Word: demian
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...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...
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...