Review: Demian

After having read Siddhartha and recently Steppenwolf, I continued my journey towards Demian. I didn’t really plan in what order I would be reading Hermann Hesse’s work, but felt right up front that Demian goes into similar subject matter of self discovery that his other works do. Demian follows the youth Emil Sinclair, whose sheltered world is upended by a class fellow named Demian. As a boy, Emil grapples with the forces he describes as dark and light, and much of this novel is on the nose of that theme. A little too on the nose.

The core of the story is that Emil is being blackmailed by a bigger neighborhood boy named Kromer. Eventually, Demian and Emil cross paths and become close. Demian extends different points of view on the world and alternative ways of thinking, all the way to the story of Cain and Abel. For instance, his perspective on the story of Cain and Abel is that Cain’s mark actually signals strength rather than sin. He goes on to explain that conventional thinking has led us to explain Cain was the ‘bad’ guy in the story, but perhaps it was just that ordinary people were unsettled by those with the mark of Cain and turned what they couldn’t understand into a fear. This unsettles Emil Sinclair and sets up the main message of this novel, that conventional morality is one sided and that embracing the duality of morality leads to real self development.

Aspects of the book felt forced, and obviously positioned against the popular Christian set of views that the world is split in ‘light’ and ‘dark’. In the aftermath of World War I, this belief may have been far from the minds of the youth that served and witnessed the senselessness of war in the name of the ‘righteous side’. Hesse drops this novel to convince the reader that division itself is a lie, dismantling the notion of a moral high ground.

While reading I started to look up the name Demian as well, one that I’ve heard in other forms as Damian or Damon. The name has a root in the Greek word ‘damazō’, meaning conquer, master or tame, in the context of an animal. However the name Demian was also used to denote ‘demon’, which comes from a different root, the ancient greek ‘daimon’ which referred to the inner guiding spirit, the voice of fate that pushes you forward towards destiny. I’m always fascinated by names and etymology, and this captured me always whenever I saw the name of the novel, and I love that Hesse went into this much detail with the choice of the titular character’s name.

The book’s core thesis goes one step further, embracing ‘light’ and ‘dark’ isn’t about accepting both moral stances, it’s about mastering oneself so neither side rules over you. Demian’s role is to tell Sinclair, and by extension to us the reader, not to trust inherited moral certainty, and to think for himself instead. When the people of a nation, or the world, subscribe to what their leaders or institutions denote as the ‘correct’ path, and don’t think for themselves, they march to their righteous orders and end up straight in the trenches. Demian spoke to the disillusioned millions who served in World War I.

From the name Demian to the unconventional world view, Hesse gives us a different kind of bildungsroman novel, one where Sinclair’s inherited moral compass and world view shifts as he meets, inherits and eventually embodies the spirit of Demian. The ideas in this novel were perhaps the first of its kind to reach a wide audience with its profoundness, and to this day still resonates with many people, including myself. I do think it dragged at times, even though it was short, there were motions that I thought could have been done without, just like with Steppenwolf, but ultimately I think it positioned its point well and I would recommend reading.