Through Demian, Hermann Hesse warned that materialism leads to the loss of one’s self and drives society toward war and chaos. His message remains relevant today, and we must seek the path to finding our true selves through it.
While appreciating Hermann Hesse’s Demian, what struck me was not merely that this work was written against the backdrop of the great catastrophe of World War I and received great acclaim in the immediate post-war period, but how profoundly vital it remains today—how it appeals to us, warns us, and furthermore illuminates our path.
Hermann Hesse, an introspective soul and the conscience of his era, who could not help but grapple with profound anguish while living in neutral Switzerland on the eve of and during World War I, arrived at a firm conviction. It was the realization that Europe’s misfortune ultimately stemmed from materialism and the resulting loss of individual selfhood. Hermann Hesse expressed it thus:
“……Whenever I read the newspaper editorials of poets extolling the blessings of war, or the appeals of university professors, or all the war poems emerging from the studies of famous poets, my heart grew ever more desolate.”
In Demian, he also has a character say the following:
“For hundreds of years, indeed for much longer, Europe has done nothing but study and build factories! They know exactly how many grams of powder are needed to kill a man, but they do not know how to pray to God, nor how to be satisfied for even an hour.”
Ultimately, individual humans, having pursued extreme materialism, sought escape from the spiritual emptiness they had fallen into—that is, they sought a misguided solution to escape the nameless anxiety and terror arising from it. Instead of listening to the true voice of destiny welling up from within their own solitude, they sought solutions by forming gatherings, moving in packs, and joining forces to roar in unison. This was not true liberation from anxiety but rather self-loss, and this self-loss was the ultimate escape sought amidst the war that had lost its reason.
This was Hermann Hesse’s view of the First World War. The result of blindly following the demagoguery of misguided leaders, loudly singing military songs in chorus, and joining the war effort was obvious. All that remained were the horrific scars left by the war. The boisterous leaders, the comrades who had relied on each other and rallied their spirits, the noisy gatherings—everything vanished.
Only the hollow self remained, devoid of any thought or voice of its own, wandering aimlessly and helplessly. It was precisely under these circumstances that Hermann Hesse’s novel Demian was published in the form of a fictional memoir titled ‘The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth’.
It’s easy to imagine the profound impact Demian had on the young people of that era, lost and wandering aimlessly in the abyss of disillusionment and despair. It was like life-giving water poured upon the parched. Young people who had lost themselves could find themselves again through it, gaining the ability to look toward a new life. The lesson, “Listen to your own heart and do only what it commands,” may sound simple enough. Yet how arduous that path truly is becomes clear when we consider that the protagonist, Sinclair, lived his entire childhood and youth solely to achieve this goal. Without a guiding mentor, it would have taken him far longer still. Let us borrow the words of Demian, Sinclair’s guide.
“The bird struggles to emerge from the egg. The egg is its world. Whoever is born must destroy a world. The bird flies toward God. The name of that God is Apollonius.”
Faith in Apollonius, this unique deity embodying both good and evil, god and devil, is nothing other than belief in the inner voice of one’s own self, endowed with agency. Sinclair begins to doubt his absolute faith in God—the epitome of all that is right and good—and in his home, the bright world he believed was imbued with such divine presence. He realizes that the world of evil, the dark world contrasting with this God, begins right outside his own door—no, that the darkness of that world has already begun to take root within himself. Sinclair discovers that ‘Abel,’ cherished as a good man and God’s favorite, is merely a model of hypocrisy created by cowards who band together in fear of the strong, clamoring in a mob. He recognizes that ‘Cain’ was the fearless one, the detached man who intimidated all cowards, and gradually finds himself drawn to faith in Abraxas. Demian and the peculiar organist Pistorius steadily guide him through this labor of self-discovery, this struggle to be born into truth (the struggle of a bird breaking free from its shell). In the end, Sinclair finds himself grown to the point where he no longer needs a guide. This is clearly evident in the final lines of the wounded Sinclair’s diary, written after meeting Demian in a field hospital during the Great War through a strange twist of fate, and after Demian’s death.
“The bandaging hurt. And everything that happened to me afterward hurt. But sometimes, I only had to descend completely into my own interior, into that dark mirror where the image of fate slumbered, to find the key. I only had to bend over that dark mirror. Then I could see there my own image, now completely like Demian, like my friend and guide Demian.”
Though Sinclair lost Demian, the symbol of all his longing, love, and faith, in the external world, he now discovered him within. And now he had gained not only Demian, but the entire world in its unchanging form, from within himself.
As mentioned earlier, in the spiritual wasteland after World War I, Hermann Hesse’s Demian became spiritual nourishment and a pillar of life for Germany’s youth. Yet Western materialism began overwhelming the human spirit once more, ultimately leading to the second catastrophe of this century. In less than twenty years, instead of listening to the voice of destiny within themselves, people threw themselves into crowds and gatherings, losing themselves, empathizing with others’ words, becoming excited, and marching in hordes to the battlefield. How many young lives had to be sacrificed again, and how much of the world had to be reduced to ashes, all because the right compass was lost!
Now the memory of World War II has faded, and its wounds have all healed. No sooner had this happened than the youth of the West grew frivolous once more, drowning in groups, gatherings, and fads, protesting in hordes, marching in hordes, clamoring in hordes. Everything is becoming communal. Even drugs and sex. Of course, there are stark differences from the patterns after World War I. That is, they do not support war; they oppose it and protest against the generation that started it. But is it too much to say that one senses a spiritual desolation in the behavior of these people—who, instead of listening to their own inner voices, get excited by the clamor from outside and chant slogans proclaimed by others? Where, ultimately, will this spiritual desolation find its next escape route? Considering this, we must learn lessons, again and again, from Hermann Hesse’s Demian.
Now, let us briefly examine Hermann Hesse’s life. On July 2, 1877, Hermann Hesse was born in Calw, Swabia. His father, who had been a missionary in India, wished his son to become a pastor. After passing difficult exams, Hermann Hesse entered the renowned Maulbronn Monastery’s theological seminary in 1891. His path now seemed wide open, but this was only a fleeting illusion. By escaping the monastery seminary the following year, he completely abandoned the path to becoming a pastor. He attempted a new life as a craftsman and then as a bookstore clerk, but these ventures also ended in failure. However, his published works began to attract attention. When his commissioned work, Peter Camenzind (1904), was finally published by S. Fischer Verlag, it greatly elevated his reputation. This allowed him to establish a new home on the shores of Lake Constance, located on the Swiss border in southwestern Germany, and devote himself to his creative life. His major works written here include the novels Beneath the Wheel (1906) and Gertrude (1910), along with poetry collections and short story anthologies.
He spent 1911 traveling in India, and the following year left Lake Constance, where he had lived for a long time, to move to Bern, Switzerland. During World War I, he engaged in prisoner-of-war relief efforts, but his non-patriotic stance toward the war drew harsh criticism in Germany. In 1919, he moved from Bern to Montagnola in southern Switzerland, settling there, and obtained Swiss citizenship in 1923. In Nazi Germany, he was branded a pro-Jewish writer and ostracized. Hermann Hesse won numerous literary awards, but the Nobel Prize in Literature awarded in 1946 for his speculative novel The Glass Bead Game would be the pinnacle.
Works written during his Bern period include the novel *Rosshalde* (1914), short story collections such as *Schön ist die Jugend* (1916) and *Knulp* (1915), and the poetry collection *The Prodigy* (1915). After a hiatus during the war, his 1919 novel Demian caused a great stir among the youth of the time. Subsequent works included Trost der Nacht (1921), Siddhartha (1922), Trost der Nacht (1929), Narcissus and Goldmund (1930), The Journey to the East (1932), Steppenwolf (1927),
*Die Gedichte* (1942), and *The Glass Bead Game* (1943). After enjoying a life of seclusion in Montagnola, he passed away in 1962 at the age of 85. Hermann Hesse has a large readership in many Eastern countries, particularly due to the Eastern and introspective nature of his works. However, interest in Hermann Hesse also continues in the industrialized nations of America and Europe.
