Demian most closely links Hesse's life and art in its account of its hero's young years. A glance at Hesse's childhood in a strict Pietist household, where he felt isolated as a rebel, suggests that with Demian he sought to exorcise a demon in himself. Sinclair's family in a small-town home with a fair but strict father, a protective and overpowering mother, and two prim sisters reflects Hesse's own childhood in the Black Forest town of Calw. This was also the region where the young writer went to boarding school and later to the university. Like Hesse's, Sinclair's adolescent years during the fin de siecle and the early years of the twentieth century were rife with excess, alcohol, and arrogant behavior.
The time of Demian's gestation and its date of publication correspond to Hesse's struggle to free himself from his marriage and family in order to strike out on his own. The third year of the war, 1916, saw the death of Hesse's father and the growing mental illness of his wife, Maria Bernoulli, or Mia. Under this pressure, Hesse suffered a deepening depression of his own. His novel successfully embodies both the crises of war and those within himself, and the emergence of both Hesse and Europe from one phase of life to a new one.
In 1917, Hesse's youngest son, Martin, became seriously ill, and Hesse himself suffered a nervous breakdown. He entered Sonnmatt, a sanatorium near Lucerne. In a letter to an old friend, Helene Welti, he described succinctly his state of mind at that time: "I'm suffering from the growth of a crisis, where the physical aspect is only of negligible though of symbolic importance . . . partly an inner disharmony, which has grown in me for years but which now, somehow, demands a solution, if carrying on is to have any meaning at all."7 Hesse, as is often noted, stands out as the first major writer to have been psychoanalyzed. As a key to his inner self and to the work that reflects it, psychoanalysis offers a useful perspective.
At Sonnmatt, Hesse was treated by the perceptive analyst Dr. Josef Bernhard Lang, a disciple of C. G. Jung's. A near-mythical meeting brought together the thirty-three-year-old analyst and the well-known writer of thirty-nine. Their therapy took place in the extremely personal atmosphere typical of the early years of psychoanalysis--an analysis that consisted of twelve sessions lasting up to three hours each, and, after Hesse's release from the sanatorium, continuing with fifty more sessions in Dr. Lang's apartment in Lucerne.
This experience was crucial for Demian and its daring penetration of the unconscious. Hesse came well prepared. In 1918, he had written an essay entitled "Artists and Psychoanalysis," insisting that the artist's "search for psychological causes in memories, dreams, and associations, retains as its permanent gain what may be called the inner relationship to his own unconscious."8 Hesse welcomed Freud's concept of "sublimation," then becoming known, a way of displacing feelings by substituting artistic creation for them. Through his growing friendship with Dr. Lang, Hesse also assimilated Jung's view that the content of the individual's unconscious is an expression of a "collective" unconscious, determined by the memories and symbols of a given culture. Although Hesse remained sympathetic to Freud's individual approach, the dreams that fill the pages of Demian are subject primarily to a Jungian interpretation. In fact, the role of J. B. Lang in Hesse's life and art pervades this novel and gives it its specific direction.
Creating images that expressed his state of mind became part of Emil Sinclair's "cure." In Demian, the omnipresent symbol of the hawk in the coat of arms of Sinclair's family is a striking example. "That night I dreamed about Demian and the coat of arms. It changed from one thing into another in a continual metamorphosis while Demian held it in his hands: now it was small and gray, now multicolored and tremendously large. He explained to me [Sinclair] that it nevertheless remained always one and the same. Finally he made me eat it. When I swallowed it, I felt, with monstrous horror, that the bird on the coat of arms I had swallowed was still alive inside me--it filled me entirely and started to eat away at me from the inside."9 Awakening, Sinclair paints a picture of the heraldic bird that objectifies the mystery of the dream (70-71).
4
Levels of awareness, then, determine Demian's meaning and design. Delving deeply into himself, Hesse created a form remarkable for its unique presentation of the individual within the "collective" unconscious without disturbing the interaction among characters expected of a conventional novel. Its dramatis personae are for the most part symbolic fictions, except for the narrator, Emil Sinclair, who stands out as the only fully developed character. For his story, Hesse used a time-honored German form of narrative, the so-called bildungsroman, a novel of education, which takes the reader from Sinclair's boyhood at the age of ten to his maturity at age twenty, roughly from 1906 to 1916.
We find that the world of his childhood is divided between "light" and "dark"--cleanliness and propriety set against dirt and fear, his own proper family against servants and laborers, criminals and people sick in hospitals. From then on, his education proceeds on two levels: daily life in a small town and a reality increasingly infused by "magic."
In order to impress an audience of village toughs (clearly inhabitants of the "dark" world), ten-year-old Sinclair falsely boasts that he has stolen a basket of apples. While Hesse probably had the first "forbidden fruit" in mind, he may have also thought of Saint Augustine's theft of a pear from a neighbor's tree in Confessions, Book 2. Franz Kromer, an older boy and leader of the toughs, blackmails Sinclair for a theft he had never committed, calling his victim by whistling. In European culture, the devil signals his presence or is summoned by a whistle, as illustrated in Der Freischutz by Carl Maria von Weber, which opera-loving Hesse probably knew, as well as in Boito's Mefistofele.
Under Kromer's diabolical extortions, Sinclair is reduced to stealing from his piggy bank, and he endures dreams that his tormentor is kneeling on top of him, forcing him to perform obscenities. In another nightmare he is even tricked into thinking of murdering his own father. The child's dream is rife with Freudian implications. Finally, Emil reaches a breaking point when his oppressor demands a meeting with one of his sisters.
Sinclair's education continues with his first rescue by a slightly older boy at school, Max Demian, the child/man with eyes "slightly sad, with flashes of mockery within them." Seeming to be an emissary from another world, Demian alleviates Sinclair's pain by the strength of his authority, which frightens Sinclair's tormentor. Neither an angel nor a minion of Satan but a guide in the spirit of Socrates' daemon, he leads Sinclair to ever greater heights of knowledge. This is, after all, a novel of education--for Hesse as well as his character. Demian may be seen as a "fiction of the self," presenting "a prophetic and highly didactic . . . version of the providential pattern of the Christian fall and redemption internalized in the narrator," as Eugene Stelzig puts it in his fine study called Hermann Hesse's Fictions of the Self.10 Accordingly, the parables Hesse insists on early in the book revolve around Eden and its loss, exemplified by the idyllic side of small-town life shortly to be annihilated in the hellish chaos of war.
During this phase of his development, Sinclair gains a new kind of knowledge. Demian calls his attention to the emblem of the sparrow hawk above the door of the family house, which might once have been part of a monastery. This emblem, which the child had never stopped to think about, connects medieval symbolism to ancient Egyptian religions and therefore confers a mark of distinction on Sinclair's home.11
From this point on, each encounter has some symbolic or allegorical significance. The bildungsroman now assumes the nature of a quest. In an important essay titled "The Quest of the Grail in Hesse's Demian," Theodore Ziolkowski notes that the bildungsroman becomes a form of Perceval's quest for the Grail.12 Even the most secularly inclined reader becomes aware of the religious nature of this pilgrimage into the deeper recesses of the self. The hero's descent into himself is a plunge into the supernatural and the divine. Demian, as Ziolkowski notes, "is a dictionary of religious lore."13
Another revelation concerns Demian's interpretation of the biblical account of Cain and Abel. In a letter written
in 1930, Hesse identified Cain with Prometheus because he represents the intellect and freedom and was punished for his daring and inquiring mind.14 This identification is already implied in his fiction of 1917-19, when Demian tells Sinclair that the Cain story was a slander invented by the weak to attack the strong.15 Both the emblem of the sparrow hawk and Demian's version of the story of Cain are meant to indicate that Sinclair belongs to a chosen few, who will be recognizable by a mark on the forehead only they can see (20-25). In a similarly unorthodox way, Sinclair's mentor teaches that the thief on the cross to Christ's left was the worthier of the two condemned men. In an allusion to Friedrich Nietzsche's famous concept of the "transvaluation of values," exemplified in his book Beyond Good and Evil (1886),16 Hesse here suggests that Demian, the daemon, is both infernal and divine.
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With the onset of adolescence, the novel of education shifts to a new level. Sinclair attends secondary school in another town, where he rejects Demian's teaching and loses himself in heavy drinking and rowdy behavior. But, after a time, a change develops. Sinclair sees a lovely young girl and promptly falls in love with her. Although he never approaches her, he attempts to paint her portrait and calls her Beatrice. This is an allusion to Dante Gabriel Rossetti's painting Beata Beatrix, not to the woman who inspired Dante Alighieri, the poet of The Divine Comedy. Sinclair's painting of the imaginary woman he loves, "an English pre-Raphaelite female figure, long-limbed and slender" with a "boyishness of form" (63), closely resembles Demian.17 And like Rossetti's Beatrice, this ideal woman also leads Sinclair toward redemption.
This painting becomes the herald of a new vision. Home on vacation, Sinclair again meets Demian, who discerns in his friend's loose living a trace of Saint Augustine's portrayal of his earlier life in his Confessions, and is convinced that, like Augustine, Sinclair will rise above the herd to achieve a purified self (69). Demian's assessment is soon borne out. Back at school, under a dreamlike compulsion, Sinclair paints his heraldic hawk as it breaks out of its egg and sends the picture to his mentor. In reply, he receives a mysterious note from Demian: "The bird fights its way out of the egg. The egg is the world. Who ever wants to be born must destroy a world. The bird flies to god. The god is called Abraxas." The meaning of Abraxas is soon clarified for Sinclair in a lecture by a teacher as "something like a deity whose symbolic task is to unite the divine and the satanic" (75).
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In the next stage of Sinclair's education, Demian is displaced by an eccentric organist named Pistorius, an interpreter of dreams and a familiar of Abraxas. Sinclair and Pistorius are soon bound by a close friendship. Pistorius is a thin disguise for Hesse's therapist and friend Dr. Josef Lang, whose favorite being was Abraxas. In fact, Hesse referred to Dr. Lang as Pistorius some years later in his semiautobiographical Nuremberg Trip (1927).18
Pistorius's lessons also include the importance of all religions as well as the belief that the reality, the only reality that counts, lies within. Here Hesse displayed the expertise he had gained from his analyst by putting into the words of Pistorius the recognition that Abraxas, a god also accepted and worshipped in gnosticism, is God and Satan in one. Although Josef Lang was rooted in gnostic mysticism, a dualistic philosophy akin to Zoroastrianism that flowered during the early Christian era,19 he gradually led Hesse beyond the implications of this system of beliefs.
Intellectually, as a growing young man, Hesse was deeply affected by two influential philosophers who were closely associated with Switzerland, his second home: Johann Jakob Bachofen, whose major work was on matriarchy and original religion, and, as noted before, Friedrich Nietzsche, whose state of mind served Hesse particularly well. Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil laid the foundation for Demian's teaching. Hesse similarly alluded to Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra to convey a strong message that a powerful spirit can transcend the strife between good and evil.
Finally, Sinclair learns Demian's and Pistorius's lesson--that he must fear nothing. The soul's ideas are not to be exorcised or made the subject of moralizing. So-called temptations are to be treated with respect and love. All have meaning. In hating or loving someone, one hates or loves something in oneself. "The things we see," says Pistorius, "are the same things that are in us. There is no reality other than what we have inside us." At this point, having learned everything Pistorius has to teach, Sinclair breaks with his mentor, since each man must find the way to himself, "to feel your way forward along your own path, wherever it led."
After leaving Pistorius, Sinclair realizes that the demand for absolute concentration on the self has isolated him. It insulates him from anyone but a purified self, standing alone with "only the cold universe around you," like "Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane." Inevitably, Sinclair's thinking draws him back to Demian until, finally, he writes a few words on a piece of paper. Though he intended to send this paper to Demian, he carries it with him instead and often recites the words to himself: "A guide has left me. I am in total darkness. I cannot take a single step alone. Help me!" (105).
7
The final stage of Sinclair's education is reached with the help of Demian's mother, Eve, alluded to throughout the novel. She is mentioned as the universal mother, a form of the Jungian "Earth Mother," magically linked to her magical son. In contrast to Sinclair's conventional family, no husband or father is ever mentioned in Demian's world. In fact, the mother/son connection is more like that of lovers, whose this-worldly bonds are incestuous. On the level of religious iconology, however, the bonds represent Eve, who not only signals the Fall but who is the universal mother of all humankind, as well as Mary--the New Eve--who with her son brings salvation.
A vision induced by Sinclair's growing awareness of his sexuality, from childhood to adulthood, pervades the entire novel and is made explicit in the final phase of the book. At the beginning of the chapter entitled "Eve," Hesse makes his point clear through a series of visual images. After an absence, Sinclair visits the house where Demian had once lived with his mother and sees an old woman in the garden. She takes him inside and shows him the photograph of a person who turns out to be Eve. His reaction is electrifying.
"[M]y heart stood still. -- It was the picture from my dream! It was her: the large, almost masculine figure, resembling her son; the signs of maternal love, strictness, and deep passion in her features; beautiful and enticing, beautiful and unapproachable, daemon and mother, fate and lover. It was her!" The photo makes clear that "there was a woman . . . who bore the features of my destiny," and she had to be Demian's mother (106).
After Sinclair actually meets Eve in his and Demian's university town, a new phase begins. Slowly, the novel turns at last to the Great War, which had been a constant if covert theme, where Hesse suggests that the will of humanity "will reveal itself." It "stands written in individuals: in you and in me. It was there in Jesus, it was there in Nietzsche" (111).
Eve and her circle of friends and disciples echo these themes, and it soon becomes evident that mother and son represent a unity. They both bear the luminous Sign of Cain on their foreheads as do all those, including Sinclair, who share Demian's insights on the "herd" versus the individual. This mark, invisible to all except the initiates, distinguished the iconoclastic son of Adam. It appears on the few who are called to understand, accept, and represent Cain's defiance of conventional morality. The entire circle--but especially the "trinity" of Sinclair, Demian, and Eve--is united in a concentration of Nietzschean, Christian, and Eastern thought.
But there is a further bond. Emil Sinclair falls in love with Eve. "I stood there, deeply moved--I had so much joy and sorrow in my heart, as though everything I had ever done and ever felt was coming back to me in that moment, as answer, as fulfillment" (113). The same barely concealed passion that connects him to Demian now finds its true object in the mother with whom his daemon had been identified from the start. His place in their lives, their places in his own, are now clear where all the "seekers" who bear the Sign of Cain wait for a Messi
ah, while Europe is characterized as "an animal that has lain in chains for an eternity."
In Sinclair's unambiguously sexual feelings for Eve, Demian is at first included. However, Sinclair becomes depressed, waiting for "a great moment" when, as he hopes and expects, Eve will declare herself. He is tortured by desire. "I thought I could not bear seeing her next to me without taking her in my arms." But the wise woman he loves senses this at once and teaches restraint. "You mustn't have wishes you don't believe in. I know what you wish for" (120).
The plot of this deceptively simple tale shows that the surface narrative is "thin fare," as Joseph Mileck correctly observed in his discussion of Demian, but not so its underlying meaning.20 At a later point, Sinclair dreams of climbing a tree or a tower and seeing an entire landscape ablaze. Eve has the same dream, and now at last their visions herald the outbreak of war. When Demian is called up as a lieutenant, he sends a final message to his friend and disciple, promising him that, if he dies, he will come to him "in spirit and in truth," the words of Christ. Demian reveals himself unmistakably as a savior-figure.
8
Demian ends with a vision and its fulfillment. We now realize that everything we read before was aimed at this defining moment. What we have seen up to now has been the chain of memories the soldier Emil Sinclair--in love with Demian/Eve--recalls as he stands guard in front of a Belgian farm. A shell crashes near him.
I could see a giant city in the clouds, with millions of people streaming out of it and swarming across the vast countryside. In their midst a powerful goddess-figure appeared, as large as a mountain range, with glittering stars in her hair and with Eve's features. The streams of people vanished into it as though into an enormous pit, and were gone. The goddess crouched on the ground and the mark on her brow glowed bright. She seemed in the grip of a dream: she closed her eyes, her huge face twisted in pain. Suddenly she shrieked, and stars leaped out of her brow, thousands of shining stars hurtling in magnificent arcs and semicircles across the black sky.