The Steppenwolf

With his novel DER STEPPENWOLF, published in 1927, Nobel Prize winner Hermann Hesse not only achieved worldwide fame, but also created his own alter ego with the main character Harry Haller. Harry Haller suffers from the conflicting nature of his personality - not just two, but hundreds, even thousands of souls live in his chest. They are at war with each other and with the world around him, blocking Haller's personal and artistic development. He constantly feels out of place, longing on the one hand for a middle-class, conformist existence, while his steppe-twelve, lonely, socially and culturally critical side constantly rebels against the prevailing conditions. But then he meets Hermione and discovers the Magic Theater. Is there a way out here? A chance for healing and reconciliation? Just like Harry Haller, the young Polish director Wiktor Bagiński (Ahmad Ali) sees himself as a kind of steppe-twelve dual being: Growing up as a person of color in an almost exclusively white society, he experiences himself as an outsider, and as an artist simultaneously as a co-creator of a culture that never quite seems to be his own.