This blog post explores why Hermann Hesse’s Demian is read as a coming-of-age novel that stirs the soul of youth across generations. Through Sinclair’s inner conflict and journey of self-discovery, we explore the meaning of human growth together.
Demian is a name, a concept, an idea
Hermann Hesse’s ‘Demian’ is a book that captivates everyone at least once during high school or their first year of university. I remember reading it with profound emotion, feeling I couldn’t be more moved. For personal reasons too, ‘Demian’ became an unforgettable book for me. A friend of mine who adored ‘Demian’ came to me one day during our sophomore year of college and asked to borrow it. Promising to return it by the following Monday, she took my copy of ‘Demian’, covered in red underlines. She was a former schoolmate from girls’ school, a model student precise as a machine in everything she did. She didn’t come to me on Monday. I casually assumed she simply couldn’t make it. Only after more than half a month passed did I learn she hadn’t come because she was already dead by then. They say she was reading ‘Demian’ until her dying moment. So that book went into the grave with her. Why did she die? That girl? For about half a year, I couldn’t shake that question. Even now, I remember that day—the day he came to borrow the book—and I cannot forget the shock I felt when I later heard of his death, casually mentioned by a third party on the street. It was winter. That event will likely remain stored in some corner of my mind for the rest of my life.
Demian, Demian—who is he? The book always found in the backpacks of Germany’s fallen students, the book that drives everyone mad at least once—where exactly does its magic come from, and why did we have to read ‘Demian’ over and over—sometimes even to the point of death? Demian—a name like the taste of childhood nostalgia, bitter and sweet.
A bird breaks out of its egg
“He who is born must destroy a world”
We have seasons of darkness not of our own choosing. An alien force, demonic almost, weighs heavily upon us, robbing us of freedom. Even if we scream, only hollow echoes return, and the demonic force presses down even harder. At such times, we cry out in horror! and simultaneously awaken from the nightmare. Our gratitude is immense when we realize it was only a dream. Emil Sinclair lived, fragmented, oppressed by various demons in the world of the unconscious. Two worlds exist within and without him: the clear, distinct, beautiful daylight, and the dark, frightening, hazy, yet enchanted night. He lives, sometimes belonging to the world of day, sometimes to the world of night, without clear consciousness. Day and night, consciousness and unconsciousness, Apollo and Dionysus, awareness and intoxication, existence and necessity, intellect and sensuality, calculation and reverie, the ordinary and the extraordinary—Emil Sinclair’s childhood is spent vaguely sensing this opposition between worlds that can be divided into such dualities, yet lacking both the courage to actively participate in it and a strong enough self to resist it, merely placing one foot in each world and living there.
He perceived the former as the cozy room of his parents, a somewhat tedious world dominated by hymns, order, and clean undergarments; the latter as the chaotic, exciting, thrilling, and terrifying world of maids, farmhands, and the butcher’s shop. Could the former be seen as the inner world, and the latter as transcendence? And Sinclair, though always belonging to the former, is seized by a longing to leap into the latter. Who hasn’t, in childhood, yearned for the world of evil, the world of chaos? Then Cain appears as the champion of that world of evil. Cain seeks to completely strip Sinclair of his free will and use him as a means to his own ends. Sinclair suffers, unable to escape no matter how much he struggles, much like how in a dream, even if we try to flee, our bodies won’t move. This is because obedience and service to Cain simultaneously constitute betrayal of the bright world (the world of his parents). Then, a fateful ‘encounter’ occurs for him. He meets Demian. From Demian, who belongs to neither world but only to himself, he vaguely receives hints about how a human should live and becomes intensely, almost madly, devoted to him. A mentor and friend, a pioneer who has read and known everything, he lives for a time solely for Demian. But that relationship is temporarily severed by Demian’s departure.
Sinclair seeks to fill his irrepressible longing for ‘another world’ in Beatrice, a girl of unforgettable clarity whom he glimpsed once by chance on the road. A girl who seemed to embody all human nobility and purity—a yearning for soul alone, devoid of sensuality.
A longing for the soul’s homeland—with this nostalgia, Sinclair gazes upon Beatrice. For a time, immersed in this world of the former, his spirit becomes tamed into something tranquil, good, and regular. Then, suddenly, a single picture flies to him. A picture of a bird about to break free from its egg—and upon it is written the following words:
The egg is the world
He who would be born must destroy a world
The bird flies toward God
And the name of that God is Apollonius.
Sinclair feels an awakening like someone who shrieks in horror and wakes from a dream. He becomes fully and distinctly conscious of the desire for transcendence that had lain dormant within him, all because of this single sheet of paper. He lives consciously once more. Beatrice, too, and his parents’ satisfaction (regarding his stability) become irrelevant to him. Ultimately, he feels himself unable to settle within that world.
And a painful time comes upon him once more. Where should he go? No, what should he begin with first? The path to reaching himself is long. Almost impossibly long. Is desire all that is ultimately given to us? From that moment, Sinclair’s sole object of interest becomes Apollonius. Apollonius—is he the spell that opens the door to some other world?
One day in class, he was vaguely listening to the lecture on Herodotus. Suddenly, however, the voice of his new teacher collided with his consciousness.
“…The example I mentioned earlier, Apollonius, is one such case. People associate that name with Greek magical practices, viewing it as a sort of demonic name akin to those still found among barbarian tribes today. But in my opinion, Apollonius seems to represent something more meaningful. We might conceive of that name, for instance, as a god bearing the symbolic task of uniting the divine and the demonic.”
The key had been turned. But that alone was insufficient. It could not fill him. Yet once more, he collided with ‘chance’. Drawn by Bach’s music drifting from a twilight church, he inevitably became acquainted with the strange man playing it, Pistorius. Pistorius brought Sinclair to his home. The room contained only books and a fireplace. Lying beside the hearth, they stared into the flames. Pistorius taught Sinclair.
“Fire worship is not the most foolish thing humans have invented.”
As he worshipped the fire, he continued his soliloquy.
“We constrain the limits of our personalities far too narrowly! …Yet we are made of the world’s totality. Just as each of us carries within our bodies the developmental lineage reaching back to fish, or even further, so our souls hold everything in which a human soul has ever lived. Every god and demon that has ever existed is within us, existing as possibility, as hope, as an exit.”
Through Pistorius, Sinclair gradually comes to understand what Aphraxas is. Yet the greatest thing Sinclair learned from him was that he provided the impetus for Sinclair to take another step on his own path. Sinclair ultimately becomes fully devoted to the ‘new religion’ Pistorius desires, yet he begins to harbor doubts about sharing ‘worship, ecstasy, and mystical rites’ with him.
He began to suspect that Pistorius was merely human—a man who knew more than he did, yet harbored hidden weaknesses greater than his own. The day he voiced this suspicion aloud became the final day of their friendship. Sinclair was left alone in solitude once more. His mental wandering continued. He had lost his mentor.
He thought of Demian. Though he had gone to another city and vanished from sight, Demian had always dominated his subconscious. The savior from childhood—both were outsiders bearing marks on their foreheads. And the young mentor who knew so much more than he did. Unable to bear his longing for Demian, he searches for him. When he chanced upon Demian on the street, he began visiting his house daily to discuss and debate all matters with him once more.
In that house lived Mrs. Eva. She was Demian’s mother. A mysterious woman embodying both male and female, divine sublimity and demonic temptation. Upon first meeting Mrs. Eva, who was both mother and lover, he knew his old dream had come true. During the time when he was shifting from the worship of Beatrice to the influence of Pistorius, he had often dreamed. The same dream kept recurring, and it was like this:
“Inside the house, my mother was walking toward me. But when I entered the house and tried to embrace her, it was not my mother; it was another figure I had never seen before. This figure was tall and powerfully built, resembling Max Demian, similar to a picture I had drawn yet entirely different. Though powerful, it was profoundly feminine. This figure drew me in, accepting me into a deep, chilling embrace. It was a mixture of pleasure and terror; the embrace was both worship and crime. Within this figure embracing me, memories of my mother and my friend Demian dominated too intensely. The woman’s embrace was impure, violating every reverence, yet simultaneously signified the utmost happiness. Often I awoke from this dream filled with profound bliss, and sometimes with the pangs of conscience as if I had committed a terrible crime, and the fear of death.
……I felt that it was precisely in this premonitory dream that I was calling out to Aphrodite. Pleasure and terror, man and woman intertwined, the sacred and the grotesque entangled, and sin startled by the most delicate innocence—this was the form of my dream of love, and also the form of Aphrodite.”
The woman who embodied that very image of the dream was none other than Demian’s mother, Mrs. Eva. Sinclair tells her that it feels as if he has finally returned home. He feels deep relief and happiness. He felt, ‘It didn’t matter what became of me. I was happy to know this woman existed in the world. I was happy to drink in her voice and breathe near her. Whether she became my mother, my lover, or my goddess—as long as she existed! As long as my path remained close to hers!’ A time of complete happiness—but it did not last long. One day, he received word that war had broken out. Both he and Demian were called to arms.
And while standing guard in front of a farmhouse in the occupied territory, Sinclair is struck down by a bullet. In the instant he was hit, he saw the mysterious goddess—the goal he had pursued through names like Eva, Phaedra, and others. In the moment he saw her filling the sky, he was struck by the bullet. While being transported to the rear, he meets Demian. In his final moments, Sinclair feels he has become Demian himself. Demian was, so to speak, his alter ego.
Our Seven Stages of Development
The human figure portrayed in the novel ‘Demian’ is one of a youth’s anguish. It depicts a solitary search, an exhausting yearning, and ultimately achieving one’s destiny through death.
The primary reason this human image resonates so powerfully with us is that it honestly portrays a stage of mental development we must all inevitably experience at some point. So how did Hermann Hesse divide these developmental stages?
First, the era of the conflict between spirit and flesh. Though not yet fully conscious, the threshold of the unconscious—the world of the self—has already been crossed. (Two worlds)
Second, the confrontation with the external world (represented by the name Kromer). The external world is always something antagonistic to us; everyone other than oneself is a stranger (Hermann Hesse uses vocabulary like lizards, fish, etc.). An instinctive aversion stemming from a sense of alienation, similar to what an Athenian might feel towards a Spartan.
Third, the emergence of Demian. We need the other to reach ourselves. We can never be ourselves alone. Only in communion with the other are we truly existent.
Fourth, the Beatrice era. An age of self-rebellion against adolescent lust, longing to gaze upon and worship white clouds. Desiring only the pure, the noble. Wanting to be the idea itself.
Fifth, Apollonius. The Gnostic era. Through the teacher Pistorius, he becomes engrossed in the mystical rites of a new religion. Yet it is the disciple’s fate to part from the master.
Sixth, Demian found again. He learns the sweetness and anguish of love from his mother Eva. It is an experience of true love, conceptual yet fundamentally different from the fourth case. Mrs. Eva is a woman of prescience, like the synthesis of motherhood, goddess, animal, devil, woman—all things—and who knows everything.
Seventh: Destruction for new creation. The bird breaks out of the egg. Beginning and end are the same. War approaches.
And the inevitable (death). Both Demian and Sinclair die. And in the moment of death, they both know each other.
They grasp. They become indistinguishably alike. And they return. To the earth, the source of all things and the mother, to death.
Demian is one name, one concept, one idea. Yet he feels more alive, more vividly present, and closer than any real human being. Because he embodies every element within us, completely and utterly, we are sometimes truer in our ideas than in reality. That is why Demian is truer than we are.
Youth and the thirst for knowledge, the symbol of the science of knowledge, the delicate advocate of childhood’s avoidance of sexuality, the escape into ideas, self-praise, and victory through death—Demian is undoubtedly our own alter ego.
