Magic
Rented rooms. Residence of the Steppenwolf from the beginning of the novel until his suicide at the end. For reasons never explained, Haller arrives in the unnamed town and takes up residence in a private home, in which he meets the initial narrator of the story, a young man who is the nephew of the owner of the house. Haller is attracted to the home because it is, as he repeatedly describes it, “bourgeois.” He likes its middle-class cleanliness, the smells from the kitchen, and the lifestyle of the family who own and run the home, as well as the other lodgers.
Haller’s rented rooms themselves assume the qualities of this man who fancies himself a wolf from the steppes; they become primarily a study in which he has art works as well as books, and he lives here in a kind of hearth and home environs protected from the howling landscape of modern man outside his windows. Basically, these rented rooms, like the nameless, unidentified small town in which Haller is living, are intentionally nondescript so that they can have universal applicability.
Black Eagle. Most important of three public bars that Haller frequents, a place with food, drink, and other accommodations. It is located in the basement of the business establishment where he experiences the Magic Theater. While apparently decent on its exterior, the Black Eagle is at its core emblematic of the decadence that pervaded Germany in the period between the two world wars in which the novel is set. Its music is that of American jazz–which in the context of the novel symbolizes wanton abandonment. Drugs are in endless supply, and casual sex is rampant, easy, and multidimensional. Though tame by standards to occur later in the twentieth century, the Black Eagle is intended to be something of a moral pigsty of its day.