Hermann Hesse - Demian

Demian

The Story of Emil Sinlair's Youth

by Hermann Hesse

Introduction by Thomas Mann

Translated from the German by

Michael Roloff and Michael Lebeck

a.b.e-book v3.0 / Notes at EOF

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The passionate account of a young man's growing awareness of his own identity, of his involvement in the secret and dangerous world of petty crime, and how, influenced by a precocious schoolmate, he rebels against convention and discovers not only the great joy of independence, but his own new powers for good and evil.

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DEMIAN

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PRINTING HISTORY

Harper Row edition published June 1963

2nd printing ..... June 1963 3rd printing..... August 1963

4th printing ..... July 1966

Bantam edition published October 1966

2nd printing ..... October 1966 3rd printing..... March 1967

4th printing ..... October 1967

Bantam Modem Classics edition published January 1968

6th printing ..... June 1968 8th printing..... February 1969

7th printing ..... October 1968 9th printing..... September 1969

10th printing ..... October 1969

New Bantam edition published June 1970

12th printing ..... October 1970 17th printing..... May 1972

13th printing ..... October 1970 18th printing..... October 1972

14th printing ..... November 1970 19th printing..... December 1972

15th printing ...... July 1971 20th printing..... June 1973

16th printing ..... November 1971 21st printing..... April 1974

22nd printing ..... July 1974

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Copyright 1963 by Harper & Row Publishers, Inc.

Introduction copyright 1948 by Holt, Rinehart & Winston, Inc.

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Introduction

A full decade has passed since I last shook Hermann Hesse's hand. Indeed the time seems even longer, so much has happened meanwhile -- so much has happened in the world of history and, even amid the stress and uproar of this convulsive age, so much has come from the uninterrupted industry of our own hand. The outer events, in particular the inevitable ruin of unhappy Germany, both of us foresaw and both lived to witness -- far removed from each other in space, so far that at times no communication was possible, yet always together, always in each other's thoughts. Our paths in general take clearly separate courses through the land of the spirit, at a formal distance one from the other. And yet in some sense the course is the same, in some sense we are indeed fellow pilgrims and brothers, or perhaps I should say, a shade less intimately, confreres; for I like to think of our relationship in the terms of the meeting between his Joseph Knecht and the Benedictine friar Jacobus in Glasperlenspiel which cannot take place without the "playful and prolonged ceremony of endless bowings like the salutations between two saints or princes of the church" -- a half ironic ceremonial, Chinese in character, which Knecht greatly enjoys and of which, he remarks, Magister Ludi Thomas von der Trave was also past master.

Thus it is only natural that our names should be mentioned together from time to time, and even when this happens in the strangest of ways it is agreeable to us. A well-known elderly composer in Munich, obstinately German and bitterly angry, in a recent letter to America called us both, Hesse and me, "wretches" because we do not believe that we Germans are the highest and noblest of peoples, "a canary among a flock of sparrows." The simile itself is peculiarly weak and fatuous quite apart from the ignorance, the incorrigible arrogance which it expresses and which one would think had brought misery enough to this ill-fated people. For my own part, I accept with resignation this verdict of the "German soul." Very likely in my own country I was nothing but a gray sparrow of the intellect among a flock of emotional Harz songsters, and so in 1933 they were heartily glad to be rid of me, though today they make a great show of being deeply injured because I do not return. But Hesse? What ignorance, what lack of culture, to banish this nightingale (for, true enough, he is no middle-class canary) from its German grove, this lyric poet whom Moerike would have embraced with emotion, who has produced from our language images of purest and most delicate form, who created from its songs and aphorisms of the most profound artistic insight -- to call him a "wretch" who betrays his German heritage simply because he holds the idea separate from the form which so often debases it, because he tells the people from whom he sprang the truth which the most dreadful experiences still cannot make them understand, and because the misdeeds committed by this race in its self-absorption stirred his conscience.

If today, when national individualism lies dying, when no single problem can any longer be solved from a purely national point of view, when everything connected with the "fatherland" has become stifling provincialism and no spirit that does not represent the European tradition as a whole any longer merits consideration, if today the genuinely national, the specifically popular, still has any value at all -- and a picturesque value may it retain -- then certainly the essential thing is, as always, not vociferous opinion but actual accomplishment. In Germany especially, those who were least content with things German were always the truest Germans. And who could fail to see that the educational labors alone of Hesse the man of letters -- here I am leaving the creative writer completely out of account -- the devoted universality of his activities as editor and collector, have a specifically German quality? The concept of "world literature," originated by Goethe, is most natural and native to him. One of his works, which has in fact appeared in America, "published in the public interest by authority of the Alien Property Custodian, 1945," bears just this title: "Library of World Literature"; and is proof of vast and enthusiastic reading, of especial familiarity with the temples of Eastern wisdom, and of a noble humanistic intimacy with the "most ancient and holy testimonials of the human spirit." Special studies of his are the essays on Francis of Assisi and on Boccaccio dated 1904, and his three papers on Dostoevski which he called Blick ins Chaos (Glance into Chaos). Editions of medieval stories, of novelle and tales by old Italian writers, Oriental fairy tales, Songs of the German Poets, new editions of Jean Paul, Novalis, and other German romantics bear his name. They represent labor, veneration, selection, editing, reissuing and the writing of informed prefaces -- enough to fill the life of many an erudite man of letters. With Hesse it is mere superabundance of love (and energy!), an active hobby in addition to his personal, most extraordinarily personal, work -- work which for the many levels of thought it touches and its concern with the problems of the world and the self is without peer among his contemporaries.