Demian Read online

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  DEMIAN

  HERMANN HESSE (1877-1962) was born in Calw, a small southern German town in the northern Black Forest, in July 1877. He was the son and grandson of a family of strict Pietist missionaries, a heritage that affected him deeply throughout his life. His grandparents had spent decades of their lives on the Malabar coast of India, where his mother also lived and worked. By the time Hesse was born, however, the family had settled in Calw, though he spent part of his early childhood in a dormitory for missionaries' children in Basel, Switzerland, the main seat of their movement, where his father was teaching. Later, back in Germany, he went through another period of institutionalized living in a Protestant boarding school housed in an old monastery not far from his home. His escape from the school at fifteen years of age became the subject of his novel Beneath the Wheel. Both experiences fortified his distaste for authority and his celebration of the individual.

  In 1895, at age eighteen, Hermann Hesse struck out for himself by taking work in a Basel bookstore. It took him nine more years of writing, however, to establish himself with his first full-length novel, Peter Camenzind (1904), followed by Beneath the Wheel (1906), Gertrud (1910), and Rosshalde (1914), as well as a wealth of short fiction, including Knulp (1915). He married Maria Bernoulli of a prominent Swiss family and lived with her and their three sons on the shore of Lake Constance in Switzerland.

  A significant change in Hesse's life occurred with the outbreak of World War I. He spent the war years in Bern, Switzerland, working with an agency under the auspices of the Red Cross, supplying books and other amenities to German prisoners of war. After the war and a psychological crisis, his marriage shattered, and Hesse removed himself to Montagnola, a small town in Italian-speaking Switzerland. There--in the relative peace of rural surroundings, interrupted only occasionally by forays into the urban centers of Zurich and Basel--he created his best-known work: Siddhartha (1922), Steppenwolf (1927), Narcissus and Goldmund (1930), Journey to the East (1932), and The Glass Bead Game (1943). Remarried in his later years to Ninon Auslander, a Jewish immigrant from Romania who inspired and sustained him in the face of his failing eyesight, he lived out his life in the seclusion of Montagnola. He received many important honors, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946, and died in 1962 soon after his eighty-fifth birthday.

  Hesse's entire life--from his resistance to authority in his young years to the mature writer's insistence on individuality in a mass culture--was devoted to those of his readers (of all ages, but especially the young) who search for wholeness and authenticity in the face of the recurrent crises that have shaped our time.

  DAMION SEARLS writes fiction, criticism, and biography, and has translated many classic twentieth-century authors, including Proust, Rilke, Robert Walser, Nescio, Thomas Bernhard, and Christa Wolf. His translation of Hans Keilson's Comedy in a Minor Key was a New York Times Notable Book and a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. Searls received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012; he lives in Brooklyn, New York.

  JAMES FRANCO is an actor, director, author, and visual artist. His film appearances include Milk, Pineapple Express, Howl, and 127 Hours, which earned him an Academy Award nomination. Franco is the author of the story collection Palo Alto, and his writing has been published in Esquire, Vanity Fair, n+1, the Wall Street Journal, and McSweeney's. Franco's art has been exhibited throughout the world, including at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art's PS1 in New York, the Clocktower Gallery in New York, and the Peres Projects in Berlin.

  RALPH FREEDMAN, professor emeritus of comparative literature at Princeton University, is acclaimed for his biographies Hermann Hesse: Pilgrim of Crisis and Life of a Poet: Rainer Maria Rilke.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA

  USA | Canada | UK | Ireland | Australia | New Zealand | India | South Africa | China Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England For more information about the Penguin Group visit penguin.com This translation first published in Penguin Books 2013

  Translation copyright (c) Damion Searls, 2013

  Introduction copyright (c) Ralph Freedman, 2013

  Foreword copyright (c) Whose Dog RU International, Inc., 2013

  All rights reserved. No part of this product may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the author's rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

  Originally published in German by S. Fischer Verlag, Berlin, 1919

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Hesse, Hermann, 1877-1962.

  [Demian. English]

  Demian : the story of Emil Sinclair's youth / Hermann Hesse ; translated by Damion Searls ; foreword by James Franco ; introduction by Ralph Freedman.

  pages cm.--(Penguin Classics)

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN 978-1-10159056-0

  1. Young men--Germany--Fiction. 2. Germany--Social conditions--1918-1933--Fiction. I. Searls, Damion, translator. II. Title.

  PT2617.E85D413 2013

  833'.912--dc23

  2013006661

  Contents

  Foreword by JAMES FRANCO: My Friend Demian

  Introduction by RALPH FREEDMAN

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  DEMIAN

  Preface

  Epigraph

  CHAPTER 1: Two Worlds

  CHAPTER 2: Cain

  CHAPTER 3: The Thief on the Cross

  CHAPTER 4: Beatrice

  CHAPTER 5: The Bird Fights Its Way Out of the Egg

  CHAPTER 6: Jacob Wrestles with the Angel

  CHAPTER 7: Eve

  CHAPTER 8: The Beginning of the End

  Foreword

  MY FRIEND DEMIAN

  I remember reading Demian for the first time. It was the beginning of summer. I had turned nineteen in April, and I was working at a cafe on the UCLA campus, selling deli sandwiches, microwaved pizza, cheap Mexican hash, and glistening Chinese food. I had spent the previous school year studying English literature but had recently taken the plunge into the raging sea of film acting and was freshly making my way through the tide pools of acting school. I had not auditioned for the UCLA theater program and thus had been forced to take classes in the Valley, and just before the spring quarter at UCLA had ended I decided to devote myself full-time to acting. My parents didn't object, saying only that they would support me as long as I studied at the university, but if I wanted to be an artist I had to find my own way.

  Working at the North Campus eatery, I was serving the students who once had been my classmates. My boss was a graduate student with a shaved head except in two spots that he dyed red and gelled into six-inch horns. I'll call him Bill. I remember liking Bill if only because he was closer to my age than any boss I'd ever had, but he was still a boss. I was working to support my dream (one of a few) to become a film actor, and my employer looked like the devil.

  On my breaks I read plays by O'Neill, Tennessee Williams, Shaw, Ibsen, Chekhov, and anyone else who might help me understand my chosen profession. It turned out that the grinding aspect of the job was not Bill's constant watch as I loaded meat and mustard on sandwiches or scooped chiles rellenos from the tin, depending on the day of the week; it was the boredom. I know now that I learned much about responsibility, dedication, and service from that humble job, but back then I had dreams of grandeur. I had left school in order to become the best actor in the world, and here I was, back on campus serving the very people who had been inviting me to frat parties a few months prior. I seemed to have taken
five steps backward, and the fact that I had left a top-rated university to join an army of hopefuls trying to break into a famously competitive industry often seemed like a fool's quest.

  On the wall next to the pizza service section was a framed photo of an elderly Marlon Brando being led by a man in a suit and a football helmet through a throng of photographers and gawkers. I'm pretty sure it was taken around the time of Brando's son's murder trial, but it inspired me as I served the slop: Brando was the pinnacle of film acting, and his picture was a reminder of the great tradition I hoped to be a part of.

  After a couple of months I started reading Demian. I'm not sure if there was a connection, but one day, without warning, I hung up my apron and walked out the back, never to return. I had planned to work that day, so once I'd taken my exit, I didn't know where to go. With Demian folded in my pocket, I headed into Westwood, full of passion because of what I had done. On the edge of campus I ran into one of my former classmates, a girl I once had flirted with, sunning herself on the grass. I told her what had happened, but it didn't seem to register. I felt as if I had taken another step away from a conformist life and another step toward artistic freedom, but, talking to her, I sounded to myself like an immature kid who had quit his job.

  At a cafe I jumped back into reading Demian and felt as if I was understood again. Emil Sinclair, the narrator, is also on a search. His vacillation between good and bad, between expected pursuits and his own artistic path, seemed to mirror mine. Like so many young people in the ninety years since the novel's publication, I felt as if Hermann Hesse was describing my own interior and exterior struggles. Sinclair had Demian to help guide him, but I had yet to find my artistic mentor. Instead I had the book.

  Demian became my Demian, a voice I could listen to and contemplate as I tried to find my way from childhood to adulthood and into the world of art. Of course there were many turns in the road ahead--I would get a job at McDonald's, get work as an actor, grow to hate much of the work I did, expand my artistic horizons (Hesse became not just a writer but also a celebrated painter)--but reading Demian was an important step in the direction of a life that resonated with my ideals.

  JAMES FRANCO

  Introduction

  New readers are advised that this introduction makes details of the plot explicit.

  It is a signal honor to introduce Hermann Hesse's Demian to a contemporary audience, since it means following in the footsteps of no less a predecessor than Thomas Mann, who wrote in April 1947, "For me, [Hesse's] life, with its roots in native German romanticism, for all its strange individualism, its now humorously petulant and now mystically yearning estrangement from the world and the times, belongs to the highest and purest spiritual aspirations and labors of our epoch."1 This statement accurately describes the achievement of Hesse, whose vision appealed not only to the generation of young men who survived World War I, but also to the counterculture of the 1960s and '70s in America and Europe.2

  This new translation returns Demian to our consciousness as a welcome face we had almost forgotten. Hesse's later works like Siddhartha and Steppenwolf have long since become part of our lives, but Demian, the novel that blazed the trail for those later works, has unjustly dropped into the background. As Demian and its stirring message once led readers into a new world of creation, Hesse's vision is again reaching out to another generation searching for meaning in an age of anxiety and war.

  1

  On the surface, Demian appears to be a simple novel of education.

  Young Emil Sinclair is acutely aware of two forces in the world--the good and the evil. He is rescued from the control of a neighborhood bully by a classmate, Max Demian, who becomes his mentor. Demian leads Sinclair to various symbols that accompany him for life--including a sparrow hawk carved above Sinclair's front door. Away at boarding school, Sinclair drinks heavily and neglects his studies, but a beautiful young woman he sees in a park transforms his life, even though he never meets her. Sinclair discovers painting as a means of expressing his inner turmoil. He paints the woman's portrait and recognizes her resemblance to Demian, his childhood mentor and savior. He next paints the image of the hawk emerging from its egg, and of Jacob wrestling with the angel--portraits of his own struggle for self-realization. He learns of a Persian god, Abraxas, who incarnates the universe, including good and evil, light and dark, masculine and feminine. The musician and theologian Pistorius teaches him more about Abraxas--and about himself. Sinclair transcends this mentor and finds Demian again, now with Demian's mother, Eve. At the outbreak of World War I, Demian and Sinclair become soldiers. The dying Demian passes on his legacy of enlightenment to the severely wounded Sinclair.

  Delving into this story, we will encounter Hesse's projection of both an individual and a generation against the backdrop of impending disaster.

  2

  Demian is at the same time the story of a youth and the history of the emotional crisis and intellectual evolution of a man around forty. In writing this novel, Hesse balanced the presentation of his own individual experience with the portrayal of universal problems. We respond to this dual effort even today, because, in the issues the novel raises--good versus evil, war and its aftermath--we recognize that our own relative safety is likewise projected against the monstrous deaths of others.

  In one of the first sentences of the book, Hesse states his position on personal versus universal experience. "Novelists when they write novels," he says, "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."3 This, he declares, he cannot do. Instead of presenting an invented and therefore a mendacious work about imagined people, he wants to write a "real story about a real, unique living person." Through Hesse's new artistry, this person became by extension the author himself, yet "objectified" in an attempt to come to grips with evil in man, in society, and, of course, the cataclysmic evil of war.

  Composed under great personal stress, Demian was published in 1919. It appeared first in monthly installments from February to April in the literary journal Die Neue Rundschau, then in book form in June of that year. Both times it was published under the pseudonym of its protagonist, Emil Sinclair.

  Pretending to be Sinclair had the great advantage for Hesse of assuring readers, many of whom were returning soldiers, that such a young writer--much like themselves--actually existed. These soldiers came home defeated, having survived the horrors of trench warfare only to confront humiliation, the miseries of revolution, and a nationwide depression. They were seeking a way out, and Emil Sinclair's story provided provisional answers.

  Another reason why Hesse published the novel under a pseudonym was more deeply personal. He evidently wished to signify that he had embarked on a new life. Whatever his motives, Hesse was so successful that Demian won the notable Fontane Prize as a first novel (though in reality it was his fifth). The prize, named for the popular novelist Theodor Fontane (1819-1898), gave further proof that "Emil Sinclair" was a beginning author who promised great distinction.

  But something about this manuscript made certain prominent people doubt that Sinclair was really the author. By all accounts, Hesse's publisher, Samuel Fischer, initially accepted the pseudonym as real, although Fischer's wife, Hedwig, was among the first to guess the author's true identity. The matter was officially brought to an end by Eduard Korrodi, the editor for literature and the arts at the Neue Zurcher Zeitung, who revealed the truth in an open letter "To Hermann Hesse" on July 4, 1920.4 It must have been with considerable regret that Hesse had to return the prize when his authorship was revealed.

  Demian's reception was an instant success and continued to be so despite the revelation of its authorship, in large part because the book is a reflection of its time, embodying both order and underlying chaos in a society whose complacency had been violently disrupted by Wor
ld War I. Although Sinclair and the avid readers who identified with him were more than twenty years younger than Hesse was, Hesse had understood and expressed their feelings and frustrations. Oddly, though, the war itself is hardly mentioned except in the foreword and the final chapter.

  Still, it is a war novel. How can that be?

  3

  The answer lies within Hesse's life and his continuing intimacy with his art. Demian is not precisely about World War I, but is a product of and a reaction to the war.5 Hesse's earlier novels, like Beneath the Wheel (1906), dramatized the failure of the social order in education, and his Rosshalde (1914) dramatized the same failure in the artist's struggle with the institution of marriage. But, at the end of the old century and the beginning of the new one, Hesse's readers knew him mainly as a poet in prose, the romantic wanderer through nature like the vagabond Knulp in a small book of that name, which Hesse published in 1915.

  Then came the Great War that changed the world, and at the war's end came Demian, which addressed a new wave of readers. Hesse's postwar fiction, like Klingsor's Last Summer (1920) or Siddhartha (1922), emerged from the shadowy period in history just before the end of the war and during the precarious peace that followed. Demian ushered in this new era in Hesse's writings, a decisive turn, anticipating his best novels of the later years, like Steppenwolf (1927), Narcissus and Goldmund (1930), and The Glass Bead Game (1943).

  Like most of Hesse's books, Demian is deeply but not slavishly autobiographical. As an expression of his antiestablishment views, Hesse draws on material from his own life but transforms it into a new vision. He probably named Emil Sinclair after Isaac von Sinclair, a nineteenth-century revolutionary once accused of high treason, and a friend of the poet Friedrich Holderlin, whom Hesse admired.6 He also used "Sinclair" as the pen name for a series of political and literary pamphlets he published.