Word: steppenwolf
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...native country, but in the past decade in the U.S. he has steadily risen to the status of a literary cult figure. College students rank him in the pantheon of literary gurus with Dostoevsky, Tolkien and Golding. In hippie hovels, those of his novels already available in English-Steppenwolf, Magister Ludi, Siddhartha, Demian, The Journey to the East, and Narcissus and Goldmund-are family bibles. Another early Hesse novel, Beneath the Wheel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $4.95), has now appeared in English. It will undoubtedly attract his youthful admirers too, although it is less likely to arouse their admiration, since...
What seems to attract young people nowadays is Hesse's preoccupation with Eastern mysticism and his soul-racked characters, who suffer from that now common malaise of the under-30 generation, the identity crisis. Not far from the Berkeley campus, a favorite hangout is a beer joint called Steppenwolf, so named by its original owner (Max Scherr) because that novel symbolizes the loneliness of the intellectual. At Harvard, where Hesse's books sell better than any of his contemporaries except Faulkner, Senior Joel Kramer says: "Reading him is a gut, emotional experience." Adds Harvard Graduate Student Mark Granovetter...
...surprise award of the 1946 Nobel literary prize to an old German named Hermann Hesse will seem more of a surprise to those who read this book of his. Steppenwolf (The Wolf of the Steppes), first printed in Germany in 1927 and in the U.S. in 1929, has long been out of print, and is now brought out again to cash in on the Nobel publicity. It is a repellent example of that beery old thing, German Romanticism, being sick in the last ditch before Naziism...
...Steppenwolf tells the story, largely in dream events, of a fractured personality -Germany's, perhaps-tinged with Lutheran, Faustian, Nietzschean and Freudian influences, and in general quite a mess. An earnest, introverted work, full of prescience (World War II is assumed throughout), it stands, as fiction, deep in the shadow of Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain...
...story is accompanied by much searching of the upper ether where those heroic German ancestors, Goethe and Mozart, presumably dwell, and the Steppenwolf's dismal adventures evoke their cold immortal laughter...