Demian

by Hermann Hesse

  I felt scared again. I suddenly remembered the story of Cain. It was all too sinister for me, and I started to whimper. There was too much uncanniness everywhere around me.

  "All right," Max Demian smiled. "Just go home! We'll take care of it. Killing him would be simplest, though, and in situations like this, the simplest thing is always the best. You are not in good hands with your friend Kromer."

  I arrived back home, and it felt like I had been away for a year. Everything looked different. There was something standing between me and Kromer now: something like a future, like hope. I was no longer alone! Only then did I realize how terribly alone I had been with my secret for all those weeks and weeks. Right away, what I had thought about so many times before came to mind again: what a relief it would be to confess to my parents, but that it would not resolve everything. Now I had practically confessed to someone else, to an outsider, and a sense of relief came over me like a sweet, strong breeze.

  All the same, I was far from overcoming my fear and was still prepared for long and terrible confrontations with my enemy. That made it all the more remarkable that everything proceeded so peacefully, in complete secrecy and calm.

  *

  Kromer's whistle in front of our house simply failed to materialize--for a day, then for two days, three days, a week. I couldn't believe it, and secretly I was waiting for him to suddenly show up again after all, just when I least expected it. But he was gone, once and for all! I didn't trust this new freedom and still did not truly believe it, until finally I ran into Franz Kromer himself. He was walking down Seilergasse, straight toward me. When he saw me he flinched, twisted his face into a wild grimace, and turned around on the spot to avoid me.

  That was an incredible moment. My enemy fleeing from me! My Satan afraid of me! Surprise and joy flooded through my heart.

  Demian turned up again. He was waiting for me in front of the school.

  "Hello," I said.

  "Good morning, Sinclair. I wanted to hear how you're doing. Kromer's leaving you alone now, isn't he?"

  "Did you do it? But how? How?! I don't understand. He's totally gone."

  "That's good. If he ever comes back--I don't think he will, but he is quite a scoundrel--then just tell him to remember Demian."

  "But what's the connection? Did you start a fight and beat him up?"

  "No, I don't like to do that. I just talked to him, the same way I talked to you. I was able to make him see that leaving you alone was to his own advantage."

  "Oh, you didn't give him any money, did you?"

  "No, my boy. You already tried that approach yourself."

  He dodged the question no matter how hard I tried to find out what had happened. I was left with the same awkward feeling toward him, a strange mix of gratitude and shyness, admiration and fear, affection and inner resistance.

  I decided to see him again soon; I wanted to talk more with him about everything, including Cain.

  It didn't happen.

  Gratitude in general is not a virtue I believe in, and it seems wrong to me to demand it from a child. So the complete lack of gratitude I showed to Max Demian does not surprise me all that much. I am absolutely certain today that if he hadn't freed me from Kromer's clutches, my health and in fact my whole life would have been ruined. Even at the time, I felt that this liberation was the greatest event of my young life--but I completely ignored the liberator himself as soon as he had performed the miracle.

  Ingratitude, as I said, is not something that needs explaining as far as I am concerned. The only thing I find hard to understand is the lack of curiosity I showed. How could I let a single day go by without trying to learn the secret of how Demian had saved me? How could I rein in my craving to hear more about Cain, more about Kromer, more about mind-reading?

  It is almost impossible to believe, and yet it was so. I suddenly found myself freed from a demonic net, and saw the world bright and joyous before me; I no longer suffered from panic attacks and a pounding heart that almost made me throw up. The spell had been broken; I was not a tormented soul in Hell but just a schoolboy again, like before. My nature wanted to regain its equilibrium as quickly as it could, which more than anything meant turning away from all the ugliness and danger I had been through and trying to forget it. With marvelous speed the whole long tale of guilt and terror slipped from my mind, without leaving behind any apparent scars or traces.

  The fact that I tried to forget my helper and savior just as quickly makes sense to me now too. I was fleeing, with all the force and might of my damaged soul, from my vale of tears and damnation, from Kromer's terrible enslavement, back to where I had earlier been happy and content: the paradise lost that had opened its gates to me once more, the bright world of Father and Mother, of my sisters--back to the scent of purity, to Abel pleasing in the sight of God.

  The very day after my short conversation with Demian, before I was fully convinced my freedom had been won back at last and I did not need to fear any relapse, I did what I had longed so desperately and so often to do: I confessed. I went to my mother and showed her the little money box with the broken lock, filled with play money instead of real coins, and I told her how my own guilt had put me in an evil tormentor's clutches for so long. She did not understand everything I said, but she saw the box and saw my changed look, heard my changed voice, and felt that the trial was over, that I had been returned to her.

  Then began the emotional celebration of my coming back into the fold--the return of the prodigal son. Mother took me to see Father, the story was repeated, questions and cries of amazement poured forth, both my parents stroked my head and sighed deeply, free at last of their long dejection. Everything was wonderful, just like in the stories; everything was resolved into magnificent harmony.

  I fled into that harmony with true passion. I could not get enough of enjoying my peace and the trust of my parents once more. I was a model child around the house, played more with my sisters than ever before, and felt redeemed as I sang the dear, old hymns during prayer with all the fervor of a convert. All these feelings came from the heart--there was no deception involved.

  And yet everything wasn't all right, not at all! This is the only true explanation for why I forgot Demian. I should have confessed to him! That confession would have been less ornamental and moving but more fruitful for me. Instead I was clinging with all my might to the paradisiacal world where I had once belonged; I had come home and been received with mercy. But Demian did not belong to that world in any way, and he could not be made to fit into it. He too--differently from Kromer, but nonetheless--was a tempter; he too was a link between me and the other world, wicked and bad, which I now wanted nothing more ever to do with. I could not and did not want to renounce Abel and glorify Cain, now that I had just turned back into an Abel again myself.

  That was my external situation. The inner circumstances, though, were these: I had been redeemed from Kromer's and the devil's hands, but not through any power or act of my own. I had tried to walk along the paths of the world, and they had proven too slippery for me. And now that a friendly hand had reached out and saved me, I ran straight back, without looking left or right, into Mother's lap, back to the safety of a pious, sheltered childhood world. I made myself younger, more dependent, and more childish than I really was. I had to replace my dependence on Kromer with a new one, because I was unable to walk alone, so I chose, in my blind heart, dependence on Father and Mother, on the old beloved "world of light," even though I already knew it was not the only one. If I hadn't made that choice, I would have had to cling to Demian and put my faith in him. At the time I thought I was unwilling to do so out of a justified mistrust of his outlandish ideas; in truth it was out of nothing but fear. For Demian would have asked more of me than my parents did, much more. He would have tried to make me more independent, with provocations and warnings, mockery and irony. Alas, I now know only too well that there is nothing in the world more hateful to a person than walking the path that leads to h
imself!

  Still, six months or so later I could not resist temptation, and on a walk with my father I asked him what to make of the fact that some people thought Cain was better than Abel.

  He was very surprised by the question. He explained to me that this interpretation was in no way new; it had emerged already in the earliest centuries of Christianity and been taught in various sects, one of which called itself the "Cainites." But obviously, he said, this insane teaching was nothing but the devil's attempt to destroy our faith. For if you believe that Cain was in the right and Abel in the wrong, then it follows that God was in error, or in other words that the God of the Bible is not the one true god but a false god. The Cainites and similar sects did in fact teach and preach such a doctrine, but this heresy had long since vanished from the earth. The only thing that puzzled him was that a schoolmate of mine had heard something about it. In any case, he warned me in grave earnest to refrain from all such thoughts.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE THIEF ON THE CROSS

  There are beautiful, wonderful, tender memories from childhood I could put in this story--my security with Father and Mother, my childhood loves, and my playful, pleasant life in gentle, loving surroundings filled with light. But I am interested here only in the steps I have taken in my life to arrive at myself. I will leave in the glowing distance all the lovely oases, blessed isles, and paradises whose magic I experienced; I have no desire to set foot in them again.

  And so, for as long as I stay with my boyhood years, I will speak of only the things that felt new, that pushed me onward, broke me loose.

  These prods from the "other world" kept coming up, and every time they brought fear and constraint and bad conscience with them. They always threatened to overthrow the peace in which I would have been happy to remain.

  Then came the years when I had to recognize once again a primal drive within me, one that had to cower and hide in the permitted world of light. Like everyone else, I too experienced my slowly awakening sexual feelings as an enemy and a destroyer, as something forbidden, as temptation and sin. The great mystery of puberty, which I was desperately curious to solve and which gave rise to dreams, lust, and fear, did not fit at all in the sheltered bliss of my peaceful childhood world. So I did what everyone does: I led the double life of a child who is no longer a child. My conscious life was lived in the familiar space of what was allowed, and denied the world rising like a new dawn within me. At the same time though, my life was lived in dreams, urges, longings of a subterranean kind across which my consciousness built ever more anxious and fearful bridges as the childhood world within me fell apart. Like almost all parents, mine did nothing to help the life forces awakening within me, which were never spoken about. They only tried, endlessly and untiringly, to help me in my hopeless efforts to deny reality and stay in a child's world that grew more and more false and unreal every day. I do not know if parents can do anything else, and I am not criticizing mine in particular. It was up to me to finish growing up and find my own way; I did it badly, like most well-raised children.

  Everyone passes through these difficulties. For the average person, this is the moment when the demands of his life come into the starkest conflict with his environment--when he has to fight hardest to make his way farther along his path. Many people experience the death and rebirth that is the destiny of us all only this once, as childhood rots from within and slowly disintegrates, as everything we have grown to love abandons us, and we suddenly feel the solitude and deathly cold of the universe around us. And very many people remain stuck at this hurdle their whole life long, desperately hanging on to the irretrievable past and clinging to the dream of a paradise lost--the worst and most deadly of all dreams.

  Let us return to our story. The sensations and mental images with which the end of childhood proclaimed itself in me are not worth telling here. The important thing was that the "dark world," the "other world," was back. What had once been Franz Kromer was now a part of myself. At the same time, the "other world" outside me was gaining more and more power over me too.

  Several years had passed since the incident with Kromer. I felt that that dramatic and guilty period of my life was very far behind me; it seemed like a nightmare that had not lasted long and had vanished without a trace. Franz Kromer had long since ceased to mean anything in my life, to the point that I barely noticed when I did run into him. The other main character in the tragedy, though--Max Demian--never again left my life completely. For a long time he stayed on the margins, in view but not having any effect on me; only gradually did he come closer again, radiating power and influence.

  I am trying to recall what I can about the Demian of that time. I may well have said not a word to him for a year or more. I avoided him, and he in no way tried to approach me. The most he would do was nod to me if we happened to run into each other. At such times I sometimes thought I could sense a delicate note of mockery or ironic reproach mixed in with his friendliness, but I may have been imagining it. It was as though the episode I had been through with him, and the peculiar influence he had exerted on me, were completely forgotten, by him no less than by me.

  As I try to recall him now, I can see him--he was there, and I did notice him. I see him going to school, alone or between two other older students, and I see him walking between the others like an exotic creature, solitary and silent, like a distant star, surrounded by a different air of his own, living under his own laws. No one liked him, no one was close to him, only his mother, and even with her he seemed to behave like an adult, not a child. The teachers had as little to do with him as they could; he was a good student but not eager to please, and now and then we would hear a rumor about something he had supposedly said to a teacher, some comment or backtalk as rude and challenging or sarcastic as could be.

  I close my eyes and think back now, and I see his image rise up before me. Where was that? Yes, there he is. It was on the street in front of our house. I saw him standing there one day with a notebook in his hand, drawing. He was drawing the old coat of arms with the bird, above our front door. I stood at a window, hidden behind a curtain, and watched him, and saw, with deep admiration, his keen, cool, bright face turned toward the coat of arms--the face of a man, a scholar or artist, supercilious and purposeful, strangely bright and cold, with knowing eyes.

  I see him again. It was a little later, on the street; all of us coming home from school were standing around a horse that had fallen. It lay in front of a farmer's cart, still harnessed to the shafts, and it snorted, complaining and questioning, through wide-open nostrils, and bled from a hidden wound. Dark liquid slowly soaked into the white dust of the street near the horse. When I turned away from the sight, feeling sick, I saw Demian's face. He had not pushed his way to the front; he stood at the back, comfortable with himself and even looking rather elegant, as usual. His gaze seemed directed at the horse's head, again with this deep, silent, almost fanatical but nevertheless dispassionate attentiveness. I could not help looking at him for a long time, and even back then I felt, far from consciously, something very unusual and special about him. I looked at Demian's face and saw the face of a man, not a boy; but not only that, I also thought I could see, or feel, that this was not just the face of a man, it was something else too. There seemed to be something of a woman's face in it as well, in fact the face seemed to me, for a moment, neither manly nor childlike, neither old nor young, but somehow millennial, timeless, marked with different spans of time from the ones we lived in. Animals might look like that, or trees, or stars--I didn't know, I didn't feel precisely what I would say about it now, as an adult, but I felt something like that. Maybe he was beautiful, maybe I was attracted to him and maybe repelled too, there was no way to decide that either. I saw only that he was different from us--he was like an animal, or like a spirit, or like a picture, I don't know what he was but he was different, unimaginably different from us all.

  My memory tells me nothing more. Maybe this scene too is partly made
up of later impressions.

  Only when I was several years older did I finally come back into closer contact with him. Demian had not been confirmed in church with the rest of his class, as was customary; here too all sorts of rumors had immediately sprung up. It was whispered once again around school that he was a Jew, or, no, a heathen, and still other students were sure he was an atheist, his mother too, or a member of some kind of legendary, evil sect. I feel like I also heard people say they suspected he and his mother were lovers. In any case he had presumably not been raised religiously up until then, but they must have decided this might cause problems for his future, so his mother decided to have him confirmed after all, two years later than the other boys his age. That is how it happened that he was my classmate for months in confirmation class.

  For a while I avoided him entirely. I did not want any part of him, completely shrouded as he was in rumors and secrets. The truth, though, was that what bothered me was the feeling that had stayed with me since the Kromer affair: that I owed him something. And I was busy enough with my own secrets just then. For me, confirmation class coincided with the period of decisive revelations in sexual matters, and, despite my best efforts, these revelations interfered drastically with my interest in religious instruction. The things the pastor spoke of lay at a great distance from me, in a silent, sacred unreality; however beautiful and valuable they were, they were not at all urgent or exciting, while these other matters possessed those qualities in the highest degree.

  The more this circumstance made me indifferent to confirmation class, the more interested I became in Max Demian again. There seemed to be some kind of bond between us. I need to retrace this connecting thread as carefully as I can. As far as I can recall, it first formed in class early one morning, when the lights were still turned on in the schoolroom. Our religious instructor had arrived at the story of Cain and Abel. I paid hardly any attention; I was sleepy, barely listening. Then the pastor raised his voice and began speaking forcefully about the mark of Cain. At that moment I felt a kind of touch or admonition. I looked up and saw Demian's face turned toward me from the front row of desks, with a bright, meaningful look in his eye, an expression which might have been either mocking or serious. He looked at me for only a moment, and suddenly I was listening intently to what the pastor was saying; I heard him talk about Cain and his mark, and felt the knowledge, deep inside me, that what he was teaching was not how it really was, that it was possible to look at it differently, that criticism was possible!