Word: demian
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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JUST what are the three books that the minister and his flock have found so satanic and obscene? The first one is Hermann Hesse's Demian, first published in 1919. Hesse happens to be one of the titans of modern literature, and his fiction earned him the Nobel Prize in 1946. Demian is the deeply probing tale of an adolescent's passage through various stages of spiritual turmoil to a final self-realization under the influence of a slightly older and rather mysterious friend and guide. There is an overlay of symbolism and surrealism, and a Jungian concern with...
...work is beautifully written, and is generally recognized as a masterpiece. As another Nobel laureate, Thomas Mann, wrote: "The electrifying influence exercised on a whole generation just after the First World War by Demian ... is unforgetable. 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." The novel's appeal has continued over the years, and it speaks (as do other Hesse novels, particularly Steppenwolf and Siddhartha ) with especial force to today...
...commend them to the Rev. Hanson and his self-righteous cohorts, whom I strongly urge to make an effort to move ahead and join the rest of us in the twentieth century. In the meantime, the Tom Marinos among us may take heart from the remark of Hesse's Demian that "people with courage and character always seem sinister to the rest...
...have known two students who have dropped out of school in the last few months while undergoing what might be called a crisis of self-discovery. Both of them felt two books were extremely relevant to their crises: Hesse's Demian and Laing's Politics of Experience. Like the hero of Hesse's Demian both boys felt a need to withdraw from the definitions and demands of the academic and business worlds, to explore and cultivate a world inside them, "to try to live," in Hesse's words, "in accord with the promptings which came from the true self." They...
...subject of that accolade? Allen Ginsberg? Bob Dylan? John Lennon? No; a German raveler of spiritual mysteries named Hermann Hesse, who died in 1962 at 85. His champion was Thomas Mann, and he was reflecting the impact of Hesse's 1919 novel, Demian, on German youth. Today Hesse is no longer so ardently esteemed in his native country, but in the past decade in the U.S. he has steadily risen to the status of a literary cult figure. College students rank him in the pantheon of literary gurus with Dostoevsky, Tolkien and Golding. In hippie hovels, those...