Prizewinner

STEPPENWOLF (309 pp.)--Hermann Hesse--Holt ($2.75).

The 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.

The hero, a middle-aged intellectual and student, has passed through successive estrangements from bourgeois life. At each removal he becomes more conscious of his spiritual liberation but also of his solitude. He broods upon his wolflike nature until only suicide is left. But in the course of a lonely ramble he is enticed into the "magic theater" of postwar German gaiety--a fantasy of despairing brilliance in vices and anodynes. Here he finds that self-knowledge is the knowledge of multiple selves. Though he falls in love with a courtesan, thinking himself happy, his disintegration proceeds. The end of his madness is not suicide but murder.

The 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.

Novelist Hesse himself wrote from the Olympian vantage point of Switzerland, where he took refuge from the Fatherland in 1912 and where he still lives, now aged 70. He has half a hundred books to his credit and a considerable popularity on the Continent, at least among oldsters.

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