New media, virtual reality, flawed utopia?: Reflections on Thomas!Mann's Der Zauberberg and Hermann!Hesse's Der Steppenwolf

Concentrating specifically on Der Steppenwolf, this paper analyses the novel as a narrative that can rightly claim a place alongside German novels of high modernism by authors such as Thomas Mann, Alfred Doblin and Robert Musil. Several remarkable parallels with Der Zauberberg are noted. Der Steppenwolf as a work of fiction may be less well constructed than Siddhartha and Narziss und Goldniund, but nor does it offer easy, schematic solutions to the issues that preoccupied Germany modernist writers. It is pervaded by a deep sense of cultural crisis, by a no less intense setf-consciousness, and by the perception that only a utopian resolution can counter the malaise of the present. It takes an extremely detailed look at the effects of a culture that had its origins in the 1920s, with its shallow enthusiasm for the cinema, the radio and gramophone. What distinguishes Hesse from the cultural pessimists of his time is that the novel presents not so much a lamentation of the cultural losses necessitated by this process, but endeavours to diagnose the ills of the present and struggles to find a means of validating the new experiences as a redemptive form of virtual living.