Man's struggle with his identity in the Steppenwolf"The Christian determination to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad. " These are the words of Friedrich Nietzsche, one of the most influential philosophers of the modern era and one who exercised an indisputable influence on many German authors, including Hermann Hesse. That Hesse would feel drawn to such an important figure in the German consciousness is unsurprising, that he would do so despite his family's religious zeal seems almost heretical. No less influential on Hesse, however, was the revolutionary psychologist Sigmund Freud, also an admirer of Nietzsche, and who "several times said of Nietzsche that he had a more penetrating knowledge of himself than any other man who ever lived or who ever could live". This theme, "self-knowledge", is recurring in Hesse's works and is central to the personal crises he faced in the years following the outbreak of the First World War. Hesse's post-1914 novels reflect his progress through successive self-knowledges. exams. Demian, published in 1919, explored his break with conventional morality in a decaying world. Siddhartha, published in 1922, presents Hesse's lifelong fascination with Eastern spirituality. It was his 1927 novel, Steppenwolf, that first achieved a complete break with the past while maintaining an openly autobiographical flavor in an otherwise total abstraction. It is Steppenwolf's break with the past that distinguishes him from the styles of two of Hesse's most important contemporaries: Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka. Although Mann and Kafka are dissimilar, their novels are characteristic of the novel as a form: as a totality. Mann's novels are extremely detailed and firmly situated in their historical contexts. Furthermore, we intimately know the characters, their backgrounds, their tastes, their values ​​and their destiny. And although Kafka's novels are highly symbolic, we are still presented with a total worldview, a worldview that we can consider in all its irony and terror. Furthermore, we can completely identify with the characters, who are really just reflections of ourselves, struggling for definition amidst ambiguity. The Hessian steppe wolf, by contrast, is essentially scrappy. We know little about Harry Haller beyond what is immediately apparent from the text. We are like the nephew in Aunt Haller's boarding house. Furthermore, we cannot identify the historical setting of the novel without referring to Hesse's own life.