HERMANN HESSE. DER STEPPENWOLF (1927). LITERARY STUDIES AND MUSICOLOGY IN DISCOURSE

Abstract

Hermann Hesse’s 1927 novel Der Steppenwolf still fascinates literary scholars and musicologists equally, since it is about more than the "midlife crisis" of the poet and of his protagonist Harry Haller, pointing towards the crisis of bourgeois society after the First World War and the tension between the experience of classical Music and Jazz. The "musical novel", which formally resembles a sonata, reveals the Mozart impression of the man who would go on to win a Nobel Prize for Literature and, through the metaphor of the "golden trace", has created a new idea for a specific Mozart culture in Germany in the second half of the 20th century in the spirit of Hermann Hesse. The article first addresses the question of backgrounds, beginnings and characteristics of this new "post-war Mozart image" in Germany, which began in the German Mozart Society (DMG) (founded 1951) with a peculiar exchange between literature and musicology and which has since been developed further. In a second step it concerns the critical evaluation of such a Mozart "ideology" for the future, then the current state of research and concludes with a case study on Johann Timotheus Hermes’ epistolary novel Sophiens Reise von Memel nach Sachsen (Sophien’s journey from Memel to Saxony) (Leipzig ²1776), which Mozart and Hesse equally appreciated, in order to present joint research perspectives.