Demian
From Free net encyclopedia
Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair's Youth is a Bildungsroman by Hermann Hesse, first published in 1919, but a prologue was added in 1960. In it, Emil Sinclair is a young boy who was raised in a bourgeois home described as a Scheinwelt, or world of light. Through the novel, accompanied and prompted by his mysterious classmate Max Demian, he descends from and revolts against the superficial ideals of this world, eventually awakening into a realization of self. The novel references concepts of Gnosticism, particularly the demiurge Abraxas, and shows the influence of Carl Jung's system of psychoanalysis. Hesse said the novel was a story of Jungian individuation, the process of opening up to one's unconscious.
The novel goes on to also discuss the parallel discoveries of self that occurs for the world as a whole. The entire world is a unit that must come to know itself, and its pattern is the same as that of the individual who lives within the world.
Demian was first published under the pseudonym "Emil Sinclair", the name of the narrator of the story, but Hesse was later revealed to be the author.
Quotations
- Der Vogel kämpft sich aus dem Ei. Das Ei ist die Welt. Wer geboren werden will, muss eine Welt zerstören. Der Vogel fliegt zu Gott. Der Gott heisst Abraxas.
- (The bird struggles out of the egg. The egg is the world. Whoever wants to be born, must first destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God's name is Abraxas.)