This blog post examines how ‘Demian’ portrays good and evil not as fixed moralities but as tensions within the human psyche, and why that boundary inevitably fluctuates, through the work’s symbols and the characters’ development.
‘Demian’ was written in 1916 during World War I and published in 1919, immediately after the war ended. Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), already a renowned author at the time, published this work under a pseudonym. He did so because he wanted the work to be judged solely on its merits. As a result, the ghost writer Emil Sinclair was nominated as the recipient of the prestigious Fontane Prize in Germany. (Hermann Hesse declined the award.) Meanwhile, a discerning German literature scholar analyzed the writing style and revealed that ‘Demian’ was indeed Hermann Hesse’s work.
This book, a record of a young man’s rite of passage in pursuit of his own life, begins with a brief philosophical reflection under the motto: “I tried to live what was striving to spring forth within me. Why was that so difficult?” In this book, Hermann Hesse reminds us that “each person’s life is a path leading to themselves” and that everyone is a precious being striving toward their own goals. This message carries even greater urgency because it was written amidst the shock of war, where precious, one-time human lives are annihilated en masse by a single bullet.
The first step on the ‘path to finding myself’ is breaking away from existing norms.
The protagonist, Emil Sinclair, is on the path to himself. Though tormented by the bonds of old norms (his father’s house, religion, morality), he examines them. These bonds separate him from the clear, bright world of childhood and are the things he must struggle to break free from on the path to becoming a true human being. In this painful, dead-end situation, he meets the older, more experienced Demian. Demian helps Sinclair, who was being severely tormented by the false accusation of theft he never committed. With the mysterious power of mind-reading and insight, he drives away the devilishly tormenting Kromer. Following this first trial with Kromer, Demian later helps Sinclair overcome the problems of adolescence. He awakens him to see anew and differently with his own eyes, shattering even the rigidly fixed frameworks of existing thought, like the story of Cain and Abel. He teaches him not to flee from fate, but to accept it. During his school days, living alone in a strange city, when his yearning for a spiritual guide reached its peak, Sinclair discovers a note tucked in a bookmark. “The bird struggles out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever is born must destroy a world. The bird flies to God. The name of God is Abraxas.”
Sinclair sets out to find this Abraxas. Organist Pistorius tells him of a mysterious deity embodying both divine and demonic, male and female, human nature and animal nature, good and evil. The dream images Sinclair depicts, the bird engraved in the sentence, his ‘distant’ lover Beatrice, the shape of clouds—all take on the form of Abraxas. Finally, he believes he sees this form within Demian and his mother, Frau Eva. He reaches his goal. Yet he does not reach it. Mrs. Eva, the eternal woman who is both mother and lover (Eva is the English Eve), both draws him and repels him. To Sinclair’s eyes, she occasionally appears like ‘his inner symbol,’ striving to reach deeper within himself. Gradually, reality and symbol merge within Mrs. Eva. The ending is almost dissonant. War breaks out. It is not the passionately yearning Mrs. Eva but a hot bullet that strikes Sinclair, mortally wounding him. Yet war also accomplishes the feat of new creation. In the field hospital, Sinclair encounters Demian once more. Demian’s kiss is also Mrs. Eva’s kiss. And it is the kiss of all who belong to the alliance of seekers and reformers.
After Demian vanishes, Sinclair says: “When I descended completely into myself (……) there I only had to bend over the black mirror. Then I saw my own image. Now I was completely like him. With him, my friend and guide.” Thus, in this final sentence where Demian and ‘I’ are almost merged into one, the vanished Demian evokes the German word Dämon. While Dämon can be translated as ‘demon,’ it also signifies the superhuman power inherent within a human being, whether good or evil. That Demian is elevated like a god by being written in capital letters as ‘He (Er)’ at the end. The preciousness of the self, painfully discovered by a youth, is indirectly expressed. Furthermore, the name Sinclair is also an uncommon German name, the name of a friend of Hölderlin, the genius poet who spent his later years consumed by madness. By borrowing the name of the person upon whom the ill-fated poet relied for solace as both the protagonist’s and the author’s name, readers may find themselves placing themselves in the position of that unfortunate genius poet.
Excluding the preface, the entire eight chapters reflect on the journey from childhood to self-discovery through universally familiar experiences of growing up.
Chapter 1, “Two Worlds,” deals with the first crack in childhood happiness through the common experience of suffering at the hands of a bad friend. Awareness begins with the painful experience of encountering another ‘dark world’ in the midst of the bright world of the father’s house, the first dark world experienced amidst the orderly peace within the home.
Chapter 2, “Cain,” explores another perspective opened by Demian, the exceptional boy who rescues Sinclair from Chromer. Demian’s interpretation of Cain—seeing the branded villain as an extraordinarily gifted individual—opens a different view of all imposed norms. It opens the possibility of thinking differently from conventional wisdom. Sinclair, who longs to become Abel again and settle back into the paradise-like world of his childhood, avoids Demian. Though Demian saved Sinclair from the small evil of Kromer, he represents a conflict Sinclair wishes to avoid—a “temptor who binds me to another world, an evil and bad world.” The conflict of not wanting to walk the difficult path leading to oneself is highlighted.
In Chapter 3, “The Thief Hanging Beside Jesus,” Demian urges him not to simply accept existing norms and offers another example. During the time when “the slowly awakening feeling of sexuality burst in as an enemy and destroyer, as a taboo, as temptation and sin,” Sinclair, who could not emerge into the permitted bright world, must discover that the primal impulse now resides within himself, not coming from outside. Through Demian, he experiences his consciousness expanding to a new dimension. Feeling that what was once Chroemer is now “embedded within myself,” the long-distant Demian gradually approaches again and reasserts his power and influence. Demian reveals the secrets of mind-reading and focused attention, broadening Sinclair’s consciousness through another religious metaphor—the example of the thieves crucified beside Jesus on Golgotha. He suggests that the thief who went his own way to the end, rather than the one who repented at the last moment, might be the thief with the ‘stronger individuality’ and the superior descendant of Cain. In doing so, he plants the seed of awareness for a comprehensive faith that serves as an alternative to Christianity’s one-sided doctrine, opening up a new framework for thought. Through this awakening, Sinclair loses his joy. His final attempt to find happiness in his parents’ shadow fails, and after leaving Demian behind following his confirmation, Sinclair sinks into solitude, waiting amidst emptiness, isolation, and desolation.
Chapter 4, “Beatrice,” depicts city life consumed by sorrow and despair, experiencing minor corruption. For Sinclair, expulsion from school is now the only thing left; in the days spent waiting for it, the final farewell to childhood occurs. One day, the girl ‘Beatrice,’ seen by chance, becomes an ideal that awakens a longing for beauty, spirituality, and purity. The image Sinclair conjures thereafter expands into a face that appears “half man, half woman, ageless, resolute yet dreamlike, rigid yet secretly vibrant with life” – the face of Demian, the thing that determined his life, his inner self, his destiny, or the guardian spirit within him, the image of a friend, a lover, the face of fate. It merges with the image of the bird carved into the worn inscription above the front door of Demian’s house. It merges with the image of a yellow-feathered bird of prey, possessing the sharp, bold head of a hawk, “half its body buried in the dark earth, seemingly emerging from a great egg, struggling against the blue sky to break free.” The wandering and struggle of a time trying to break free from its shell is condensed into a single symbol.
Chapter 5, “The Bird Struggles to Break Free from the Egg,” begins with sending this image of the bird to Demian and receiving an unexpected reply. “The bird struggles to break free from the egg. The egg is the world. He who is born must destroy a world. The bird flies to God. The name of God is Abraxas.“ Sinclair, who happened to hear this name in history class and only learned it represented ”some divinity bearing the symbolic task of uniting the divine and the demonic,” searches the library in vain for this unfamiliar god, Abraxas, and becomes obsessed with his inner voice, the image from that dream.
Then he meets the organist Pistorius and experiences an urgent listening to his own dark soul and a fire-worshiping ritual. He has found another teacher. “Every conversation, even the most banal, hammered steadily and softly at a single point within my heart. Every conversation contributed to my formation. Every conversation helped me shed my skin, break the shell.“
Chapter 6, ”Jacob’s Struggle,” is set against the story of Jacob wrestling with an angel, refusing to let him go until he received a blessing.
To the eighteen-year-old extraordinary youth, “precocious in a hundred things, yet terribly backward and helpless in a hundred others,” Pistorius says: “Sinclair, when some truly splendid thought—or a sinful one—rises again in your mind, when you feel the urge to kill someone or commit some monstrously unclean act, pause for a moment. That which spreads its wings of imagination within you is Abraxas! The man you wish to kill is never Mr. So-and-so. That person is merely a disguise. When we hate someone, we hate something within ourselves that we see reflected in their image.
What isn’t within us doesn’t provoke us.” Sinclair stood before him as if facing a spirit (god) demanding a decisive battle. Yet, even with such a friend and mentor, a rupture came, a parting occurred. He also encountered a friend who followed him as he once followed Demian, and Sinclair moved forward. Within himself, he saw the figure of a guide. Demian appeared again. “He resembled Demian, and my destiny was written in his eyes.”
Chapter 7, “Mrs. Eva,” is a reflection on encounters and community. Sinclair finally finds in reality the image he had drawn in his dream. It is Mrs. Eva, Demian’s mother. He meets Demian again. He also meets the exceptional people around Mrs. Eva who “go their own way.” Yet a shadow falls over this happiness. For the weak create communities everywhere “born of fear, dread, and panic,” and such communities are merely cliques, internally damaged and seeming ready to collapse. Demian says people are merely fleeing into each other. He believes that once the current communities disintegrate, space will emerge. In this premonition of the end, Sinclair sees the image of a bird shaking off the blue chaos, flapping its wings powerfully, and vanishing into the thickly clouded sky. He feels the collapse of an old world on his skin.
The gap between the ‘hope’ of exceptional individuals and the ‘despair’ of society revealed here not only exposes the contrast between those who forge their own path and the many who follow the herd, but can also be read as a critique of the groups and shifting alliances that proliferated in the chaotic society on the brink of war. Indeed, author Hermann Hesse volunteered for service immediately after the war broke out. Though deemed unfit for combat and thus unable to participate in actual battle, he devoted himself in Switzerland to aiding prisoners of war and internees. He contributed to all manner of newspapers and magazines, wrote appeals, and even established his own publishing house to produce twenty-two volumes of the Magazine for Internees. (He even painted pictures to sell to fund this work.)
In Chapter 8, “The Beginning of the End,” Sinclair calls out to Mrs. Eva in his mind. She had said: “If one day it is not I but your love that draws me, then I will go. I won’t give myself as a gift. I will be won.” But instead of Mrs. Eva, Demian comes running to tell Sinclair that war has broken out. Events rapidly unfold: Demian goes to the front, and Sinclair also heads to the battlefield. Wounded on the winter battlefield, Sinclair meets Demian once more. He receives his kiss and, through him, Mrs. Eva’s kiss, but when he wakes the next morning, Demian is already gone. Yet he discovers a likeness of himself in “my friend and guide.” He has now become one with the ‘superior being within himself.’
Hermann Hesse ultimately linked the figure of the seeker Sinclair to World War I, but most of the narrative process is intertwined with Romanticism and the world of ancient mythology. This fusion is often deemed anachronistic and a failure. Its unclear language and excessive symbolism are also criticized. Nevertheless, ‘Demian’ still holds its place as one of the most widely read works in the German-speaking world.
(The literary reputation of author Hermann Hesse is still higher outside Germany than within it.) Hermann Hesse’s central theme, ‘the path to oneself,’ seems to be a universal concern.
I spent about ten years assigning various books to university freshmen. Brilliant passages written by young people about ‘Demian’ come to mind. Truthfully, the task of interpreting this work’s content should belong to those very people—young individuals who have just left behind or are right in the midst of the painful world of growth this book depicts. For this book portrays the ‘path to finding oneself,’ that painful period of wandering and its conclusion, which no one can fundamentally escape, no matter how much times change.
