In Demian, Hermann Hesse warned that materialism leads to the loss of the individual and to war and chaos in society. His message is still valid today, and we should seek a way to find our true selves through it.
What I felt while reading Hermann Hesse’s “Demian” was that, apart from the fact that the book was written against the backdrop of the Great War and was well received in the various situations that followed the war, it is still very much alive today, appealing to us, warning us, and even illuminating our path.
Hermann Hesse, an introverted man and a conscience of the times, who suffered much on the eve of the First World War and during the war in neutral Switzerland, where he had left his homeland, came to a firm realization. It was the realization that the misfortune of Europe was ultimately caused by materialism and the resulting loss of the individual self. Hermann Hesse expresses.
“…… Every time I read the newspaper editorials of poets who exploit the war, the pleas of university professors, and all kinds of war poetry from the studies of famous poets, my heart became more and more miserable.”
In Demian, he also says the following through the mouth of a character in the story.
“For hundreds of years, even longer, Europe has done nothing but study and build factories! They know exactly how many grams of powder it takes to kill a man, but they do not know how to pray to God, nor how to be satisfied even for an hour.”
In the end, people tried to escape from the emptiness of the mind that they had fallen into while pursuing extreme materialism, in other words, to escape from the anxiety and fear that resulted from it, and they found the wrong solution. Instead of listening to the true voice of destiny that comes from their loneliness, they tried to find a solution by forming groups, going around in groups, and joining forces with each other to make a fuss. This was not a true liberation from fear, but rather a loss of self, and this loss of self was the ultimate escape from a war in which reason was lost.
This was Hermann Hesse’s view of the First World War. The result of blindly following the demagoguery of the wrong leaders and loudly singing the military anthem while serving in the war was obvious. All that remained were the terrible scars left by the war. The leader who shouted, the comrades who relied on each other to boost their morale, the noisy gatherings, everything was gone. He was left with nothing but an empty self that had never thought or spoken for itself, wandering aimlessly.
It was under these circumstances that Hermann Hesse’s novel Demian was published in the form of a memoir by a fictional character called “Emil Sinclair’s Account of His Youth. It is easy to imagine how “Demian” influenced the young people of that time, who were lost in a morass of disillusionment and despair, not knowing where to go. It was like the water of life coming to the barren. The young people who had lost themselves were able to find themselves again and look forward to a new life. The lesson to “listen to your own heart and do only what it commands” may sound very simple, but it is a difficult path to walk. This can be easily understood by the fact that the protagonist, Sinclair, lived his childhood and youth just to achieve this goal. It would have taken even longer if there had been no leader to guide them. Let’s borrow the words of Demian, Sinclair’s leader.
“A bird struggles to come out of an egg. The egg is the bird’s world. He who is to be born must shatter a world. The bird flies to the god. The name of this God is Aphrakthas.”
The belief in Aphrakthas, a unique god as a composite of good and evil, gods and demons, is nothing more than a belief in one’s own inner voice with a sense of self. Sinclair begins to doubt God, who is always synonymous with right and good, and his absolute faith in his bright world, which he believed to be inhabited by such a god. And he realizes that the evil world, which is the opposite of this God, begins at the door of his house, or rather, that the darkness of such a world has already begun to inhabit his inner self. Sinclair finds that “Abel,” who has been loved as a good man and the darling of God, is a mere hypocrite, created by cowards who are united by fear of the strong and who chatter on and on. And he is gradually drawn to the belief in the Apocalypse, realizing that “Cain” was a fearless and incomparable man who intimidated all cowards. Demian and the unusual organist Pistorius guide Sinclair through the process of self-discovery, the struggle to be born as a true being (the struggle of a bird to break out of its shell). In the end, Sinclair finds himself so mature that he no longer needs a guide. This is evident in the final passage of Sinclair’s wounded soldier’s journal, written after he meets Demian in the field hospital, who has been injured in a strange accident during the battle, and after Demian’s death.
“It hurt to put on the bandages. And everything that happened to me after that hurt. But I only had to go down into myself, into the dark mirror where the reflection of my destiny slept, sometimes to find the key, sometimes to bend over the dark mirror, and I could see myself there, just like Demian, my friend and guide.”
Sinclair lost Demian, the symbol of all his admiration, love, and faith, in outer space, but now that he has found his inner self, he has gained not only Demian, but the whole world in the form of an unchanging image within himself.
As mentioned earlier, Hermann Hesse’s “Demian” became a source of spiritual sustenance and a pillar of life for young Germans in the spiritual wasteland of the post-World War I period. However, Western materialism once again began to overwhelm the human spirit, eventually leading to the second catastrophe of the century. In less than 20 years, instead of listening to the voice of destiny within themselves, people lost themselves in crowds and groups, empathizing with others, getting excited, and marching in groups to the battlefield. How many young lives have been lost to mass death and how many cities have been reduced to ashes because we have lost the right indicators?
Now the memory of the Second World War has disappeared and all the wounds have healed. As soon as this happens, young people in the West become frivolous again, immersed in groups, gatherings and trends, protesting in groups, marching in groups, talking in groups. Everything becomes communalized. Drugs and sex. Of course, there are aspects that are quite different from the post-World War I scene. In other words, they are not sympathizing with the war, but rather protesting against the generation that started the war and opposed it. But is it too much to say that you feel mentally devastated by the ecology of people who are excited by words that echo from the outside instead of listening to their own inner voice and chanting slogans that others chant, is it too much to say? Where will this spiritual devastation eventually lead, and where will we find a way out? With this in mind, we should learn and continue to learn from Hermann Hesse’s “Demian”.
Let’s take a brief look at Hermann Hesse’s life. Hermann Hesse was born on July 2, 1877, in the Swabian town of Calw. His father, who had been a missionary in India, wanted his son to become a pastor. After passing a difficult examination, Hermann Hesse was admitted to the theological seminary of the famous Maulbronn Abbey in 1891. Now his path seemed clear, but this was only a momentary illusion. The following year, he left the seminary and completely abandoned his career as a priest. He tried a new life as a weaver and a bookseller, but that too ended in failure. Then his published works began to attract attention, and finally the book Peter Camenzind (1904), commissioned by the S. Fischer publishing house, was published, which greatly enhanced his reputation. From then on, he was able to settle down and concentrate on his creative life on the shores of Lake Constance, on the Swiss border in southwestern Germany. Her major works include “Beneath the Wheel” (1906), “Gertrude” (1910), and other novels, as well as a book of poems and a collection of short stories.
She spent 1911 traveling in India, and the following year she left her longtime home on Lake Constance and moved to Bern, Switzerland. During World War I, he became involved in a prisoner-of-war relief movement, but was harshly criticized in Germany for his unpatriotic attitude toward the war. In 1919, he moved from Bern to Montagnola in southern Switzerland, where he settled and became a Swiss citizen in 1923. In Nazi Germany, he was branded as a pro-Jewish writer and rejected. Hermann Hesse won numerous literary awards, but the highlight was the Nobel Prize in Literature, which he received in 1946 for his fantasy novel The Glass Bead Game.
His works from his time in Bern include the novel “Rosshalde” (1914), the short story collections “Schön ist die Jugend” (1916) and “Knulp” (1915), and the poetry collection “Das Wunderkind” (1915). After a break during the war, the novel “Demian” was published in 1919, which caused a great sensation among the youth of the time. He then wrote “Comfort of the Night” (1921), “Siddhartha” (1922), “Comfort of the Night” (1929), “Narcissus and Goldmund” (1930), “Journey to the East” (1932), “Steppenwolf” (1927),
He produced a rich harvest of works, including novels, short story collections, poetry collections, essays and criticism, such as “The Poems” (1942) and “The Glass Bead Game” (1943). After a reclusive life in Montagnola, he died in 1962 at the age of 85. Hermann Hesse has many readers in various countries of the East, especially because of the oriental and introverted nature of his works. However, interest in Hermann Hesse continues to grow in industrialized countries such as the United States and Europe.
