Hermann Hesse’s Steppenwolf presents a paradoxical picture of the bourgeoisie. The main character, Harry Haller, acknowledges his bourgeois upbringing and frequently has a bourgeois view about various aspects of society; however, at the same time, he condemns the bourgeois lifestyle and all that it represents because of his perceived alienation from it.

The bourgeoisie itself is represented in many different lights in Steppenwolf. The first representation is through the character of Haller’s landlady’s nephew. The nephew is the most typical bourgeois in the novel, and thus the least explored representation because he easily fits into the reader’s own perceptions with no need for further elaboration. He is the petit bourgeois who goes to his business every day, takes the same short lunch break, returns to work, goes home, and repeats the same unadventurous pattern day after day without ever questioning his role in society or the reason for his existence.

The "Treatise on the Steppenwolf" presents another portrait of Hesse’s perception of the bourgeoisie and of Haller’s relationship to it. Haller is "secretly and persistently attracted to the little bourgeois world" (50) in the same way he is to jazz music which "much as [he] detested it, had always had a secret charm for [him]."(37) Because "he took up his abode always among the middle classes", he had grown accustomed to viewing society "in a thoroughly bourgeois manner." (51) The treatise describes being "bourgeois" as seeking balance between two extremes "at the cost of that intensity of life and feeling which an extreme life affords." (51) In this sense, Haller himself is bourgeois because he constantly seeks a balance between what he describes as the man and the wolf within him, and before meeting Hermine there is no intensity in his life. The treatise then explains that "the bourgeois treasures nothing more highly than the self" (52) as does Haller who is forced once inside the Magic Theater "to leave [his] highly esteemed personality [behind] in the cloakroom." (176)

The treatise goes on to examine the bourgeois dependency on Steppenwolves. Since Haller is a Steppenwolf, it implicitly indicates that he is in fact outside of the bourgeoisie and not a member of it after all. He is, however, "captive to the bourgeoisie and cannot escape it" because he is "fastened to it by sentiments of [his] childhood and infected for the most part with its less intense life." (53) The reader sees this in Haller's fascination with "the washed leaves of the plant - the very essence of bourgeois cleanliness, of neatness and meticulousness, of duty and devotion shown in little things." (14) It is for this reason that he "would not for the world laugh at the bourgeois life" (15), or at least not until he meets Mozart who will tell him to do precisely that.

This bond to the bourgeoisie can only be broken by joining the Immortals as Mozart has done in the "imaginary realm" of humor where Haller can "include the bourgeois, too" (54) as only one of the many facets of his soul. The treatise warns, however, that he can't share his hope of rescue from the bourgeois world with anyone else because the love between him and this person would "keep him forever tied to the bourgeois world". (55) Thus, concludes the treatise, it is only through suffering that "his relation to the bourgeois world would lose its sentimentality both in its love and in its hatred, and his bondage to it would cease to cause him the continual torture of shame." (55) Haller fails to do this when he enters the Magic Theater. His love for Hermine, and jealousy of Pablo, keeps him tied to the bourgeois world because he can't accept with humor even the illusion of the two of them together, and he thus fails in his first attempt to reach the Immortals.

In addition to humor, the treatise indicates that in order to escape the bourgeoisie and attain the realm of the Immortals, the Steppenwolf must accept to "look deeply into the chaos of his own soul" (55) by means of "that mirror in which he has such bitter need to look and from which he shrinks in such deathly fear." (56) He is one of the few who has the potential to do so because only "those outside of the bourgeoisie live in the atmosphere of these magic possibilities." (56) This mirror in which he must look will be the Magic Theater which reflects all the thousands of facets of his soul so that he may discover them.

From the treatise, Haller must conclude that in order to reach the Immortals and thus escape the bourgeoisie he must combine these two tools, humor and the mirror, at his disposal. He must take one of the magical mirrors and look deep into his soul, and then he must be able to accept the humor in what he sees and laugh at himself.

Haller's experiences leading up to and in the Magic Theater give once more another view on the bourgeoisie, in part through his own views on it. When Haller goes to the professor's home for dinner, he remarks that in the same way that he and the professor are obligated to "exchange a few more or less insincere compliments..., 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." (77) He realizes that these "obligations of politeness, of talking shop and of contemplating another's domestic bliss" (76) are petty bourgeois conventions, but he is not yet able to see that he should simply dismiss them with humor rather than contemplate suicide over something of so little importance in comparison to the vastness of existence offered by the Immortals.

Haller then loses all control when confronted with his hostess' treasured picture of Goethe which in his eyes shows a "conceited air of nobility, the great man ogling the distinguished company, and beneath the manly exterior what a world of charming sentimentality." (81) Haller's inability to accept the bourgeois portrayal of Goethe and simply laugh at it forces him to make excuses to the professor and belittle himself by admitting that he is "a schizomaniac" who is "no longer fit for decent society." (82) He is really saying that he can no longer tolerate bourgeois society and for that reason he concludes that there is no place in the world left for him and that death is his only escape.

When Haller, in this state of utter despair, meets Hermine, she nods to him "as though to humor [him]" (85), takes him in hand "with a touch of mockery" (86), and tells him that life is "child's play." (87) She already knows that the only way to deal with the frustrations associated with living in a bourgeois-dominated world is with humor, and she is to become Haller's guide in his quest to finally understand this and reach the Immortals. She begins by scolding him, "if you had sense, you would laugh at the artist and the professor - laugh and be done with it." (91)

At the beginning of his lessons with Hermine, Haller is still repulsed by the bourgeoisie, but cannot see that he too has many bourgeois values. He admits:

This description, together with the Masked Ball scene, strongly evokes F. Scott Fitzgerald's poignant portrait of the bourgeois excesses of the Jazz Age of the Roaring Twenties in America in his novel The Great Gatsby written only two years before Steppenwolf. This is the new bourgeoisie, and exactly as the treatise describes, Haller is outside of it, but he is also tied to it because he was brought up in the old bourgeoisie, the bourgeoisie of those privileged enough to study Goethe and to attend concerts of Mozart's music. Haller fails to make the distinction between the two bourgeoisie which is determined merely by the way in which the two groups concentrate their resources of the privileged few on different excesses, those excesses which characterize their own generation.

After having learned from Hermine to accept this new bourgeoisie represented by jazz music and to not take it seriously, Haller realizes that:

Hermine has already escaped a lifestyle dominated by bourgeois values and its work-ethic and thus is an example for Haller to imitate in order to free himself of his self-imposed bourgeois nobleness. She knows that if she had conformed to the bourgeois-dominated world that "a woman like [her] 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." (150) By laughing at these options imposed by the bourgeois society, she has freed herself from them.

Haller's first adventure inside the Magic Theater is the automobile hunt which is as much a war with the bourgeois as it is with the vehicles. The war is designed "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." (180) The war is an attempt to eliminate the bourgeois who created these machines which only further flaunt their elevated social status. Their own fearless egoism and attitude of superiority has led them to have taken all the credit for "the blessing 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" (181) in their exaggerated opinion of themselves. This reverence of systems and order has created an "iron-cast civilisation" (181) which is responsible for the class struggles between the common people and the bourgeois, as well as the problems experienced by those like the Steppenwolves and Hermine who are outside of this system altogether.

Haller soon discovers, however, that the actual attack on the cars presents a different problem for Gustav and himself which they cannot solve either. They can kill the bourgeois represented by the "big luxury car" (182), but the only way to do so is to "aim at the chauffeur" (183) and to kill him as well. It is thus impossible to eliminate the bourgeoisie without also destroying the common people on whom it stands. They think that they are attacking American and Bolshevik ideals because they believe that "both are extraordinarily rational, and both lead to a frightful oppression and impoverishment of life, because they simplify it so crudely." (188) They fail to see that their attacks on the cars without protecting the chauffeurs is also crude simplification of the solution to what they see as the problem of the bourgeoisie. Only after seeing an innocent man walk by do "all [their] praise-worthy and most necessary activities [become] stupid and repulsive" in their eyes. (189)

Some critics, such as Franz Wegener, open the possibility of another interpretation of the role that the bourgeoisie may play in Steppenwolf based on the meaning attributed to other images in the novel such as the mother image. Wegener explains that "the German mind seems dominated by the law of the mother" (Wegener, 4) and that in an "atlandian metaphor" (Wegener, 5) suicide is like going in the water that would be the fluidic space of a mother's womb. Death is thus associated with a return to the womb and to the security that precedes birth and life. In Steppenwolf, Haller's mother is a bourgeois and he himself is determined to commit suicide. If the mother image really were associated with death in this novel, then one could conclude that Haller's desire for suicide is an attempt to reintegrate into the bourgeois society which offers the same security as the womb for those inside it. This option, however, must be rejected by Haller because both bourgeois society and the womb are closed environments which contrast sharply with the endlessness of the space inhabited by the Immortals. The mother/death image must thus be differently applied in Steppenwolf.

More prominent in the novel than Haller's biological mother is Hermine whom he often describes as like a mother to him. To him, her voice "was so deep and good and maternal." (93) She also treats him like her baby. "You're a baby and you need some one to look after you," she tells him. (89) Ironically, she also says to him, "Well, thank god, I'm not your mother" (88), but metaphorically she actually is. Not only does she take care of his basic needs, such as making him sit down and eat, but she also guides him spiritually and is responsible for his social development. Since Hermine is like his mother, and the mother is associated with death, when Haller kills the illusion of Hermine in the Magic Theater, it is to him like killing death itself, and essentially attempting to become an Immortal. It is "his decision to overcome his own possession by the Mutterimago." (Wegener, 6)

When Siddartha is about to throw himself into the river, he hears Om and understands life and the unity of the soul. The Steppenwolf, who also passes through a period of great despair, believes that death, his own and then his mother's, is connected to that same enlightenment and that it will bring him to the Immortals. In this case, Hesse rejects what he earlier affirmed. In Steppenwolf, because "Hermine and Pablo are but projections of his own higher self" (Boulby, 187), Haller finds not enlightenment, but punishment for killing a mere fantasy. In fact, afterwards, "he is unable to distinguish at all clearly between Hermine's wishes and his own" (Boulby, 199) which further proves how unreal the whole experience is. This shortcut provided by death is not the real way to becoming an Immortal and Mozart can't help but laugh at Haller's pathetic attempt to join him.

Boulby argues that Haller kills Hermine because he experiences "an upsurge of disgust with the sensual" (200), but this argument can be rejected since Haller has just come from the fantasy in which all the girls were his and he has developed and learned to embrace his own sexuality. He states that he was ready to fully use his sensuality and that he "was equipped, far gone in knowledge, wise, expert - ripe for Hermine." (203) Simple, senseless jealousy can be ruled out as a motivation for the murder of Hermine in the Magic Theater since he has just accepted "that seduction to which Pablo had once invited [him]" (202) and "fantastic games for three or four caught [him] up in their dance with a smile." (202-203)

Haller's fault lies in his inability to distinguish between realism and surrealism. The treatise, Hermine, Pablo, Mozart, and the Magic Theater are all surreal projections of his own psyche. Even when he kills Hermine, for example, she is not really dead for Mozart has the power to "restore this girl to life again and marry [him] to her". (216) When he sees Hermine an Pablo on the floor together, he is confused about in which realm he is, and has "confounded [the] beautiful picture gallery with so-called reality." (215) He believes that he has returned to reality, which is bourgeois, but he is still in the surreal Magic Theater in one of the many rooms. His confusion causes him to react with bourgeois jealousy which is out of place in this surreal world, and is not a reaction that he would have had if he had believed that he was still in the surreal realm. His mind was playing tricks on him. If he had been aware that he was still in the surreal world, he would probably have joined Hermine and Pablo on the floor just as he had already done in the room All Girls Are Yours. He is in fact still in the room How One Kills For Love but does not realize it. The reason why he entered into this room in the first place because he made a bourgeois choice that ended the All Girls fantasy. "At once I came to myself and made an end to this fairy tale of love; for I did not wish to meet her [Hermine] 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." (203) Haller wants to possess and be possessed solely by Hermine in the real bourgeois realm and in a perception of love that excludes all the "fantastic games" he had just played. He doesn't understand that he can't possess a surreal projection of a person in the real world.

After killing Hermine because of his bourgeois reaction, Haller finally confronts both the bourgeois in himself and his contempt for what is bourgeois, and learns from Mozart how he should react to it. Haller sees radio, which represents the bourgeoisie, as a "devilish tin trumpet" that spits out "a mixture of bronchial slime and chewed rubber." (212) Mozart tells him that he must learn to "listen without either pathos or mockery, while far behind the veil of this hopelessly idiotic and ridiculous apparatus the form of this divine music [the ritardando] passes by." (212) Mozart can see that the radio plays music "without distinction, stupid and coarse, lamentably distorted, to boot... yet after all this it cannot destroy the original spirit of the music; it can only demonstrate its own senseless mechanism, its inane meddling and marring." (212-213) The same is true for the bourgeoisie which appears to taint humanity with a shroud of senseless conventions, but really only shows its own ineptness because it is impossible to completely repress human freespiritness. Mozart continues on to explain that "everywhere it obtrudes its mechanism, its activity, its dreary exigencies and vanity between the ideal and the real... and we must let it be so; and if we are not asses, laugh at it." (213) He warns, however, that before laughing at radio and the bourgeoisie, Haller and all Steppenwolves "better learn to listen first! Learn what is to be taken seriously and laugh at the rest." (213) Haller must "learn to listen to more of the radio music of life" and "apprehend the humor of life, its gallows-humor". (216)

Mozart's imperative applies equally to the radio and to the bourgeoisie. This signifies, for example, to be able to look at the picture of Goethe and recognize that there is some truth in this bourgeois portrayal of him, and at the same time be able to laugh at it and be done with it instead of insulting the hostess. It requires him to laugh at the people eating popcorn at the presentation of the Ten Commandments "presented for money" (161) rather than leave in disgust. Haller must be able to simultaneously admire and laugh at the ridiculousness of the carefully washed leaves of the plant. This is the path to the Immortals, and now that he understands it and resolves to "be a better hand at the game" (218) it seems that he will one day join Pablo and Mozart who are waiting for him in this magical realm free of bourgeois conventions. To "teach [him] to laugh [was] the whole aim" (177) and it is the only true suicide of the Steppenwolf and the bourgeois self because "it's no good with a razor." (178) Only laughter can free the thousand facets of his soul.

Boulby, Mark. Herman Hesse: His Mind and Art. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1967

Hesse, Hermann. Steppenwolf. Trans. Basil Creighton. Ed. Joseph Mileck and Horst Frenz. New York: Henry Holt and Company Ltd., 1990

Wegener, Franz. Herman Hesse's theory of National Socialism in "Der Steppenwolf". Trans. Laura Campbell, Werner Habel and Eva-Maria Stuckel. http://geocities.datacellar.net/Athens/Troy/8444/steppenwolfeng.html (visited: 99/01/30)

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