A Letter to Hermann Hesse, Author of "Demian"

Dear Herr Hesse,

I know you’ve been dead since 1962, a good ten years before I was born, and my writing to you may come across as a mad gesture the likes of which only the overly obsessed are capable of. I can assure you I’m not mad, even though everyone around me is.

I’ve just finished reading your 1919 novel Demian, which you wrote when you’re on the brink of madness (Was the war that bad? Why did all those young men have to die?), and which made you what my generation calls an “overnight sensation” among the disillusioned young. Before I started reading the book, I’d wondered why it’d had such an effect on the young men of the 1910s (and also those of the following decades). It’s just a book, I thought. Aren’t we exaggerating? But I should’ve known. Your Siddhartha has after all been my personal guide since I first read it in 2004, so why should this one be made of lesser stuff?

The actor/scholar James Franco, a young(ish) man of my generation, wrote a new introduction to Demian, claiming that the book had seen him through some difficult times when he’s a drama student working at a café on the UCLA campus. “Demian became … a voice I could listen to and contemplate as I tried to find my way from childhood to adulthood and into the world of art,” he wrote (ix). It caught my attention.

I went into it thinking it’s just another bildungsroman (I must say you did a good job pulling the wool over my eyes). Emil Sinclair, the young protagonist, is naïve and innocent, but he’s discovering that the squeaky-clean Christian world he’s grown up in won’t prepare him for the evil and darkness around him. You see, religion is a one-sided system which unfairly demonises the dark. It doesn’t allow the young Sinclair to come to terms with a world which perpetuates good as well as evil. At this point enters the titular hero Max Demian, mysterious, mature beyond his years, mystical. Under his tutelage Sinclair learns to re-interpret religious faith, the notions of family, of society, and of himself. He learns that what religion calls “evil” is in fact human. Cain is as human as Abel and deserves to be lauded for his bravery, his non-conformist attitude. Sinclair also wears the mark of Cain, says Demian, but it hasn’t yet made itself clear. That’s because Sinclair is still very much living according to society’s norms; because, to use your apt metaphor, the bird hasn’t yet fought its way out of the egg.  

You’ve made it clear that Sinclair is sexually attracted to Demian (why should it be wrong for a boy to be attracted to another boy? Is it because society says so?). Later on, Sinclair is drawn to Demian’s mother and longs for her. You’ve named the mother Eve. I’m assuming you mean to say Sinclair is in love with the Mother of mothers? Throughout the novel Sinclair struggles with several forms of sexual desire. He’s tormented and incapacitated by them. Then he finds a way to deal with them by painting his sex dreams, visualising them with the help of symbolism. The hawk, the egg, Beatrice (Dante’s inspiration, who turns out to have a boy’s face resembling Demian’s) – all these prophetic images come together to form a visual representation of Sinclair’s internal strife. The message I’m supposed to derive from this is the idea that light and dark, good and evil are synonymous. They have to be merged for an individual to be whole. Or in Demian’s words: “We need to create a God who includes the devil too, and whose eyes we don’t need to cover when the most natural things in the world take place in front of him” (48).

After Demian and Sinclair part ways, the latter’s life takes a downward turn. He loses himself in alcohol. Following the philosophy of Siddhartha, would it be fair to say that in order to find yourself you must first lose yourself? And obviously Sinclair has to do all this by himself (the Buddha instructs Siddhartha to go his own way too). A man who follows others is a herd animal that can never rise above the mediocre and the mundane. Thank you, Herr Nietzsche.

The last chapter of the novel takes me by surprise and upsets me more than necessary.

You reunite Sinclair and Demian, but dark times are ahead. I should’ve seen the sign, of course. That heraldic hawk, the symbol of war-like victory, must play a role somewhere. I realised then that Sinclair’s self-discovery was meant to prepare him for the end of the world as orchestrated by the dumb masses that always insist on doing things collectively. That’s why we’re never truly done with warfare. Demian says when we wage war, it isn’t because we’re trying to defeat enemies. It’s because it’s in our nature to cause mayhem and to self-destruct. A man who’s blind to his true nature will retread the same ground.

I wish I’d read this novel when I was a teen. I would’ve become a different man, one with a sharper vision. But not all is lost. I’ve arrived at your work via another route, carrying with me other kinds of monumental experiences. Now that I’ve met Demian, I’ve fallen in love with him too, and like James Franco, I’ll  now carry his voice inside me no matter where I end up, and it’ll inevitably remind me that the journey to myself can only be undertaken by myself alone. No religious leader, politician, employer, father, or lover can show me the way.

Alas, Herr Hesse, I wish I’d tell you that the world had heeded your advice and we’re now living in a harmonious pseudo-paradise where all men and women exist solely to cultivate their inner selves in their own way. That isn’t the case. Just like the sad young men back in your day, we, too, are being pressured to be like everyone else, to subscribe to the same beliefs, tenets, and ethics, to honour the flawed heritage of our ancestors. The world isn’t a different place. I’m saddened every time I read about men who kill other men because they can’t agree on whose God is mightier (why should God care?), about men who are persecuted, tortured and dispatched because they’ve chosen to be outsiders, about regimes which think that men should live to serve the ideas of the masses. Sometimes I feel that the human race can never be redeemed.

But now a shaft of light has entered.

Demian is with me now, and I know that should I find myself in despair over the acts of men in the future, his voice will be the first I hear. He’ll whisper to me, “Little friend! The remarkable thing is that your ‘destiny,’ this private and solitary thing, would now be shared with so many other people, with the whole world, and that we would experience it together.”

Hochachtungsvoll,

E.

Hesse, Hermann. Demian: The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth. London: Penguin Books, 2013.