The Story of a Youth, in Quotes: Demian by Hermann Hesse

41 min readFeb 6, 2022

at face value, a collection of quotes from the novel. at face value from the other side of the same coin, a detailed snapshot, a snapshot summary, a sampling of thematic ideas, a book journal, a reading record, a stripping-to-the-core, an extracted compendium, a journey through and with Demian, Sinclair, and Hesse.

[finished reading on January 30, 2022]

preface:

Here’s a book that spoke to my 21-year-old soul, to parts that I already knew within myself and parts that revealed themselves for the first time as I traveled through Emil Sinclair’s narrative. Demian makes me wonder how much has changed — and not changed — for the youth of today versus the youth of generations past…

It is said that upon its first publication in 1919, this story inspired a whole generation of disillusioned young men and women to seek their true selves, unconfined by societal expectations or structures of authority. Fellow author Thomas Mann noted Hesse’s intentional ambiguity in the original subtitle, The Story of a Youth, “which may be taken to apply to a whole young generation as well as to an individual.” This intent, and the book itself, aged well.

Around me is a fractured world where humanity and human society don’t feel like two sides of the same coin. Where herd instinct and herd mentality rage on and trample the outliers, where depression and apathy and loneliness and empathy deficit and all kinds of conflict plague generations and nations in disturbing yet somehow accepted ways, where the pace of our global ecosystem is accelerating so quickly into a black box — a black hole, really — of non-understanding that no one can see inside of, that even our leaders are too scared to face for even a millisecond, driving even the most brilliant minds and voices to practice willful ignorance or proclaim grandiose visions, stopping nowhere in between, avoiding chances to stand two-feet on the ground and calmly consider our fate, together, as the one species we are — humans.

So where are we going? Is a catastrophic change — a revolution of ideals — a destruction and rebirth of the fundamental fabric of modern civilization — imminent on the timeline of human progress, as it was in Demian? In whatever future that comes next, what will my role be? My answer is rather grand — if I told you maybe you’d think it pretentious — but I have every intention of making it happen.

(laughs).

Seriously.

~ Livy — February 5, 2022

details of my paperback version:

Title: Demian
Author: Hermann Hesse
Translated from German by: Michael Roloff and Michael Lebeck
Publisher: HarperCollins (First Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition)
Publication Date: 1999, reissued 2009 (hardcover edition 1965)
Brief Publication History of Demian: first published as Demian: the story of Emil Sinclair’s youth in Germany in 1919 under the pseudonym of the narrator, Emil Sinclair; first published in the United States in 1948 with an introduction by author Thomas Mann (April, 1947)

a chronological list of quotes, snippets, and passages that compelled me to mark them on first read for some reason or another:

— organized by section and page number.

— also includes each section’s opening and ending remarks, not only because the frame the reader’s mind but also because someone else’s ends and beginnings, whether closed or open, fictional or nonfictional, mattered to them then and may matter now to another someone else.

— does not include any of my own words — my articulated thoughts around each quote hover comfortably, mercurially, in the margins of my paperback, scribbled in satisfying black ink at the moments of their inception.

— some lines are bolded for extra emphasis.

Introduction (by Thomas Mann — April, 1947)

[opening] A full decade has passed since I last shook Hermann Hesse’s hand.

With uncanny accuracy this poetic work struck the nerve of the times and called forth grateful rapture from a whole youthful generation who believed that an interpreter of their innermost life had risen from their own midst — whereas it was a man already forty-two years old who gave them what they sought.
For me [Hesse’s] lifework, with its roots in native German romanticism, for all its occasional strange individualism, its now humorously petulant and now mystically yearning estrangement from the world and the times, belongs to the highest and purest spiritual aspirations and labors of our epoch.

[…] [Hesse’s] philosophical detachment from all German politics.
[…] it was this particular work which Hesse did not wish to have appear over his own name which was already known and typed. Instead he had the pseudonym Sinclair — a name selected from the Hölderlin circle […]

[ending] Toward the end of the book (the time is 1914) Demian says to his friend Sinclair: “There will be war […] The new is beginning and for those who cling to the old the new will be horrible. What will you do?” The right answer would be: “Assist the new without sacrificing the old.” The best servitors of the new — Hesse is an example — may be those who know and love the old and carry it over into the new.

[standalone opening quote]

I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?

[Prologue] (untitled)

[opening] I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back. If it were possible I would reach back farther still — into the very first years of my childhood, and beyond them into distant ancestral past.
Novelists when they write novels tend to take an almost godlike attitude towards their subject, pretending to a total comprehension of the story, a man’s life […]

My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams — like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.
[ending] We can understand one another; but each of us is able to interpret himself to himself alone.

[Chapter] 1: Two Realms

[opening] I shall begin my story with an experience I had when I was ten and attended our small town’s Latin school.

3–4

Unquestionably I belonged to the realm of light and righteousness; I was my parents’ child. But in whichever direction I turned I perceived the other world, and I lived within that other world as well, though often a stranger to it, and suffering from panic and a bad conscience.

returning to the realm of light […] seemed almost like returning to something less beautiful, something rather drab and tedious.

I knew I now had a secret, a sin which I would have to expiate alone.

[the moment with Kromer] was the first fissure in the columns that had upheld my childhood, which every individual must destroy before he can become himself.

[ending] My condition at that time was a kind of madness. Amid the ordered peace of our house I lived shyly, in agony, like a ghost; I took no part in the life of others, rarely forgot myself for an hour at a time. To my father, who was often irritated and asked me what was the matter, I was completely cold.

[Chapter] 2: Cain

[opening] My salvation came from a totally unexpected source, which, at the same time, brought a new element into my life that has affected it to this very day.

I knew that everything I said would be accepted sympathetically […] but that they would not understand, that the whole thing would be regarded as a momentary aberration, whereas in truth it was my fate.

I looked up helplessly at [Demian’s] face, which was as serious and intelligent as ever, and kind. Yet its detached severity lacked tenderness; impartiality or something similar was visible in it.

[Demian said] “[…] you realize, don’t you, that your fear of [Kromer] is all wrong? Such fear can destroy us completely.”

Only now did I realize how horribly alone I had been with my secret for weeks on end. And at once I remembered a thought I had several times before: that a confession to my parents would lighten my load but would not entirely relieve me of it. Now I had almost confessed, to another, to a stranger, and the sense of relief was like a fresh breeze.

[Demian] evaded all my questions, leaving me with the same uneasy feeling toward him I’d had before: a strange mixture of gratitude and awe, admiration and fear, sympathy and inward resistance.

As I have said, ingratitude does not surprise me. What does startle me, in retrospect, is my lack of curiosity. How was I able to go on living a single day without trying to come nearer to the secret which Demian had revealed to me?
The whole episode of my guilt and fright slipped from my memory with incredible speed and without apparently leaving any scars or deep impressions behind.

I confessed.
[…] everything resolved itself in wonderful harmony. I drugged myself on the satisfaction of having regained my peace of mind and the confidence of my parents […]
[Demian] too — though differently from Kromer — was a tempter; he, too, was a link to the second, the evil world with which I no longer wanted to have anything to do. (^ also quoted by RM in the music video for “Blood Sweat & Tears” by BTS — I finally understand the context of the storyline, five years later. iykyk ^.^)

37–38

Those were the superficial reasons [why not everything was back in order]. The inner ones, however, were as follows: I was free of Kromer’s and the devil’s hands but through no power or effort of my own. I had tried to pass through the labyrinth of the world but the way had proved too intricate for me. Now that a friendly hand had extricated me, I retreated […] straight to my mother’s lap and the security of a pious, sheltered childhood. I turned myself into someone younger, more dependent, more childish than I was. I had to replace my dependence on Kromer with a new one, for I was unable to walk alone.

For Demian would have been far more exacting than my parents; he would have tried to make me more independent by using persuasion, exhortation, mockery, and sarcasm. I realize today that nothing in the world is more distasteful to a man than to take the path that leads to himself.

38-39

[ending] [My father explained that] […] this heresy had long since disappeared from the face of the earth and he was only surprised that a school friend of mine should have heard anything about [the alternate view that Cain was a better person than Abel and that the ‘God of the Bible was not the right and only one, but a false God’]. He warned me most seriously against harboring such ideas.

[Chapter] 3: Among Thieves

[opening] If I wanted to, I could recall many delicate moments from my childhood: the sense of being protected that my parents gave me, my affectionate nature, simply living a playful, satisfied existence in gentle surroundings. But my interest centers on the steps that I took to reach myself. All the moments of calm, the islands of peace whose magic I felt, I leave behind in the enchanted distance. Nor do I ask to ever set foot there again. That is why — as long as I dwell on my childhood — I will emphasize the things that entered it from the outside, that were new, that impelled me forward or tore me away.
I led the double life a child who is no longer a child.

Side by side with this [‘familiar and sanctioned world’] I lived in a world of dreams, drives, and desires of a chthonic nature, across which my conscious self desperately built its fragile bridges, for the childhood world within me was falling apart.
It was my own affair to come to terms with myself and to find my own way, and like most well-brought-up children, I managed it badly.

Yet the face struck me at that moment as neither masculine nor childlike, neither old nor young, but somehow a thousand years old, somehow timeless, bearing the scars of an entirely different history than we knew […] Perhaps he was handsome, perhaps I liked him, perhaps I also found him repulsive, I could not be sure of that either. All I saw was that he was different from us, he was like an animal or like a spirit or like a picture, he was different, unimaginably different from the rest of us.

[Demian] looked at me for only a moment and suddenly I listened tensely to the pastor’s words […] and deep within me I felt the knowledge that it was not as he was teaching, that one could look at it differently, that his view was not above criticism. This one minute re-established the link between me and Demian.

[Demian said] “[…] [The male night-moths] acquired [‘such a highly developed sense of smell’ to find female moths] only because that had to train themselves to have it. If a person were to concentrate all his will power on a certain end, then he would achieve it. That’s all. […] Examine a person closely enough and you know more about him than him than he does himself.”

[Demian said] “[…] Once that is the case, once you have tried something that you have been ordered to do from within yourself, then you’ll be able to accomplish it, then you can harness your will to it like an obedient nag.”

[Demian said] “[…] Every time his eyes meet mine I stare him down. Very few people can stand that for long. All of them become uneasy.”

Demian, however, had accustomed me to regard and interpret religious stories and dogma more freely, more individually, even playfully, with more imagination.

[Demian said] “[…] But I mean we ought to consider everything sacred, the entire world, not merely this artificially separated half! Thus alongside the divine service we should also have a service for the devil. I feel that would be right. Otherwise you must create for yourself a God that contains the devil too and in front of which you needn’t close your eyes when the most natural things in the world take place.”

52–53

[Demian’s words] touched directly on the whole secret of my adolescence […] corresponded exactly to my own thoughts, my own myth, my own conception of the world as being divided into two halves — the light and the dark. The realization that my problem was one that concerned all men, a problem of living and thinking, suddenly swept over me and I was overwhelmed by fear and respect as I suddenly saw and felt how deeply my own personal life and opinions were immersed in the eternal stream of great ideas. Though it offered some confirmation and gratification, the realization was not really a joyful one. It was hard and had a harsh taste because it implied responsibility and no longer being allowed to be a child; it meant standing on one’s own feet.

[Demian said] “[…] I can see that your thoughts are deeper than you yourself are able to express. But since this is so, you know, don’t you, that you’ve never liked what you are thinking and that isn’t good. Only the ideas that we actually live are of value. You knew all along that your sanctioned world was only half the world and you tried to suppress the second half the same way the priests and teachers do. You won’t succeed. No one succeeds in this once he has begun to think.” This went straight for my heart.

[Demian said] “[…] Those who are too lazy and comfortable to think for themselves and be their own judge obey the laws […] Each person must stand on his own feet.” Suddenly he seemed to regret having said so much and fell silent.
Though [Demian] delivered his ideas in a pleasant and perfunctory manner, he still could not stand conversation for its own sake […] In my case, however, he sensed — besides genuine interest — too much playfulness, too much sheer pleasure in clever gabbing, or something of the sort; in short a lack of complete commitment.

[…] I could not help thinking that the value of this religious instruction consisted for me not in what I had learned, but in the proximity and influence of Max Demian.
“We talk too much,” [Demian] said with unwonted seriousness. “Clever talk is absolutely worthless. All you do in the process is lose yourself. And to lose yourself is a sin. One has to be able to crawl completely inside oneself, like a tortoise.”

My spellbound eyes were fixed on his face, on this pale stone mask, and I felt: this is real Demian. When he walked beside me or talked to me — that was only half of him, someone who periodically plays a role, adapts himself, who out of sheer complaisance does as others do. The real Demian, however, looked like this, as primeval, animal, marble, beautiful and cold, dead yet secretly filled with fabulous life. And around him this quiet emptiness, this ether, interstellar space, this lonely death! Now he had gone completely into himself, I felt, and I trembled. Never had I been so alone.

Now everything changed. My childhood world was breaking apart around me […] That is the way leaves fall around a tree in autumn, a tree unaware of the rain running down its sides, of the sun or the frost, and of life gradually retreating inward. The tree does not die. It waits.
[ending] It had been decided that I would be sent away to a boarding school […] for the first time I would be away from home […] Demian was away on a trip. I was alone.

[Chapter] 4: Beatrice

[opening] At the end of the holidays, without having seen my friend again, I went to St. — — . My parents accompanied me and entrusted me to the care of a boy’s boardinghouse run by one of the teachers at the preparatory school.

I was neither liked nor respected in my boys’ boarding-house […] I fell in with this role, even exaggerated it, and grumbled myself into a self-isolation that must have appeared to outsiders like permanent and masculine contempt of the world, whereas in truth, I often secretly succumbed to consuming fits of melancholy and despair.
[…] the present [class] lagged somewhat behind the one I had left — and I began to regard the students in my age group contemptuously as mere children.

60-61

Soon, however, unused to the wine, I became very loquacious […] For how long, for how terribly long hadn’t I really talked to anyone?

Alfons Beck, who was eighteen, seemed to be able to draw on a vast body of experience.

There seemed to be hidden sources of pleasure, at least for the older boys, of which I had not dreamed. Something about it didn’t sound right […] but at least: this was reality, this was life and adventure, and next to me sat someone who had experienced it, to whom it seemed normal.
[…] our conversation began to taper off. I was no longer the damned clever little bastard; I’d shrunk to a mere boy listening to a man.

So that’s what I looked like inside! I who was going about contemptuous of the world! […] With nausea and outrage I could still hear my life, drunk and unruly, sputtering out of me in idiotic laughter, in jerks and fits. There I was. In spite of everything, I almost reveled in my agonies. I had been blind and insensible and my heart had been silent for so long, had cowered impoverished in a corner, that even this self-accusation, this dread, all these horrible feelings were welcome. At least it was feeling of some kind, at least there were some flames, the heart at least flickered. Confusedly I felt something like liberation amid my misery.

[…] while my friends regarded me as a leader and as a damned sharp and funny fellow, deep down inside me my soul grieved.
There was good reason why I never became one with my companions, why I felt alone among them and was therefore able to suffer to suffer so much.

I simply did what I had to do, because I had no idea what to do with myself otherwise. I was afraid of being alone for long, was afraid of the many tender and chaste moods that would overcome me […]
There are numerous ways in which God can make us lonely and lead us back to ourselves.
It was like a bad dream [..] In this unpleasant fashion I was condemned to become lonely […] It was a beginning, an awakening of nostalgia for my former self.

I could not have cared less what became of me. In my odd and unattractive fashion, going to bars and bragging was my way of quarreling with the world — this was my way of protesting. I was ruining myself in the process but at times I understood the situation as follows: if the world has no use for people like me, if it did not have a better place and higher tasks for them, well, in that case, people like me would go to pot, and the loss would be the world’s.

66–67

Christmas vacation was a joyless affair that year […] Everything seemed out of place […] The gingerbread smelled sweet; it exuded a host of memories which were even sweeter. The fragrance of the Christmas tree told of a world that no longer existed. I longed for evening and for the holidays to be over.

Although I never addressed a single word to Beatrice, she exerted a profound influence on me at the time […] From one day to the next I stayed clear of all bars and nocturnal exploits. I could be alone with myself again and enjoyed reading and going for long walks. My sudden conversion drew a good deal of mockery in its wake. But […] I had come home again to myself, even if only as the slave and servant of a cherished image.

[…] this present “world of light” […] was a new duty, one I had invented and desired on my own, with responsibility and self-control.
My goal was not joy but purity, not happiness but beauty, and spirituality.

70–71

It was not the face of that girl — it wasn’t supposed to be that any longer. It was something else, something unreal, yet it was no less valuable to me. It looked more like a boy’s face than a girl’s […] As a whole it was somewhat stiff and masklike but it was impressive and full of a secret life of its own […] It resembled a kind of image of God or a holy mask, half male, half female, ageless, as purposeful as it was dreamy, as rigid as it was secretly alive […] It bore a resemblance to someone, yet I did not know whom.

Why had it taken me so long? It was Demian’s face.

[…] the portrait of Beatrice, or Demian, […] I began to sense that this was neither Beatrice nor Demian but myself. Not that the picture resembled me — I did not feel that it should — but it was what determined my life, it was my inner self, my fate or my daemon.
74
I took a swallow and looked at him with hostility. “Well, not everybody’s Faust,” I said curtly. He looked at me somewhat taken aback. Then he laughed at me in his old lively and superior fashion.
When I wanted to leave I discovered that Demian had paid the bill — which put me in an even worse humor.

[…] — in the same state of dreamlike presentiment in which I did everything — […]
[ending] It was an accident that this transformation coincided with my parents’ and teachers’ wishes. This change did not bring me close to the community of others, did not make me closer to anyone, but actually made me even lonelier. My reformation seemed to point in the direction of Demian, but even this was a distant fate. I did not know myself, for I was too deeply involved. It had begun with Beatrice, but for some time I had been living in such an unreal world with my paintings and my thoughts of Demian that I’d forgotten all about her, too. I could not have uttered a single word about my dreams and expectations, my inner change, to anyone, not even if I had wanted to. But how could I have wanted to?

[Chapter] 5: ”The Bird Fights Its Way Out of the Egg”

[opening] My painted dream bird was on its way searching for my friend. In what seemed the strangest possible manner a reply reached me.

[Dr. Jollens lectured] “[…] This name occurs in connection with Greek magical formulas and is frequency considered the name of some magician’s helper such as certain uncivilized tribes believe in even at present. But it appears that Abraxas has a much deeper significance. We may conceive of the name as that of a godhead whose symbolic task is the uniting of godly and devilish elements.”
For a time I pursued this thought eagerly without making any headway. I even pored over a whole libraryful of books seeking a mention of Abraxas. However, my nature had never been disposed to this kind of direct and conscious investigation where at first one finds only truths that are so much dead weight in one’s hand.

[Beatrice] no longer satisfied the longings of my soul. In the peculiar self-made isolation in which I existed like a sleepwalker, a new growth began to take shape within me. The longing for life grew — or rather the longing for love.

Love had ceased to be the dark animalistic drive I had experienced at first with fright nor was it any longer the devout transfiguration I had offered to Beatrice. It was both, and yet much more.
[…] I was a fully grown man, and yet I was completely helpless and without a goal in life.

82–83

Perhaps I was mad, as I thought at moments; perhaps I was not like other men? But I was able to do the same things the others did; with a little effort and industry I could read Plato, was able to solve problems in trigonometry or follow a chemical analysis. There was only one thing I could not do: wrest the dark secret goal from myself and keep it before me as others did who knew exactly what they wanted to be — professors, lawyers, doctors, artists, however long this would take them and whatever difficulties and advantages this decision would bear in its wake. This I could not do. Perhaps I would become something similar, but how was I to know?

I wanted only to try to live in accord with the promptings which came from my true self. Why was everything so very difficult?
But as always, as soon as a dream had given me hope, it wilted and became useless. It was futile to sorrow after the loss. I now lived within a fire of unsatisfied longing, of tense expectancy that often drove me completely wild.
I experienced the whole of that winter as one unending inner turbulence, which I find difficult to describe. I had long since become used to my loneliness — that did not oppress me […] for everything pointed toward vastness and space — it all pointed toward Abraxas.

I was always preoccupied with myself. And I longed desperately to really live for once, to give something of myself to the world, to enter into a relationship and battle with it.
Just then I found a strange refuge — “by chance,” as they say — though I believe there is no such thing. If you need something desperately and find it, this is not an accident; your own craving and compulsion leads you to it.

[Pistorius was] devout with that unconditional surrender to a universal feeling that transcends all confessions.

I did not hesitate to tell [Pistorius] [about where I found out about Abraxas when he asked].

[Pistorius said] “[…] I was a theology student but shortly before my state exams I left […] for I’m still most interested to see what kinds of gods people have for themselves. Otherwise I’m a musician at present and it looks as though I will receive small post as an organist somewhere. Then I’ll be back in the employ of the church again.”

90–91

The surrender to Nature’s irrational, strangely confused formations produces in us a feeling of inner harmony with the force responsible for these phenomena. We soon fall prey to the temptation of thinking of them as being our own moods, our own creations, and see the boundaries separating us from Nature begin to quiver and dissolve. We become acquainted with that state of mind in which we are unable to decide whether the images on our retina are the result of impressions coming from without or from within. Nowhere as in this exercise can we discover so easily and simply to what extent we are creative, to what extent our soul partakes of the constant creation of the world.

Not until many years later did I find these observations of mine confirmed, in a book by Leonardo da Vinci, who describes at one point how good, how intensely interesting it is to look at a wall many people have spit on.
The next time we were together, the organist gave me an explanation: “We always define the limits of our personality too narrowly. In general, we count as part of our personality too narrowly. In general, we count as part of our personality only that which we can recognize as being an individual trait or as diverging from the norm. But we consist of everything the world consists of, each of us […]”

91–92

[Pistorius said] “[…] If the human race were to vanish from the face of the earth save for one halfway talented child that had received no education, this child would rediscover the entire course of evolution, it would be capable of producing everything once more, gods and demons, paradises, commandments, the Old and New Testament.” “Yes fine,” I replied. “But what is the value of the individual in that case? Why do we continue striving if everything has been completed within us?” “Stop!” exclaimed Pistorius. “There’s an immense difference between simply carrying the world within us and being aware of it […]”

“A madman can spout ideas that remind you of Plato, and a pious little seminary student rethinks deep mythological correspondences found among the Gnostics or in Zoroaster. But he isn’t aware of them. He is a tree or stone, at best an animal, as long as he is not conscious. But as soon as the first spark of recognition dawns within him, he is a human being. You wouldn’t consider all the bipeds you pass on the street human beings simply because they walk upright and carry their young in their bellies nine months! It is obvious how many of them are fish or sheep, worms or angels, how many are ants, how many are bees! Well, each of them has the possibility of becoming human, but only by having an intimation of these possibilities, partially even by learning to make himself conscious of them; only in this respect are these possibilities his.”
But everything, even the most ordinary matters, resembled gentle persistent hammer blows on the same spot within me […] and after each blow I lifted my head a little higher, a little more freely, until my yellow bird pushed its beautiful raptor’s head out of the shattered shell of the terrestrial globe.

Pistorius’ comment was: “The impetus that makes you fly is our great human possession […] It is the feeling of being linked with the roots of power, but one soon becomes afraid of this feeling. It’s damned dangerous! That is why most people shed their wings and prefer to walk and obey the law. But not you. You go on flying. And look! […][To] the great general force that tears you upward these is added a delicate small force of your own, an organ, a steering mechanism. How marvelous! Lacking that, you would be drawn up to the heights, powerless — which is what happens to madmen […] [who] have no key and no steering mechanism and roar off into infinity. But you, Sinclair, you are going about it the right way. How? You probably don’t know yourself […]”
[ending] And with a peculiar shudder I felt that an organ from an earlier period of evolution was still alive within me.

[Chapter] 6: Jacob Wrestling

[opening] It is impossible to recount briefly all that Pistorius the eccentric musician told me about Abraxas. Most important was that what I learned from him represented a further step on the road toward myself.
When I compared myself with other boys my age I often felt proud and conceited but just as often humiliated and depressed. Frequently I considered myself a genius, and just as frequently, crazy. […] I was helplessly separated from them. I was debarred from life.

94–95

[Pistorius said] “[…] if Nature has made you a bat you shouldn’t try to be an ostrich. You consider yourself odd at times, you accuse yourself of taking a road different from most people. You have to unlearn that […] [D]on’t ask first whether it’s permitted or would please your teachers or father, or some god. You will ruin yourself if you do that.”

[Pistorius said] “[…] But I have no desire to [convert them]. A priest does not want to convert, he merely wants to live among believers, among his own kind. He wants to be the instrument and expression for the feeling from which we create our gods.”

96–97

[Pistorius said] “[…] live those dreams, play with them, build altars to them […]

[Pistorius said] “[…] If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us.”

[Pistorius said] “[…] There is no reality except the one contained within us. That is why so many people live such an unreal life. They take the images outside them for reality and never allow the world within to assert itself. You can be happy that way. But once you know the other interpretation you no longer have the choice of following the crowd. Sinclair, the majority’s path is an easy one, ours is difficult.”

“Go ahead, tell me about it,” I encouraged [Knauer, the boy that waited in the alley to ask me a question]. “I don’t know much about spirits. I live in my dreams — that’s what you sense. Other people live in dreams, but not in their own. That’s the difference.”

99–100

“[…] I think of something, a word for example, or a name or a geometrical form. Then I think this form into myself as hard as I can. I try to imagine it until I can actually feel it inside my head. then I think it in the throat, and so forth, until I turned to stone and nothing can distract me any more.”

101

I was incapable of giving advice that did not derive from my own experience and which I myself did not have the strength to follow.
“I’ve tried everything!” moaned Knauer beside me. “[…] Each night I awake from dreams that I’m not even allowed to think about — and the horrible part is that in the process I’m gradually forgetting everything spiritual I ever learned. I hardly ever succeed any more in concentrating or in making myself fall asleep […]”
My only feeling was: I can’t help you.

102

The painted face in the lamplight changed with each exhortation […] It was woman, man, girl, a little child, an animal, it dissolved into a tiny patch of color, grew large and distinct again.

103

Gradually I began to have an inkling.

104

But suddenly I knew everything. Not only what had transpired between [Knauer and me] but also why I had come here and what Knauer had wanted to do out here.

105

I drew him into the open. The first horizontal rays of daylight glimmered cold and listless in the gray dawn.
Yet these occult matters were not what nourished me inwardly. What invigorated me was the progress I had made in discovering my self, the increasing confidence in my own dreams, thoughts, and intimations, and the growing knowledge of the power I possessed within me.

106

[My daemon was] no longer confined to my dreams, no longer merely depicted on paper, but lived within me as an ideal and intensification of my self.
Sooner or later each of us must take the step that separates him from his father, from his mentors; each of us must have some cruelly lonely experience — even if most people cannot take much of this and soon crawl back.

107

But where we have given of our love and respect not from habit but of our own free will, where we have been disciples and friends out of our inmost hearts, it is a bitter and horrible moment when we suddenly recognize that the current within us wants to pull us away from what is dearest to us. Then every thought that rejects the friend and mentor turns in our own hearts like a poisoned barb, then each blow struck in defense flies back into one’s one face, the words “disloyalty” and “ingratitude” strike the person who feels he was morally sound like catcalls and stigma, and the frightened heart flees timidly back to the charmed valleys of childhood virtues, unable to believe that this break, too, must be made, this bond also broken.
No quarrel or scene occurred between [me and Pistorius], no break and not even a settling of accounts. I uttered only a single — actually harmless — phrase, yet it was in that moment that an illusion was shattered.

108

All this seemed to me odd and eclectic and not of vital importance; […] it sounded like tedious research among the ruins of former worlds. And all at once I felt a repugnance for his whole manner, for this cult of mythologies, this game of mosaics he was playing with secondhand modes of belief.
[…] “What you’re telling me there is all so — so damned antiquarian.”
He, too, kept silent and so we lay while the fire dwindled, and with each dying flame I felt something beautiful, intimate irrevocably burn low and become evanescent.

109

[W]hat Pistorius had been and given to me was precisely what he could not give to himself. He had led me along a path that would transcend and leave even him, the leader, behind.
How much I wished then that he become enraged, defend himself, and berate me! He did nothing of the kind — I had to do all of that myself. He would have smiled if he could have, and the fact that he found it impossible was the surest proof of how deeply I had wounded him.

110

Finally I could bear it no longer. I got up and left […] and walked for hours through the town […] During that walk I felt for the first time the mark of Cain on my forehead.
[Pistorius’] dream had been to be a priest, to proclaim the new religion, to introduce new forms of exaltation, of love, of worship, to erect new symbols. But this was not his strength and it was not his function. He lingered too fondly on the past […] His love was shackled to images the earth had seen before, and yet, in his inmost heart, he realized that the New had to be truly new and different, that it had to spring from fresh soil and could not be drawn from museums and libraries. His function was perhaps to lead men to themselves as he had led me. To provide them with the unprecedented, the new gods, was not in him.

110–111

[A] sharp realization burned within me: each man had his “function” but none which he can choose himself, define, or perform as he pleases […] I had often speculated with images of the future, dreamed of roles that I might be assigned, perhaps as a poet or prophet or painter, or something similar. All that was futile. I did not exist to write poems, to preach or to paint, neither I nor anyone else. All of that was incidental. Each man had only one genuine vocation — to find the way to himself […] to discover his own destiny — not an arbitrary one — and live it out wholly and resolutely within himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses, conformity, and fear of one’s own inwardness.

111

I had already felt much loneliness, now there was a deeper loneliness still which was inescapable.

112

[Pistorius said] “[…] I am not capable of standing so naked and alone. I, too, am a poor weak creature who needs warmth and food and occasionally the comfort of human companionship. Someone who seeks nothing but his own fate no longer has any companion, he stands quite alone and has only cold universal space around him. […]”
[Pistorius said] “[…] But the man who seeks his destiny has neither models nor ideals, has nothing clear and consoling! And actually this is the path one should follow. People like you and me are quite lonely really but we still have each other, we have the secret satisfaction of being different, of rebelling, of desiring the unusual. But you must shed that, too, if you want to go all the way to the end. […]”

113

[ending] My schooldays were over. I was to take a trip during my vacation — my father’s idea — and then enter a university. But I did not know what I would major in. I had been granted my wish: one semester of philosophy. Any other subject would have done as well.

[Chapter] 7: Eva

114

[opening] Once during my vacation I visited the house where years before Demian had lived with his mother. I saw an old woman strolling in the garden and, speaking with her, learned that is was her house. I inquired about the Demian family.

115

There were other days when I realized the futility of my search. […] I found it impossible to fall asleep. Only while traveling on the train could I catch an occasional brief nap. […] I would have rather died on the spot than have paid attention to another woman, even for an hour.
[…] [A]t the university of H […] lectures on the history of philosophy were just as uninspired and stereotyped as the activities of most of the students. Everything seemed to run according to an old pattern, everyone was doing the same thing, and the exaggerated gaiety on the boyish faces looked depressingly empty and ready-made. But at least I was free.
I lived with [Nietzsche]], sensed the loneliness of his soul, perceived the fate that had propelled him on inexorably; I suffered with him, and rejoiced that there had been one man who followed his destiny so relentlessly.

116

I stood at a street corner and listened: out of two bars the methodically rehearsed gaiety of youth rang out against the night. False communion everywhere, everywhere shedding the responsibility of fate, flight to the herd for warmth.
[…] I relished the sound of Demian’s voice. It still had its familiar ring; the same old beautiful certainty and calm had all their old power over me. Now all was well. I had found him.

117

“Did you recognize me at once?” “Of course. You’ve change[d] somewhat. But you have the sign. […] You’ve always had it, that’s why I became your friend. But now it has become more distinct. [….] [My mother and I have] been in the dark about you for a long time.”
Only our earliest and closest bond, the Franz Kromer episode, was never mentioned.

118

“Genuine communion,” said Demian, “is a beautiful thing. But what we see flourishing everywhere is nothing of the kind. The real spirit will come from the knowledge that separate individuals have of one another and for a time it will transform the world. The community spirit at present is only a manifestation of the herd instinct. Men fly into each other’s arms because they are afraid of each other — the owners are for themselves, the workers for themselves, the scholars for themselves! And why are they afraid? You are only afraid if you are not in harmony with yourself. People are afraid because they have never owned up to themselves. A whole society composed of men afraid of the unknown within them! […] They know exactly how many ounces of powder it takes to kill a man but they don’t know how to pray to God, they don’t even know how to be happy for a single contented hour. […]”

119

[Demian said] “[…] They hanker after ideals no longer but they will hound the man to death who sets up a new one. I can feel the approaching conflict. It’s coming, believe me, and soon. […] The will of humanity, which our Europe has shouted down for a time with its frenzy of technology, will come to the fore again. And then it will become clear that the will of humanity is nowhere — and never was — identical with the will of present-day societies, states and peoples, clubs and churches. No, what Nature wants of man stands indelibly written in the individual, in you, in me. It stood written in Jesus, it stood written in Nietzsche. These tendencies — which are the only important ones and which, of course, can assume different forms every day — will have room to breathe once the present societies have collapsed.”

119–120

Here and there students were reeling noisily to their quarters. I had often marked the contrast between their almost ludicrous gaiety and my lonely existence, sometimes with scorn, sometimes with a feeling of deprivation. But never until today had I felt with as much calm and secret strength how little it mattered to me, how remote and dead this world was for me.

120

Everywhere they looked for “freedom” and “luck” in the past, out of sheer dread of their present responsibilities and future course. They drank and caroused for a few years and then they slunk away to become serious-minded gentlemen in the service of the state. Yes, our society was rotten, and these student stupidities were not so stupid, not so bad as a hundred other things.
Let the students have their drunken orgies and tattoo their faces; the rotten world could await its destruction — for all I cared. I was waiting for one thing — to see my fate step forth in a new guise.
For the first time the outer world was perfectly attuned to the world within; it was a joy to be alive.

121

I had forgotten that the world could still be so lovely. I had grown accustomed to living within myself. I was resigned thad only o the knowledge that I had lost all appreciation of the outside world, that the loss of its bright colors was an inseparable part of the loss of my childhood, and that, in a certain sense, one had to pay for freedom and maturity of the soul with the renunciation of this cherished aura. But now, overjoyed, I saw that all this had only been buried or clouded over and that it was still possible — even if you had become liberated and had renounced your childhood happiness — to see the world shine and to savor the delicious thrill of the child’s vision.

121–122

In a flash I saw hosts of images throng past my mind’s eye; my parents’ house […], the boy Demian […], myself as a boy […], myself as an adolescent […], the soul caught in the intricacies of its own threads — and everything, everything to this present moment resounded once more within me, was affirmed by me, answered, sanctioned.

122

“One never reaches home,” [Demian’s mother] said. “But where paths that have affinity for each other intersect, the whole world, looks like home, for a time.”
Her voice and her words resembled her son’s and yet were quite different. Everything was riper, warmer, more self-evident. But just as Max had never given anyone the impression of being a boy, so his mother did not appear at all like a woman who had a full-grown son […].

122–123

I had attained a goal, a high point on the road: from there the next stage of the journey appeared unhampered and marvelous, leading toward promised lands.

123

[Demian’s mother said] “[…] It is always difficult to be born. You know the chick does not find it easy to break his way out of the shell. […]”

124

[Demian’s mother said] “[…] Yes, you must find your dream, then the way becomes easy. But there is no dream that lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular one.”
I heard her voice behind me, calm and yet brimful with tenderness as a beaker with wine.

125

“[…] Frau Eva! The name fits her perfectly. She is like a universal mother.” […] “So you know her name already? You can be proud of yourself. You are the first person she has told it to during the first meeting.”

125–126

[…] I went in and out of the house like a son or a brother — but also as someone in love. […] Outside was reality […] — but here inside there was love; here lived the legend and the dream. And yet we lived in no way cut off from the outside world; in our thoughts and conversations we often lived in the midst of it, only on an entirely different plane […] separated from the majority of men […] simply by another mode of vision.

126

Our task was to represent an island in the world, a prototype perhaps, or at least a prospect of a different way of life. I, who had been isolated for so long, learned about the companionship which is possible between two people who have tasted complete loneliness.
But whereas we, who were marked, believed that we represented the will of Nature to something new, to the individualism of the future, the other sought to perpetuate the status quo. Humanity — which they loved as much as we did — was for them something complete that must be maintained and protected. For us humanity was a distant goal toward which all men were moving, whose image no one knew, whose laws were nowhere written down.

127

Thus from everything we collected in this manner, we gained a critical understanding of our time and of contemporary Europe: with prodigious efforts mighty new weapons had been created for mankind but the end was flagrant, deep desolation of the spirit. Europe had conquered the whole world only to lose her own soul.
We in the inner circle listened but accepted none of these teachings as anything but metaphors. We, who bore the mark, felt no anxiety about the shape the future was to take.

127-128

Demian often said to me: “What will come is beyond imagining. The soul of Europe is a beast that has lain fettered for an infinitely long time. And when it’s free, its first movements won’t be the gentlest. […] Then our day will come, then we will be needed. Not as leaders and lawgivers […] but rather as those who are willing, as men who are ready to go forth and stand prepared wherever fate may need them. Look, all men are prepared to accomplish the incredible if their ideals are threatened. But no one is ready when a new ideal, a new and perhaps dangerous and ominous impulse, makes itself felt. The few of us who will be ready at that time and who will go forth — will be use. […] All men who have had an effect on the course of human history, all of them without exception, were capable and effective only because they were ready to accept the inevitable.

129–130

[Eva] said: “You must not give way to desires which you don’t believe in. I know what you desire. You should, however, either be capable of renouncing these desires or feel wholly justified in having them. Once you are able to make your request in such a way that you will be quite certain of its fulfillment, then the fulfillment will come. But at present you alternate between desire and renunciation and are afraid all the time. All that must be overcome. […]”

130

“Love must not entreat,” [Eva] added, “or demand. Love must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then it ceases merely to be attracted to and begins to attract. […]”
[Eva:] “[…] I will not make a gift of myself, I must be won.”

131

And instead of merely winning a woman he embraced the entire world and every star in heaven glowed within him and sparkled with joy in his soul. He had loved and had found himself. But most people love to lose themselves.

132

“The dream is beautiful,” she said quietly. “Make it come true.”
[…] and it flashed through me: You’ve seen this before!

133

[I] kissed the rain out of her hair. Her eyes were bright and calm but the raindrops tasted like tears.

134

Then a loose, yellow cloud swept across the sky, collided with the other, gray bank of cloud. In a few second the wind had fashioned a shape out of this yellow and blue-gray mass, a gigantic bird that tore itself free of the steel-blue chaos and flew off into the sky with a great beating of wings. Then the storm became audible and rain rattled down mixed with hail. A brief, incredible, terrifying roar of thunder cracked across the rain-lashed landscape and immediately afterwards a gleam of sunshine burst through. On the nearby mountains the pale snow shone livid and unreal above the brown forest.
[Demian:] “[…] One can see that you really were outside.”
Demian heaved a great sigh.

135

“[…] I only feel that [the bird] signifies some shattering event, a move on the part of destiny. I believe that it concerns all of us.”

136

[Demian:] “[…] The world wants to renew itself. There’s a smell of death in the air. Nothing can be born without first dying. But it is far more terrible than I had thought.”
[Demian:] “[…] [I]t’s no use anyway. Whatever happens will suddenly be here; then we shall learn soon enough what we need to know.”
[ending] [W]hen I took my leave and walked alone through the hallway, the stale scent of hyacinths seemed cadaverous. A shadow had fallen over us.

[Chapter] 8: The End Begins

137

[opening] I had persuaded my parents to allow me the summer semester in H.
[T]hese months in H. seemed to me altogether like a magic dream island on which I was allowed to lead a comfortable, enchanted existence among beautiful and agreeable surroundings. […] Yet at any moment this happiness could produce in me the deepest melancholy, for I knew very well that it could not last. It was not my lot to breathe fullness and comfort, I needed the spur of tormented haste. I felt that one day I would waken […] and stand, alone again, in the cold world where there was nothing for me but solitude and struggle […].

139

[Demian] spoke very softly although no one was anywhere near us. “[…] there will be war […] But you will see, Sinclair, that this is only the beginning. Perhaps it will be a very big war, a war on a gigantic scale. But that, too, will only be the beginning. The new world has begun and the new world will be terrible for those clinging to the old. What will you do?”
140
[Demian:] “[…] You know I dislike calling attention to myself so much I almost always went to the other extreme, just to give a correct impression. I believe I’ll be on the front in a week.”

141

How strange that the stream of the world was not to bypass us any more, that it now went straight through our hearts, and that now or very soon the moment would come when the world would need us, when it would seek to transform itself.
[Eva] rose to her feet and preceded me into the garden twilight. Tall and regal she strode between the silent trees.
All men seemed to have become brothers — overnight. They talked of “the fatherland” and of “honor,” but what lay behind it was their own fate whose unveiled face they had now all beheld for one brief moment. Young men left their barracks, were packed into trains, and on many faces I saw a sign — not ours — but a beautiful, dignified sign nonetheless that meant love and death.

142

But this intoxication was sacred, for it was the result of their all having thrown that brief and terribly disquieting glance into the eyes of their fate.
At one time I had given much thought to why men were so very rarely capable of living for an ideal. Now I saw that many, no, all men were capable of dying for one. Yet it could not be a personal, a freely chosen ideal; it had to be one mutually accepted.
Many, very many, not only during the attack but at every moment of the day, wore in their eyes the remote, resolute, somewhat possessed look which knows nothing of aims and signified complete surrender to the incredible.
Deep down, underneath, something was taking shape. Something akin to a new humanity.

144

I was night and I was fully conscious […] in the long hall, bedded down on the floor. […] [C]lose to my mattress lay another; someone on it bent forward and looked at me […] It was Max Demian. […] He smiled. He gazed into my eyes for what seemed like an endless time. Slowly he brought his face closer to mine: we almost touched. “Sinclair,” he said in a whisper. […] His lips lay very close to mine. Quietly he continued to speak. […] “Little Sinclair, listen: I will have to go away. […] You’ll have to listen within yourself, then you will notice that I am within you. Do you understand? […]”

144–145

[Demian:] “[…] Frau Eva said that if you were ever in a bad way I was to give you a kiss from her that she sends by me…. Close your eyes, Sinclair!”

145

[ending] Dressing the wound hurt. Everything that has happened to me since has hurt. But sometimes when I find the key and climb deep into myself where the images of fate lie aslumber in the dark mirror, I need only bend over that dark mirror to behold my own image, now completely resembling him, my brother, my master.

[About Demian (by Hal Hager)] Demian, The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth, 1919 (U.S. 1948)

147

[opening] Hermann Hesse wrote his fifth novel — Demian: Die Geschichte von Emil Sinclairs Jugend — over a few months in 1917, the year following his father’s death, his younger son’s serious illness, and his wife’s mental breakdown; and immediately after undergoing analysis in Lucerne, Switzerland, with a proponent of the depth psychology of Carl Jung.

148

In his own preface of the novel, Hesse emphasized that each individual human being “represents the unique, very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again.”

149

[ending] As Thomas Mann pointed out, Demian “called forth grateful rapture from a whole youthful generation who believed that an interpreter of their innermost life had risen from their own midst ,” not realizing that the seer whom they now revered was forty-two years old.

[About Hermann Hesse (by Hal Hager)] Hermann Hesse

151

[opening] “I was born in Calw in the Black Forest on July 2, 1877,” Hermann Hesse wrote in his autobiographical statement for the Nobel Literature Committee in 1946, on the occasion of his being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

152

He was involved in that frequently difficult transition between adolescent dependence and mature self-awareness, the transition — together with the attendant resentments, rebellions, disdains, and despondencies — that would be a major theme of all his fiction.

153

He later wrote that the title and contents of [his first prose collection, Eine Stunde hinter Mitternacht (An Hour Behind Midnight)] suggested “the kingdom in which I lived, the dreamland of my working hours and days that lay mysteriously anywhere between time and space.”
[Hesse’s first novel, Peter Camenzind] also introduced the theme with which Hesse would be engaged throughout his career: the individual’s arduous search for self-awareness, identity, and self-fulfillment.
[Hesse wrote] “a rural life, far from the cities and civilization, was my aim. Since then I have always lived in the country.”

154

[Hesse’s novels Gertrud (1910; U.S. Gertrude, 1969) and Rosshalde (1914; U.S. 1970)] addressed the problems, personal and social, faced by the committed artist, the individual who has chosen a life of creativity.

155

Seeking relief from his despondency, Hesse contacted Dr. Joseph Lang, a disciple of the great Swiss psychiatrist, Carl Jung, and began a program of analysis and learning Jung’s theories — thereby absorbing one of the most important influences on his later work.

156

Hesse also took up painting for the first time during these years; he would become an accomplished, widely exhibited painter; and painting remained his favorite hobby throughout the rest of his life.
Having lived in Switzerland for more than twenty years, and having despaired of his native country’s ability to reclaim its artistic and cultural legitimacy, Hesse renounced his German citizenship in 1923 and adopted Swiss citizenship.

157

[Narziss und Goldmund (1930; U.S. Narcissus and Goldmund, 1968) is] one of Hesse’s most popular novels and regarded by many as his greatest. This story of a friendship between two priests in the Middle Ages — one at peace with his received religion and beliefs, the other a wanderer in search of his own peace and salvation — emphasizes Hesse’s attitudes toward self-denying spiritual austerity and the creative energies of the individual soul.

158

[ending] Hermann Hesse spent his final years in seclusion, in his beloved Montagnola House, where he died on August 9, 1962.