Steppenwolf

Between a Life Crisis and a New Beginning – Harry Haller’s Journey into the Unknown

First published in 1927, Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf became an international bestseller and a touchstone for generations of young readers. Yet this is no coming-of-age story, but the story of a man in crisis who can no longer go on living as he has before.

Harry Haller, the »Steppenwolf,« feels like a stranger in a world where the certainties of the past are crumbling. »Caught between eras,« he wanders the city without a sense of belonging, torn between a respectable bourgeois existence and a longing for a radically different life. When, on the brink of suicide, he meets the vivacious Hermine, she leads him on an unexpected journey into the unknown. She teaches him to dance and introduces him to a world of new experiences and encounters. At Hermine’s side, amid the excesses of the city’s nightlife, Haller discovers that the human being is not a single, unified self, but an infinite multiplicity. Only when he learns to embrace the contradictions within himself with humor does he find a new way of approaching life.