HERMANN HESSE AND THE DIALECTICS OF TIME Salvatore C. P. ...

debate on jazz but also by the Nazi glorification of Wagner. With its social and
political overtones, music made its way, as a literary motif, into narrative texts of this
period and, as a sign of the originality of Der Steppenwolf, jazz, or music related to its
idiom, was adopted by Hesse as just such a literary motif (see Weiner, 305).
What was an element of novelty for the German literature of the time was
however a fairly common theme in the European intellectual debate. The Russian
novel The Master and Margarita, for instance, contemporary with Der Steppenwolf,
bears striking similarities to the latter in the way it relates to jazz.80
Harry Haller, the protagonist of Der Steppenwolf, embodies Hesse's selective
and conservative tastes in music; he feels the discomfort of living in a society that,
from his perspective, has lost sight of true values. Haller describes the music bursting
out loudly from a club as disquieting and disturbing:' Aus einem Tanzlokal, an dem
ich voriiberkam, scholl mir, heifi und roh wie der Dampf von rohem Fleisch, eine
heftige Jazzmusik entgegen' (SW 4, 38). 81 In a similar way, 'jazz' resounds in 'a roar
of brass [which deafens Margarita]' (Bulgakov, 299). A chapter in The Master and
Margarita, 'Satan's Rout', portrays a masked ball reminiscent of the 'Maskenball in
den Globussalen' in the last section of Hesse's novel. In the ball of The Master and
Margarita 'the stage behind the wall of tulips had been taken over by a jazz band of
frenetic apes' (309) and, in Der Steppenwolf, 'the cellar room of the inn where [the
masked ball] takes place is decorated to look like hell, and the members of the jazz
band in this hell are dressed as devils' (Rose, 90). 82
In both texts, jazz appears as one of the negative forces pointing to alternative
social orders. Jazz accompanies latent visions of escape from modern civilization, 'a
80 Mikhail Bulgakov began the composition of The Master and Margarita around 1928 and completed this work
almost ten years later; the novel, however, appeared only after his death in 1940. Wright's article, The Themes
of Polarities in Russian and German Twentieth-Century Literature: Mikhail Bulgakov and Hermann Hesse as
Literary Cousins' (1983), explores what he calls 'affinities' between Hesse and Bulgakov in view of the lack of
evidence of any mutual direct influence, 'at least until a definitive list of the books in Bulgakov's personal
library should show otherwise' (55).
81 It is worth noting that Hesse employs a derivative of'roh' to describe Wagner's music too: 'Ehe ich bei
Wagner Zuge dieser geschminkten Rohheit entdeckte, war er mir sehr viel' (letter of 1898 to Helene Voigt-
Diederichs, Musik, 131; my emphasis).
82 In his article (see note 80), Wright highlights several connections between the two artists (e.g. the theme of
polarities) and, more specifically, between the two novels: the theme of the outsider, the concern with
immortality, the similar atmosphere characterizing the 'ball in the magic theatre' and 'Satan's Ball'; he fails,
however, to pick up on the theme of jazz as a further point of convergence of the two texts.
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