Herman Hesse's "Steppenwolf" is published in an exclusive luxury edition
For the first time in Germany, France and the world, the manuscript of "Der Steppenwolf", Hermann Hesse's masterpiece, is published in a limited and numbered luxury edition.
Steppenwolf, the manuscript by Hermann Hesse
After Hermann Hesse's death in 1962, his widow Ninon decided to donate part of her husband's literary estate, which consisted of manuscripts and letters, to the German Literature Archive in Marbach.
The German Literature Archive was founded in Marbach am Neckar in 1955 and is one of the largest literary archives in the world. This prestigious institution opened the Museum of Modern Literature in 2006.
A genesis in the crisis
At the beginning of the 1920s, Hermann Hesse was almost fifty. However, a series of personal events plunged him into a deep and lasting existential crisis.
In the winter of 1926, he began writing texts in Zurich that were labelled "crisis poems", some of which were published in the literary magazine Die neue Rundschau under the title Der Steppenwolf. Ein Stück Tagebuch in Versen. These poems represent an essential moment in the genesis of Der Steppenwolf. The novel as we know it develops from these autobiographical poems by Hermann Hesse.
An unpublished manuscript with passages that have never been published
The manuscript consists of 155 sheets, generally labelled in blue and black ink and numbered with Arabic or Roman numerals.
Hermann Hesse had the habit of adding extra sheets when proofreading and marking the places where they were to be inserted on the original sheets with "X". He regularly wrote these additional sheets on old paper, such as publishers' advertisements, letters, watercolours or old calendar pages, the backs of which he blacked out, and which are reproduced here in the chronological order of the novel.
The author also added written material to this corpus that he had written before starting the actual work on the novel.
A foreword by Hermann Hesse specialist Rudolf Probst
Rudolf Probst studied German and philosophy at the University of Bern, where he obtained his doctorate in 2004. He has worked at the Swiss Literary Archives in Bern since 1993, where he has worked on the estates and archives of numerous writers.
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Photos: SP Verlag
