Category: Literary Prize

Sometime in the late 1990s, I read Herman Hesse’s 1927 novel Steppenwolf and was awed by a passage that prophesied the great destruction coming to Europe. Harry Haller, that book’s antihero, observed with a cold eye the public unrest in Germany, the fragmentation of its politics, the racism and xenophobia that was parading openly on the streets. In youthful fancy, I wondered about the thrill of being alive during such times. The 1990s, after all, seemed hopelessly dull, and political …