by Hermann Hesse

Editor-- In the introduction to the book, Thomas Mann wrote:

Toward the end of the book Demian says to his friend Sinclair: “There will be war…But you will see, Sinclair, that this is just the beginning. Perhaps it will become a great war, a very great war. But even that is just the beginning. The new is beginning and for those who cling to the old the new will be horrible. What will you do?”

The right answer would be: “Assist the new without sacrificing the old.” The best servitors – Hesse is an example – may be those who know and love the old and carry it over into the new.

Hermann Hesse Agentur Schirner, Berlin, 1927

      I wanted only to try to live in accord with the       promptings which came from my true self. Why was that       so difficult?

Preface

  I cannot tell my story without reaching a long way back. If it were possible I would reach back farther still – into the very first years of my childhood, and beyond them into distant ancestral past.

  Novelists when they write novels tend to take an almost godlike attitude toward their subject, pretending to a total comprehension of the story, a man’s life, which they can therefore recount as God Himself might, nothing standing between them and the naked truth, the entire story meaningful in every detail.

  I am as little able to do this as the novelist is, even though my story is more important to me than any novelist’s is to him – for this is my story; it is the story of a man, not of an invented, or possible, or idealized, or otherwise absent figure, but of a unique being of flesh and blood.

Yet, what a real living human being is made of seems to be less understood today than at any other time before, and men – each one of whom represents a unique and valuable experiment on the part of nature – are therefore shot wholesale nowadays.

If we were not something more than unique human beings, if each one of us could really be done away with once and for all by a single bullet, storytelling would lose all purpose. But every man is more than just himself; he also represents the unique, the very special and always significant and remarkable point at which the world’s phenomena intersect, only once in this way and never again. That is why every man’s story is important, eternal, sacred; that is why every man, as long as he lives and fulfills the will of nature, is wondrous, and worthy of every consideration. In each individual the spirit has become flesh, in each man the creation suffers, within each one a redeemer is nailed to the cross.

Few people nowadays know what man is. Many sense this ignorance and die the more easily because of it, the same way that I will die more easily once I have completed this story.

I do not consider myself less ignorant than most people. I have been and still am a seeker, but I have ceased to question stars and books. I have begun to listen to the teachings my blood whispers to me. My story is not a pleasant one; it is neither sweet nor harmonious, as invented stories are; it has the taste of nonsense and chaos, of madness and dreams – like the lives of all men who stop deceiving themselves.

Each man’s life represents a road toward himself, an attempt at such a road, the intimation of a path. No man has ever been entirely and completely himself. Yet each one strives to become that – one is an awkward, the other in a more intelligent way, each as best as he can. Each man carries the vestiges of his birth – the slime and eggshells of his primeval past – with him to the end of his days. Some never become human, remaining frog, lizard, ant. Some are human above the waist, fish below. Each represents a gamble on the part of nature in creation of the human.

We all share the same origin, our mothers; all of us come in at the same door. But each of us – experiments of the depths – strives toward his own destiny. We can understand one another; but each of us is able to interpret himself to himself alone.

An excerpt

What Demian had said about God and the devil, about the official godly and the suppressed devilish one, corresponds exactly to my own thoughts, my own myth, my own conception of the world as being divided into two halves – the light and the dark.

The realization that my problem was one that concerned all men, a problem of living and thinking, suddenly swept over me and I was overwhelmed by fear and respect as I suddenly saw and felt how deeply my own personal life and opinions were immersed in the eternal stream of great ideas. Though it offered some confirmation and gratification, the realization was not really a joyful one. It was hard and had a harsh taste because it implied responsibility and no longer being allowed to be a child; it meant standing on one’s own feet.

“We’ll talk about it some other time,” he said forbearingly. “I can see that your thoughts are deeper than you yourself are able to express. But since this is so, you know, don’t you, that you’ve never lived what you are thinking and that isn’t good. Only the ideas that we actually live are of any value.”..

I find it difficult to think back to that time without a certain fondness. Once more I was trying most strenuously to construct an initimate “world of light” for myself out of the shambles of a period of devastation; once more I sacrificed everything within me to the aim of banishing darkness and evil from myself. And, furthermore, this present “world of light” was to some extent my own creation; it was no longer an escape, no crawling back to mother and the safety of irresponsibility; it was new duty, one I had invented and desired on my own, with responsibility and self-control.

My sexuality, a torment from which I was in constant flight, was to be transfigured into spirituality and devotion by this holy fire. Everything dark and hateful was to be banished, there was to be no more tortured nights, no excitement before lascivious pictures, no eavesdropping at forbidden doors, no lust. My goal was not joy but purity, not happiness but beauty and spirituality.

Yesterday a precocious cynic, today I was an acolyte whose aim was to become a saint. I not only avoided the bad life to which I had become accustomed, I sought to transform myself by introducing purity and nobility into every aspect of my life.

Demain: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth
Hermann Hess
Quality Paperback Book Club, NY

Photo Credit

Hermann Hesse: Agentur Schirner, Berlin, 1927