficiently prepared you. You, Harry, after
having left behind your valuable personality, will have the left side of the
theatre at your disposal, Hermine the right. Once inside, you can meet each
other as you please. Hermine will be so kind as to go for a moment behind
the curtain. I should like to introduce Harry first.”
Hermine disappeared to the right past a gigantic mirror that covered the rear
wall from floor to vaulted ceiling.
“Now, Harry, come along be as jolly as you can. To make it so and to teach
you to laugh is the whole aim in getting up this entertainment—I hope you
will make it easy for me. You feel quite well, I trust? Not afraid? That’s
good, excellent. You will now, without fear and with unfeigned pleasure,
enter our visionary world. You will introduce yourself to it by means of a
trifling suicide, since this is the custom.”
He took out the pocket-mirror again and held it in front of my face. Again I
was confronted by the same indistinct and cloudy reflection, with the wolf’s
shape encircling it and coursing through it. I knew it too well and disliked it
too sincerely for its destruction to cause me any sorrow.
“You will now extinguish this superfluous reflection, my dear friend. That
is all that is necessary. To do so, it will suffice that you greet it, if your
mood permits, with a hearty laugh. You are here in a school of humour. You
are to learn to laugh. Now, true humour begins when a man ceases to take
himself seriously.”
I fixed my eyes on the little mirror, where the man Harry and the wolf were
going through their convulsions. For a moment there was a convulsion deep
within me too, a faint but painful one like remembrance, or like
homesickness, or like remorse. Then the slight oppression gave way to a
new feeling like that a man feels when a tooth has been extracted with
cocaine, a sense of relief and of letting out a deep breath, and of wonder, at

the same time, that it has not hurt in the least. And this feeling was
accompanied by a buoyant exhilaration and a desire to laugh so irresistible
that I was compelled to give way to it.
The mournful image in the glass gave a final convulsion and vanished. The
glass itself turned grey and charred and opaque, as though it had been burnt.
With a laugh Pablo threw the thing away and it went rolling down the
endless corridor and disappeared.
“Well laughed, Harry,” cried Pablo. “You will learn to laugh like the
immortals yet. You have done with the Steppenwolf at last. It’s no good
with a razor. Take care that he stays dead. You’ll be able to leave the farce
of reality behind you directly. At our next meeting we’ll drink brotherhood,
dear fellow. I never liked you better than I do to-day. And if you still think it
worth your while we can philosophise together and argue and talk about
music and Mozart and Gluck and Plato and Goethe to your heart’s content.
You will understand now why it was so impossible before. I wish you good
riddance of the Steppenwolf for to-day at any rate. For naturally, your
suicide is not a final one. We are in a magic theatre; a world of pictures, not
realities. See that you pick out beautiful and cheerful ones and show that
you really are not in love with your highly questionable personality any
longer. Should you still, however, have a hankering after it, you need only
have another look in the mirror that I will now show you. But you know the
old proverb: ‘A mirror in the hand is worth two on the wall?’ Ha! ha!”
(again that laugh, beautiful and frightful!) “And now there only remains one
little ceremony and quite a jolly one. You have now to cast aside the
spectacles of your personality. So come here and look in a proper looking-
glass. It will give you some fun.”
Laughingly with a few droll caresses he turned me about so that I faced the
gigantic mirror on the wall. There I saw myself.
I saw myself for a brief instant as my usual self, except that I looked
unusually good-humoured, bright and laughing. But I had scarcely had time
to recognise myself before the reflection fell to pieces. A second, a third, a
tenth, a twentieth figure sprang from it till the whole gigantic mirror was
full of nothing but Harrys or bits of him, each of which I saw only for the
instant of recognition. Some of these multitudinous Harrys were as old as I,
some older, some very old. Others were young. There were youths, boys,

schoolboys, scamps, children. Fifty-year-olds and twenty-year-olds played
leap frog. Thirty-year-olds and five-year-olds, solemn and merry, worthy
and comic, well dressed and unpresentable, and even quite naked, long
haired, and hairless, all were I and all were seen for a flash, recognised and
gone. They sprang from each other in all directions, left and right and into
the recesses of the mirror and clean out of it. One, an elegant young fellow,
leapt laughing into Pablo’s arms and embraced him and they went off
together. And one who particularly pleased me, a good looking and
charming boy of sixteen or seventeen years, sprang like lightning into the
corridor and began reading the notices on the doors. I went after him and
found him in front of a door on which was inscribed:

ALL GIRLS ARE YOURS
ONE QUARTER IN THE SLOT

The dear boy hurled himself forward, made a leap and, falling head first
into the slot himself, disappeared behind the door.
Pablo too had vanished. So apparently had the mirror and with it all the
countless figures. I realised that I was now left to myself and to the theatre,
and I went with curiosity from door to door and read on each its alluring
invitation.
The inscription

JOLLY HUNTING
GREAT HUNT IN AUTOMOBILES

attracted me. I opened the narrow door and stepped in.
I was swept at once into a world of noise and excitement. Motor-cars, some
of them armoured, were run through the streets chasing the pedestrians.
They ran them down and either left them mangled on the ground or crushed
them to death against the walls of the houses. I saw at once that it was the
long-prepared, long-awaited and long-feared war between men and
machines, now at last broken out. On all sides lay dead and decomposing
bodies, and on all sides, too, smashed and distorted and half-burnt motor-
cars. Aeroplanes circled above the frightful confusion and were being fired

upon from many roofs and windows with rifles and machine guns. On every
wall were wild and magnificently stirring placards, whose giant letters
flamed like torches, summoning the nation to side with the men against the
machines, to make an end at last of the fat and well-dressed and perfumed
plutocrats who used machines to squeeze the fat from other men’s bodies,
of them and their huge fiendishly purring automobiles. Set factories afire at
last! Make a little room on the crippled earth! Depopulate it so that the
grass may grow again, and woods, meadows, heather, stream and moor
return to this world of dust and concrete. Other placards, on the other hand,
in wonderful colours and magnificently phrased, warned all those who had
a stake in the country and some share of prudence (in more moderate and
less childish terms which testified to the remarkable cleverness and intellect
of those who had composed them) against the rising tide of anarchy. They
depicted in a truly impressive way the blessings of order and work and
property and education and justice, and praised machinery as the last and
most sublime invention of the human mind. With its aid, men would be
equal to the gods. I studied these placards, both the red and the green, and
reflected on them and marvelled at them. The flaming eloquence affected
me as powerfully as the compelling logic. They were right, and I stood as
deeply convinced in front of one as in front of the other, a good deal
disturbed all the time by the rather juicy firing that went on all round me.
Well, the principal thing was clear. There was a war on, a violent, genuine
and highly sympathetic war where there was no concern for Kaiser or
republic, for frontiers, flags or colours and other equally decorative and
theatrical matters, all nonsense at bottom; but a war in which every one who
lacked air to breathe and no longer found life exactly pleasing gave
emphatic expression to his displeasure and strove to prepare the way for a
general destruction of this iron-cast civilisation of ours. In every eye I saw
the unconcealed spark of destruction and murder, and in mine too these wild
red roses bloomed as rank and high, and sparkled as brightly. I joined the
battle joyfully.
The best of all, however, was that my school-friend, Gustav, turned up close
beside me. I had lost sight of him for dozens of years, the wildest, strongest,
most eager and venturesome of the friends of my childhood. I laughed in
my heart as I saw him beckon me with his bright blue eyes. He beckoned
and at once I followed him joyfully.

“Good Lord, Gustav,” I cried happily, “fancy seeing you again. Whatever
has become of you?”
“Keep quiet with your questions and chatter! I’m a professor of theology if
you want to know. But, the Lord be praised, there’s no occasion for
theology now, my boy. It’s war. Come on!”
He shot the driver of a small car that came snorting towards us and leaping
into it as nimbly as a monkey, brought it to a standstill for me to get in.
Then we drove like the devil between bullets and crashed cars out of town
and suburbs.
“Are you on the side of the manufacturers?” I asked my friend.
“Oh, Lord, that’s a matter of taste, so we can leave it out of account—
though now you mention it, I rather think we might take the other side,
since at bottom it’s all the same, of course. I’m a theologian and my
predecessor, Luther, took the side of the princes and plutocrats against the
peasants. So now we’ll establish the balance a little. This rotten car, I hope
she’ll hold out another mile or two.”
Swift as the wind, that child of heaven, we rattled on, and reached a green
and peaceful countryside many miles distant. We traversed a wide plain and
then slowly climbed into the mountains. Here we made a halt on a smooth
and glistening road that led in bold curves between the steep wall of rock
and the low retaining wall. Far below shone the blue surface of a lake.
“Lovely view,” said I.
“Very pretty. We’ll call it the Axle Way. A good many axles of one sort or
another are going to crash here, Harry, my boy. So watch out!”
A tall pine grew by the roadside, and among the tall branches we saw
something like a little hut made of boards to serve as an outlook and point
of vantage. Gustav smiled with a knowing twinkle in his blue eyes. We
hurried out of the car, climbed up the trunk and, breathing hard, concealed
ourselves in the outlook post, which pleased us much. We found rifles and
revolvers there and boxes of ammunition. We had scarcely cooled down
when we heard the hoarse imperious hoot of a large touring-car from the
next bend of the road. It came purring at top speed up the smooth road. Our
rifles were ready in our hands. The excitement was intense.

“Aim at the chauffeur,” commanded Gustav quickly just as the heavy car
went by beneath us. I aimed, and fired at the chauffeur in his blue cap. The
man fell in a heap. The car careened on, charged the cliff face, rebounded,
attacked the lower wall furiously with all its unwieldy weight like a great
bumble bee and, tumbling over, crashed with a brief and distant report into
the depths below.
“Got him!” Gustav laughed. “My turn next.”
Another came as he spoke. There were three or four occupants packed in
the back seat. From the head of a woman a bright blue veil streamed out
behind. It filled me with genuine remorse. Who could say how pretty a face
it might adorn? Good God, though we did play the brigand we might at
least emulate the illustrious and spare pretty women. Gustav, however, had
already fired. The driver shuddered and collapsed. The car leapt against the
perpendicular cliff, fell back and overturned, wheels uppermost. Its engine
was still running and the wheels turned absurdly in the air; but suddenly
with a frightful explosion it burst into flames.
“A Ford,” said Gustav. “We must get down and clear the road.”
We climbed down and watched the burning heap. It soon burnt out.
Meanwhile we made levers of green wood and hoisted it to the side of the
road and over the wall into the abyss, where for a long time it went crashing
through the undergrowth. Two of the dead bodies had fallen out as we
turned the car over and lay on the road with their clothing partly burnt. One
wore a pretty good coat. I searched the pockets to see who he was. A leather
case came to hand with some cards in it. I took one and read: Tat Twam Asi.
“Very witty,” said Gustav. “Though, as a matter of fact, it is all one what
our victims are called. They’re poor devils just as we are. Their names don’t
matter. This world is done for and so are we. The least painful solution
would be to hold it under water for ten minutes. Now to work—”
We threw the bodies after the car. Already another one was tooting. We shot
it down with a volley where we stood. It made a drunken swerve and reeled
on for a stretch, then turned over and lay gasping. One passenger was still
sitting inside, but a pretty young girl got out uninjured, though she was
white and trembling violently. We greeted her politely and offered our

assistance. She was too much shaken to speak and stared at us for a while
quite dazed.
“Well, first let us look after the old boy,” said Gustav and turned to the
occupant of the car who still clung to his seat behind the chauffeur. He was
a gentleman with short grey hair. His intelligent, clear grey eyes were open,
but he seemed to be seriously hurt; at least, blood flowed from his mouth
and he held his neck askew and rigid.
“Allow me to introduce myself. My name is Gustav. We have taken the
liberty of shooting your chauffeur. May we inquire whom we have the
honour to address?”
The old man looked at us coolly and sadly out of his small grey eyes.
“I am the Attorney-General Loering,” he said slowly. “You have not only
killed my poor chauffeur, but me too, I fancy. Why did you shoot on us?”
“For exceeding the speed limit.”
“We were not travelling at more than normal speed.”
“What was normal yesterday is no longer normal to-day, Mr. Attorney-
General. We are of the opinion that whatever speed a motor-car travels is
too great. We are destroying all motor-cars and all other machines also.”
“Your rifles too?”
“Their turn will come, granted we have the time. Presumably by to-morrow
or the day after we shall all be done for. You know, of course, that this part
of the world was shockingly overpopulated. Well, now we are going to let
in a little air.”
“Are you shooting every one, without distinction?”
“Certainly. In many cases it may no doubt be a pity. I’m sorry, for example,
about this charming young lady. Your daughter, I presume.”
“No. She is my stenographer.”
“So much the better. And now will you please get out, or let us carry you
out, as the car is to be destroyed.”
“I prefer to be destroyed with it.”

“As you wish. But allow me to ask you one more question. You are a public
prosecutor. I never could understand how a man could be a public
prosecutor. You make your living by bringing other men, poor devils
mostly, to trial and passing sentence on them. Isn’t that so?”
“It is. I do my duty. It was my office. Exactly as it is the office of the
hangman to hang those whom I condemn to death. You too have assumed a
like office. You kill people also.”
“Quite true. Only we do not kill from duty, but pleasure, or much more,
rather, from displeasure and despair of the world. For this reason we find a
certain amusement in killing people. Has it never amused you?”
“You bore me. Be so kind as to do your work. Since the conception of duty
is unknown to you—”
He was silent and made a movement of his lips as though to spit. Only a
little blood came, however, and clung to his chin.
“One moment!” said Gustav politely. “The conception of duty is certainly
unknown to me—now. Formerly I had a great deal of official concern with
it. I was a professor of theology. Besides that, I was a soldier and went
through the war. What seemed to me to be duty and what the authorities and
my superior officers from time to time enjoined upon me was not by any
means good. I would rather have done the opposite. But granting that the
conception of duty is no longer known to me, I still know the conception of
guilt—perhaps they are the same thing. In so far as a mother bore me, I am
guilty. I am condemned to live. I am obliged to belong to a State, to serve as
a soldier, to kill and to pay taxes for armaments. And now at this moment
the guilt of life has brought me once more to the necessity of killing people
as it did in the war. And this time I have no repugnance. I am resigned to the
guilt. I have no objection to this stupid congested world going to bits. I am
glad to help and glad to perish with it.”
The public prosecutor made an effort to smile a little with his lips on which
the blood had coagulated. He did not succeed very well, though the good
intention was manifest.
“Good,” said he. “So we are colleagues. Well, as such, please do your duty.”
The pretty girl had meanwhile sat down by the side of the road and fainted.

At this moment there was again the tooting of a car coming down the road
at full speed. We drew the girl a little to one side and, standing close against
the cliff, let the approaching car run into the ruins of the other. The brakes
were applied violently and the car reared up in the air. It came to a standstill
undamaged. We seized our rifles and quickly had the newcomers covered.
“Get out!” commanded Gustav. “Hands up!”
Three men got out of the car and obediently held up their hands.
“Is any one of you a doctor?” Gustav asked.
They shook their heads.
“Then be so good as to remove this gentleman. He is seriously hurt. Take
him in your car to the nearest town. Forward, and get on with it.”
The old gentleman was soon lying in the other car. Gustav gave the word
and off they went.
The stenographer meanwhile had come to herself and had been watching
these proceedings. I was glad we had made so fair a prize.
“Madam,” said Gustav, “you have lost your employer. I hope you were not
bound to the old gentleman by other ties. You are now in my service. So be
our good comrade. So much for that; and now time presses. It will be
uncomfortable here before long. Can you climb, Madam? Yes? Then go
ahead and we’ll help you up between us.”
We all climbed up to our hut in the tree as fast as we could. The lady did not
feel very well up there, but we gave her some brandy, and she was soon so
much recovered that she was able to admire the wonderful view over lake
and mountains and to tell us also that her name was Dora.
Immediately after this, there was another car below us. It steered carefully
past the overturned one without stopping and then gathered speed.
“Poltroon!” laughed Gustav and shot the driver. The car zig-zagged and
dashing into the wall stove it in and hung suspended over the abyss.
“Dora,” I said, “can you use firearms?”
She could not, but we taught her how to load. She was clumsy at first and
hurt her finger and cried and wanted court-plaster. But Gustav told her it

was war and that she must show her courage. Then it went better.
“But what’s going to become of us?” she asked.
“Don’t know,” said Gustav. “My friend Harry is fond of pretty girls. He’ll
look after you.”
“But the police and the soldiers will come and kill us.”
“There aren’t any police and such like any more. We can choose, Dora.
Either we stay quietly up here and shoot down every car that tries to pass,
or else we can take a car and drive off in it and let others shoot at us. It’s all
the same which side we take. I’m for staying here.”
And now there was the loud tooting of another car beneath us. It was soon
accounted for and lay there wheels uppermost.
Gustav smiled. “Yes, there are indeed too many men in the world. In earlier
days it wasn’t so noticeable. But now that every one wants air to breathe,
and a car to drive as well, one does notice it. Of course, what we are doing
isn’t rational. It’s childishness, just as war is childishness on a gigantic
scale. In time, mankind will learn to keep its numbers in check by rational
means. Meanwhile, we are meeting an intolerable situation in a rather
irrational way. However, the principle’s correct—we eliminate.”
“Yes,” said I, “what we are doing is probably mad, and probably it is good
and necessary all the same. It is not a good thing when man overstrains his
reason and tries to reduce to rational order matters that are not susceptible
of rational treatment. Then there arise ideals such as those of the Americans
or of the Bolsheviks. Both are extraordinarily rational, and both lead to a
frightful oppression and impoverishment of life, because they simplify it so
crudely. The likeness of man, once a high ideal, is in process of becoming a
machine-made article. It is for madmen like us, perhaps, to ennoble it
again.”
With a laugh Gustav replied: “You talk like a book, my boy. It is a pleasure
and a privilege to drink at such a fount of wisdom. And perhaps there is
even something in what you say. But now kindly re-load your piece. You
are rather too dreamy for my taste. Any moment may bring a few buck, and
we cannot kill them with philosophy. We must have ball in our barrels.”

A car came and was dropped at once. The road was blocked. A survivor, a
stout red-faced man, gesticulated wildly over the ruins. Then he stared up
and down and, discovering our hiding place, came for us bellowing and
shooting up at us with a revolver.
“Get off with you or I’ll shoot,” Gustav shouted down. The man took aim at
him and fired again. Then we shot him.
After this two more came and were bagged. Then the road was silent and
deserted. Apparently the news had got about that it was dangerous. We had
time to enjoy the beauty of the view. On the far side of the lake a small
town lay in the valley. Smoke rose from it and soon we saw fire leaping
from roof to roof. Shooting could be heard. Dora cried a little and I stroked
her wet cheeks.
“Have we all got to die then?” she asked. There was no reply. Meanwhile a
man on foot went past below. He saw the smashed-up motor-cars and began
nosing round them. Leaning over into one of them he pulled out a gay
parasol, a ladies’ hand-bag and a bottle of wine. Then he sat down
contentedly on the wall, took a drink from the bottle and ate something
wrapped in tinfoil out of the hand-bag. After emptying the bottle he went
on, well pleased, with the parasol clasped under his arm; and I said to
Gustav: “Could you find it in you to shoot at this good fellow and make a
hole in his head? God knows, I couldn’t.”
“You’re not asked to,” my friend growled. But he did not feel very
comfortable either. We had no sooner caught sight of a man whose
behaviour was harmless and peaceable and childlike and who was still in a
state of innocence than all our praiseworthy and most necessary activities
became stupid and repulsive. Pah—all that blood! We were ashamed of
ourselves. But in the war there must have been Generals even who felt the
same.
“Don’t let us stay here any longer,” Dora implored. “Let’s go down. We are
sure to find something to eat in the cars. Aren’t you hungry, you
Bolsheviks?”
Down in the burning town the bells began to peal with a wild terror. We set
ourselves to climb down. As I helped Dora to climb over the breast work, I

kissed her knee. She laughed aloud, and then the planks gave way and we
both fell into vacancy—

Once more I stood in the round corridor, still excited by the hunting
adventure. And everywhere on all the countless doors were the alluring
inscriptions:

MUTABOR
TRANSFORMATION INTO ANY ANIMAL OR PLANT
YOU PLEASE

KAMASUTRAM
INSTRUCTION IN THE INDIAN ARTS OF LOVE
COURSE FOR BEGINNERS; FORTY-TWO DIFFERENT
METHODS AND PRACTICES

DELIGHTFUL SUICIDE
YOU LAUGH YOURSELF TO BITS

DO YOU WANT TO BE ALL SPIRIT?
THE WISDOM OF THE EAST.

DOWNFALL OF THE WEST
MODERATE PRICES. NEVER SURPASSED

COMPENDIUM OF ART
TRANSFORMATION FROM TIME INTO SPACE

BY MEANS OF MUSIC

LAUGHING TEARS
CABINET OF HUMOUR

SOLITUDE MADE EASY
COMPLETE SUBSTITUTE FOR ALL FORMS OF
SOCIABILITY.

The series of inscriptions was endless. One was

GUIDANCE IN THE BUILDING UP OF THE
PERSONALITY. SUCCESS GUARANTEED

This seemed to me to be worth looking into and I went in at this door.
I found myself in a quiet twilit room where a man with something like a
large chess-board in front of him sat in Eastern fashion on the floor. At the
first glance I thought it was friend Pablo. He wore at any rate a similar
gorgeous silk jacket and had the same dark and shining eyes.
“Are you Pablo?” I asked.
“I am not anybody,” he replied amiably. “We have no names here and we
are not anybody. I am a chess-player. Do you wish for instruction in the
building up of the personality?”
“Yes, please.”
“Then be so kind as to place a few dozen of your pieces at my disposal.”
“My pieces—?”
“Of the pieces into which you saw your so-called personality broken up. I
can’t play without pieces.”
He held a glass up to me and again I saw the unity of my personality broken
up into many selves whose number seemed even to have increased. The
pieces were now, however, very small, about the size of chessmen. The

player took a dozen or so of them in his sure and quiet fingers and placed
them on the ground near the board. As he did so he began to speak in the
monotonous way of one who goes through a recitation or reading that he
has often gone through before.
“The mistaken and unhappy notion that a man is an enduring unity is
known to you. It is also known to you that man consists of a multitude of
souls, of numerous selves. The separation of the unity of the personality
into these numerous pieces passes for madness. Science has invented the
name Schizomania for it. Science is in this so far right as no multiplicity
may be dealt with unless there be a series, a certain order and grouping. It is
wrong in so far as it holds that one only and binding and lifelong order is
possible for the multiplicity of subordinate selves. This error of science has
many unpleasant consequences, and the single advantage of simplifying the
work of the state-appointed pastors and masters and saving them the labours
of original thought. In consequence of this error many persons pass for
normal, and indeed for highly valuable members of society, who are
incurably mad; and many, on the other hand, are looked upon as mad who
are geniuses. Hence it is that we supplement the imperfect psychology of
science by the conception that we call the art of building up the soul. We
demonstrate to any one whose soul has fallen to pieces that he can rearrange
these pieces of a previous self in what order he pleases, and so attain to an
endless multiplicity of moves in the game of life. As the playwright shapes
a drama from a handful of characters, so do we from the pieces of the
disintegrated self build up ever new groups, with ever new interplay and
suspense, and new situations that are eternally inexhaustible. Look!”
With the sure and silent touch of his clever fingers he took hold of my
pieces, all the old men and young men and children and women, cheerful
and sad, strong and weak, nimble and clumsy, and swiftly arranged them on
his board for a game. At once they formed themselves into groups and
families, games and battles, friendships and enmities, making a small
world. For a while he let this lively and yet orderly world go through its
evolutions before my enraptured eyes in play and strife, making treaties and
fighting battles, wooing, marrying and multiplying. It was indeed a crowded
stage, a moving breathless drama.
Then he passed his hand swiftly over the board and gently swept all the
pieces into a heap; and, meditatively with an artist’s skill, made up a new

game of the same pieces with quite other groupings, relationships and
entanglements. The second game had an affinity with the first, it was the
same world built of the same material, but the key was different, the time
changed, the motif was differently given out and the situations differently
presented.
And in this fashion the clever architect built up one game after another out
of the figures, each of which was a bit of myself, and every game had a
distant resemblance to every other. Each belonged recognisably to the same
world and acknowledged a common origin. Yet each was entirely new.
“This is the art of life,” he said dreamily. “You may yourself as an artist
develop the game of your life and lend it animation. You may complicate
and enrich it as you please. It lies in your hands. Just as madness, in a
higher sense, is the beginning of all wisdom, so is schizomania the
beginning of all art and all fantasy. Even learned men have come to a partial
recognition of this, as may be gathered, for example, from Prince
Wunderhorn, that enchanting book, in which the industry and pains of a
man of learning, with the assistance of the genius of a number of madmen
and artists shut up as such, are immortalised. Here, take your little pieces
away with you. The game will often give you pleasure. The piece that to-
day grew to the proportions of an intolerable bugbear, you will degrade to-
morrow to a mere lay figure. The luckless Cinderella will in the next game
be the princess. I wish you much pleasure, my dear sir.”
I bowed low in gratitude to the gifted chess-player, put the little pieces in
my pocket and withdrew through the narrow door.
My real intention was to seat myself at once on the floor in the corridor and
play the game for hours, for whole eternities; but I was no sooner in the
bright light of the circular theatre passage than a new and irresistible current
carried me along. A dazzling poster flashed before my eyes:

MARVELLOUS TAMING OF THE STEPPENWOLF

Many different emotions surged up in me at the sight of this announcement.
My heart was painfully contracted by all kinds of fears and repressions
from my former life and the reality I had left behind. With trembling hand I
opened the door and found myself in the booth of a Fair with an iron rail

separating me from a wretched stage. On the stage I saw an animal-tamer—
a cheap-jack gentleman with a pompous air—who in spite of a large
moustache, exuberantly muscular biceps and his absurd circus get-up had a
malicious and decidedly unpleasant resemblance to myself. The strong man
led on a leash like a dog—lamentable sight—a large, beautiful but terribly
emaciated wolf, whose eyes were cowed and furtive; and it was as
disgusting as it was intriguing, as horrible as it was all the same secretly
entertaining, to see this brutal tamer of animals put the noble and yet so
ignominiously obedient beast of prey through a series of tricks and
sensational turns.
At any rate, the man, my diabolically distorted double, had his wolf
marvellously broken. The wolf was obediently attentive to every command
and responded like a dog to every call and every crack of the whip. He went
down on his knees, lay for dead, and, aping the lord of creation, carried a
loaf, an egg, a piece of meat, a basket in his mouth with cheerful obedience;
and he even had to pick up the whip that the tamer had let fall and carry it
after him in his teeth while he wagged his tail with an unbearable
submissiveness. A rabbit was put in front of him and then a white lamb. He
bared his teeth, it is true, and the saliva dropped from his mouth while he
trembled with desire, but he did not touch either of the animals; and at the
word of command he jumped over them with a graceful leap, as they
cowered trembling on the floor. More—he laid himself down between the
rabbit and the lamb and embraced them with his foremost paws to form a
touching family group, at the same time eating a stick of chocolate from the
man’s hand. It was an agony to witness the fantastic extent to which the
wolf had learnt to belie his nature; and I stood there with my hair on end.
There was some compensation, however, both for the horrified spectator
and for the wolf himself, in the second part of the programme. For after this
refined exhibition of animal-taming and when the man with a winning smile
had made his triumphant bow over the group of the wolf and the lamb, the
rôles were reversed. My engaging double suddenly with a low reverence
laid his whip at the wolf’s feet and became as agitated, as shrunken and
wretched, as the wolf had been before. The wolf, however, licked his chops
with a grin, his constraint and dissimulation erased. His eyes kindled. His
whole body was taut and showed the joy he felt at recovering his wild
nature.

And now the wolf commanded and the man obeyed. At the word of
command the man sank on his knees, let his tongue loll out and tore his
clothes off with his filed teeth. He went on two feet or all-fours just as the
wolf ordered him, played the human being, lay for dead, let the wolf ride on
his back and carried the whip after him. With the aptness of a dog he
submitted gladly to every humiliation and perversion of his nature. A lovely
girl came on to the stage and went up to the tamed man. She stroked his
chin and rubbed her cheek against his; but he remained on all-fours,
remained a beast. He shook his head and began to show his teeth at the
charming creature—so menacingly and wolfishly at last, that she ran away.
Chocolate was put before him, but with a contemptuous sniff he thrust it
from him with his snout. Finally the white lamb and the fat piebald rabbit
were brought on again and the docile man gave his last turn and played the
wolf most amusingly. He seized the shrieking creatures in his fingers and
teeth, tore them limb from limb, grinningly chewed the living flesh and
rapturously drank their warm blood while his eyes closed in a dreamy
delight.
I made for the door in horror and dashed out. This Magic Theatre was
clearly no paradise. All hell lay beneath its charming surface. O God, was
there even here no release?
In fear I hurried this way and that. I had the taste of blood and chocolate in
my mouth, the one as hateful as the other. I desired nothing but to be
beyond this wave of disgust. I wrestled with myself for more bearable,
friendlier pictures. “O Friend, not these notes!” sang in my head, and with
horror I remembered those terrible photographs from the Front that one saw
occasionally during the war—those heaps of bodies entangled with each
other, whose faces were changed to grinning ghouls by their gas-masks.
How silly and childish of me, a humanely minded opponent of war though I
was, to have been horrified by those pictures. To-day I knew that no tamer
of beasts, no General, no insane person could hatch a thought or a picture in
his brain that I could not match myself with one every bit as frightful, every
bit as savage and wicked, as crude and stupid.
With an immense relief I remembered the notice I had seen on first entering
the theatre, the one that the nice boy had stormed so furiously—

ALL GIRLS ARE YOURS

and it seemed to me, all in all, that there was really nothing else so desirable
as this. I was greatly cheered at finding that I could escape from that cursed
wolf-world, and went in.
The fragrance of spring-time met me. The very atmosphere of boyhood and
youth, so deeply familiar and yet so legendary, was around me and in my
veins flowed the blood of those days. All that I had done and thought and
been since, fell away from me and I was young again. An hour, a few
minutes before, I had prided myself on knowing what love was and desire
and longing, but it had been the love and the longing of an old man. Now I
was young again and this glowing current of fire that I felt in me, this
mighty impulse, this unloosening passion like that wind in March that
brings the thaw, was young and new and genuine. How the flame that I had
forgotten leaped up again, how darkly stole on my ears the tones of long
ago! My blood was on fire, and blossomed forth as my soul cried aloud and
sang. I was a boy of fifteen or sixteen with my head full of Latin and Greek
and poetry. I was all ardour and ambition and my fancy was laden with the
artist’s dreams. But far deeper and stronger and more awful than all there
burned and leapt in me the flame of love, the hunger of sex, the fever and
the foreboding of desire.
I was standing on a spur of the hills above the little town where I lived. The
wind wafted the smell of spring and violets through my long hair. Below in
the town I saw the gleam of the river and the windows of my home, and all
that I saw and heard and smelt overwhelmed me, as fresh and reeling from
creation, as radiant in depth of colour, swayed by the wind of spring in as
magical a transfiguration, as when once I looked on the world with the eyes
of youth—first youth and poetry. With wandering hand I pulled a half-
opened leaf-bud from a bush that was newly green. I looked at it and smelt
it (with the smell everything of those days came back in a glow) and then I
put it between my lips, lips that no girl had ever kissed, and began playfully
to bite it. At the sour and aromatically bitter taste I knew at once and
exactly what it was that I was living over again. It all came back. I was
living again an hour of the last years of my boyhood, a Sunday afternoon in
early spring, the day that on a lonely walk I met Rosa Kreisler and greeted
her so shyly and fell in love with her so madly.
She came, that day, alone and dreamingly up the hill towards me. She had
not seen me and the sight of her approaching filled me with apprehension

and suspense. I saw her hair, tied in two thick plaits, with loose strands on
either side, her cheeks blown by the wind. I saw for the first time in my life
how beautiful she was, and how beautiful and dreamlike the play of the
wind in her delicate hair, how beautiful and provocative the fall of her thin
blue dress over her young limbs; and just as the bitter spice of the chewed
bud coursed through me with the whole dread pleasure and pain of spring,
so the sight of the girl filled me with the whole deadly foreboding of love,
the foreboding of woman. In that moment was contained the shock and the
forewarning of enormous possibilities and promises, nameless delight,
unthinkable bewilderments, anguish, suffering, release to the innermost and
deepest guilt. Oh, how sharp was the bitter taste of spring on my tongue!
And how the wind streamed playfully through the loose hair beside her rosy
cheeks! She was close now. She looked up and recognised me. For a
moment she blushed a little and looked aside; but when I took off my
school-cap, she was self-possessed at once and, raising her head, returned
my greeting with a smile that was quite grown-up. Then, entirely mistress
of the situation, she went slowly on, in a halo of the thousand wishes, hopes
and adorations that I sent after her.
So it had once been on a Sunday thirty-five years before and all that had
been then came back to me in this moment. Hill and town, March wind and
buddy taste, Rosa and her brown hair, the welling-up of desire and the
sweet suffocation of anguish. All was as it was then, and it seemed to me
that I had never in my life loved as I loved Rosa that day. But this time it
was given me to greet her otherwise than on that occasion. I saw her blush
when she recognised me, and the pains she took to conceal it, and I knew at
once that she had a liking for me and that this encounter meant the same for
her as for me. And this time instead of standing ceremoniously cap in hand
till she had gone by, I did, in spite of anguish bordering on obsession, what
my blood bade me do. I cried: “Rosa! Thank God, you’ve come, you
beautiful, beautiful girl. I love you so dearly.” It was not perhaps the most
brilliant of all the things that might have been said at this moment, but there
was no need for brilliance, and it was enough and more. Rosa did not put on
her grown-up air, and she did not go on. She stopped and looked at me and,
growing even redder than before, she said: “Heaven be praised, Harry—do
you really like me?” Her brown eyes lit up her strong face, and they showed
me that my past life and loves had all been false and perplexed and full of
stupid unhappiness from that very moment on a Sunday afternoon when I

had let Rosa pass me by. Now, however, the blunder was put right.
Everything went differently and everything was good.
We clasped hands, and hand in hand walked slowly on as happy as we were
embarrassed. We did not know what to do or to say, so we began to walk
faster from embarrassment and then broke into a run, and ran till we lost our
breath and had to stand still. But we did not let go our hands. We were both
still children and did not know quite what to do with each other. That
Sunday we did not even kiss, but we were immeasurably happy. We stood
to get our breath. We sat on the grass and I stroked her hand while she
passed the other one shyly over my hair. And then we got up again and tried
to measure which of us was the taller. In reality, I was the taller by a
finger’s breath, but I would not have it so. I maintained that we were of
exactly the same height and that God had designed us for each other and
that later on we would marry. Then Rosa said that she smelt violets and we
knelt in the short spring grass and looked for them and found a few with
short stalks and I gave her mine and she gave me hers, and as it was getting
chill and the sun slanted low over the cliffs, Rosa said she must go home. At
this we both became very sad, for I dared not accompany her. But now we
shared a secret and it was our dearest possession. I stayed behind on the
cliffs and lying down with my face over the edge of the sheer descent, I
looked down over the town and watched for her sweet little figure to appear
far below and saw it pass the spring and over the bridge. And now I knew
that she had reached her home and was going from room to room, and I lay
up there far away from her; but there was a bond between her and me. The
same current ran in both of us and a secret passed to and fro.
We saw each other again here and there all through this spring, sometimes
on the cliffs, sometimes over the garden hedge; and when the elder began to
bloom we gave each other the first shy kiss. It was little that children like us
had to give each other and our kiss lacked warmth and fullness. I scarcely
ventured to touch the strands of her hair about her ears. But all the love and
all the joy that was in us were ours. It was a shy emotion and the troth we
plighted was still unripe, but this timid waiting on each other taught us a
new happiness. We climbed one little step up on the ladder of love. And
thus, beginning from Rosa and the violets, I lived again through all the
loves of my life—but under happier stars. Rosa I lost, and Irmgard
appeared; and the sun was warmer and the stars less steady, but Irmgard no

more than Rosa was mine. Step by step I had to climb. There was much to
live through and much to learn; and I had to lose Irmgard and Anna too.
Every girl that I had once loved in youth, I loved again, but now I was able
to inspire each with love. There was something I could give to each,
something each could give to me. Wishes, dreams and possibilities that had
once had no other life than my own imagination were lived now in reality.
They passed before me like beautiful flowers, Ida and Laura and all whom I
had loved for a summer, a month, or a day.
I was now, as I perceived, that good looking and ardent boy whom I had
seen making so eagerly for love’s door. I was living a bit of myself only—a
bit that in my actual life and being had not been expressed to a tenth or a
thousandth part, and I was living it to the full. I was watching it grow
unmolested by any other part of me. It was not perturbed by the thinker, nor
tortured by the Steppenwolf, nor dwarfed by the poet, the visionary or the
moralist. No—I was nothing now but the lover and I breathed no other
happiness and no other suffering than love. Irmgard had already taught me
to dance and Ida to kiss, and it was Emma first, the most beautiful of them
all, who on an autumn evening beneath a swaying elm gave me her brown
breasts to kiss and the cup of passion to drink.
I lived through much in Pablo’s little theatre and not a thousandth part can
be told in words. All the girls I had ever loved were mine. Each gave me
what she alone had to give and to each I gave what she alone knew how to
take. Much love, much happiness, much indulgence, and much
bewilderment, too, and suffering fell to my share. All the love that I had
missed in my life bloomed magically in my garden during this hour of
dreams. There were chaste and tender blooms, garish ones that blazed, dark
ones swiftly fading. There were flaring lust, inward reverie, glowing
melancholy, anguished dying, radiant birth. I found women who were only
to be taken by storm and those whom it was a joy to woo and win by
degrees. Every twilit corner of my life where, if but for a moment the voice
of sex had called me, a woman’s glance kindled me or the gleam of a girl’s
white skin allured me, emerged again and all that had been missed was
made good. All were mine, each in her own way. The woman with the
remarkable dark brown eyes beneath flaxen hair was there. I had stood
beside her for a quarter of an hour in the corridor of an express and
afterwards she often appeared in my dreams. She did not speak a word, but

what she taught me of the art of love was unimaginable, frightful, deathly.
And the sleek, still Chinese, from the harbour of Marseilles, with her glassy
smile, her smooth dead-black hair and swimming eyes—she too knew
undreamed-of things. Each had her secret and the bouquet of her soil. Each
kissed and laughed in a fashion of her own, and in her own peculiar way
was shameful and in her own peculiar way shameless. They came and went.
The stream carried them towards me and washed me up to them and away. I
was a child in the stream of sex at play in the midst of all its charm, its
danger and surprise. And it astonished me to find how rich my life—the
seemingly so poor and loveless life of the Steppenwolf—had been in the
opportunities and allurements of love. I had missed them. I had fled before
them. I had stumbled on over them. I had made haste to forget them. But
here they all were stored up in their hundreds, and not one missing. And
now that I saw them I gave myself up to them without defence and sank
down into the rosy twilight of their underworld. Even that seduction to
which Pablo had once invited me came again, and other earlier ones, none
of which at the time I had even fully grasped, fantastic games for three or
four, caught me into their gambols with a laugh. Many things happened and
many games were played not to be said in words.
When I rose once more to the surface of the unending stream of allurement
and vice and entanglement, I was calm and silent. I was equipped, far gone
in knowledge, wise, expert—ripe for Hermine. She rose as the last figure in
my populous mythology, the last name of an endless series; and at once I
came to myself and made an end of this fairy-tale of love; for I did not wish
to meet her in this twilight of a magic mirror. I belonged to her not just as
this one piece in my game of chess—I belonged to her wholly. Oh, I would
now so lay out the pieces in my game that all was centred in her and led to
fulfilment.
The stream had washed me ashore. Once again I stood in the silent theatre
passage. What now? I felt for the little figures in my pocket—but already
this impulse died away. Around me was the inexhaustible world of doors,
notices and magic mirrors. Listlessly I read the first words that caught my
eye, and shuddered.

HOW ONE KILLS FOR LOVE

was what it said.
Swiftly a picture was flashed upon my memory with a jerk and remained
there one instant. Hermine at the table of a restaurant, turning all at once
from the wine and food, lost in an abyss of speech, with a terrifying
earnestness in her face as she said that she would have one aim only in
making me her lover, and it was that she should die by my hand. A heavy
wave of anguish and darkness flooded my heart. Suddenly everything
confronted me once more. Suddenly once more the sense of the last call of
fate gripped my heart. Desperately I felt in my pocket for the little figures
so that I might practise a little magic and rearrange the lay-out of the board.
The figures were no longer there. Instead of them I pulled out a knife. In
mortal dread I ran along the corridor, past every door. I stood opposite the
gigantic mirror. I looked into it. In the mirror there stood a beautiful wolf as
tall as myself. He stood still, glancing shyly from unquiet eyes. As he leered
at me, his eyes blazed and he grinned a little so that his chops parted and
showed his red tongue.
Where was Pablo? Where was Hermine? Where was that clever fellow who
had discoursed so pleasantly about the building up of the personality?
Again I looked into the mirror. I had been mad. I must have been mad.
There was no wolf in the mirror, lolling his tongue in his maw. It was I,
Harry. My face was grey, forsaken of all fancies, fordone with all vice,
horribly pale. Still it was a human being, some one one could speak to.
“Harry,” I said, “what are you doing there?”
“Nothing,” said he in the mirror, “I am only waiting. I am waiting for
death.”
“Where is death then?”
“Coming,” said the other. And I heard from the empty spaces within the
theatre the sound of music, a beautiful and awful music, that music from
Don Giovanni that heralds the approach of the guest of stone. With an awful
and an iron clang it rang through the ghostly house, coming from the other
world, from the immortals.
“Mozart,” I thought, and with the word conjured up the most beloved and
the most exalted picture that my inner life contained.

At that, there rang out behind me a peal of laughter, a clear and ice-cold
laughter out of a world beyond unknown to men, a world born of sufferings,
purged and divine humour. I turned about, frozen through with the blessing
of this laughter, and there came Mozart. He passed by me laughing as he
went and, strolling quietly on, he opened the door of one of the boxes and
went in. Eagerly I followed the god of my youth, the object, all my life
long, of love and veneration. The music rang on. Mozart was leaning over
the front of the box. Of the theatre nothing was to be seen. Darkness filled
the boundless space.
“You see,” said Mozart, “it goes all right without the saxophone—though to
be sure, I shouldn’t wish to tread on the toes of that famous instrument.”
“Where are we?” I asked.
“We are in the last act of Don Giovanni. Leporello is on his knees. A superb
scene, and the music is fine too. There is a lot in it, certainly, that’s very
human, but you can hear the other world in it—the laughter, eh?”
“It is the last great music ever written,” said I with the pomposity of a
schoolmaster. “Certainly, there was Schubert to come. Hugo Wolf also, and
I must not forget the poor, lovely Chopin either. You frown, Maestro? Oh,
yes, Beethoven—he is wonderful too. But all that—beautiful as it may be—
has something rhapsodical about it, something of disintegration. A work of
such plentitude and power as Don Giovanni has never since arisen among
men.”
“Don’t overstrain yourself,” laughed Mozart, in frightful mockery. “You’re
a musician yourself, I perceive. Well, I have given up the trade and retired
to take my ease. It is only for amusement that I look on at the business now
and then.”
He raised his hands as though he were conducting, and a moon, or some
pale constellation, rose somewhere. I looked over the edge of the box into
immeasurable depths of space. Mist and clouds floated there. Mountains
and sea-shores glimmered, and beneath us extended world-wide a desert
plain. On this plain we saw an old gentleman of a worthy aspect, with a
long beard, who drearily led a large following of some ten thousand men in
black. He had a melancholy and hopeless air; and Mozart said:

“Look, there’s Brahms. He is striving for redemption, but it will take him
all his time.”
I realised that the thousands of men in black were the players of all those
notes and parts in his scores which according to divine judgment were
superfluous.
“Too thickly orchestrated, too much material wasted,” Mozart said with a
nod.
And thereupon we saw Richard Wagner marching at the head of a host just
as vast, and felt the pressure of those thousands as they clung and closed
upon him. Him, too, we watched as he dragged himself along with slow and
sad step.
“In my young days,” I remarked sadly, “these two musicians passed as the
most extreme contrasts conceivable.”
Mozart laughed.
“Yes, that is always the way. Such contrasts, seen from a little distance,
always tend to show their increasing similarity. Thick orchestration was in
any case neither Wagner’s nor Brahms’ personal failing. It was a fault of
their time.”
“What? And have they got to pay for it so dearly?” I cried in protest.
“Naturally. The law must take its course. Until they have paid the debt of
their time it cannot be known whether anything personal to themselves is
left over to stand to their credit.”
“But they can’t either of them help it!”
“Of course not. They cannot help it either that Adam ate the apple. But they
have to pay for it all the same.”
“But that is frightful.”
“Certainly. Life is always frightful. We cannot help it and we are
responsible all the same. One’s born and at once one is guilty. You must
have had a remarkable sort of religious education if you did not know that.”
I was now thoroughly miserable. I saw myself as a dead-weary pilgrim,
dragging myself across the desert of the other world, laden with the many

superfluous books I had written, and all the articles and feuilletons;
followed by the army of compositors who had had the type to set up, by the
army of readers who had had it all to swallow. My God—and over and
above it all there was Adam and the apple, and the whole of original sin. All
this, then, was to be paid for in endless purgatory. And only then could the
question arise whether, behind all that, there was anything personal,
anything of my own, left over; or whether all that I had done and all its
consequences were merely the empty foam of the sea and a meaningless
ripple in the flow of what was over and done.
Mozart laughed aloud when he saw my long face. He turned a somersault in
the air for laughter’s sake and played trills with his heels. At the same time
he shouted at me: “Hey, my young man, you are biting your tongue, man,
with a gripe in your lung, man? You think of your readers, those carrion-
feeders, and all your type-setters, those wretched abettors, and sabre-
whetters. You dragon, you make me laugh till I shake me and burst the
stitches of my breeches. O heart of a gull, with printer’s ink dull, and soul
sorrow-full. A candle I’ll leave you, if that’ll relieve you. Betittled,
betattled, spectakled and shackled, and pitifully snagged and by the tail
wagged, with shilly and shally no more shall you dally. For the devil, I pray,
will bear you away and slice you and splice you till that shall suffice you
for your writings and rotten plagiarisings ill-gotten.”
This, however, was too much for me. Anger left me no time for melancholy.
I caught hold of Mozart by the pig-tail and off he flew. The pig-tail grew
longer and longer like the tail of a comet and I was whirled along at the end
of it. The devil—but it was cold in this world we traversed! These
immortals put up with a rarefied and glacial atmosphere. But it was
delightful all the same—this icy air. I could tell that, even in the brief
moment that elapsed before I lost my senses. A bitter-sharp and steel-bright
icy gaiety coursed through me and a desire to laugh as shrilly and wildly
and unearthily as Mozart had done. But then breath and consciousness
failed me.

When I came to myself I was bewildered and done-up. The white light of
the corridor shone in the polished floor. I was not among the immortals, not

yet. I was still, as ever, on this side of the riddle of suffering, of wolf-men
and torturing complexities. I had found no happy spot, no endurable resting
place. There must be an end of it.
In the great mirror, Harry stood opposite me. He did not appear to be very
flourishing. His appearance was much the same as on that night when he
visited the professor and sat through the dance at the Black Eagle. But that
was far behind, years, centuries behind. He had grown older. He had learnt
to dance. He had visited the magic theatre. He had heard Mozart laugh.
Dancing and women and knives had no more terrors for him. Even those
who have average gifts, given a few hundred years, come to maturity. I
looked for a long time at Harry in the looking-glass. I still knew him well
enough, and he still bore a faint resemblance to the boy of fifteen who one
Sunday in March had met Rosa on the cliffs and taken off his school-cap to
her. And yet he had grown a few centuries older since then. He had pursued
philosophy and music and had his fill of war and his Elsasser at the Steel
Helmet and discussed Krishna with men of honest learning. He had loved
Erica and Maria, and had been Hermine’s friend, and shot down motor-cars,
and slept with the sleek Chinese, and encountered Mozart and Goethe, and
made sundry holes in the web of time and rents in reality’s disguise, though
it held him a prisoner still. And suppose he had lost his pretty chessmen
again, still he had a fine blade in his pocket. On then, old Harry, old weary
loon.
Bah, the devil—how bitter the taste of life! I spat at Harry in the looking-
glass. I gave him a kick and kicked him to splinters. I walked slowly along
the echoing corridor, carefully scanning the doors that had held out so many
glowing promises. Not one now showed a single announcement. Slowly I
passed by all the hundred doors of the Magic Theatre. Was not this the day I
had been to a Masked Ball? Hundreds of years had passed since then. Soon
years would cease altogether. Something, though, was still to be done.
Hermine awaited me. A strange marriage it was to be, and a sorrowful wave
it was that bore me on, drearily bore me on, a slave, a wolf-man. Bah, the
devil!
I stopped at the last door. So far had the sorrowful wave borne me. O Rosa!
O departed youth! O Goethe! O Mozart!

I opened it. What I saw was a simple and beautiful picture. On a rug on the
floor lay two naked figures, the beautiful Hermine and the beautiful Pablo
side by side in a sleep of deep exhaustion after love’s play. Beautiful,
beautiful figures, lovely pictures, wonderful bodies. Beneath Hermine’s left
breast was a fresh round mark, darkly bruised—a love bite of Pablo’s
beautiful, gleaming teeth. There, where the mark was, I plunged in my knife
to the hilt. The blood welled out over her white and delicate skin. I would
have kissed away the blood if everything had happened a little differently.
As it was, I did not. I only watched how the blood flowed and watched her
eyes open for a little moment in pain and deep wonder. What makes her
wonder? I thought? Then it occurred to me that I had to shut her eyes. But
they shut again of themselves. So all was done. She only turned a little to
one side, and from her arm-pit to her breast I saw the play of a delicate
shadow. It seemed that it wished to recall something, but what I could not
remember. Then she lay still.
For long I looked at her and at last I waked with a shudder and turned to go.
Then I saw Pablo stretch himself. I saw him open his eyes and stretch his
limbs and then bend over the dead girl and smile. Never, I thought, will this
fellow take anything seriously. Everything makes him smile. Pablo,
meanwhile, carefully turned over a corner of the rug and covered Hermine
up as far as her breast so that the wound was hidden, and then he went
silently out of the box. Where was he going? Was everybody leaving me
alone? I stayed there, alone with the half-shrouded body of her whom I
loved—and envied. The boyish hair hung low over the white forehead. Her
lips shone red against the dead pallor of her blanched face and they were a
little parted. Her hair diffused its delicate perfume and through it glimmered
the little shell-like ear.
Her wish was fulfilled. Before she had ever been mine, I had killed my
love. I had done the unthinkable, and now I kneeled and stared and did not
know at all what this deed meant, whether it was good and right or the
opposite. What would the clever chess-player, what would Pablo have to
say to it? I knew nothing and I could not think. The painted mouth glowed
more red on the growing pallor of the face. So had my whole life been. My
little happiness and love were like this staring mouth, a little red upon a
mask of death.

And from the dead face, from the dead white shoulders and the dead white
arms, there exhaled and slowly crept a shudder, a desert wintriness and
desolation, a slowly, slowly increasing chill in which my hands and lips
grew numb. Had I quenched the sun? Had I stopped the heart of all life?
Was it the coldness of death and space breaking in?
With a shudder I stared at the stony brow and the stark hair and the cool
pale shimmer of the ear. The cold that streamed from them was deathly and
yet it was beautiful, it rang, it vibrated. It was music!
Hadn’t I once felt this shudder before and found it at the same time a joy?
Hadn’t I once caught this music before? Yes, with Mozart and the
immortals.
Verses came into my head that I had once come upon somewhere:

We above you ever more residing
In the ether’s star translumined ice
Know nor day nor night nor time’s dividing,
Wear nor age nor sex as our device.
Cool and unchanging is our eternal being,
Cool and star bright is our eternal laughter.

Then the door of the box opened and in came Mozart. I did not recognise
him at the first glance, for he was without pigtail, knee-breeches and
buckled shoes, in modern dress. He took a seat close beside me, and I was
on the point of holding him back because of the blood that had flowed over
the floor from Hermine’s breast. He sat there and began busying himself
with an apparatus and some instruments that stood beside him. He took it
very seriously, tightening this and screwing that, and I looked with wonder
at his adroit and nimble fingers and wished that I might see them playing a
piano for once. I watched him thoughtfully, or in a reverie rather, lost in
admiration of his beautiful and skilful hands, warmed too, by the sense of
his presence and a little apprehensive as well. Of what he was actually
doing and of what it was that he screwed and manipulated, I took no heed
whatever.
I soon found, however, that he had fixed up a wireless set and put it in
going order, and now he inserted the loud-speaker and said: “Munich
calling. Concerto Grosso in F major of Handel.”
At once, to my indescribable astonishment and horror, the devilish metal
funnel spat out, without more ado, its mixture of bronchial slime and
chewed rubber; that noise that possessors of gramophones and wireless sets
are prevailed upon to call music. And behind the slime and the croaking
there was, sure enough, like an old master beneath a layer of dirt, the noble
outline of that divine music. I could distinguish the majestic structure and
the deep wide breath and the full broad bowing of the strings.
“My God,” I cried in horror, “what are you doing, Mozart? Do you really
mean to inflict this mess on me and yourself, this triumph of our day, the
last victorious weapon in the war of extermination against art? Must this be,
Mozart?”

How the uncomfortable man laughed! And what a cold and eerie laugh! It
was noiseless and yet everything went to smithereens in it. He marked my
torment with deep satisfaction while he bent over the cursed screws and
attended to the metal trumpet. Laughing still, he let the distorted, the
murdered and murderous music ooze out and on; and laughing still, he
replied:
“Please, no pathos, my friend! Anyway, did you observe the ritardando? An
inspiration, eh? Yes, and now you tolerant man, let the sense of this
ritardando touch you. Do you hear the basses? They stride like gods. And
let this inspiration of old Handel penetrate your restless heart and give it
peace. Just listen, you poor creature, listen without either pathos or
mockery, while far away behind the veil of this hopelessly idiotic and
ridiculous apparatus the form of this divine music passes by. Pay attention
and you will learn something. Observe what this crazy speaking-trumpet,
apparently the most stupid, the most useless and the most damnable thing
that the world contains, contrives to do. It takes hold of some music played
where you please, without distinction or discretion, lamentably distorted, to
boot, and chucks it into space to land where it has no business to be; and yet
after all this it cannot destroy the original spirit of the music; it can only,
however it may meddle and mar, lay its senseless mechanism at its feet.
Listen, then, you poor thing. Listen well. You have need of it. And now you
hear not only a Handel who, disfigured by wireless, is, all the same, in this
most ghastly of disguises still divine; you hear as well and you observe,
most worthy sir, a most admirable symbol of all life. When you listen to
wireless you are a witness of the everlasting war between idea and
appearance, between time and eternity, between the human and the divine.
Exactly, my dear sir, as the wireless for ten minutes together projects the
most lovely music without regard into the most impossible places, into snug
drawing-rooms and attics and into the midst of chattering, guzzling,
yawning and sleeping listeners, and exactly as it strips this music of its
sensuous beauty, spoils and scratches and beslimes it and yet cannot
altogether destroy its spirit, just so does life, the so-called reality, deal with
the sublime picture-play of the world and make a hurley-burley of it. It
makes its unappetising tone-slime of the most magic orchestral music.
Everywhere it obtrudes its mechanism, its activity, its dreary exigencies and
vanity between the ideal and the real, between orchestra and ear. All life is
so, my child, and we must let it be so; and, if we are not asses, laugh at it. It

little becomes people like you to be critics of wireless or of life either.
Better learn to listen first! Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at
the rest. Or is it that you have done better yourself, more nobly and fitly and
with better taste? Oh, no, Mr. Harry, you have not. You have made a
frightful history of disease out of your life, and a misfortune of your gifts.
And you have, as I see, found no better use for so pretty, so enchanting a
young lady than to stick a knife into her body and destroy her. Was that
right, do you think?”
“Right?” I cried in despair. “No! My God, everything is so false, so
hellishly stupid and wrong! I am a beast, Mozart, a stupid, angry beast, sick
and rotten. There you’re right a thousand times. But as for this girl—it was
her own desire. I have only fulfilled her own wish.”
Mozart laughed his noiseless laughter. But he had the great kindness to turn
off the wireless.
My self-extenuation sounded unexpectedly and thoroughly foolish even to
me who had believed in it with all my heart. When Hermine had once, so it
suddenly occurred to me, spoken about time and eternity, I had been ready
forthwith to take her thoughts as a reflection of my own. That the thought,
however, of dying by my hand had been her own inspiration and wish and
not in the least influenced by me I had taken as a matter of course. But why
on that occasion had I not only accepted that horrible and unnatural thought,
but even guessed it in advance. Perhaps because it had been my own. And
why had I murdered Hermine just at the very moment when I saw her lying
naked in another’s arms? All-knowing and all-mocking rang Mozart’s
soundless laughter.
“Harry,” said he, “you’re a great joker. Had this beautiful girl really nothing
to desire of you but the stab of a knife? Keep that for some one else! Well,
at least you have stabbed her properly. The poor child is as dead as a mouse.
And now perhaps would be an opportune moment to realise the
consequences of your gallantry towards this lady. Or do you think of
evading the consequences?”
“No,” I cried. “Don’t you understand at all? I evade the consequences? I
have no other desire than to pay and pay and pay for them, to lay my head
beneath the axe and pay the penalty of annihilation.”

Mozart looked at me with intolerable mockery.
“How pathetic you always are. But you will learn humour yet, Harry.
Humour is always gallows-humour, and it is on the gallows you are now
constrained to learn it. You are ready? Good. Then off with you to the
public prosecutor and let the law take its course with you till your head is
coolly hacked off at break of dawn in the prison-yard. You are ready for it?”
Instantly a notice flashed before my eyes:

HARRY’S EXECUTION

and I consented with a nod. I stood in a bare yard enclosed by four walls
with barred windows, and shivered in the air of a grey dawn. There were a
dozen gentlemen there in morning coats and gowns, and a newly erected
guillotine. My heart was contracted with misery and dread, but I was ready
and acquiescent. At the word of command I stepped forward and at the
word of command I knelt down. The public prosecutor removed his cap and
cleared his throat and all the other gentlemen cleared their throats. He
unfolded an official document and held it before him and read out:
“Gentlemen, there stands before you Harry Haller, accused and found guilty
of the wilful misuse of our magic theatre. Haller has not alone insulted the
majesty of art in that he confounded our beautiful picture gallery with so-
called reality and stabbed to death the reflection of a girl with the reflection
of a knife; he has in addition displayed the intention of using our theatre as
a mechanism of suicide and shown himself devoid of humour. Wherefore
we condemn Haller to eternal life and we suspend for twelve hours his
permit to enter our theatre. The penalty also of being laughed out of court
may not be remitted. Gentlemen, all together, one-two-three!”
On the word “three” all who were present broke into one simultaneous peal
of laughter, a laughter in full chorus, a frightful laughter of the other world
that is scarcely to be borne by the ears of men.
When I came to myself again, Mozart was sitting beside me as before. He
clapped me on the shoulder and said: “You have heard your sentence. So,
you see, you will have to learn to listen to more of the wireless music of
life. It’ll do you good. You are uncommonly poor in gifts, a poor blockhead,
but by degrees you will come to grasp what is required of you. You have got

to learn to laugh. That will be required of you. You must apprehend the
humour of life, its gallows-humour. But of course you are ready for
everything in the world except what will be required of you. You are ready
to stab girls to death. You are ready to be executed with all solemnity. You
would be ready, no doubt, to mortify and scourge yourself for centuries
together. Wouldn’t you?”
“Oh, yes, ready with all my heart,” I cried in my misery.
“Of course! When it’s a question of anything stupid and pathetic and devoid
of humour or wit, you’re the man, you tragedian. Well, I am not. I don’t
care a fig for all your romantics of atonement. You wanted to be executed
and to have your head chopped off, you Berserker! For this imbecile ideal
you would suffer death ten times over. You are willing to die, you coward,
but not to live. The devil, but you shall live! It would serve you right if you
were condemned to the severest of penalties.”
“Oh, and what would that be?”
“We might, for example, restore this girl to life again and marry you to her.”
“No, I should not be ready for that. It would bring unhappiness.”
“As if there were not enough unhappiness in all you have designed already!
However, enough of pathos and death-dealing. It is time to come to your
senses. You are to live and to learn to laugh. You are to listen to life’s
wireless music and to reverence the spirit behind it and to laugh at the bim-
bim in it. So there you are. More will not be asked of you.”
Gently from behind clenched teeth I asked: “And if I do not submit? And if
I deny your right, Mozart, to interfere with the Steppenwolf, and to meddle
in his destiny?”
“Then,” said Mozart calmly, “I should invite you to smoke another of my
charming cigarettes.” And as he spoke and conjured up a cigarette from his
waistcoat pocket and offered it me, he was suddenly Mozart no longer. It
was my friend Pablo looking warmly at me out of his dark exotic eyes and
as like the man who had taught me to play chess with the little figures as a
twin.
“Pablo!” I cried with a convulsive start. “Pablo, where are we?”

“We are in my Magic Theatre,” he said with a smile, “and if you wish at
any time to learn the Tango or to be a General or to have a talk with
Alexander the Great, it is always at your service. But I’m bound to say,
Harry, you have disappointed me a little. You forgot yourself badly. You
broke through the humour of my little theatre and tried to make a mess of it,
stabbing with knives and spattering our pretty picture-world with the mud
of reality. That was not pretty of you. I hope, at least, you did it from
jealousy when you saw Hermine and me lying there. Unfortunately, you did
not know what to do with this figure. I thought you had learnt the game
better. Well, you will do better next time.”
He took Hermine who at once shrank in his fingers to the dimensions of a
toy-figure and put her in the very same waistcoat-pocket from which he had
taken the cigarette.
Its sweet and heavy smoke diffused a pleasant aroma. I was utterly done-up
and ready to sleep for a year.
I understood it all. I understood Pablo. I understood Mozart, and
somewhere behind me I heard his ghastly laughter. I knew that all the
hundred thousand pieces of life’s game were in my pocket. A glimpse of its
meaning had stirred my reason and I was determined to begin the game
afresh. I would sample its tortures once more and shudder again at its
senselessness. I would traverse not once more, but often, the hell of my
inner being.
One day I would be a better hand at the game. One day I would learn how
to laugh. Pablo was waiting for me, and Mozart too.

THE END

Transcriber’s Notes
New original cover art included with this eBook is granted to the public domain.
Perceived typographical errors have been silently corrected.
Variations in hyphenation and compound words have been preserved.

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