Table of Contents:

• Part One: Two Worlds — Cain — The Thief on the Cross
• Part Two: The Pistorius Arc — Lady Eve — The Beginning of the End

PART ONE

Demian, published in 1919, is the first of Herman Hesse’s major novels, introducing the questions and problems he would continually return to throughout his literary career. Originally published pseudonymously under the name of the main character, Emil Sinclair, the novel takes the form of an autobiography of a young man growing into maturity by casting off the traditional values of his youth.

Of vital importance to our reading of Demian is the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche. I’ll provide here a brief overview of the most important idea of his ideas as they pertain to this book, that of the Overman/Superman, or Ubermensch in the original German. Now, when Nietzsche appeals to this concept, he doesn’t always use this precise word, but there is a tendency in his aphorisms for him to make distinctions — to separate humanity into two classes of people — and when he does this, he is implicitly talking about the Overman.

(Note on translation: Both Overman and Superman sound stupid, and Ubermensch makes you sound like a Nazi, so there’s no real good way to talk about this without sounding a little silly. I’d encourage you to join me in not focusing too much on the label or name, but instead on the concept behind it. I’m going to use Overman because it is distinct enough to avoid confusion with Superman, the comic book character.)

One key aspect of Nietzsche’s philosophy is self-actualization. What this entails is freeing one’s self from forces of repression, which commonly take the form of religious codes of morality. An Overman or Ubermensch is someone who can cast off these shackles and live in a totally free manner, manifesting their will directly and completely in the world. An Overman is not a moral man, and is not a good man, but is the most ultimately powerful man, because he is in full control of himself.

Nietzsche himself was no such person, and didn’t seem to believe that such a person was even possible at the time of writing. What he was intending to do was provide the foundation for the future to build upon, in order to eventually unlock the full potential of humanity — that is, humanity as individuals, not as a collective.

Now, this concept of the Overman can of course be taken in a variety of ways. Many see it as a glorification of coercive force, such as using physical strength to enact one’s will, or using mental fortitude to bend the world to fit your reality. Max Demian, in this novel, often showcases this sort of strength. Generals, warriors, and even fascist dictators do certainly fall under this definition of Overman, which quite reasonably leads many people to be very dubious of any invocation of Nietzchean philosophy.

I don’t think this is an incorrect reading, but I also don’t think this is the only way to interpret the idea. It is clear in Nietzsche’s work that there is more to the Overman than physical coercion. Often, he will connect this concept to artists, primarily poets, who manifest their individual personality not in feats of physical strength, but in the creation of meaningful works. The true poet goes against the grain; they don’t follow the rules of those that came before, either poetic rules or societal rules. Devoting one’s self to poetry, or art of any kind, is rarely a popular or recommended way to spend one’s life, and living an artistic life free of compromise is fraught with difficulty. Remaining true to oneself as an artist requires the fortitude of an Overman; it requires self-knowledge and self-discipline, both of which are signs of a strong will.

Emil Sinclair, the main character of Demian, is not at the gym lifting weights, nor is he an aspiring politician. He is somewhat effeminate and bourgeois, and his powers lie in his intellect. His struggles to understand himself are done so that he can live at all, because he finds it impossible to live the kind of life that everyone expects him to. The tribulations he faces on the way to achieving self-knowledge and self-actualization are primarily internal, and primarily about understanding both himself and the world, rather than changing it.

This is how Herman Hesse seems to read Nietzsche’s philosophy, and how many others do too: as a means toward forging a new way of living, a way that allows for true human thriving. This way will be different for each individual. Emil, like all of us, has to discover or create the path he’s following while he’s already on it. This is what it means to seek meaning for one’s life, instead of accepting someone else’s meaning.

All of Herman Hesse’s novels articulate a spiritual journey, a search by the main character for the meaning of their life. Each must face struggles, must fight false conceptions, and eventually emerge as a true, complete person, no longer a shadow, no longer repressed or oppressed.

Those who are able to complete this journey become heroes; in Nietzschean fashion, although their stories are full of military metaphors, the final form is often that of an artist. In Steppenwolf, they are described as Eternals — Mozart and Goethe are put forth as shining examples — who, throughout their artistic career, strove not for fame or posterity, but for something greater even than that, something beyond time and space altogether.

Emil Sinclair, in Demian, is young, and we watch him embark on the first stage of his journey. These initial steps can be the most trying, but at the same time, these early preconceptions of youth can be the easiest to break, since they come not from within ourselves, but from outside. Emil has to overcome his parents, his bourgeois upbringing, and the traditional religious values that were imparted on him. He has to do this because he feels that pull toward eternity — toward being a complete individual.

Importantly absent from this novel is any sense of social responsibility. Emil lives in a deep solipsism, concerned only with his own individual existence. The other characters have an unreal quality about them. Max Demian is only really real when he is involving himself in Emil’s life; outside of that, he almost disappears. Characters like Franz Kromer and Emil’s parents are in conflict, but they don’t directly interact; instead, they are each pulling Emil in one direction or the other. Emil’s is a quintessentially youthful way of looking at the world, where everything centres around his journey, and the things outside of his sight may as well not exist.

It’s important to remember that the Overman ideal is intrinsically tied to nobility and aristocracy. The signifiers of the Overman often hearken to the European leisured class — in The Gay Science, Nietzsche praises “those men of leisure who spend their lives hunting, traveling, or in love affairs and adventures” — in other words, those who are free, due to their inherited wealth, to live whatever life they please. Emil Sinclair is not quite growing up in such extreme aristocratic leisure, but he is higher class, as we see in the fact that he goes to a different school than the working-class children in his town.

In Hesse’s later novels, such as the The Glass Bead Game, we get a much deeper look into how this sort of renunciation of social responsibility on the part of the elite affects the greater world — the question actually arises as to whether such inner-looking activities are beneficial in a more general sense, or merely egoistic.

For now though, we’re stuck with Emil Sinclair, trying to find his own way in the world. The emphasis here is on it being his own, and the role of the world is an antagonistic force. This, I think, is what makes the novel resonate so deeply with young rebellious people. When things don’t go your way, or you don’t feel like you’re able to live the life that you want, then it only feels right to lash out against the world. Going your own way in life, and not following any path laid out for you, is difficult; even finding out what your own way is can be difficult, and it involves a constant double-checking: “Is this what I want? Or is this what other people want for me?”

TWO WORLDS

The book’s first sentence tells us, in an abstract sense, what Emil Sinclair really wants:

“All I wanted was to live the life that was spontaneously welling up within me. Why was that so very difficult?”

Born around the turn of the 20th century to a bourgeois German family, Emil Sinclair suffers more acutely than most the transition from childhood to adolescence, when one starts to catch glimpses of a world one is still unable to understand. Inside young Emil is an older, stronger, darker, and more mature Emil struggling desperately to emerge. He needs a little coaxing; to fully embody this new image of himself, Emil must face those aspects of the world, and of ourselves, that many of us try to ignore.

In the first chapter, “Two Worlds,” Emil labels these aspects the “Dark World.” It is at around ten years old that Emil begins to recognize this Dark World as a distinct entity, an opposite pole to the innocent propriety of his childhood home. It is not as simple as separate places, physically, as the Dark World interpenetrates the Sinclair household: the domestic workers occupy this Dark World, sharing stories of “slaughterhouse and jail, drunks and bickering women, cows giving birth, horses collapsing… burglaries, killings, suicides.” When the maids are engaged in prayer with Emil’s parents, they are part of the Bright World, but as soon as they escape to the kitchen or pantry, they become part of the Dark.

We can see from a few of these examples that this Bright World/Dark World distinction isn’t tied only to morality, but to class. A cow giving birth or a horse collapsing is not immoral. It’s completely amoral; it’s just an animal doing something natural. But people of Emil’s social class do not deal with nature, in the form of animal life, in this way. They don’t dirty their hands with newborn calves or dead horses. If a horse dies, it preferably dies outside of their sight, and doesn’t get in their way. They might have to order someone to buy them a new horse, but that’s about as involved as they’ll get.

The Dark World is not Dark because it’s inherently evil, but it’s dark because it’s meant to be unseen. Emil and those like him aren’t supposed to look at it. They may catch glimpses of the Dark World, but they’re meant to act as if they don’t. They’re not supposed to acknowledge it, and this is the source of Emil’s frustration. He feels constrained by the Bright World, like he’s missing some key part of human existence.

Emil feels himself to be the only one of his family who recognizes this Dark World, and who feels its pull. As far as he is concerned, his parents and his sisters have no connection to or conception of it at all; they fully embody the Bright World. They know nothing of slaughterhouses or suicides. If we stand back to consider this, outside of Emil’s perspective, it is obviously untrue. His parents, no matter what their status or profession, are inevitably more tangled up in this darker world than Emil could ever imagine. But Emil doesn’t consider this; in his eyes, the Dark World exists only for him, to tempt him exclusively.

This temptation already places in Emil a sense of guilt. He is guilty just for having the thought that the Dark World might be more interesting or more engaging than the Bright. He reads accounts of prodigal sons, and realizes that their fall from grace is often much more exciting than their inevitable return to the fold. This is our first hint in the novel at the concept of sin, which will play a major role. Sin, within the model of Christianity in which Emil is raised, often has nothing to do with actions. Sin is temptation, it is the pull toward Satan, and what’s important is not doing good acts necessarily, but resisting an inner inclination toward bad acts. Being internal, this struggle is known only to you and God; thus, you can be guilty without harming anyone around you, or without them even noticing that you’re guilty of anything.

This is where Emil finds himself. He considers himself innately more guilty than his parents and sisters. When he does anything bad, such as acting out when playing with his sisters, it is him introducing the very concept of badness into their Bright World. In this way, he is already primed for a fall; it is a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it soon begins to fulfill itself.

Emil finds himself one day hanging out with a bully named Franz Kromer, who comes from the darker, poorer, lower-class part of society. Emil is frightened of Franz; Franz, by virtue of being forged in the darker parts of the world, is stronger and fiercer than him. Franz is able to order Emil and a few of his schoolmates around, making them collect odds and ends by the river that we can assume Franz will later sell.

During a break, the kids tell stories about pranks and other mischievous activities they’ve gotten up to. Emil feels pressured to tell a story of his own, so he reaches into his imagination and begins to spin a yarn about stealing fruit from a nearby orchard.

At this moment, Emil commits his Original Sin. Up to this point, his sins have been entirely internal, but this sin exists in the world, by virtue of him speaking it aloud. It doesn’t actually matter that the sin itself is untrue; Emil, through his enthusiastic storytelling, convinces himself that it’s real. As the reader, it is clear that his audience likely doesn’t believe his story, but Emil thinks they do, and that’s all that matters. This sin has now stained his external reputation, and that makes him a legitimate Sinner.

There is an obvious parallel here between Emil’s original sin, and that of Adam and Eve picking the apple in the Garden of Eden. Another parallel, which itself uses Genesis as an archetype, is Saint Augustine’s original sin of stealing pears. Like Emil, Augustine is far more scandalized by this petty crime than anyone without an overbearing religious conscience might be. Augustine pleads to God,

“Now, behold, let my heart tell Thee what it sought there, that I should be gratuitously evil, having no temptation to ill, but the ill itself. It was foul, and I loved it; I loved to perish, I loved mine own fault, not that for which I was faulty, but my fault itself. Foul soul, falling from Thy firmament to utter destruction; not seeking aught through the shame, but the shame itself!”

Emil similarly relishes in his imaginary theft and the feeling of guilt that it provides. Whereas before he had felt a vague, abstract sense of guilt with no fixed position, now he has a real (albeit imaginary), tangible guilt in which to revel in. He finally has a reason for his feelings.

This allusion to Saint Augustine sets up an archetype for Emil’s journey that we already know will not be fulfilled. We know this because earlier, when Emil comments on the stories of prodigal sons, of which Augustine’s Confessions is a foundational example, he rejects the premise that a return to Grace is a satisfying resolution. Emil’s journey begins with familiar notes of Christianity and Sin, but it will provide a new spin on it. Emil will not fall and then return to where he was, but instead find somewhere new, some new way to be that is different from the ideal world of his parents. Emil is a modern man, a follower of Nietzsche; he sees that the world is changing, and that the old beliefs can’t keep up.

Franz Kromer uses Emil’s lie to blackmail him, threatening to rat him out if Emil doesn’t give him money or perform tasks for him. Kromer obviously sees through Emil’s lie, and he uses this to concoct his own lie, telling Emil that he actually knows the man whose orchard he stole from, and that this man is offering a reward for information regarding the theft. Both Emil and Kromer know that this theft is imaginary, but it still has power to affect their relationship and power dynamic. Kromer, by sheer force of will, is able to convince Emil that his threat is real, and therefore turn an imaginary idea into an instrument for his own ends.

We will later hear Max Demian discuss this very power, which he uses on his schoolteachers, and possibly even on Kromer himself. Demian, however, doesn’t use the power for mere pecuniary or otherwise trivial ends, but only when he feels an intense spiritual inclination toward a certain goal. This places Demian above the average schoolyard bully, and makes it clear that his Nietzschean Overman abilities are not about power for its own sake, but about the power to self-actualize.

To return to Emil, as soon as he acquiesces to Kromer’s blackmail, and promises him money in return for not being turned in, he’s done for. “My life was wrecked,” he says. He contemplates running away, or committing suicide, but settles for sitting down on the stairs and sobbing. This may seem an overreaction, but there are a few things at play here. First, Emil is only ten years old, and little problems feel a lot more significant when you’re ten years old. Secondly, Emil has always felt himself destined to be pulled down into the Dark World, and now it has finally happened. He is fatalistic about it because he literally considers it his fate.

He is physically incapable of doing the very simple actions that might free him from Kromer’s pull, such as telling his parents about the whole thing, knowing that they will sincerely believe him when he says the apple-theft never really happened. This is because even if he were to free himself this time, it is inevitable that, in the future, he will once again be pulled into the Dark World. He’s tainted, now. He’s already a sinner, and there’s no turning back.

He says himself, “Whether my crime was a theft or a lie… didn’t matter. My sin wasn’t any particular action, my sin was having given my hand to the Devil.” It doesn’t matter what he did, and therefore it doesn’t matter if his punishment fits the crime; the true crime is internal, in his giving in to temptation, and therefore his true punishment will not be bestowed by authority figures, but will be inflicted on himself in the form of anguish and torment.

Kromer takes on a massive presence in Emil’s mind, dominating his every waking moment. He is always on the alert for Kromer’s distinctive whistle, which lets him know that Kromer wants him to do something, or give him something. This whistle is ubiquitous; it can appear at any time and in any place, and interrupt whatever Emil is doing.

Kromer is much more important as a mental phenomenon than as a physical one. His presence in the world pales in comparison to his presence in Emil’s imagination. His real power is incredibly limited; he’s just a schoolyard bully, after all. Even if he were to turn Emil in, which wouldn’t even make sense because Emil didn’t actually do anything, the worst that could happen is that Emil gets scolded a little. The farmer isn’t going to kill him for pretending to have stolen a few apples.

Thus, Kromer is a mere representation of something greater; that is, the Devil. He has Emil under his sway, and is able to compel Emil to do his bidding because of Emil’s innate sinfulness. Or rather, Emil’s innate sinfulness lies in in the fact that he can be compelled by the Devil.

Emil mentions that the entire Kromer saga might only have lasted a few weeks in all, and yet it left such a mark on him that he chooses it as the introduction to his life story. There are a few reasons for this: one is what I’ve mentioned thus far: that this was his first proper sin. Second, is because the Kromer saga ends with the appearance of Max Demian, and the first showcasing of his powers, which we will get to in the next chapter. But third is an incident that Emil says is the “important and lasting element” of the whole experience, and this is when Emil overcomes his father.

Like most incidents in Emil’s life, this is a one-sided affair. Emil’s father has no idea that he is being overcome, or that anything of note is happening at all. In his eyes, he’s simply scolding Emil for dirtying his shoes outside. But Emil knows the truth: which is that he has done something much worse than dirtying his shoes. He’s dirtied his soul. He has ruined himself to such an extent that it feels almost comical that his father wouldn’t notice. From this, he gains a sense of pride: he knows something his father doesn’t, and thus, he is superior to him in this way. We can tell that Emil has always respected his father, like many children do, and considered him essentially omniscient and omnipotent. It is only now that he realizes that he will not be in his father’s sway forever, and that he has the power to become his own individual.

In another sense, we can see this as a confrontation with the Father, in a more abstract sense; i.e. overcoming God, and the material ramifications of following God’s commandments. The implications of God the Father go further than just denoting that Jesus is his son, but casts a wide shadow over father-son relationships in general. In the traditional bourgeois family structure in which Emil is born, the father is the arbiter of judgment and punishment. In sinning and not receiving immediate punishment from on high, Emil has proven that the connection between sin and punishment is not as direct as he may have previously thought, at least in a material sense. No one can punish you for things they don’t know about, and it is now proven to be possible for his father to not know about things.

This whole initial chapter is about tearing down these sorts of structures and barriers that prevent Emil from expressing his true self, which must, in order to be true, incorporate aspects of the Dark World as well as the Bright World. The initial consequences of these breakdowns are anguish and torment, and Emil remembers this era as a terrifying and terrible time in his life. But at the same time, it opens up the possibility of true self-knowledge and self-actualization, which will become the driving force behind the rest of the narrative. By the end of this first chapter, Emil is entirely estranged from his family; they can’t understand him or what he’s going through, and he can’t possibly feel comfortable in their presence, considering the state of his soul.

Cast off from the familiar path, and no longer able to look to his family for comfort or guidance, Emil is in need of a new compass by which to orient himself. And this comes in the form of Max Demian.

CAIN

Max Demian is a mysterious transfer student who had joined Emil’s grammar school shortly prior to his run-in with Franz Kromer. He is several years older than Emil, and has an air of maturity and cool sophistication that makes him stick out even from the students in his own grade. He stands apart from them, not participating in their scuffles or games, and seems to considers the teachers as his peers, rather than the students.

Due to his cool demeanour and aloofness, rumours begin to spread throughout the school. His mother is a widow, and neither of them attend Church, causing speculation as to whether they might be Jewish, Muslim, or something else entirely. They are not actually too far from the truth, as these next two chapters, titled "Cain" and the "Thief on the Cross", centre around Demian’s unorthodox and even blasphemous interpretations of Biblical stories. Emil is already emotionally well on his way toward abandoning his childhood religion, but what Demian provides here is an intellectual basis with which to justify these sentiments.

Emil first meets Max Demian when their classes have to share a classroom for a session. The older students are working on an essay, while the younger are lectured on the story of Cain and Abel. Emil finds himself unable to resist stealing glances at Demian, even though he admits a certain aversion to him. This is possibly a sort of jealousy, as Demian seems to be able to do what Emil cannot: that is, “live the life that is spontaneously welling up inside [of him.]" Emil has still not overcome the repressive judgments of his society; when he sees Demian acting out of line, he still has this desire to stop or censure him.

After class, Demian catches up with Emil and asks to walk with him a ways. When Emil points out his house, Demian says that he already knows about it, and has in fact been curious about a worn-out crest on the wall above Emil’s front door. The contents of this crest foreshadow a motif that will show up later in the novel, but of initial interest here are two things: first, that Demian immediately reveals that he has more or deeper knowledge of Emil and his upbringing than Emil himself does, and secondly, it seems to hint at a sort of fate, or destiny for Emil, being born beneath a symbol that will later represent his spiritual journey.

Demian then, out of the blue, asks what Emil thinks of the story of Cain and Abel. Emil’s initial response points to his ambivalence; he actually dislikes much of these stories he learns in school, but doesn’t dare say it. Instead, he gives a non-committal answer, saying it’s “fine.” Demian, for the first of many times, sees right through him, and launches into a strange exegesis of the tale.

In the original version, Cain kills his brother Abel because God favours Abel’s offerings more. To quote the NIV, “Then the Lord put a mark on Cain so that no one who found him would kill him.” Cain then travels to a land of Nod, where he ends up taking a wife and becoming a patriarch in himself. The actual story in the Bible is quite short and enigmatic, open to a wide variety of interpretations.

In Demian’s version, Cain is not marked by God because he killed his brother. The mark instead comes first, and perhaps isn’t a physical mark at all, but some aspect of his personality that distinguishes him from others. Demian posits that this might have been heightened intelligence or bravery. This strong distinguished man, Cain, killed another man — maybe his brother, maybe not — as Demian says, “When you come down to it, all men are brothers” — and no one was brave enough to take vengeance, and so they invented this idea that God decided he can’t be killed in order to exculpate their cowardice.

When Emil gets home and looks in his Bible, he finds Demian’s theory to be nonsensical. The text does not support such a reading at all. Demian has gone beyond Biblical criticism; he essentially ignores the text completely, arguing that the story we have received in the Bible has been corrupted over time. This argument of corruption or of wrongly interpreted texts is the same that Jesus makes when he disregards the Pharisees, and the same that Mohammad makes when he claims the Qur'an to be the True Word of God, as opposed to the Hebrew and Christian Bibles. Demian is not trying to re-interpret Christianity here; he is instead founding a new religion.

In this new religion, Cain’s mark takes on an entirely different meaning than it does in Genesis. Cain is not the lowest of the low, but instead the highest of the high. The mark is a mark of distinction, and it is one that Demian clearly has. Emil specifically notes, “This Demian, isn’t he himself a sort of Cain?” Demian stands taller than his peers; he frightens them with his intelligence and the sharp look in his eyes. They don’t like him, and they spread nasty rumours about him, but he doesn’t care, because he knows himself to be above all that.

Demian’s take on Cain is essentially a self-justification. In the same way that he argues that the “priestly” interpretation of the story serves the ends of the priests, his version serves his own ends. We know that Demian is a clever guy, so it’s likely that this is an intentional, cynical move. Like Bazarov in Turgenev’s Father & Sons, Demian realizes that if all these myths are mere inventions in order to promote ideologies, what’s to stop him from inventing his own myths? There is no fundamental truth to them, only the emotional meaning, and what they make us do.

The story of Cain itself isn’t important; what’s important is convincing Emil that the Demian’s way of life is best. We will get into the possible reasons for this later.

Emil connects this story of Cain to his earlier experience with his father, where he felt superior in his distinction as a sinner over his father’s innocent piety. Despite the fact that it’s nonsense in a Biblical sense, the Demian’s story has, in his eyes, an emotional truth, and he takes it on as a sort of framework for the type of critical thinking that he is going to engage in for the rest of his life. Demian’s Cain is a sort of Overman; he stands superior to those around him because of his power to transcend their bourgeois morality.

Soon after this conversation, Emil’s difficulties with Kromer come to a head. Kromer asks Emil to bring his sister along, so that he can “get to know” her. Emil does not know what getting to know each other means, but he does understand sex to be “some kind of secret, disgusting and forbidden thing” that older boys and girls are able to do to each other. Sex is clearly part of the Dark World, and to bring his Bright World sister into contact with it would be more monstrous than anything Emil has done so far.

At this point, Emil has reached an impasse. Petty crimes, real or imaginary, are one thing, but corrupting his own family is another. It is no surprise then that Max Demian shows up to solve the problem. It is important to note here that Max Demian, although cool and aloof, is always the one approaching Emil, going out of his way to involve himself in Emil’s life.

He finds Emil at this time jumpy and anxious, and immediately surmises, using what he calls mind-reading, that Emil shares some sort of secret with Franz Kromer, and is in his debt.

“You ought got to get rid of that fellow!” he says. “If it can’t be done any other way, kill him! I’d be impressed and pleased if you did. I’d even help you.” This is the Cain/Overman in Demian coming out. He has transcended regular morality, and sees the world simply: if you don’t like someone, and you don’t want them in the world, you should kill them. It’s as easy as that. It makes sense, logically; the only thing going against such an idea is the moral framework we have been raised to live in.

In the end, Demian doesn’t kill Kromer, but he does manage to stop him from harassing and blackmailing Emil. In terms of how he did this, all we find out from Demian is that he “merely spoke to him… [and made] it clear… that it’s to his own advantage to leave [Emil] in peace.” Now, if we imagine this conversation, the only real way this could have worked is via threat, as Kromer’s relationship to Emil up to this point has been entirely to his advantage. Demian has been rumoured by the schoolchildren to have unnatural powers, and to have paralyzed another student’s arm simply by squeezing his neck, so perhaps he made use of this reputation.

Thus, Emil’s problem has been solved, but importantly, Emil didn’t solve it. He didn’t face the Dark World head-on, and he didn’t manifest his own strength; instead, he sat passively, allowing others to fight over him. Free from his personal Satan, he finally confesses to his parents what he’s done, and the petty sins he was forced to do in order to satisfy Kromer. Safe in their arms, and in the calming realm of the Bright World, he reverts to a second childhood, relishing in the culmination of his prodigal-son-journey.

But deep in his heart, Emil knows that this isn’t over. He’s seen the Dark World, and he’s even lived in it, and he understands that Demian’s action didn’t only free him from Kromer. It has, at the same time, transferred possession of Emil’s soul from Kromer to Demian. Kromer is the Satan of the Dark World; he is sin in its most pure, simple, and stupid form. He uses his power to achieve petty goals with no higher meaning. Demian, on the other hand, is the Lord of a realm that transcends Emil’s initial conception of Two Worlds. Demian’s realm straddles both in order to reach at something loftier. Emil recognizes that the path Demian has laid out for him will be much more difficult, and much more demanding, and thus he fears putting himself in Demian’s hands.

At the same time, there is a recognition that Demian’s control is somehow benevolent. Emil recounts nightmares in which Kromer beats him pins him to the ground, or forces him to commit terrible acts, like murdering his father. In these dreams, Emil struggles against him. But when Emil has these same dreams of being “beaten and terrorized,” not by Kromer but by Demian, he does not struggle, but instead accepts it, with “an emotion made up just as much of pleasure as of fear.”

This is a recognition on Emil’s part that whatever suffering Demian’s path will put him through, it will be good for him in the end; that Demian is trying to help him here.

This mixture of pleasure and fear characterizes their relationship. When Emil first sees Demian, he says that he doesn’t like him, that he found him “too provokingly self-confident.” And yet he is clearly attracted to him and his self-confidence, to the point where he can’t take his eyes off him.

Due to his fear of this domination, Emil tries to forget about Demian completely after the Kromer saga, never actually thanking him for his help.

At the end of the chapter, Emil asks his father about Demian’s interpretation of the story of Cain and Abel. His father tells him that such an interpretation inevitably leads to the Gnostic heresy that God had made a mistake, and that the God of the Bible wasn’t the True God, but some other thing. His father dismisses this as a Satanic heresy, an attempt by the Devil to destroy Christianity. But is this argument that much different than Demian’s idea that the Church has concealed the true meaning of the story? Emil has overcome the point where this kind of authoritative voice is comforting, and instead has learned to doubt everything.

THE THIEF ON THE CROSS

We will end this first Part by taking a look at The Thief on the Cross, which serves to accentuate many of the themes introduced in the previous chapter. We learn more about Demian and some of his powers, and he offers us another heretical Biblical exegesis.

After saving Emil from Kromer, Demian disappears from Emil’s life for a number of years. Without Demian around, Emil makes little progress in his development, still caught in much the same place as we left him at the end of Chapter 2. In fact, he has very little to relate about this period of his life at all, aside from mentioning the imposition of sexual thoughts into his mental life, which he refuses to confront, still thinking of sex as that “secret, forbidden, and disgusting thing.” He makes no attempt to reconcile his feelings, instead living a sort of double life where he continues to act like a child while growing into an adult. These sexual feelings are only briefly introduced in this chapter; they will become much more important in its sequel.

Aside from this phenomenon, Emil mentions a few instances in which he sees Demian: one, another instance of foreshadowing where he is sketching the crest on the front of Emil’s house; and another where he is casually observing a dead horse on the road, which calls back to the description of the Dark World from the first chapter, where Emil mentions “horses collapsing” as a distinctly Dark World phenomenon. What we are meant to gleam from this brief scene is a reinforcement of Demian’s comfort in both of Emil’s Two Worlds.

When Demian reappears in Emil’s life, it is during Confirmation class. Confirmation is a rite of passage in many branches of Christianity whereby young people, usually between twelve or fourteen, are reaffirmed in their faith as they transition into adulthood. This is often preceded by a series of lectures on a variety of topics meant to cement their foundational knowledge of Christian belief. Demian, being older than Emil, should have been Confirmed a few years earlier, but in his general unorthodoxy, is instead doing it a few years late, thus placing him and Emil in the same class.

Once again, it seems that Demian’s life in a certain way almost revolves around Emil. Him and his mother both live a non-traditional life, and we see that Demian is not a Christian, which will be reinforced during this chapter. He is not attending Confirmation class in order to learn, or to reaffirm his faith, but is instead there to deal the finishing blows to Emil’s faith.

This is clear from the way that Demian uses his powers of persuasion to finagle his way into sitting next to Emil during class. Their seats are meant to be arranged alphabetically by last name, but Demian simply sits down where he chooses, and by sheer force of will makes the teacher ignorant of the fact that he’s in the wrong place. He convinces Emil that this is some mystical power, that an individual with a strong enough will can bend the universe to his whim, at least to a certain extent, if he desires something strongly enough.

This idea reminds me of Renaissance ideas of attraction or magnetism, where charisma is considered a spiritual quality, rather than a form of psychological manipulation. What we’re dealing with here is a difference of conception, rather than a material difference. Demian’s work here has much in common with someone walking around with a clipboard like they own the place and convincing people to let them into places where they shouldn’t be. Whether this is magic or something more mundane is often a matter of perspective. Demian is convinced that he got away with all of this due to the power of his will, rather than the teacher simply not caring that much, and Emil is convinced of this too, which, in the end, is what’s most important here.

The power of the individual will in the face of spiritual authority also plays a key role in Demian’s interpretation of the Thief on the Cross, which gives name to the chapter. The episode in question makes up only a few lines in the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 23, when Jesus is being crucified on the hill of Golgotha. He is flanked on either side by a pair of thieves, who are being crucified at the same time. One decides to taunt Jesus, asking him, if he’s supposedly the Messiah, why he can’t save them from their punishment. The other thief seems to be a Christian convert, since he claims that Jesus has done nothing wrong, and asks him to remember him when he enters Paradise, or Heaven.

Similar to the Mark of Cain, this is a passage that is easy to pass over, being fairly short and initially seeming pretty cut-and-dry. The first thief is being punished via crucifixion, with no hope of possible redemption or compensation, because he doesn’t believe in the power of Jesus. The second thief, on the other hand, despite the worldly punishment he is receiving, understands that by accepting Jesus as his Lord, he will be provided an eternity in Heaven, which more than makes up for a few days on a Cross. The episode showcases the power of conversion and of accepting Jesus: we have two people suffering the same worldly fate, presumably for the same or similar acts, and yet with two wildly varying religious ideas that will vastly alter what happens to them after death.

Demian, of course, can’t leave things at that. Instead, he makes a hero of the first thief, the taunting thief, for sticking to his convictions. The second thief, he believes, is an example of someone who converts on their death bed, at the point when they have no further prospect of benefiting from sinful acts. He sees this as taking the easy way out, and also as a form of betrayal toward their prior self. Such a person is fundamentally untrustworthy, because they are willing to completely change the principles they have lived by at the drop of a hat, when it seems like it will benefit them. The first thief, on the other hand, sticks to his jeering and sinful ways up to the last moment, regardless of the consequences.

The story, in its Christian context, only has meaning if Jesus’ gospel is taken as the absolute Truth. The second thief is only a positive role model if Jesus actually is the Son of God, and if belief in his Lordship is a surefire way to achieve Paradise in the afterlife. If none of this is the case — if Jesus is just some guy, and the afterlife either doesn’t exist or exists in a different form — then the attitudes of these two thieves is irrelevant when faced with the fact that they both die while being crucified.

What Demian has to do then, is construct a new cosmology where these attitudes are, in fact, meaningful, but in a way that is directly opposed to the Gospel-as-Truth cosmology presented by Jesus and his disciples. Demian’s cosmology is, on the other hand, subjective, and one’s only loyalty is toward one’s individual nature, rather than some all-encompassing set of beliefs. The second thief is true to God; the first thief is true to himself, because he has, at least in the implied backstory that Demian provides for him, constructed his own principles and then stuck to them.

This conversation ends with an important exchange, where Demian’s ideas begin to intersect with Emil’s theory of the Two Worlds. Demian argues that in Christian thought, everything good and holy is connected to God, while everything else in the world is either ignored or ascribed to the Devil. This leads people to an incomplete understanding of the world and of themselves, because they can’t appreciate the interplay between what is the Devil’s and what is God’s, or, in other words, between the Dark World and the Bright World. “And so,” he says, “we must also have a service for the Devil… Or else… create some new God, who would also include the Devil within himself.” As we will see later, such a God exists, and learning to worship him will be a part of Emil’s journey.

In practical terms, what this means is learning to face both the Bright World and the Dark World, and accepting that each of these worlds exists within one’s self. Emil’s pull towards the Dark isn’t sin or temptation, but instead a longing for completeness, which will, in the end, give him the power to live “the life that is spontaneously welling up within him.”

This power is exemplified in the character of Demian, who has, by the end of this chapter, transformed from a cool older friend to a nigh-supernatural figure. His off-stage handling of Kromer, combined with the rumours floating around him, already hinted at powers beyond normal human capacities, and in this chapter we are introduced to his magical charismatic power, as well as a form of meditation that hearkens to legends of Eastern sages.

This meditation is discovered by Emil one day in class, when he looks over at Demian and finds him sitting completely still — not even breathing — pale and lifeless. Demian had mentioned previously that “A person must be able to crawl away into himself completely, like a turtle,” and it looks like he is able to do just that. A fly lands and crawls across his face, and he doesn’t even twitch.

Emil is frightened by this for a reason beyond its obvious uncanninness. In Demian’s stone-cold mask he thinks he sees the real Demian — that the Demian that talks and hangs out with him is just Demian playing a role for his sake, but that the true Demian is this person, “stony, age-old, animal-like, stone-like, beautiful and cold, dead and secretly filled with unimaginable life.”

What terrifies Emil is the knowledge that this true Demian is impenetrable. He contains within himself all he needs, and because of that, he can absent himself from the world at will. This ability means that every interaction he has with the world, and with Emil, takes place on his terms, and that he holds all the power. The world can not affect him, because the true Him lies behind this impenetrable stone mask.

By revealing this power, Demian is signaling his incoming disappearance from Emil’s life. He will, for the next few years, become totally inaccessible, and Emil will need to learn to cope without him and find the power within himself. In Demian’s worldview, relying on others is a weakness; each man is an island, and must learn to live totally independently.

Emil is not there yet. He’s nowhere near. When he attempts to emulate Demian by practicing meditation, he struggles to keep it up. He hasn’t developed that inner world to escape into.

At the end of the chapter, Emil is preparing to leave his childhood home to attend school in another town. We have reached the end of Emil’s adolescence. He previously learned that he can’t rely on his parents, and thus turned to Demian. Now, he has learned that he can’t rely on Demian, either. “Demian had gone out of town. I was alone,” he writes, in the chapter’s final sentence.

But we are never ready for a new phase in our life, no matter how much we prepare. In order to progress, we must face new challenges, and fail. Emil, left alone, without Demian, will flounder. He will find himself unable, at first, to live the life spontaneously welling up within him. He’s not ready yet. He’s not meant to be ready yet. Demian’s readiness is an aberration; he is too old for his age, as if he was simply born knowing all that Emil would have to learn. In this way, he’s not a real person, because he doesn’t have a journey and he doesn’t change; he’s more like a demi-God or a spirit.

Emil is a real person, and his struggle is that of a real person. We can attempt to learn from what Demian says, if we like, but it’s difficult to internalize it. This is why the story isn’t about Demian. It is only by following Emil’s journey that we can see how this philosophy works within a real human life, and perhaps learn something about what it means to become yourself.

PART TWO

We are now at the midpoint of our journey, and we find Emil Sinclair left to fend for himself in the world. Like any good student, after leaving the tutelage of his master, he immediately forgets everything he has been taught and falls into a life of total debauchery.

Emil is slightly ahead of the students at his new school, and is unwelcome by them due to his melancholy and aloof attitude. He has grown, physically, from a gentle child to a misshapen adolescent, and is right in the midst of those awkward, gangly years when one’s mass struggles to keep up with one’s height. In the same way, Emil’s spiritual maturity hasn’t been able to keep up with his new role as an independent and free man.

He looks down on the students around him, and in a way attempts to emulate Demian by remaining aloof and isolated. But unlike Demian, Emil has nothing within himself to fall back on, so his solitude is empty of any meaning, and instead merely a source of depression.

With the gentle encouraging of an older student he meets in the park, Emil turns to drink, and very quickly finds himself an unrepentant alcoholic. Although drinking is not pleasant to him, and he never gets used to it enough to not feel the after-effects dearly, he sees no other way to escape the gloom of his inner life. On top of this, the drink gives him the power to talk, and while he struggles to think straight, he realizes that he can talk well enough to feel like a man who knows what he’s about.

Demian had warned Emil at the end of the previous chapter about such talk. He says, “Smart talk has no value, none at all. It just leads you away from yourself.” With every drunken night, Emil is running further and further from himself; every time he looks out the window, there he is, running away from himself. He trots out Demian’s theories: his interpretation of Cain and Abel and the Thief on the Cross, but they don’t mean anything in this context; they’re just verbal games. Demian was particular about telling Emil the stories that would help him develop; Emil, instead, tells stories simply for the sake of it. It’s just smart talk.

Emil falls into debt, he struggles to keep up with his schoolwork, and despite holding court night after night at the tavern, he is lonely. The Bright World he abandoned so long ago no longer even feels real; when his father visits to admonish him, Emil finds that he can’t care less what his father thinks. Demian’s world, the world that transcends Bright and Dark, similarly ceases to have any meaning. He begins to resent Demian for abandoning him. Without Demian, there is no spiritual journey; there is no development, there’s just a big pit for Emil to fall into. Emil starts to feel like there is simply no place for a person like him in the world, and he decides that that’s not his fault, but the world’s.

At the brink of expulsion from school, at the nadir of his material and spiritual well-being, Emil is walking through the park where he had first met with the older student who led him to his first drinking binge. You may start to notice at this point that Emil is always being pulled one way or another; that he only casts off one Tempter to place himself firmly in the hands of another: from Kromer to Demian, from Demian to Alcohol. Emil now finds, in the same place where his drunkenness began, a new form of intoxication.

It arrives in the form of a young woman. He doesn’t know her name, so he decides to refer to her as Beatrice, a reference to Dante, for whom his long-term crush Beatrice serves as a symbol for beauty, love and grace. Emil notes that he hadn’t actually read Dante when he decides this, but had only seen a painting of Beatrice by a British artist, whom my edition notes as Dante Gabriel Rosetti. He describes the Beatrice in the painting as displaying “that slenderness and boyishness of forms that I loved.”

It is at this point that it seems reasonable to take a good look at Emil’s sexuality. When he begins going out drinking with his classmates, he always finds himself uncomfortable talking on a certain topic: that of girls, and the things that go on between boys and girls: that “secret, forbidden, and disgusting thing.” Emil never quite accustoms himself to sexual life; he blushes at the stories and the jokes, and seems afraid of the idea of the sexual world existing in the same world as everything else. It is perhaps one of the features of his upbringing, and of his Bright World/Dark World cosmology, that he struggles so much to break down this barrier.

It is not much of a leap to say that Emil doesn’t seem to be attracted to women. While he often speaks of girls or women when discussing his sexuality, these seem to be mere metaphors for the object of his attraction, rather than the object itself. Aside from Beatrice, and, well, even including Beatrice, he never shows any interest in a real woman, but only in the ideal of a feminine being.

Beatrice, by which I mean the real person whose name is not actually Beatrice, isn’t the object of Emil’s affection, and this quickly becomes clear. Emil, as is his wont, quickly abstracts his relationship to her, just like he did with Kromer when he transformed him into his personal Satan. Beatrice, on the other hand, becomes his deity, or at least, his idol.

In this way, he frees himself from the bestial passions of drink and lust. His goal becomes “not pleasure, but purity; not happiness, but beauty and intellectuality.” Due to her angelic influence, Emil shuns drink, and becomes more comfortable in his own solitude.

Emil takes up painting, and it is via this medium that we begin to understand what Beatrice, the symbol, truly means. He begins by painting neutral subjects, such as pots, flowers, and imaginary landscapes. Eventually, he gathers the courage to attempt to paint his love, Beatrice. He first tries to paint her as she exists in reality, but finds all these attempts inadequate. He then allows himself to paint unconsciously, and from within his imagination comes a painting that speaks to him more than any he had made in the past.

This painting is a portrait, but it’s not of Beatrice. He’s no longer trying to paint Beatrice. Instead, he is painting his true love, that love for which Beatrice is merely a stand-in. Her boyish androgyny has given away to what is clearly a young man’s face, a face “a little stiff and masklike, but impressive and full of secret life.”

It’s Demian, of course. It takes Emil some time to recognize this fact, but to us it’s clear as day. Beatrice was never his idol; she was never the ideal he was chasing. It was Demian. It was always Demian. Even as he drunk himself into oblivion, it was Demian he was trying to emulate; it was Demian he was trying to reach.

But we can’t stop here. The solution to Emil’s problems is not that he’s secretly gay. There’s something more going on here. As Emil stares more and more into the picture, and sees it in new lights, he realizes that its resemblance to Demian too is somewhat superficial. What he has truly painted is a self-portrait. “The picture didn’t resemble me,” he says, “nor was it meant to — but it depicted that which constituted my life, it was my inner self, my fate, or my daemon.”

This clearly points us toward the true nature of Max Demian. Whether he truly exists, or whether he is only a figment of Emil’s imagination, is left ambiguous, and the answer probably lies somewhere in the middle. It’s likely that Max Demian is a real person, but that, like Beatrice, Emil has ascribed to him meaning and power that he doesn’t truly possess. In this book, we only ever get Emil’s perspective, and we’ve seen in the past that this doesn’t always reflect reality. His naive perceptions of his family, as well as his idea that Kromer actually believed his story about the apple orchard, point to the fact that Emil is not the most reliable source as to what’s truly happening on Earth.

In the following paragraph, Emil brings up a quote from Novalis, an 18th century German philosopher. It goes, “A man’s character and his fate are two names for the same concept.” We could argue that Emil’s present makes up his character, but Demian is his fate. That’s why the painting seems to resemble them both. They’re the same thing, only captured at different times.

At the end of the chapter, Emil is once again longing for Demian’s guidance. He brings up a meeting he had with Demian a while prior to his painting, while he was visiting his parents over the holidays. He says that he omitted to bring this up earlier in the story because of the shame it caused him. During the meeting, Demian lightly admonishes Emil for his new lifestyle and his aimlessness, but then points out that such a phase is not abnormal for young men who would later come to terms with their spirituality, bringing up Saint Augustine again as an example.

He then says, “Inside of us there’s a self that knows everything, wills everything, does everything better than we do.” That’s what Demian is for Emil. He’s always a step ahead, many steps ahead in fact, and is always able to recognize where Emil is on his journey, and where he needs to go next. Demian himself is the end of Emil’s journey; he is the ideal that Emil aspires to. That ideal lives within him, in his idea of Demian, and it is what allows him to break free from all these tempters that come between him and himself, and that allows him to, at last, live that life that is spontaneously welling up within him.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Emil still has more to do. He has recognized the folly of his drunken lifestyle, and he has recognized that the power of Beatrice, which is also in some respects the power of Demian, has, in some measure, come from within himself. What he needs to do next is empower that part of himself, to let it free and let it take control, rather than running from it.

Emil has a dream in which he sees Demian holding the coat-of-arms from his childhood house, that he had often seen Demian staring at and sketching. The coat-of-arms depicts a sparrowhawk, and in the dream, Demian convinces Emil to swallow it. The bird remains alive within Emil’s stomach, and begins to eat at Emil from within. When Emil awakes, he sets about painting this bird, now a bird of prey, emerging from the egg that had contained it.

This is a metaphor for Emil’s inner Daemon, his Demian — this ideal self that exists within him that he needs to embody. He needs to let it eat its way out from within himself. He can’t will this so much as he can let it happen, but for it to happen, he must get himself straight first. He can’t run away from himself into the intoxicating power of drink or lust. His idealization of Beatrice is in some way religious, but its religious content is still superficial. It is in the next chapter that Emil will truly reckon with the religious spirit.

THE PISTORIUS ARC

THE BIRD FIGHTS ITS WAY OUT OF THE EGG; JACOB WRESTLES WITH GOD

At the end of Chapter 4, Emil sends his painting of the sparrowhawk to Demian. As a reply, he receives a note curiously left in one of his schoolbooks. He immediately recognizes the note as being from Max Demian, who has somehow snuck into Emil’s classroom during a break. The note explains that the egg is the world, and that anyone who wishes to be born must destroy a world. “The bird is flying to God,” it says. “The God is named Abraxas.”

This God, Abraxas, is the God foreshadowed in Chapter 3, when Demian spoke of the God that must also contain the Devil with Himself. Abraxas is an enigmatic figure in Gnostic religion, about which there is much scholarship and consequently much disagreement, but in this story, his meaning is quite simple. Abraxas is the symbol for a God that is different from the Christian God, in that he accepts responsibility for both the good and the bad in the world. The lack of concrete information regarding Abraxas — Emil even searches an entire library and comes up with nothing — allows the characters to say whatever they like about him, and use him for their philosophy, similar to how Demian deracinates Cain and the Thief on the Cross from their original Christian contexts.

Around the same time as he learns about Abraxas, Emil starts to lose faith in the religion he's built around Beatrice. He finds that he can’t repress his sexual urges like this forever, and begins once again to dream and to lust. He begins to have a recurring dream that he describes as “the most important and memorable in my life,” so it behooves us to pay a certain amount of attention to it.

In this dream, Emil returns to his father’s home, where he falls into his mother’s embrace. But as he embraces her, he realizes that his mother is not just his mother, but that she is also someone else, a tall and powerful figure that we will later meet as Lady Eve. This figure seems to combine motherhood and femininity with that portrait Emil painted in the last chapter: the one that resembled both himself and Max Demian. This embrace seems to Emil to be “a divine service but also a crime.” It fills him with bliss and comfort, but also fear, similar to the dream-presence of Demian when he tortured Emil during Chapter 2. There’s also an implied sexual thrill, which confuses Emil, due to the figure’s connection with both his mother and Max Demian.

What Emil comes to recognize about this dream is that what he is truly embracing is the God Abraxas. This figure combines the bright and dark world — the familiar safety and innocence of his childhood, combined with the guilt of his mature sexual lust. “Rapture and terror, man and woman combined, deep guilt quivering in the heart of gentle innocence.” This amalgam of paradoxes is Abraxas — it is accepting the world as it is, and realizing that all things and all feelings have their place in it. You can’t understand the world if you hide from its darker aspects. Emil began his life repressing his sexual feelings in the form of sin and guilt; later, he transformed them into his deification of Beatrice. In both instances, he is failing to reckon with them for what they truly are, and by extension, what all human feelings are. We are both human and animal; we have base lusts, but also high, sophisticated ideals. Abraxas is the god of “Can’t it be both?”

Emil, upon realizing this, goes a little crazy. He can’t fully internalize this new understanding. He can’t transcend his binary moral system. He can only bounce back and forth, as we’ve seen him do throughout the novel. He is enveloped by passions; ideas swarm about in his head, but he has no control over them. What he is missing is a will, a desire strong enough to provide focus to his life. While other people study to become doctors or lawyers, Emil has no purpose. He has the beginnings of a philosophy, but no knowledge of how to actually apply this philosophy to his life.

It is during this confusion that Emil passes by a church, from which he hears emanating the sound of an organ, and discovers in this music a yearning similar to his own: a deep religious passion disconnected from commonplace piety, a “frenzy of devotion and a profound curiosity for the miraculous.”

He follows this organ player one night, and learns that his name is Pistorius, and that he is the prodigal son of a pastor, as well as being a musician and a scholar of ancient esoteric texts. The two immediately sense a sympathy in their pursuits; Pistorius recognizes Emil as a cut above the normal type of person, as someone who is searching for the Truth of the world.

Pistorius hopes to discover this truth via the study of theology. He practices a syncretic sort of religion, borrowing aspects from Christianity, Gnosticism, and Buddhism, among others. He practices solitary rituals, even at times worshipping fire, spending evenings with Emil staring into the fireplace as a sort of meditation. Pistorius becomes Emil’s new mentor, sharing ideas that have much in common with those of Max Demian.

However, unlike Demian, Pistorius does not have the overwhelming presence and force of will that inspires confidence and respect. While he is a profound elitist, considering people like himself to be above the average person — who he compares to fish, sheep, worms, leeches, ants, and even bees — he is not an Overman; far from it. He is more like the real Friedrich Nietzsche, as opposed to Demian, who embodies Nietzsche’s ideal.

Pistorius is a teacher, and a talker. Demian had warned Emil earlier to avoid smart talk, as it only alienates you from yourself. Pistorius lives this alienation. He preaches the same path as Demian, but he only preaches. He has not severed his connections to the world and gone it alone; instead, he lives with his parents, and is looking to get a job as an organ player and a pastor. While he studies esoteric texts in solitude, what he truly desires is to be able to share his religion with the masses; “it has to become the religion of the community,” he says. When he practices his mysteries by himself, it’s “not the real thing.”

Emil is, at first, enraptured by Pistorius’ profound knowledge, and accepts him as his new mentor. In a certain sense, he doesn’t have a choice; at this point in his life, he still needs that mentorship to save him from his all-encompassing confusion. But gradually, the veil falls from his eyes. It begins when he encounters Pistorius one night hobbling home drunk from the nearby tavern. Pistorius is so far gone that he doesn’t even recognize Emil as he passes by. While, in the moment, Emil censures himself for such a moralistic judgment as condemning alcohol, he understands from experience that intoxication doesn’t lead to spiritual fulfillment, but instead only alienates one’s self further.

In the midst of his time with Pistorius, Emil encounters another, even more pathetic figure. A younger student named Knauer approaches Emil after school one day, drawn by his air of spirituality. We see here a sort of bizarro-world inversion of Emil and Demian’s initial relationship. While Demian approached Emil in the hopes of teaching him, here Knauer approaches Emil with the hopes of being taught, bringing a sort of desperation that is wholly off-putting. Emil has little interest in helping him, but listens to him briefly to find out what he’s about.

Knauer’s main focus seems to be on sexual abstinence — in his words, continence. This is a doctrine as old as time, and we see it around today on online message boards that promote abstaining from all sexual acts — including masturbation — in order to increase testosterone levels, boost confidence, cure depression, etc, etc. It’s presented as a sort of cure-all for the many maladies that are epidemic among young men. This follows the modern trend of using scientific claims as the basis for what are ultimately spiritual matters — similar to the psychiatric co-opting of religious meditation practices.

What’s at the heart of it, really, is an attempt to take control of one’s life by proving that one can resist mere animal needs with mental fortitude. It is about not being a slave to one’s passions. What we see in young Knauer, however, is that his obsession with negating these passions has only made them stronger. His sexual fantasies have become completely overwhelming, and have morphed into forms that frighten even him. His whole life, it seems, is a constant battle with the demons raging inside him. Through this battle, his very idea of humanity has become warped; by demonizing his natural sexual feelings, he has come to the conclusion that humans are innately sinful and ugly.

Emil is no stranger to these problems, as we’ve seen in his own repressive tendency toward his sexual feelings. In fact, this is something Emil has yet to overcome, and therefore he has no advice to give. He says, “I became taciturn and felt humiliated because someone was seeking advice from me and I had none to give.” In response, Emil acts sarcastic, rude, and aloof. He has none of the charm and personability of Demian, because that all came from Demian’s understanding of and confidence in himself as a complete being. Emil is not ready to be a teacher; he tells Knauer, “In such matters, people can’t help each other. No one helped me, either.” This is obviously a complete lie, as we’ve seen that Emil would’ve been hopeless without Demian. How can he hope to be a teacher when he can’t even recognize himself as having been taught?

After this encounter, Emil once again has his dream of Lady Eve, and this time he paints the figure upon awakening. Once again, it seems to resemble Demian, and also himself, and he stands before it, praising and deprecating it in turn, desperate to understand what it means to him. By the end of this process, he says, “I wanted to kneel down before it, but it was so firmly inside of me that I could no longer separate it from myself, as if it had become my pure ego.” Later, he retains a vague memory of burning the painting, and eating the ashes. In a sense, we can understand this as Emil overcoming the external Demian and recognizing the Demian that is within him, and recognizing also that he must play the role of Demian for Knauer. He remembers the passage from the Bible when Jacob fights with the Angel of God and attains the name Israel, and he quotes Jacob: “I will not let you go unless you bless me.” This quote offers an insight into the teacher/student relationship here.

Emil, without knowing it, was desperate for Demian’s help, and seemed to summon him in his times of most need. Now, it is Emil’s turn to be needed, and to be summoned. Waking in the middle of the night, Emil finds himself prompted by a mysterious impulse to head out into the town, and finds himself at a construction site that resembles where his own spiritual journey began, when Kromer blackmailed him. Here, he finds Knauer. Emil doesn’t know why he’s come here; when Knauer asks how he found him here, Emil tells Knauer that he wasn’t even looking for him. Knauer has unconsciously brought him here, using that power that Demian described earlier of being able to bend the universe to one’s whim if one feels strongly enough.

He finds Knauer in truly dire straits, on the verge of suicide, and it was this desperation that drew Emil to him. During their short conversation here, Emil tells Knauer, “We’re not pigs, as you think. We’re human beings. We create Gods and fight with them, and then they bless us.” This is what Emil has been doing, with Demian, with Beatrice, with Abraxas. He has deified these beings, but in so doing has come to understand where they fall short, the ways in which they aren’t enough. They can’t offer Emil a full understanding of himself; they are only aspects of a bigger picture. Thus, Emil must reject them, find their weakness, in order to be blessed by them; blessed, that is, with a deeper knowledge of himself.

Knauer, meanwhile, comes to deify Emil in his own right, insisting that Emil teach him how to contact spirits or understand the Kabbala: things which Emil knows nothing about. The image of Emil that exists in Knauer’s head is entirely divorced from the true Emil; he imagines Emil to contain the knowledge that he himself desires. He sees Emil as the self that he wants to become. This is exactly the nature of the Max Demian that we meet in this book. We see him as Emil sees him, but what Emil is really seeing is his own idealized self, projected onto a person who is mysterious and reserved enough to facilitate such projection. Max Demian himself is not a spirit, or a ghost, or a figment of Emil’s imagination — in all likelihood, he’s just a weird guy that Emil met at school, in the same way that we know Emil to be just a weird guy struggling to understand himself.

Knauer ends up silently drifting out of Emil’s life, we can assume in order to find the appropriate spiritual teacher for the next phase of his journey. Pistorius, on the other hand, must be actively overcome. Pistorius’ presence has become a comfort to Emil; he clings to him long after it becomes clear that their paths must diverge. Pistorius has provided Emil with a more systematic, a more religious understanding of what it means to come to terms with one’s self, but at the same time, he has become trapped within this religious framework. What finally severs their relationship is an idle comment Emil makes one night, when he asks Pistorius to tell him something true, something personal, instead of all this religious talk which he disparages as “so damned antiquarian!”

Pistorius, despite all his unorthodoxy and syncreticism, is of a priestly nature. What he wants is a set of rules passed down through antiquity; he doesn’t want to create anything new. He wants a book that he can show to everyone and say, “Look! This is the new religion!” But such a person is inherently incapable of actually founding that new religion. Jesus, Mohammed, and Demian: what they do is re-fashion these old truths, re-interpret the old stories in order to communicate something radically new. They have that charisma, that divine inspiration, that allows them to put their lives on the line for the sake of these truths. Pistorius doesn’t have that courage, or that confidence; he needs to read it in a book for it to be true. Unfortunately for him, the book he needs hasn’t been written yet.

Esoteric pseudo-Egyptian Greek treatises can not tell you who you are. They can’t show you how to live your life. None of these books can, esoteric or otherwise. The Bible or the Quran won’t either, not on their own. They all require the reader to bring something of their own; they require the reader’s belief, and it is only through that belief that we can gleam anything from their words. As with the story of the Thief on the Cross we discussed in Part One, the story only matters if the crucifixion of Jesus is a significant moment, and that only matters if Jesus is a significant person. To believe this already requires a certain amount of faith in the person of Jesus, whether this is due to his charismatic, intellectual, or spiritual power, or simply because of his legendary status in our culture.

Pistorius does not have religious faith. He doesn’t believe any of these stories whole-heartedly; if he did, he wouldn’t be searching for new ones all the time. He doesn't want a religion at all; he wants a Church. He has abandoned the Protestant Church because of its rationality; that it has placed reason before faith. Pistorius claims that “our religion [Protestantism] is practised as if it weren’t one.” Ironically, this is exactly what he continues to do. The problem with introducing rationality into the religious world is that faith is inherently irrational. If it wasn’t irrational, you wouldn’t need faith at all; you’d only need logic. But logic can’t replace faith, because there are aspects of our world and our lives that can not be explained by reason or science — aspects that are immaterial, and unobservable. You can’t find the soul with a microscope. It’s only there if you believe it is.

He makes an idle comment to the effect that he’d even rather be a Catholic, if only because Catholicism retains those antique rites that, to his mind, make religion so powerful. The so-called Ancients that he reads were writing in times when religion was the language of culture, of philosophy, and of science. The upshot of that is that it makes it seem, to us modern readers, that they had a more direct connection with the spiritual, and thus that they had knowledge that we can no longer attain. What Emil realizes is that this is nonsense; it’s just a trick of the way they talk. Just because it’s old doesn’t mean it’s true.

Furthermore, this antiquarian thinking closes off the possibility of gaining understanding here and now. This is antithetical to the Nietzschean ideal of self-actualization. There is no pre-requisite knowledge to being an Overman; all that’s required is the courage and fortitude to grapple with one’s self. If you are alive and have a self, then you are capable of understanding the world.

Pistorius himself understands all this. At the end of Chapter 6, he admits to Emil that this longing for a Church is his weakness, and that the only way to truly reach the new religion is by standing alone, naked and vulnerable, with no authenticated dogma to turn to. A true Overman can’t follow an ideal; he must be his own authentic self. This is why Emil had to overcome Demian, to burn his portrait and eat its ashes. He can’t chase after someone else’s tail. He must find his own way.

LADY EVE

Now that Emil has overcome Demian as an ideal, he is ready to reunite with Max Demian as a person. But first, he must decide on a new quarry. The fate of someone like Emil is that of a seeker, always chasing after and pursuing an ideal, and by so doing, attaining the truth of their own self. Demian is an Overman, but part of being an Overman is reaching this state yourself; you can’t just copy someone else. That’s why Emil’s focus in this penultimate chapter turns from Demian to Lady Eve.

Lady Eve first appeared in Chapter 4, as a sort of amalgamation of Emil’s mother, Emil himself, and Max Demian. She becomes a reality when Emil visits Demian’s old house in his hometown and sees a portrait of Demian’s mother. This idea of motherhood as an archetype is actually first introduced in the novel’s preface, when Emil says, “We all have a common origin, the Mother [or Mothers, depending on your translation] … but each of us strives toward his own goal.”

Lady Eve, as the mother of Demian, embodies this archetypal role as the origin of life, either collective life or individual life. Obviously, her name, Eve, points to a collective motherhood, Eve being the first ever mother. By shifting his orientation from Demian to Eve, what Emil is doing is focusing now on the underlying philosophical foundation of Overmanhood, rather than its specific representation in Max Demian.

But first, he will be reunited with Max Demian himself, and develop a more equal relationship than the teacher-mentor relationship from earlier in the book. As tends to be the case in this novel, this encounter is pure chance; but of course, we know that chance in this novel is influenced greatly by the passions and desires of the main characters. In real life, this would be a chance encounter, but we know it was brought about by the desires of Emil and likely Demian himself as well.

While walking through the town where he is attending university one night, Emil overhears a conversation between a man that he recognizes as Max Demian and a Japanese fellow whose name we don’t learn. The presence of the unnamed Japanese man has manifold implications: first, it shows that Max Demian is a global, cosmopolitan sort of guy, not constrained to the culture he grew up in. Second, their conversation reveals that the new phenomena of the “seekers” is not specific to Germany or even Europe; as we will see later on, Demian’s acquaintances are from all over, with religious and cultural backgrounds that span the whole globe. We find that no culture is more or less conducive to recognizing the Truth; Hesse’s orientalist tendencies might lead us to believe that the so-called “East” is somehow more enlightened or spiritual than Europe, but the truth that we see here is that enlightened people are rare anywhere, and that a key step in this enlightenment is overcoming one’s mother culture.

Demian introduces Emil to his mother, Lady Eve, shortly after their reunion, and we find that she function as the nucleus around which all these strange social outcasts orbit. Lady Eve is, like Beatrice — the only other female character in this novel — a symbol of femininity as a whole, rather than an individualized character. She plays a supporting role in the lives of the “seekers,” never offering input into their conversation, but instead encouraging them with her smile and motherly gaze. While Beatrice works as a figment of Emil’s imagination, a sort of fantasy woman of the kind that many young men create out of their crushes, the fact that both female characters in the novel function in basically this same way is a worthy object of criticism. From what we can tell from the text, the idea here seems to be that the role of women is not to seek the truth, or go on their own spiritual journeys, but instead to support men doing these things. This is just one way in which the kind of archetypal symbolism Hesse employs in the novel perpetuates social norms, even in a novel where other, similar social norms are being criticized.

When Emil meets Lady Eve, he says to her, “I think that all my life I’ve always been on a journey — and now I’ve returned home.” This brings us back to the idea of the prodigal son from the first chapter. I mentioned that Emil’s journey would not be that straightforward, and it wasn’t. However, there is still this sense of the homecoming. Emil is not returning to his familial religious or cultural beliefs, and in fact, it seems that his biological family is no longer a factor in his life at all. When he goes home for Christmas vacation at the end of the chapter, he doesn’t mention his family at all; he only talks about the fact that he has to leave Lady Eve for a while. What Emil has instead returned to is something more primal, something beyond his individual origin. His home is the self that he was born to become. Somehow, through being born and raised, he had lost access to this central aspect of his being, but now, at the conclusion of his spiritual journey, he can finally say that he is himself. He’s no longer confused and afraid; he no longer needs to pretend. It seems that Emil is finally beginning to live that life that was spontaneously welling up within him.

However, he continues to be tormented by the sexual desires that have plagued his life, now directed at Lady Eve. This is probably the right moment to finally truly reckon with Emil’s sexuality. In the Beatrice section, I briefly alluded to Emil being gay and in love with Max Demian. I’d like to take the opportunity now to try to understand what role Emil’s sexuality plays in the novel.

If we need further evidence on this point, by the way, in this penultimate chapter, Emil comes across Demian working out, shirtless, and we are told that he “looked marvelous,” followed by a description of his physical features, including his strong, capable arms and taut muscles. And we can’t forget that the novel ends with Emil and Max Demian sharing a passionate and loving kiss.

It’s not hard to see that a key part of this entire process of overcoming the guilt and sin Emil associates with being himself is tied to the fact that the culture he lives in is unwilling to acknowledge or accept his sexuality, and that in turn Emil himself finds his sexual feelings difficult to acknowledge. In his dreams, Emil often finds himself in situations where his feelings seem contradictory: such as the dream in which Demian beats and terrorizes him and Emil accepts it with “a mixture of pleasure and fear.”

We are led back to the god Abraxas: the God that allows for contradiction and paradox. Human sexuality is not simple, and it is not binary. Emil is attracted to Demian, yes, but he’s also attracted to Beatrice — both the real Beatrice and the one in the painting — and Lady Eve, who we will return to in a second. We can’t just decide that this attraction is illegitimate simply because we think he’s gay, or because these feelings only exist in fantasy. Emil’s journey is about overcoming the binary cosmology of the Bright World and the Dark World; about accepting yourself fully and completely, and not caring if such a full and complete picture contains contradictions and paradoxes.

Emil’s attraction to androgynous or “boyish” women isn’t a cover-up for being gay, as it’s sometimes made out to be. Androgyny is often considered an attractive trait to people of all genders and sexual orientations across myriad cultures and time periods. Emil lives in a deeply conservative and sexually repressive culture where sexual feelings outside of those between men and women are censured and often simply unacknowledged. A large part of the Dark World/ Bright World distinction was that the Bright World is one of ignorance: that it refuses to see that which exists in the dark. This darkness contains basically all of human sexuality, so its no surprise that Emil’s dreams and fantasies are so confused. He doesn’t have the concepts with which to deal with any of it.

What Emil desires from Lady Eve is ambiguous. In a way, the love seems a lot like his love for Beatrice; he says that at times he feels that Eve is “only a symbol of my inner self.” However, at other times, he is “aflame with sensuous desire in her presence.” Most tellingly, he relates to us that, “While reading a book I gained a new insight, and it was the same feeling as being kissed by Lady Eve.” Thus, like with Beatrice, we can’t really call this love in any realistic sense.

More likely, what Emil has fallen in love with is the pure idea of self-knowledge and self-actualization that he can now conceptualize directly. While before, he chased after phantoms such as intoxication, idolization, and esoteric religious doctrines, now he can “worship” the real thing. Lady Eve is the mother of Emil’s ideal self, his daemon Max Demian. She is the catalyst that will allow Emil to become his full self, to live the life that is spontaneously welling up within him. In this way, she is the vector for his self-knowledge. And while, in my eyes, this is the most important role Lady Eve plays, she remains a deeply mysterious and enigmatic figure in the novel, and trying to contain her within a single label or role is probably a fool’s errand.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

We now arrive at the book’s final chapter. Emil, as we noted in the previous chapter, has reached maturity. His journey is far from over, but he seems to have made his way through the stormiest waters. What happens now is that the scope of the story changes from the internal struggle of Emil Sinclair as an individual, to the collective struggle of humanity.

At the end of Chapter 7, after returning from his Christmas vacation, Emil goes to Demian’s house only to find him in his near-comatose meditative state that we first saw during communion class in Chapter 3. Now, as then, this foreshadows Demian’s exit from Emil’s life, this time for good. When Emil leaves Demian’s room, he comes across Lady Eve, who seems just as perturbed and distracted as Demian, and tells Emil to leave and come back later.

Emil goes for a walk, and in the clouds of the storm brewing overhead, he sees the form of the sparrowhawk. When he returns, he finds Demian now awake, and he tells him of the vision. It appears to be linked with visions that Demian experienced during his meditation, and it all points to the great cataclysmic rebirth that is looming. Demian mentions in his dream that he climbed a tower, or a tree, and once on top, saw a vision of the world in flames. This strongly resembles various shamanistic rituals, where shamans spiritually ascend the tree or ladder that connects Earth and Heaven, and in Heaven are given access to divine knowledge. In Christianity, we can recognize this archetype in the legend of Jacob’s Ladder. Hesse is deliberately invoking this symbolism to present Demian as a legitimate seer, and we know that what Demian foresees does in fact become real.

Demian notes that, while many of his dreams apply specifically to himself, he can tell that this one applies to the whole world. This represents a massive change of scale in the narrative of the novel. Most of the book has been focused almost solipsistically on Emil’s inner journey and development. Now that Emil has become himself, or is at least capable of becoming himself, he can begin to look at the world and understand it in a way he could not previously. Much like how Emil needed to survive trials and tribulations in order to be reborn stronger, so does the world. Demian says, “No new thing can arrive unless a new thing dies.”

This cataclysmic event is the First World War. It is first introduced in the novel as a looming presence in the previous chapter, when Demian and Emil are first reunited, and Demian, as is his wont, immediately turns the conversation to spiritual matters, and begins to expound upon the so-called “spirit of Europe.” In Demian’s view, the people of Europe, despite all wanting to follow the herd, are deeply isolated and discontent, and their sense of community is based on fear and anxiety. This fear stems from the fact that they haven’t accepted themselves; that they understand subconsciously that the rules and ideals they live by are no longer valid, but they can’t acknowledge it. This is classic Nietzsche. God is Dead, but no one knows it yet.

Demian says,

“Whether the workers kill the owners or Russia and Germany shoot at each other, that will only mean a change of ownership. But it won’t all be for nothing. It will show clearly just how worthless today’s ideals are; there will be a clearing out of Stone Age gods. The world, as it now is, wants to die, it wants to perish, and it will.”

In this view, such a cataclysmic event is inevitable. Whether it’s a global capitalist war or a worker’s revolution, the key here is that something big must happen, not because it would make the world better in itself, but because such an eruption of violence and chaos is the only thing that will snap the people of Europe out of their catatonic state.

We have to remember that Herman Hesse wrote this book as the First World War was ongoing. The full consequences of the conflict were yet unknown, and heavy government censorship meant that much of what we know about the conflict was not knowable to contemporary people. In a meaningful way, Hesse is looking at the war not as a historical or even contemporary event, but as a spiritual catalyst for the future.

The way Demian seems to almost relish the upcoming murder of tens of millions of people is chilling, to say the least. He knows that the event will be terrible, chaotic, violent — and yet he wills it all the same. There’s also present here the sort of elitism one would expect from Nietzschean philosophy. Demian and his fellow seekers, those born with Mark of Cain, are the people destined to bring about this future, to usher humanity into this new age. While everyone else will merely run along with the herd, the “Elect,” the Overmen, the “men of destiny” are “able to accomplish new, unheard-of things and to save their species by means of new adaptations.” This final evocation of evolutionary theory as applied to human civilization should immediately ring our alarm bells.

It is easy, in the position that Demian and his friends find themselves, to hypothetically or even literally be willing to sacrifice other people for your ideals. They have come to think that they understand what the world wants and what the world needs, not by asking people, but by looking deep into themselves and thereby tapping into some seemingly more primal connection to the human spirit. But as we’ve seen throughout this novel, when you search into yourself, you only get yourself, not anyone else. Emil has proven himself blind to what goes on around him and to the interiority of others, and we see now Demian making the exact same mistake.

Demian is lionized in the novel, but we, the readers, have to be more critical. The ideas he comes up with are often self-aggrandizing and self-justifying, a sort of apologia for who he is and how he acts. He’s generous only to those he considers part of his in-group, those with the Mark of Cain; in other words, those who he intuitively senses to be strong in some way. Strength is certainly not a bad thing, but its also not necessarily an appropriate basis for selecting an elite. I mean, I don’t think there is an appropriate basis for selecting an elite, but to keep it specific here, there are many instances in which acknowledging individual weakness leads to greater collective strength, and that’s an idea that has no place in Demian’s philosophy.

On a personal level, I find Demian’s views in this final section to be reprehensible. This is deeply uncomfortable, because I have actually, in my life, gained a lot from reading Nietzsche, and attempting to self-actualize and understand myself using aspects of his philosophy. Now, there’s obviously never a direct determined relationship between a philosopher and their followers, but it’s impossible to ignore the fact that this sort of elitism and this idea of enforcing one’s will and using one’s strength, whether other people like it or not, does lead to this kind of thinking.

The novel itself is not explicitly critical of any of this. Like I said earlier, the idea of social responsibility doesn’t show up in Hesse’s early work. While he expands Emil’s struggle to this global level through the symbol of the First World War, it’s notable that this transition still treats humanity as one collective individual, not as an amalgam of various cultures, beliefs, and even personalities. Demian’s type is considered the ideal: the type who is willing to put their life on the line for some sort of principle; and the way that Demian conceptualizes his self is the way that humanity as a whole is meant to conceptualize itself. This is an extremely limiting view, and this is what leads Demian to celebrate something as horrific as the First World War, as if this war is what the general population actually wanted, instead of a result of a political situation and the specific desires of the people in power. It always pays to tread cautiously when you find that someone’s “individual” ideology is so deeply compatible with the desires of colonial military states.

Now, when the war actually arrives, Demian’s gung-ho attitude reveals itself to be naïve. Demian realizes, in this last dream, that the war will be far more terrible than he previously imagined. His youthful ideal of “burning it all down” feels a lot different in reality than it does in fantasy. Demian and Emil realize that they too will have to live through this apocalypse, and there’s no guarantee that they will make it out unharmed.

At the same time as it is deemed necessary for humanity, the war is also necessary for Emil’s development. During the summer prior to its outbreak, which Emil describes as a “dream island,” Emil lives with Demian and Lady Eve in their earthly paradise. He is able to retreat from the world and devote himself “exclusively to beautiful, pleasant things and ideas.” But Emil knows this retreat is only temporary, and that soon he will have to return to struggle. “I wasn’t meant to exist in the lap of plenty and ease; I needed torment and persecution.” One cannot achieve self-actualization by running from the world; one must face it head-on.

One day, on a day when these feelings of the impermanence of his situation sit heavily in his mind, Emil decides to test out his powers by calling for Lady Eve, psychically, from his home. However, Demian arrives in her stead. Emil desires the safety and comfort of Lady Eve, but the universe realizes what he truly needs is Demian, the man who pushes him forward, whether he likes it or not.

Demian tells Emil that war has broken out between Germany and Russia, which signifies the beginning of the First World War, that calamity they had so often yearned for. Emil is particularly elated by the idea that he is now a part of the destiny of the world, that he will now participate in the grand machinations of world-historical events.

Emil’s experiences in the war make up only a brief few pages at the end of the novel. What Emil sees happening around him is exactly what he trained himself to see: humanity evolving as it acknowledges its primal urges. For Emil, and as far as he can tell, for the people around him, the war is not about military or political objectives. The material conditions are totally irrelevant. In his eyes, the soldiers are not fighting the enemy, but instead embodying a primal urge within themselves to kill and destroy in order to bring about the new world. As we are keenly aware, this is only what Emil feels, not what he actually sees.

This is made more clear during Emil’s final experience in the novel. As he is standing guard one night, he sees a vision in the sky of millions of people pouring out of a vast city, and in the midst stands a giant figure resembling Lady Eve. She screams in pain, the mark on her forehead shines brightly, and out of it shoots thousands of stars, flying through the sky. One of the stars lands near Emil, throws him into the air, and he next awakes in a military hospital.

In a symbolic sense, we can see the stars as the people of the world being sent forth by Lady Eve, the mother, the primal urge, to sacrifice themselves in destruction for the rebirth of the world. In a literal sense, what Emil is witnessing is an artillery barrage.

When he wakes up, he sees in the cot next to him Max Demian. Demian asks him, “Can you still recall Franz Kromer?” Emil has noted at other times that, during all the rest of their interactions, they never mentioned Demian saving Emil from Kromer, likely because Emil didn’t like to acknowledge the fact that he needed to be saved. Demian tells Emil that he is going to depart — by which he means die — and he tells Emil, “you’ll have to listen within yourself, and you’ll notice that I’m inside you.” He then gives Emil a kiss on the lips, supposedly sent from Lady Eve.

Emil falls asleep. When he awakes, Demian is gone, and the person on the cot next to him is a total stranger. The novel ends with Emil saying, “whenever I descend all the way into myself, where the images of destiny slumber in the dark mirror, I need only lean over the black mirror to see my own image, which now looks exactly like him, him, my friend and guide.”

I make no definitive claim as to the reality or unreality of Demian. I have laid out for you all the ambiguities present in his depiction: the times when his appearance is unworldly; the times when it seems that Emil is projecting something onto him; but also the times when it seems clear that he is just a real guy in the real world. With his death, Demian has sacrificed himself for the ideal he believed in. This loss causes Emil great pain, but at the same time, there is no loss, because Demian, like all other people in Emil’s life, is internal to him. Demian, whether real or not, is a part of Emil’s inner spiritual life: that life that can not be broken into by the material world.

The dark mirror shows Emil his shadow. Demian is Emil’s ideal self, but he’s also a tempter, just like all the other tempters that have captured Emil’s soul. Demian, as we’ve discussed, is demonic in the way that he views other people as instruments for his goals. He only considers the well-being of those like him, those who he can incorporate into himself, who share his goals and beliefs.

But Emil is not Demian, in the end. Demian is only a part of him. The fact that he sees him in a dark mirror, not just any old mirror, shows to me that Emil recognizes that there are aspects of Demian that he must fight against. Remember what he said earlier to Knauer: “We create Gods and fight with them.” My hope would be that Emil can overcome Demian’s overpowering influence, that he can pursue self-knowledge and self-actualization in a way that doesn’t involve the manipulation of other people. There’s not much evidence that this is what he is going to do; perhaps this is only my own blind hope.

In the end, it’s of no importance what Emil does next. What’s important is what we do with his story. This novel is especially affecting for young people who feel out of step with the culture that surrounds them. We can relate to Emil, to his confusion, his struggles, and his feeling of destiny regarding his life.

We too can feel the allure of Max Demian, with his charismatic power. At the same time, we can recognize the darkness that comes with that power. Demian is a novel about becoming one’s self. That’s something we all end up doing, whether we like it or not. Emil is conscious of his attempt to become himself, and he conceptualizes it using religious motifs. Hesse draws on an understanding of a wide variety of spiritual practices and beliefs, using tales that we know to lead us through this journey toward understanding. Hesse was interested in the archetypal thinking of Carl Jung, and we can definitely see this influence in the language and symbolism of the novel, and also in this idea that all people, regardless of their cultures or religion, share some primal urge toward self-discovery.

I think Emil’s personal journey is where the novel excels; when it comes to the idea of a world-historical psyche, I am less convinced. However, Emil’s journey is so well-constructed and so heartfelt that the novel shines regardless. Hesse captures the non-linearity of any journey; as soon as Emil feels he’s made progress, he finds some defect in his understanding, and is seemingly thrown back to where he began. But each stumbling block only makes him stronger, and even those beliefs he has overcome still play a role in his intellectual development.

Importantly, Demian doesn’t end with any sort of lesson. Emil coming to terms with himself doesn’t happen in a specific dramatic moment, if it even happens at all. At the end of the book, Emil is still just a young man, still confused, still in pain. And in the end, Max Demian remains memorable because, despite the clarity of his personality, the question of his actual existence remains ambiguous. In fact, much of the symbolism in the novel is obscure, able to be read in a variety of ways, only a few of which are present in my reading. As with one's path toward self-actualization, one's journey with Demian is inherently individual, and will not bear the same fruits for all people.