Word: steppenwolf
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...STEPPENWOLF (309 pp.)-Hermann Hesse-Holt...
...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...
...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...