Woodcut Prints from the Steppenwolf Portfolio by Helmut Ackermann, 1990. (Jazzbar, Goethe, The Meal & On a Rug Lay Two Naked Figures)
These beautiful woodcuts by Helmut Ackermann show scenes from the 1927 novel Steppenwolf by Herman Hesse. The Steppenwolf is the hero Harry Haller, a man of the bourgeoisie living in the modern world but who finds himself outside of both.
These woodcuts are apt to describe a man caught between eras by working with the German expressionist style that revived early modern printmaking techniques in the early 20th century.
“The man of this concordat, like every other bourgeois ideal, is a compromise, a timid and artlessly sly experiment, with the aim of cheating both the angry primal Mother Nature and the troublesome Father Spirit of their pressing claims, and of living in a temperate zone between the two of them. This is why the average person tolerates what he calls ‘personality’, but, at the same time, surrenders the personality to the Moloch ‘State’ and constantly plays off one against the other. For this reason the bourgeois today burns as heretics and hangs as criminals those to whom he erects monuments tomorrow.”
Steppenwolf, by Herman Hesse, translated by Basil Creighton and Revised by Walter Sorell, 1927.