49 pages • 1 hour read

Steppenwolf

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1927

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Summary

Background

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Preface

Pages 29-75

Pages 75-136

Pages 136-185

Pages 185-248

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

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Discussion Questions

Pages 136-185Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Pages 136-153 Summary

Hermine and Haller return to Haller’s apartment and practice the fox trot. Haller performs poorly, but Hermine assures him he will do better the next day. Haller does not believe her, but the dancing lesson the next day shows great improvement. Hermine says they must go out dancing, and they go to the Balance Hotel the following evening. Hermine and Haller dance to jazz music, and Hermine introduces Haller to the saxophonist, Pablo. Hermine encourages Haller to ask another woman to dance, and Haller is shocked when the woman he asks agrees. They dance, and Haller feels free and comfortable dancing for two songs with the other woman. Afterward, Haller sits with Hermine and Pablo, though Haller does not like Pablo. Hermine tells Haller that Pablo said Haller looks sad. Haller expresses his shock that Hermine is such an intelligent woman, and Hermine says that, like Haller, she dislikes everyone and recognized that Haller feels the same when they met. Hermine thinks they will teach each other their talents, but neither of them will be happy. Haller tells Hermine about the treatise saying each person has many souls, and Hermine loves the concept. Hermine suggests that Haller try to sleep with the woman with whom he danced, Maria, but Haller says he is too old for casual love affairs.

The gramophone in Haller’s room makes him uncomfortable, and he feels the different sides of himself clashing. He feels his personality shifting, realizing that the treatise was right about his many souls. Without Hermine’s presence, he thinks he would leave entirely. Often, he longs for the years before the war, when he could make a living off his intellect. He notes the contrast of his political opinions and his lifestyle, in which his radical stances do not change his normal life. Hermine is always around, and Haller spends more time with Pablo. Pablo gives Haller some cocaine when Haller becomes irritable. Talking to Pablo in the street one day, Haller finally gets Pablo to speak to him. Pablo says there is no point in talking about music, only in playing it to invigorate himself and others. Haller insists that Mozart is at a higher “level” than modern music, like jazz, and Pablo says that such a hierarchy of music is outside his control.

Pages 153-167 Summary

Haller deals with the internal conflict between his new and old selves, thinking again of the “razor.” One night, Haller goes to a musical performance. After the performance, Haller is distraught and blames Hermine for his internal conflict. Haller finds Maria in his bed and realizes Hermine sent her. They have sex. He and Maria spend time together for days afterward in a separate apartment, and Haller is fascinated by the free flow of Maria and Hermine’s lives. They work occasionally, have affairs, live off men, and thoroughly enjoy music and food. Maria speaks highly of Pablo, as Hermine has done, and Haller asks self-consciously what either woman could see in him, when he is so different from Pablo. Maria says Haller’s kisses make her feel that he is grateful to her, and she loves them. Other men, though, kiss her like they are doing her a favor, and she loves those, too. Images of Erica, his mother, his ex-wife, and other scenes from his life appear before Haller, and he sees his memories as the sum of his life on earth. He feels close to the immortals and envisions himself as a unified whole.

Hermine makes sure that Haller does not give Maria money, but he does buy Maria presents, sometimes with money in them. Haller laments that Maria sleeps with other men, including Pablo, but he is grateful to have her in his life. Through Maria, Haller learns about the others in their social circle, such as jazz players, other women, and specifically Pablo. Haller becomes friends with Pablo, frequently taking Pablo’s recommendations about drug use. One day, Pablo invites Maria and Haller to his room and suggests an orgy, though Haller declines. After smoking opium, Pablo kisses Haller on the eyes. Another day, Pablo asks Haller for some money for another musician, and Pablo offers to have Maria spend the night with Haller. Haller is offended that Pablo would use a woman transactionally, but he gives Pablo the money and helps him with his errands. Hermine tells Haller that she told Maria a lot about him, and Maria tells Hermine things about Haller. However, Hermine is not yet willing to kiss Haller, though she reveals that she has kissed Maria. Haller begins to think of more sexual possibilities and reflects on the thousands of souls from the treatise.

Pages 168-185 Summary

Haller prepares for the Fancy Dress Ball, but he discovers that Hermine and Maria both already have dates. Hermine refuses to disclose her costume, but she visits Haller the night before the ball. Haller says he is not happy with his happiness, which feels temporary. She says she knows how Haller is disappointed in life, saying he is too hungry for his shallow world. People are content with food and entertainment, but Haller wants more. They wonder if peoples’ contentedness is only a facet of modern life, or if people have always largely been complacent in life. Hermine says people like her and Haller yearn for death to return to eternity, like heaven. She thinks the immortals, like Mozart and the saints, are all there enjoying a lasting contentedness. Haller kisses her forehead, holds her cheek against his, and leaves to meet Maria. At the restaurant, Haller thinks of the light, airy feeling of Mozart, noticing it is the same as Goethe’s laughter in his dream. Haller writes a poem on a card called “The Immortals,” which illustrates how the immortals bring light and happiness into otherwise distraught humanity. Haller and Maria have sex, and Maria suggests it may be the last time before Hermine takes him. Haller is happy, and he feels his fear of death begin to change into release and surrender.

Haller sleeps until the following evening, when he gets dressed for the Fancy Dress Ball. Since he is going alone, he plans to arrive late and goes to a tavern he used to frequent. Haller feels he is separate from the men of his time, calling himself neither modern nor old-fashioned. The guests greet him, he eats dinner, and he picks up gifts for the landlady. Remembering the ball, Haller feels torn between excitement and fear, and he decides to go to the theater. The theater is showing The Old Testament, and Haller appreciates the music and filming of the movie. He notes how clergy take students to see the film, which is often shown for free. However, Haller feels an irony at the scene of the Jews worshipping a golden calf while Moses receives the Ten Commandments, noting how the culture and religion of the people is now a gaudy cinema experience. Leaving the theater, Haller decides it is time to go to the ball.

Pages 136-185 Analysis

As Haller settles into learning to dance with Hermine, his discomfort with popular culture presents an obstacle to Overcoming Alienation. The gramophone, a new technology in this era, “contaminated the esthetic and intellectual atmosphere” of his home, and he thinks of Hermine’s recordings of dance music as “strangers,” “disturbers,” and “destroyers” of his “carefully tended garden of music” (146). Haller longs for the days before the war, but he is only expressing a nostalgia aggregated in his “garden” of literature, art, and music from earlier times. His feeling of disgust at modernity reflects the sense—widespread after the devastation of the WWI—that the values that had given meaning to life before the war no longer applied, and that modern culture was thus like a garden trying to grow in barren ground. Pablo sees Haller’s alienation as superficial, and he refuses to talk with Haller about music, saying: “Music does not depend on being right, on having good taste and education and all that” (151). With his gentle mockery, Pablo encourages Haller to set aside the search for meaning and engage with music as a pure pleasure. In this way, he is an ally of Hermine, who teaches Haller to dance as a way of teaching him to live in the moment.

Hermine and Haller debate whether people have always been content with superficial comforts. Hermine, like Pablo, contradicts Haller’s assertion that society is declining or degrading in the modern era, saying: “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” (174). Hermine’s perspective is that society has always led most people to live empty lives of struggling for money and power, focusing their efforts on status, while a select few are not interested in those things. She does not say, however, that these “real men” are privy to any deeper source of meaning, as Haller would like to believe. Instead, the real people are those who accept the transience of life and the inevitability of death. As such, Hermine, Pablo, and Haller do stand outside society, and, in a sense, they do see themselves as superior to common people, but people of both kinds have existed in all times and places. Crucially, Hermine’s conception of wanting more from life, rather than less, subverts Haller’s dedication to removing himself from society. Instead, Haller can engage with dances, women, and friends while still pursuing his loftier goals of “immortality.”

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The immortals’ search for greater meaning is synonymous with The Search for Spiritual and Psychological Fulfillment that Haller undertakes, and Haller regularly thinks about the thousands of souls that, according to the treatise, exist within himself. With Maria the night before the ball, Haller sees a similarity between how he “started aside in fear from the easy thoughtless pleasure of merely sensual love” and his current “dread of death, a dread, however, that was already conscious of its approaching change into surrender and release” (179). Haller is beginning to accept the pleasures Hermine has introduced into his life, and he points to a critical similarity between the stages of his change. At first, Hermine had to convince Haller to pursue any pleasure, rather than wallowing in his self-loathing and suffering. Now, as Haller approaches a confrontation with himself, he feels the same hesitance at the coming change into not only enjoying life but trying to enjoy his “self” or “soul” as a multiplicity.