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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 833.912
EAN: 9780060931919
ISBN: 0060931914
Label: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Manufacturer: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Number Of Items: 1
Book Pages: 176
Publication Date: 1999-07-01
Publisher: Harper Perennial Modern Classics
Product Release Date: 1999-06-02
Studio: Harper Perennial Modern Classics

In Demian, one of the great writers of the twentieth century tells the dramatic story of young, docile Emil Sinclair's descent--led by precocious shoolmate Max Demian--into a secret and dangerous world of petty crime and revolt against convention and eventual awakening to selfhood.

"The electrifying influence exercised on a whole generation just after the First World War by Demian...is unforgettable. 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."
-- From the Introduction by Thomas Mann

Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Puzzling Out Omens In Pre-War Germany
Review: Hermann Hesse's Demian (1919) is the coming-of-age story of Emil Sinclair, an initially innocent, introverted boy who, over the course of a decade, falls under the spell of the intellectually seductive and physically charismatic Max Demian in pre-World War I Germany. Finding himself blackmailed by lower-class bully Franz Kromer after foolishly telling a lie in public, Emil is mysteriously freed from his plight through the intervention of Demian, a romantic figure who is also a fellow student at Emil's school. Demian takes up and drops Emil socially over the course of a year, before inexplicably targeting him for friendship at the time of their confirmation.

Physically mature for his age, poised, well-dressed, and handsome, Demian challenges Emil's bland acceptance of the scriptures, outlines his own personalized Nietzschean philosophy, and shares his Gnostic beliefs ("God and Satan are one"). In the process, he slowly reveals himself to be something more than merely human. For Demian is capable of uncanny paranormal powers: by carefully studying his subjects and concentrating his will, Demian can read the minds and bend the will of others "like puppets on a string." Transfixed, Emil learns that Demian is suspected of being "a heathen" and rumored to be involved in an incestuous relationship with his own mother. Emil perceives Demian in numinous and archetypal terms, as "animal, tree, planet"--as "somehow timeless, bearing the scars of an entirely different history than we knew."

Both internally and externally, Demian becomes an idol and unwieldy obsession for Emil, simultaneously exerting a hold on him from a distance and occupying the still center of his private universe. Emil eventually becomes enamored of a young woman whom he calls 'Beatrice,' who is "boyish" and slightly built. He paints her portrait, but realizes it doesn't resemble her. He studies the painting day after day before he realizes what the reader has already effortlessly guessed: that the painting does not resemble 'Beatrice,' but Demian, who is "an angel and Satan, man and woman in one flesh, man and beast, the highest good and the worst evil." Taken a step further, Emil equates the face in the painting with his "fate or daemon," which further literalizes the book's title and title character.

As in Steppenwolf (1927), and to a more pronounced degree in Narcissus and Goldmund (1930), the novel has a muted but unmistakable homosexual subtext: Demian and Emil speak specifically of the "vice" of youthful sexuality, an unnamed "drive" that "the Greeks and many other peoples" elevated to the "divine and celebrated it in great feasts." Shortly after their initial meeting, Emil dreams that the larger, older Demian kneels on his chest like a medieval succubus, a dream that Demian correctly guesses Emil has experienced. Later, Emil finds the scent of "fresh soap emanating from his nape" intoxicating. Emil calls Demian "my fate and my beloved."

In fact, the entire novel reads like the protracted end product of the author's repressed and sublimated homosexuality, which, unrealized and driven inward, has taken on a variety of archetypal and magical connotations in his creative psyche.

Hesse attempts to resolve this conflict by allowing Emil to meet and fall in love with Demian's mother, the banally named "Eva." Eva is essentially Demian in a dress and with longer hair, though Emil finds everything about her "riper, warmer, more self-evident," and before long, Emil is hilariously kissing "the rain out of her hair."

Whereas Demian has long predicted a coming cataclysm that will first destroy and then transform Western civilization, Eva spouts a kind of woozy, proto-New Age mysticism that would have made Anais Nin blush: "Yes, you must find your dream, then the way becomes easy. But there is no dream that lasts forever, each dream is followed by another, and one should not cling to any particular one...as long as the dream is your fate you should remain faithful to it."

Now enthusiastically invited to share their home life, Emil soon finds himself surrounded by "astrologers and cabalists...devotees of Indian asceticism, vegetarians, and Buddhists" as the novel further devolves into unintentional parody.

The book concludes with Emil and Demian literally entrenched in the war that Demian has foreseen. Laying side by side, "his lips very close to mine," Emil finally gets the dramatic kiss he has been longing for, though it is a kiss, Demian explains, which has been ordered by and sanctioned by Frau Eva. When Emil awakes, Demian is gone, but he understands he will always remember him as "my brother, my master."

Murky, nearly useless mysticism, not wisdom, defines the text. Once Emil's early isolation and emotional suffering comes to an end, at the novel's midpoint, the book falls apart spectacularly, a fate also suffered by Steppenwolf in that novel's closing pages.

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Strange companions
Review: As a little boy Emile Sinclair feels that life is divided into a world of light and a world of dark. Emile meets Max Demian, an older self-assured boy who seems to know much about life. While Demian does not dominate Sinclair, the younger boy falls increasingly under the influence of the older youth. The novel follows Sinclair's development through through childhood to adolescent rebellion to young adulthood. It plots Sinclair's evolving thought from unorthodox religion to philosophical mysticism and on towards self-awareness.

This book was published in 1919, just after World War 1. It shows the influence of the great ferment of thought that occurred at turn of the twentieth century and which resulted in various mystical movements such as theosophy and Rudolf Steiner's anthroposophy. Most of all, the book seems to show the influence of the then new psychology of Carl Jung, including Jung's interest in psychic phenomena. The novel is increasingly didactic as Sinclair delves deeper into mysticism, philosophy and psychology and as a result will be of less interest to those interested in stories of human interaction and events. This is not to say that 'nothing happens' in the novel, even in the second half, but long 'teaching' speeches occupy much of this second half of the book. As someone interested in Jungian psychology I found this book fascinating, but almost 100 years on I am left wondering did the 'grand new man' really emerge or are we still clinging to the "heard instinct" so accurately described in ?

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: for 17 year old budding existentialists
Review: ...It was OK. I found the novel slow to start, difficult to deliver its theme, and a bit pale in the spectrum of existentialist literature. I have a feeling that I may have enjoyed it more at age 17 but it held no new revelations for me nor did I find the style particularly captivating. That said, I was intrigued by one particular passage:

"Always, you must think of these things in evolutionary, in historical terms! When the upheavals of the earth's surface flung the creatures of the sea onto the land and the land creatures into the sea, the specimens of the various orders that were ready to follow their destiny were the ones that accomplished the new and unprecedented; by making new biological adjustments they were able to save their species from destruction. We do not know whether these were the same speciments that had previously distinguished themselves among their fellows as conservative, upholders of the status quo, or rather as eccentrics, revolutionaries; but we do know they were ready, and could therefore lead their species into new phases of evolution. That is why we want to be ready."

...Hesse as a pre-Kurzweillian proto-Singularity transhumanist? Or Hesse attempting to appeal to us that we are otherwise base, animal creatures that seem capable only of destruction?

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Strange beauty
Review: I was never quite sure how to describe or catergorize this odd and beautiful masterpiece, but over the years, I have remained grateful that I even had a high school teacher who included this in a Senior lit. class so many years in my past.

Over the years, I have glanced through this rather slim novel from time to time, puzzled at what it was that made such a huge impact on my spirit, all of 17 years old at the time. But there was something here that Hesse capitivated and I don't know exactly what it was but I sat up and read each word with utter fascination along with an eerie kind of knowing.

It's that kind of book.

If you are looking for a straight narrative that has a predictable or pat ending, you might be dissapointed. This is definitely not for the WATER FOR ELEPHANTS, EAT PRAY LOVE set. It's strange. It's fascinating and it's a classic one of a kinder. There will be those who swear it has the power to change your life and those who will shrug their shoulders with indifference. I have no idea why this read impacted my 17 year old self so. It has not done the same to me as a 38 year old as it had with my adolescent self. But I will say it is so worth reading, as all of Hesse's strange and beautiful works. There just isn't a lot out there today that captures spirituality the way this author does.

One exception, however, is the remarkable SIM0N LAZARUS--of course, the Eckhart Tolle endorsement inspired me!

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Customer Rating:
Review Summary: Demian: A Changing Perspective
Review: I first read "Demian" as a mid-teen and it made a BIG impression on me. Since it's a coming-of-age tale it really appeals to teens who are certainly torn with their belief structure and trying to gain a perspective on the world around them.

Everyone needs to understand the setting of this novel as well as what influenced the Nobel-prize winning author, Hermann Hesse. The time period is just prior to WWI in Germany so remember there was little technology to occupy one's time with entertainment. They were a very relationship-based society back then. Hermann was around the age of 40 when he penned this novel so he had some decent adult perspective in writing it.

And perspective is a key element in reviewing the novel. Again, when I was a teen it mirrored my struggles and I found it to be very engaging in its outlay of religious (and a-religious) mystery as well as one's struggle with sexuality. Emil Sinclair went through the entire novel always a little clueless about all the big issues confronting him. He leaned on Max Demian and Frau Eva for support and never really obtained his own independence from their influence. And it was odd that Max and Eva seemed to have so much more influence on him than his own family. He barely talked about his own parents and his sisters. But that's probably due to his "mark of Cain" affinity he had with the Demians, and of course he had outright burning lust in his heart for Max's widowed mother, Eva. (And whatever became of Max's father anyway?) Again, those are elements that many confused teens can identify with.

But now that I'm in my 40s I read it with a far different perspective. It certainly does not affect me the way it once did. I can easily see now that it's a run of the mill coming of age story maybe typical for the early 1900s in Germany. And instead of identifying with Emil's struggles, I am more inclined to point out his folly and shortcomings. I'm more likely to view Max and Eva as manipulative and self-serving than mystically mysterious. And I'm more cynical of how Hesse, who penned the novel AFTER WWI, gave his Max Demian character the prescience to foresee the war and the upheaval it would bring.

So my adult re-reading is far less satisfying than my first teen reading. Then how does one rate a novel with such different perspectives? If you'd asked me as a teen I'd have given it five stars, but as an adult I'd give a pedestrian two stars. So, here, I give it three stars. It's not a badly written novel, it didn't win him the Nobel prize but it certainly was an important work for him that surely accounted for some portion of the Nobel committee's consideration. But its target audience is definitely those in their teen years; they'll find it a more impressive reading experience than established adults.

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