Demian
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Hermann Hesse
<p>James Kingsland is a science and medical journalist with twenty-five years of experience working for publications such as <em>New Scientist</em>, <em>Nature</em>, and most recently the <em>Guardian</em> (UK), where he was a commissioning editor and a contributor for its Notes & Theories blog. On his own blog, Plastic Brain, he writes about neuroscience and Buddhist psychology.</p>
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Reviews for Demian
1,605 ratings21 reviews
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This was swallowed the same period as Steppenwolf. I recall this one for the inclusion of jazz in its milieu. Not much of a chance for a return.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Published in 1919, it’s the coming-of-age story of a middle class boy and his struggle between a “world of light” and a "world of illusion". This was my first Hermann Hesse book, and I’ve added several more to my reading list. Good stuff.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This book made such a progress in my brain, that at the moment I finished it, I literally threw it in the ground and couldn't speak for half an hour. It made me think of things I have never thought before. Amazing. :D
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Although an early work Hesse was 42 at time of publication and no youth. Overall I think he tried to do too much and the novel doesn't come together dissolving into a morass of symbols. The ideas are complex requiring external reading and in the end unless you are religious it won't be terribly profound, except as an intellectual exercise. It was perfect for the post-FIrst World War generation in Germany who questioned authority and God in the face of defeat. And I might have liked it as a younger person in the 1960s counter-culture environment. Hesse is a godfather of counter-culture, though not by design, he was 40 years ahead of his time and couldn't have predicted beats and hippies. But there is a connection worth exploring. Germany's collapse created a new culture that spread westward, not unlike what is happening with new Russian culture spreading in the decades after its collapse. Sadly the Russians do it through a different form of art then prestige literature.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5a favourite and classic book!
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Long my favorite novel. I'm just a sucker for an existentialist Bildungsroman.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Why had I not discover this book when I was a teenager? Would I have enjoyed it so much if I had??
Hesse is a great writer. A great read for anyone really interested in exploring what it means to think independently. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Herman Hesse has a way with writing that it makes you feel like he is telling you the secrets of the world. The book is mainly insight driven. You experience a person's struggle as he grows up and experiences the world outside the safety of his home. There are many allusions of good vs evil and I feel Herman Hesse does a good job showing that it is not as easy to define as some would think. The protagonist meets many "guides" along the way that help him with his journey, which only we could all be so lucky. But it served as a good way of detailing the ups and downs of life, growth and experiences, but mainly that you really have to work on yourself to figure out who you are and where you would like to fit in the world. While this book is good, if you are looking to start a Herman Hesse book I would recommend starting with his other books as they are much stronger reads.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Excellent book. Great coming of age story with an emphasis on spiritual and philosophical development. Love the subtle supernatural elements. Brilliant and more than a little creepy.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5a darker yet more approachable child shouting out to the education system, being too smart for his own good, growing up, and dying. hesse at his in-between.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/51173. Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth, by Herman Hesse (read 26 Jul 1972) This is the first book of Hesse's I read and I was much moved, being reminded of Kafka and The Wanderer by Alain Fournier, I having read The Wanderer in June of 1961, but felt Demian was much more connected and less obviously dreamlike. I was carried away by the word painting of mood: "But I felt dispirited, and when I took my leave and walked alone thru the hallway, the stale scent of the hyacinth seemed cadaverous. A shadow had fallen over us." I went on to read seven other Hesse books, with appreciation of nearly all of them.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5wonderfull book, reminded me of some of my own feelings when growing up.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5An enlightening examination of duality and individual transformation that everyone should read. Those who do not wholly identify with Sinclair will still be absorbed by the great story and beautiful language. Those who do identify with Sinclair however, will be amazed that someone was able to articulate in writing this scarce man whose path is rarely comprehended. None better than Hesse to do it, surely. An amazing novel by an amazing novelist. One of my favorites.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5I love Hesse, one of my favorite authors ever. Not only is the spirtualism/sensualism dichotomy (which forms the major theme of all of his works) one of the more interesting philosophical questions of mankind, but I can't think of any author who has continually revealed his own personal neuroses and self-doubts through their characters. This quality has always provoked a certain empathy, admiration, and even self-recognition when I read his books. As someone concerned with those important questions of life, I can identify with his characters, and, because his characters are so autobiographical, I feel like I can consequently identify with Hesse himself.
One of the more fascinating thought exercises related to Hesse is studying his works as attempts to reconcile these two aspects of life: the ethereal, divine and ecstatic with the corporeal, material and sensual. As brilliant as he was, he never figured out how to do it completely, which is what makes all of his novels ultimately unsatisfying. The interesting part, however, is that each successive novel comes closer to the answer, so that Demian feels by far the least developed, and while Hesse realizes "Nirvana" in Siddhartha, it never feels authentically earned. Steppenwolf feels altogether more on the right track before devolving into a psychedelic madhouse (perhaps precisely because he didn't know where next to take it?), and then Narcissus and Goldmund and The Journey to the East get even closer to the ultimate reconciliation while still falling short. The Glass Bead Game is by far the most developed of his novels and gets tantalizingly close to a "solution" for this problem, but it still leaves the reader vaguely grasping at the "how" of Hesse's prescription.
As obsessed as Hesse was with this issue, he was never able to solve it, and it leaves us with the suspicion that it is an insoluble problem, perhaps THE insoluble issue of humanity. His books are so enjoyable, though, precisely because nobody has ever taken up the question with such earnest seriousness. All of his books leave us unsatisfied, but upon further thought one concludes that they are unsatisfactory only because they so unerringly reflect the great human predicament: the paradox of the divine animal. **Full Disclosure: I can no longer remember concretely, but I suspect that I owe a lot of credit for this analysis to Colin Wilson, from his fantastic The Outsider.** - Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I thought this was brilliant when I was a teenager. Someday I should reread it and see if I agree as an adult.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5I first read Demian (my first Hermann Hesse) when I was 14. It was eye-opening and I fell in love with Bildungsroman in general, probably because at that time I was a teenager myself. The struggles Emil Sinclair goes through are not unlike those of many other young people, and the issue of belonging and peer pressure is explored in a realistic and yet lyrical manner by Hesse. On a borader and more universal level, the book also is an exercise in personal judgment, beliefs and reasoning right as Europe was emerging from the ashes of the Great War. Beautiful book, it should be required reading in high schools across the United States.
- Rating: 2 out of 5 stars2/5What should have taken me only hours to read ended up taking me nearly three days; Demian can be an exhausting read, especially if you're not used to heavy philosophical diatribes passed-off as dialogue. I'm sure that Demian is a lot better than I've suggested here, but it depends on the person reading, and I really struggled. It isn't the first Hesse novel I've read, but I'm frankly put off now, and it'll take a lot to get me back in. I'll stick with what I can more readily understand.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5Unfortunately I read Narcissus and Goldmund before this book, so I was not as impressed as I may have been otherwise. Demian is Narcissus and Goldmund's less experienced little brother; both books explore the same ideas about education, sprituality, and individual will, but N&G is much longer and more developed, spanning the entire lives of its main characters, whereas I felt Demian ended abruptly with too many questions left unanswered. If you are going to read this, read it before Narcissus and Goldmund.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5This is an excellent book that chronicles a young man's discovery of a personal philosophy. The duality of nature as well as many of the tenants of individualism are fictionalized in an engaging manner. Personally I found the book to be an easy read, but there were certain passages that I read over and over out of sheer joy.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Published in 1919, it’s the coming-of-age story of a middle class boy and his struggle between a “world of light” and a "world of illusion". This was my first Hermann Hesse book, and I’ve added several more to my reading list. Good stuff.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5One of the books that made Hesse into such a hero back in the day. We are entertained, but also prodded into thinking.
Book preview
Demian - Hermann Hesse
DEMIAN
THE STORY OF A YOUTH
BY HERMANN HESSE
A Digireads.com Book
Digireads.com Publishing
Print ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-4794-6
EBook ISBN 13: 978-1-4209-4795-3
This edition copyright © 2013
Please visit www.digireads.com
CONTENTS
THE STORY OF EMIL SINCLAIR'S YOUTH
CHAPTER 1. TWO WORLDS
CHAPTER 2. CAIN
CHAPTER 3. THE THIEF ON THE CROSS
CHAPTER 4. BEATRICE
CHAPTER 5. THE BIRD FIGHTS ITS WAY OUT OF THE EGG
CHAPTER 6. JACOB WRESTLES WITH GOD
CHAPTER 7. MOTHER EVE
CHAPTER 8. BEGINNING OF THE END
DEMIAN
THE STORY OF EMIL SINCLAIR'S YOUTH
I wanted only to try to live in obedience to the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?
In order to tell my story, I must begin far back. If it were possible, I should have to go back much further still, to the earliest years of my childhood, and even beyond, to my distant ancestry.
Authors, in writing novels, usually act as if they were God, and could, by a broadness of perception, comprehend and present any human story as if God were telling it to Himself without veiling anything, and with all the essential details. That I cannot do, any more than can the authors themselves. But I attach more importance to my story than can any other writer to his: because it is my own, and it is the story of a human being—not that of an invented, possible, ideal or otherwise, non-existent creature, but that of a real, unique, living man. What that is, a real living man, one certainly knows less today than ever. For men are shot down in heaps-men, of whom each one is a precious, unique experiment of nature. If we were nothing more than individuals, we could actually be put out of the world entirely with a musket-ball, and in that case there would be no more sense in relating stories. But each man is not only himself, he is also the unique, quite special, and in every case the important and remarkable point where the world's phenomena converge, in a certain manner, never again to be repeated. For that reason the history of everyone is important, eternal, divine. For that reason every man, so long as he lives at all and carries out the will of nature, is wonderful and worthy of every attention. In everyone has the spirit taken shape, in everyone creation suffers, in everyone is a redeemer crucified.
Few today know what man is. Many feel it, and for that reason die the easier, as I shall die the easier, when I have finished my story.
I must not call myself one who knows. I was a seeker and am still, but I seek no more in the stars or in books; I am beginning to listen to the promptings of those instincts which are coursing in my very blood. My story is not pleasant, it is not sweet and harmonious like the fictitious stories. It smacks of nonsense and perplexity, of madness and dreams, like the lives of all men who do not wish to delude themselves any longer.
The life of everyone is a way to himself, the search for a road, the indication of a path. No man has ever yet attained to self-realization; yet he strives thereafter, one ploddingly, another with less effort, each as best he can. Each one carries the remains of his birth, slime and eggshells of a primeval world, with him to the end. Many a one will remain a frog, a lizard, an ant. Many a one is top-part man and bottom-part fish. But everyone is a projection of nature into manhood. To us all the same origin is common, our mothers—we all come out of the womb. But each of us—an experiment, one of nature's litter, strives after his own ends. We can understand one another; but each one is able to explain only himself.
CHAPTER 1. TWO WORLDS
I WILL BEGIN my story with an event of the time when I was ten or eleven years old and went to the Latin school of our little town. Much of the old-time fragrance is wafted back to me, but my sensations are not unmixed, as I pass in review my memories—dark streets and bright houses and towers, the striking of clocks and the features of men, comfortable and homely rooms, rooms full of secrecy and dread of ghosts. I sense again the atmosphere of cozy warmth, of rabbits and servant-girls, of household remedies and dried fruit. Two worlds passed there one through the other. From two poles came forth day and night.
The one world was my home, but it was even narrower than that, for it really comprised only my parents. This world was for the most part very well known to me; it meant mother and father, love and severity, good example and school. It was a world of subdued luster, of clarity and cleanliness; here were tender friendly words, washed hands, clean clothes and good manners. Here the morning hymn was sung, and Christmas was kept.
In this world were straight lines and paths which led into the future; here were duty and guilt, evil conscience and confession, pardon and good resolutions, love and adoration, Bible texts and wisdom. To this world our future had to belong, it had to be crystal-pure, beautiful and well ordered.
The other world, however, began right in the midst of our own household, and was entirely different, had another odor, another manner of speech and made different promises and demands. In this second world were servant-girls and workmen, ghost stories and breath of scandal. There was a gaily colored flood of monstrous, tempting, terrible, enigmatical goings-on, things such as the slaughter house and prison, drunken men and scolding women, cows in birth-throes, plunging horses, tales of burglaries, murders, suicides. All these beautiful and dreadful, wild and cruel things were round about, in the next street, in the next house. Policemen and tramps passed to and fro, drunken men beat their wives, crowds of young girls flowed out of factories in the evening, old women were able to bewitch you and make you ill, robbers dwelt in the wood, incendiaries were rounded up by mounted policemen—everywhere seethed and reeked this second, passionate world, everywhere, except in our rooms, where mother and father were. And that was a good thing. It was wonderful that here in our house there were peace, order and repose, duty and a good conscience, pardon and love—and wonderful that there were also all the other things, all that was loud and shrill, sinister and violent, yet from which one could escape with one bound to mother.
And the oddest thing was, how closely the two worlds bordered each other, how near they both were! For instance, our servant Lina, as she sat by the sitting-room door at evening prayers, and sang the hymn with her bright voice, her freshly washed hands laid on her smoothed-out apron, belonged absolutely to father and mother, to us, to what was bright and proper. Immediately after, in the kitchen or in the woodshed, when she was telling me the tale of the headless dwarf, or when she quarreled with the women of the neighborhood in the little butcher's shop, then she was another person, belonged to the other world, and was enveloped in mystery. It was the same with everything and everyone, especially with myself. To be sure, I belonged to the bright, respectable world, I was my parents' child, but the other world was present in everything I saw and heard, and I also lived in it, although it was often strange and foreign to me, although one had there regularly a bad conscience and anxiety. Sometimes I even liked to live in the forbidden world best, and often the homecoming into the brightness—however necessary and good it might be—seemed almost like a return to something less beautiful, to something more uninteresting and desolate. At times I realized this: my aim in life was to grow up like my father and mother, as bright and pure, as systematic and superior. But the road to attainment was long, you had to go to school and study and pass tests and examinations. The road led past the other dark world and through it, and it was not improbable that you would remain there and be buried in it. There were stories of prodigal sons to whom that had happened—I was passionately fond of reading them. There the return home to father and to the respectable world was always so liberating and so sublime, I quite felt that this alone was right and good and desirable. But still that part of the stories which dealt with the wicked and profligate was by far the most alluring, and if one had been allowed to acknowledge it openly, it was really often a great pity that the prodigal repented and was redeemed. But one did not say that, nor did one actually think it. It was only present somehow or other as a presentiment or a possibility, deep down in one's feelings. When I pictured the devil to myself, I could quite well imagine him down below in the street, openly or in disguise, or at the annual fair or in the public house, but I could never imagine him with us at home.
My sisters also belonged to the bright world. It often seemed to me that they approached more nearly to father and mother; that they were better and nicer mannered than myself, without so many faults. They had their failings, they were naughty, but that did not seem to me to be deep-rooted. It was not the same as for me, for whom the contact with evil was strong and painful, and the dark world so much nearer. My sisters, like my parents, were to be treated with regard and respect. If you had had a quarrel with them, your own conscience accused you afterwards as the wrongdoer and the cause of the squabble, as the one who had to beg pardon. For in opposing my sisters I offended my parents, the representatives of goodness and law. There were secrets which I would much sooner have shared with the most depraved street urchins than with my sisters. On good, bright days when I had a good conscience, it was often delightful to play with my sisters, to be gentle and nice to them, and to see myself under a halo of goodness. That was how it must be if you were an angel! That was the most sublime thing we knew, to be an angel, surrounded by sweet sounds and fragrance like Christmas and happiness. But, oh, how seldom were such days and hours perfect! Often when we were playing one of the nice, harmless, proper games I was so vehement and impetuous, and I so annoyed my sisters that we quarreled and were unhappy. Then when I was carried away by anger I did and said things, the wickedness of which I felt deep and burning within me, even while I was doing and saying them. Then came sad, dark hours of remorse and contrition, the painful moment when I begged pardon, then again a beam of light, a peaceful, grateful happiness without discord, for minutes or hours.
I used to go to the Latin school. The sons of the mayor and of the head forester were in my class and sometimes used to come to our house. They were wild boys, but still they belonged to the world of goodness and of propriety. In spite of that I had close relations with neighbors' boys, children of the public school, whom in general we despised. With one of these I must begin my story.
One half-holiday—I was little more than ten at the time—I went out with two boys of the neighborhood. A public-school boy of about thirteen years joined our party; he was bigger than we were, a coarse and robust fellow, the son of a tailor. His father was a drunkard, and the whole family had a bad reputation. I knew Frank Kromer well, I was afraid of him, and was very much displeased when he joined us. He had already acquired manly ways, and imitated the gait and manner of speech of the young factory hands. Under his leadership we stepped down to the bank of the stream and hid ourselves from the world under the first arch of the bridge. The little bank between the vaulted bridge wall and the sluggishly flowing water was composed of nothing but trash, of broken china and garbage, of twisted bundles of rusty iron wire and other rubbish. You sometimes found there useful things. We had to search the stretch under Frank Kromer's direction and show him what we found. He then either kept it himself or threw it away into the water. He bid us note whether the things were of lead, brass or tin. Everything we found of this description he kept for himself, as well as an old horn comb. I felt very uneasy in his company, not because I knew that father would have forbidden our playing together had he known of it, but through fear of Frank himself. I was glad that he treated me like the others. He commanded and we obeyed; it seemed habitual to me, although that was the first time I was with him.
At last we sat down. Frank spat into the water and looked like a full-grown man; he spat through a gap in his teeth, directing the sputum in any direction he wished. He began a conversation, and the boys vied with one another in bragging of schoolboy exploits and pranks. I was silent, and yet, if I said nothing, I was afraid of calling attention to myself and inciting Kromer's anger against me. My two comrades had from the beginning turned their backs on me, and had sided with him; I was a stranger among them, and I felt my clothes and manner to be a provocation. It was impossible that Frank should like me, a Latin schoolboy and the son of a gentleman, and the other two, I felt, as soon as it came to the point, would disown me and leave me in the lurch.
At last, through mere fright, I also began to relate a story. I invented a long narration of theft, of which I made myself the hero. In a garden by the mill on the corner, I recounted, I had one night with the help of a friend stolen a whole sack of apples, and those none of the ordinary sorts, but russets and golden pippins, the very best. In the danger of the moment I had recourse to the telling of this story, which I invented easily and re-counted readily. In order not to have to finish off immediately, and so perhaps be led from bad to worse, I gave full scope to my inventive powers. One of us, I continued, always had to stand sentinel, while the other was throwing down apples from the tree, and the sack had become so heavy that at last we had to open it again and leave half the apples behind; but we returned at the end of half an hour and took the rest away with us.
I hoped at the end to gain some little applause, I had warmed to my work and had let myself go in my narration. The two small boys waited quiet and expectant, but Frank Kromer looked at me penetratingly through half-closed eyes and asked me in a threatening tone:
Is that true?
Yes,
I said.
Really and truly?
Yes, really and truly,
I asserted defiantly, though