>>24487032
Are you kidding? Just about every work of his is bloated with it. Steppenwolf, Demian, Siddhartha... everything is always a transcendent spiritual journey with him. Every trivial little musing he gives to the protagonists is blown up to Biblical significance. And it's always the misunderstood Sensitive Young Man.
Just scrolling through wikiquote for steppenwolf, you got a passage like
>Do you think I can’t understand your horror of the fox trot, your dislike of bars and dancing floors, your loathing of jazz and the rest of it? I understand it only too well, and your dislike of politics as well, your despondence over the chatter and irresponsible antics of the parties and the press, your despair over the war, the one that has been and the one that is to be, over all that people nowadays think, read and build, over the music they play, the celebrations they hold, the education they carry on. You are right, Steppenwolf, right a thousand times over, and yet you must go to the wall. You are much too exacting and hungry for this simple, easygoing and easily contented world of today. You have a dimension too many. Whoever wants to live and enjoy his life today must not be like you and me. Whoever wants music instead of noise, joy instead of pleasure, soul instead of gold, creative work instead of business, passion instead of foolery, finds no home in this trivial world of ours.
That's Hermine, who supposedly teaches gloomy old Harry about life. And Hesse can't even stop himself to ruin her with pretentiousness too, after pages and pages of suffering through Harry's get-off-my-lawn-isms. Worst of all, it's always told, not shown. Compare Goethe's Werther, where it's done really well.
