DEMIAN

by Hermann Hesse ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 2, 1965

What Catcher in the Rye has come to mean for America's younger generation, Demian proved to be for Germany's early post-WWI youth. Yet though the effect was similar, Hermann Hesse's beautiful, brooding tale, both in style and philosophic intent, bears little relation to Salinger's work. Rather it is in that odd, poetic, distinctly European tradition of Goethe's Werther, on the one hand, and Cocteau's Les Enfants Terribles and Musil's Young Torless, on the other. Many diverse notes are struck in this first-person narration of a schoolboy's slow, puzzling awakening to maturity, to the world within and without, as he passes through successively strange encounters with his mysterious friend, Demian. The latter serves as the boy's mentor, his Vergil (in the Dantean sense), exerting now the powers of evil, now of good. The relationship between them is always hesitantly stated: on a psychological plane, an element of homoeroticism; on the social, different sequences describing the boy's various rebellions against his bourgeois background; and finally, religiously, the key motif; a kind of mystic mingling of Christianity and Buddhism. In the startling later passages, the boy, now eighteen, undergoes a romantic attachment to Demian's mother, followed by his baptism through fire at the front and the death of the wounded Demian in his presence. In the dream-like finale the boy bends over ""that dark mirror to behold my own image, now completely resembling him, my brother, my master."" It is Hesse's greatness to make what could be errant nonsense into a quite believable, fascinating, moving portrait of youth.

Pub Date: June 2, 1965

ISBN: 3518010956

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harper Row

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1965

Categories: FICTION