Word: demian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...DEMIAN by Hermann Hesse, translated by Roloff and Lebeck. 171 pages. Harper...
World War I changed all that. Hesse protested publicly against the Kaiser's policies, suffered an emotional breakdown, was cured by a pupil of Switzerland's Carl Jung, and in 1919 published Demian, the story of a young man's struggle for identity that electrified a generation looking for a way out of moral and political disaster...
Glinting Images. Hesse's hero is obviously himself: the son of a devout and prosperous burgher who in childhood encounters a strange companion named Max Demian. Demian is a boy, but he has "the face of a man, superior and purposeful, lucid and calm, with knowing eyes. Yet the face had something feminine about it too, and was somehow a thousand years old. He was different, like an animal or a spirit or a picture, unimaginably different from the rest...
...Demian is the hero's daemon, a figure that embodies the latent power of his own personality, the god within him that is evil as well as good. The novel describes how at first the opposites oppose each other but at last are reconciled in the self the hero becomes. In effect, the book is a case history of the integration process as Jung describes it, and as such it frequently suffers from schematism. The characters are concepts and their lives are theories, but somehow the abstractions are all bathed in a luminous and powerful stream of feeling that...
Salvation, in a word, is the theme of Demian-and of all the important novels (Siddhartha, Narziss und Goldmund, Glasperlenspiel) that followed it. In them all Hesse writes with the subtle and mocking simplicity of an oracle; almost every sentence must be sifted for double or triple meanings. And he never condescends to the little tricks of storytelling that make reading easy. He is totally, Germanically humorless, and time and again displays the absurdity of the selfabsorbed: when he tries to be serious about life, he often manages merely to be earnest about himself. Yet at his best Hesse writes...