An amazing spiritual journey with Hesse following Demjan through his childhood, youth, adolescents. Hesse's wisdom is endless, his writings beautiful, his story always relevant. I found Hesse when I was 16 and his books changed my life. I further went into exploration of spirituality and searched for God since. His deep inspiration is priceless... He was my first Guru and his books my first Divine discovery...

This is the kind of book I'd have eaten up when I was in my early 20s, I think. It's one of those novels of ideas, and the ideas are vague enough that one can project one's own feelings on them. That's one reason it would have appealed to me. Also, I was a young man struggling with what I thought/knew and what I wanted to be, like most young men. So I think I could see reading this 10+ years ago and thinking it was pretty decent. I liked Steppenwolf back then too. (And I wonder how I'd feel now.) But I have no time for shit like this; I really don't. This book may have connected to a feeling some people (mostly German) were feeling as WWI came to an end, but that doesn't make that feeling particularly universal and it sure doesn't make the wishy washy "philosophy" in this book hold up over time. This is the kind of weak spiritualism and wilfully stupid belief in destiny that I not only cannot abide any more in art, but that I now view as politically dangerous. (I've read Nietzsche too, and I don't get the things Hesse does from him.) If these ideas weren't so vague - and if the "premonitions" weren't so clearly written with the benefit of hindsight - maybe this would be less ridiculous, but the idea that there is a select few who are marked for special beliefs and who can interpret the "signs" is both patently ridiculous and dangerous. It has no basis in reality and it's also the kind of idiotic ego-stroking that is the last thing young men actually need. (To grow up, I believe, young men need to learn their unimportance in the grand scheme of things, not the opposite.) It's kind of bizarre that this book is viewed as a "mature" work by Hesse. Maybe it's because I'm so divorced from his time and place, but this to me feels like the yearnings of someone who hasn't yet actually accepted reality for what it is - who is still fighting (pointlessly and fruitlessly) against the actual world. Don't bother.

This book was weird and gave me the hardest time to really focus on it. It starts a little boring because Sinclair really is boring af, but things seemed to appear interesting when the boy who gives name to the book, Demian, shows up. He guides him to the funny path away from all that boring life he has. He is devilishly exciting and I was thrilled. Then he disappears and Sinclair... I mean I get it, I really do, this coming-of-age thing. I felt identified with some sensations of feelings that Sinclair describes. But it goes NUTS at the end. And not the good nutty stuff I love, just ugh. I don't even know and I'm not really in the mood to explain why men being men does bore me to death nowadays. I just thought Sinclair and Demian's relationship was going to be a lot more... interesting. But nope. So I just finished the book to end my agony.

I was prepared to crucify this short and tedious work as a kind of Celestine Prophecy for a far dumber age, until I saw that it was written at a time of high stress by a recently converted Jungian. At any rate, none of my friends rated it well either, so excoriating it no longer seems quite so necessary.

Perhaps Hesse was a dedicated pacifist, but this book would be as effective as a pistol against a tank in WWI or any war. I can't honestly find the pacifism in the book, except possibly as a subdued alternative to the usual German hysteria of its time, and if young Germans at the end of WWI were drawn to this updated take on German Romanticism, well, being goaded to let their personal will overcome all obstacles, to the point of killing your (metaphorical?) tormenter if necessary hardly sounds like pacifism to me.

I have a hard time accepting that the character of Demian is based on a Nobel-prize winning pacifist. The character comes across as some kind of messianic Hitler character, to be followed without being understood, and his advice makes total destruction of Europe sound necessary and possibly even good, so that those with "the mark" will survive, despite the fact that they join the initial destruction too.

I believe that Demian's secretive whispers to the effect that the world is nothing except what our individual will makes it is a reminder that German idealism, springing from Kant?, is what Bertrand Russell probably considered the dangerous German? drive to war.

The book seems in fact a study in symbols that appealed to young Germans for all the wrong reasons.

The only redeeming feature, and this of high quality, is the genuinely emotional portrayal of Hesse's quasi-religious youth. Later, more simplistic Hesse was popular with a man I know who is naive, a little stupid, and quasi-German. He read Hesse when he was 14 of course, when a combination of heartfealt naivete and a jumble of meaningless symbols appeals to the wrong people.

I almost wonder if the cult of teenagers in the US has its origins in a Germanic search for unmoderated impulse. Someone should have told those teenagers and and 20th-century Germans, and Hesse that, frankly, "you arent't that deep."

Demian, is a book about the growth of an individual,
a story about a boy becoming an adult.
Demian offers a poignant statement of the terrors and torments of adolescence.

"Now everything changed. My childhood world was breaking apart around me. My parents eyed me with a certain embarrassment. My sisters had become strangers to me. A disenchantment falsified and blunted my usual feelings and joys: the garden lacked fragrance, the woods held no attraction for me, the world stood around me like a clearance sale of last year's secondhand goods, insipid, all its charm gone. Books were so much paper, music a grating noise. That is the way leaves fall around a tree in autumn, a tree unaware of the rain running down its sides, of the sun or the frost, and of life gradually retreating inward. The tree does not die. It waits." _ Hermann Hesse

One of the major themes is the existence of opposing forces (good and evil) and the idea that both are necessary using the God Abraxas as a Symbol through the story.