plagiarism is fun! ft. Hesse's "Demian"

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God had made a mistake; in other words, the God of the Bible
was not the right and only one, but a false God. Indeed, the
Cainites had taught and preached something of the sort.
However, this heresy had long since disappeared from the
face of the earth and he was only surprised that a school
friend of mine should have heard anything about it. He
warned me most seriously against harboring such ideas.
3) Among Thieves
If I wanted to, I could recall many delicate moments from my
childhood: the sense of being protected that my parents gave
me, my affectionate nature, simply living a playful, satisfied
existence in gentle surroundings. But my interest centers on
the steps that I took to reach myself. All the moments of calm,
the islands of peace whose magic I felt, I leave behind in the
enchanted distance. Nor do I ask to ever set foot there again.
That is why–as long as I dwell on my childhood–I will
emphasize the things that entered it from outside, that were
new, that impelled me forward or tore me away. These
impulses always came from the “other world” and were
accompanied by fear, constraint, and a bad conscience. They
were always revolutionary and threatened the calm in which I
would gladly have continued to live.
Then came those years in which I was forced to
recognize the existence of a drive within me that had to make
itself small and hide from the world of light. The slowly
awakening sense of my own sexuality overcame me, as it does
every person, like an enemy and terrorist, as something
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forbidden, tempting and sinful. What my curiosity sought,
what dreams, lust and fear created–the great secret of
puberty–did not fit at all into my sheltered childhood. I
behaved like everyone else. I led the double life of a child who
is no longer a child. My conscious self lived within the familiar
and sanctioned world, it denied the new world that dawned
within me. Side by side with this I lived in a world of dreams,
drives, and desires of a chthonic nature, across which my
conscious self desperately built its fragile bridges, for the
childhood world within me was falling apart. Like most
parents, mine were no help with the new problems of puberty,
to which no reference was ever made. All they did was take
endless trouble in supporting my hopeless attempts to deny
reality and to continue dwelling in a childhood world that was
becoming more and more unreal. I have no idea whether
parents can be of help, and I do not blame mine. It was my
own affair to come to terms with myself and to find my own
way, and like most well-brought-up children, I managed it
badly.
Everyone goes through this crisis. For the average
person this is the point when the demands of his own life
come into the sharpest conflict with his environment, when
the way forward has to be sought with the bitterest means at
his command. Many people experience the dying and rebirth-
-which is our fate–only this once during their entire life. Their
childhood becomes hollow and gradually collapses, everything
they love abandons them and they suddenly feel surrounded
by the loneliness and mortal cold of the universe. Very many
are caught forever in this impasse, and for the rest of their
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lives cling painfully to an irrevocable past, the dream of the
lost paradise–which is the worst and most ruthless of dreams.
But let me return to my story. The sensations and
dream images announcing the end of my childhood are too
many to be related in full. The important thing was that the
“dark world,” the “other world,” had reappeared. What Franz
Kromer had once been was now part of myself.
Several years had gone by since the episode with
Kromer. That dramatic time filled with guilt lay far in the past
and seemed like a brief nightmare that had quickly vanished.
Franz Kromer had long since gone out of my life, I hardly
noticed when I happened to meet him in the street. The other
important figure in my little tragedy, Max Demian, was never
to go out of my life again entirely. Yet for a long time he
merely stood at its distant fringes, visible but out of effective
range. Only gradually did he come closer, again radiating
strength and influence.
I am trying to see what I can remember of Demian at
that time. It is quite possible that I didn’t talk to him once for
a whole year or even longer. I avoided him and he did not
impose himself on me in any way. The few instances that we
met, he merely nodded to me. Sometimes it even seemed as
though his friendliness was faintly tinged with derision or with
ironic reproach–but I may have imagined this. The experience
that we had shared and the strange influence he had exerted
on me at that time were seemingly forgotten by both of us.
I can conjure up what he looked like and now that I
begin to recollect, I can see that he was not so far away from
me after all and that I did notice him. I can see him on his way
to school, alone or with a group of older students, and I see
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him strange, lonely, and silent, wandering among them like a
separate planet, surrounded by an aura all his own, a law unto
himself. No one liked him, no one was on intimate terms with
him, except his mother, and this relationship, too, seemed not
that of a child but of an adult. When they could, the teachers
left him to himself; he was a good student but took no
particular trouble to please anyone. Now and again we heard
of some word, some sarcastic comment or retort he was
rumored to have made to a teacher, and which–as gems of
provocation and cutting irony–left little to be desired.
As I close my eyes to recollect I can see his image rise
up: where was that? Yes, I have it now: in the little alley
before our house. One day I saw him standing there,
notebook in hand, sketching. He was drawing the old coat of
arms with the bird above our entrance. As I stood at the
window behind the curtain and watched him, I was deeply
astonished by his perceptive, cool, light-skinned face that was
turned toward the coat of arms, the face of a man, of a
scientist or artist, superior and purposeful, strangely lucid and
calm, and with knowing eyes.
And I can see him on another occasion. It was a few
weeks later, also in a street. All of us on our way home from
school were standing about a fallen horse. It lay in front of a
farmer’s cart still harnessed to the shaft, snorting pitifully with
dilated nostrils and bleeding from a hidden wound so the
white dust on one side of the street was stained. As I turned
away nauseous I beheld Demian’s face. He had not thrust
himself forward but was standing farthest back, at ease and as
elegantly dressed as usual. His eyes seemed fixed on the
horse’s head and again showed that deep, quiet, almost
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fanatical yet dispassionate absorption. I could not help
looking at him for a time and it was then that I felt a very
remote and peculiar sensation. I saw Demian’s face and I not
only noticed that it was not a boy’s face but a man’s; I also felt
or saw that it was not entirely the face of a man either, but
had something feminine about it, too. Yet the face struck me
at that moment as neither masculine nor childlike, neither old
nor young, but somehow a thousand years old, somehow
timeless, bearing the scars of an entirely different history than
we knew; animals could look like that, or trees, or planets–
none of this did I know consciously, I did not feel precisely
what I say about it now as an adult, only something of the
kind. Perhaps he was handsome, perhaps I liked him, perhaps
I also found him repulsive, I could not be sure of that either.
All I saw was that he was different from us, he was like an
animal or like a spirit or like a picture, he was different,
unimaginably different from the rest of us.
My memory fails me and I cannot be sure whether
what I have described has not to some extent been drawn
from later impressions.
Only several years later did I again come into closer
contact with him. Demian had not been confirmed in church
with his own age group as was the custom, and this again
made him the object of wild rumors. Boys in school repeated
the old story about his being Jewish, or more likely a heathen,
and others were convinced that both he and his mother were
atheists or belonged to some fabulous and disreputable sect.
In connection with this I also remember having heard him
suspected of being his mother’s lover. Most probably he had
been brought up without any religious instruction whatever,
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but now this seemed to be in some way ominous for his
future. At rate, his mother decided to let him take
Confirmation lessons after all, though two years later than his
age group. So it came about that he went to the same
Confirmation class as I did.
For a time I avoided him entirely. I wanted no part of
him; he was surrounded by too many legends and secrets, but
what bothered me most was a feeling of being indebted to
him that had not left me since the Kromer affair. I now had
enough trouble with secrets of my own, for the Confirmation
lessons coincided with my decisive enlightenment about sex,
and despite all good intentions, my interest in religious
matters was greatly diminished. What the pastor discussed
lay far away in a very holy but unreal world of its own; these
things were no doubt quite beautiful and precious, but they
were by no means as timely and exciting as the new things I
was thinking about. The more indifferent this condition made
me to the Confirmation lessons, the more I again became
preoccupied with Max Demian. There seemed to be a bond
between us, a bond that I shall have to trace as closely as
possible. As far as I can remember, it began early one morning
while the light still had to be turned on in our classroom. Our
scripture teacher, a pastor, had embarked on the story of Cain
and Abel. I was sleepy and listened with only half an ear.
When the pastor began to hold forth loudly and urgently
about Cain’s mark I felt almost a physical touch, a warning,
and looking up I saw Max Demian’s face half turned round
toward me from one of the front rows, with a gleaming eye
that might express scorn as much as deep thought, you could
not be sure. He looked at me for only a moment and suddenly
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I listened tensely to the pastor’s words, heard him speak
about Cain and his mark, and deep within me I felt the
knowledge that it was not as he was teaching it, that one
could look at it differently, that his view was not above
criticism.
This one minute reestablished the link between me
and Demian. And how strange–hardly was I aware of a certain
spiritual affinity, when I saw it translated into physical
closeness. I had no idea whether he was able to arrange it this
way himself or whether it happened only by chance–I still
believed firmly in chance at that time–but after a few days
Demian suddenly switched seats in Confirmation class and
came to sit in front of me (I can still recall it precisely: in the
miserable poorhouse air of the overcrowded classroom I
loved the scent of fresh soap emanating from his nape) and
after a few days he had again changed seats and now sat next
to me. There he stayed all winter and spring.
The morning hours had changed completely. They no
longer put me to sleep or bored me. I actually looked forward
to them. Sometimes both of us listened to the pastor with the
utmost concentration and a glance from my neighbor could
draw my attention to a remarkable story, an unusual saying. A
further glance from him, a special one, could make me critical
or doubtful.
Yet all too frequently we paid no attention. Demian
was never rude to the teacher or to his fellow students. I
never saw him indulge in the usual pranks, not once did I hear
him guffaw or gossip during class, and he never incurred a
teacher’s reprimand. But very quietly, and more with signs
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and glances than whispering, he contrived to let me share in
his activities, and these sometimes were strange.
For instance, he would tell me which of the students
interested him and how he studied them.
About some of them he had very precise knowledge.
He would tell me before class: "When I signal with my thumb
So-and-so will turn round and look at us, or will scratch his
neck." During the period, when it had almost completely
slipped my mind, Max would suddenly make a significant
gesture with his thumb. I would glance quickly at the student
indicated and each time I saw him perform the desired
movement like a puppet on a string. I begged Max to try this
out on the pastor but he refused. Only once, when I came to
class unprepared and told him that I hoped the pastor would
not call on me that day, he helped me. The pastor looked for a
student to recite an assigned catechism passage and his eyes
sweeping through the room came to rest on my guilty face.
Slowly he approached me, his finger pointing at me, my name
beginning to form on his lips–when suddenly he became
distracted or uneasy, pulled at his shut collar, stepped up to
Demian, who was looking him directly in the eye and seemed
to want to ask him something. But he turned away again,
cleared his throat a few times, and then called on someone
else.

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There was good reason why I never became one with
my companions, why I felt alone among them and was
therefore able to suffer so much. I was a barroom hero and
cynic to satisfy the taste of the most brutal. I displayed wit
and courage in my ideas and remarks about teachers, school,
parents, and church. I could also bear to hear the filthiest
stories and even ventured an occasional one myself, but I
never accompanied my friends when they visited women. I
was alone and was filled with intense longing for love, a
hopeless longing, while, to judge by my talk, I should have
been a hard-boiled sensualist. No one was more easily hurt,
no one more bashful than I. And when I happened to see the
young well-brought-up girls of the town walking in front of me,
pretty and clean, innocent and graceful, they seemed like
wonderful pure dreams, a thousand times too good for me.
For a time I could not even bring myself to enter Mrs. Jaggelt’s
stationery store because I blushed looking at her
remembering what Alfons Beck had told me.
The more I realized that I was to remain perpetually
lonely and different within my new group of friends the less I
was able to break away. I really don’t know any longer
whether boozing and swaggering actually ever gave me any
pleasure. Moreover, I never became so used to drinking that I
did not always feel embarrassing after-effects. It was all as if I
were somehow under a compulsion to do these things. I
simply did what I had to do, because I had no idea what to do
with myself otherwise. I was afraid of being alone for long,
was afraid of the many tender and chaste moods that would
overcome me, was afraid of the thoughts of love surging up in
me.
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85
What I missed above all else was a friend. There were
two or three fellow students whom I could have cared for, but
they were in good standing and my vices had long been an
open secret. They avoided me. I was regarded by and large as
a hopeless rebel whose ground was slipping from under his
feet. The teachers were well-informed about me, I had been
severely punished several times, my final expulsion seemed
merely a matter of time. I realized myself that I had become a
poor student, but I wriggled strenuously through one exam
after the other, always feeling that it couldn’t go on like this
much longer.
There are numerous ways in which God can make us
lonely and lead us back to ourselves. This was the way He
dealt with me at that time. It was like a bad dream. I can see
myself: crawling along in my odious and unclean way, across
filth and slime, across broken beer glasses and through
cynically wasted nights, a spellbound dreamer, restless and
racked. There are dreams in which on your way to the
princess you become stuck in quagmires, in back alleys full of
foul odors and refuse. That was how it was with me. In this
unpleasant fashion I was condemned to become lonely, and I
raised between myself and my childhood a locked gateway to
Eden with its pitilessly resplendent host of guardians. It was a
beginning, an awakening of nostalgia for my former self.
Yet I had not become so callous as not to be startled
into twinges of fear when my father, alarmed by my tutor’s
letters, appeared for the first time in St.——and confronted
me unexpectedly.
Later on that winter, when he came a second time,
nothing could move me any more, I let him scold and entreat
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me, let him remind me of my mother. Finally toward the end
of the meeting he became quite angry and said if I didn’t
change he would have me expelled from the school in
disgrace and placed in a reformatory. Well, let him! When he
went away that time I felt sorry for him; he had accomplished
nothing, he had not found a way to me–and at moments I felt
that it served him right.
I could not have cared less what became of me. In my
odd and unattractive fashion, going to bars and bragging was
my way of quarreling with the world–this was my way of
protesting. I was ruining myself in the process but at times I
understood the situation as follows: if the world had no use
for people like me, if it did not have a better place and higher
tasks for them, well, in that case, people like me would go to
pot, and the loss would be the world’s.
Christmas vacation was a joyless affair that year. My
mother was deeply startled when she saw me. I had shot up
even more and my lean face looked gray and wasted, with
slack features and inflamed eyes. The first touch of a
mustache and the eyeglasses I had just begun wearing made
me look odder still. My sisters shied away and giggled.
Everything was most unedifying. Disagreeable and bitter was
the talk I had with my father in his study, disagreeable
exchanging greetings with a handful of relatives, and
particularly unpleasant was Christmas Eve itself. Ever since I
had been a little child this had been the great day in our
house. The evening was a festivity of love and gratitude, when
the bond between child and parents was renewed. This time
everything was merely oppressive and embarrassing. As usual
my father read aloud the passage about the shepherds in the
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fields “watching their flocks,” as usual my sisters stood
radiantly before a table decked with gifts, but father’s voice
sounded disgruntled, his face looked old and strained, and
mother was sad. Everything seemed out of place: the presents
and Christmas greetings, Gospel reading and the lit-up tree.
The gingerbread smelled sweet; it exuded a host of memories
which were even sweeter. The fragrance of the Christmas tree
told of a world that no longer existed. I longed for evening
and for the holidays to be over.
It went on like this the entire winter. Only a short
while back I had been given a stern warning by the teachers’
council and been threatened with expulsion. It couldn’t go on
much longer. Well, I didn’t care.
I held a very special grudge against Max Demian,
whom I hadn’t seen again even once. I had written him twice
during my first months in St.——but had received no reply; so
I had not called on him during the holidays.
In the same park in which I had met Alfons Beck in the
fall, a girl came to my attention in early spring as the thorn
hedges began to bud. I had taken a walk by myself, my head
filled with vile thoughts and worries–for my health had
deteriorated–and to make matters worse I was perpetually in
financial difficulties, owed friends considerable sums and had
thus continually to invent expenditures so as to receive
money from home. In a number of stores I had allowed bills to
mount for cigars and similar things. Not that this worried me
much. If my existence was about to come to a sudden end
anyway–if I drowned myself or was sent to the reformatory–a
few small extras didn’t make much difference. Yet I was
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forced to live face to face with these unpleasant details: they
made me wretched.
On that spring day in the park I saw a young woman
who attracted me. She was tall and slender, elegantly dressed,
and had an intelligent and boyish face. I liked her at once. She
was my type and began to fill my imagination. She probably
was not much older than I but seemed far more mature, well-
defined, a full-grown woman, but with a touch of exuberance
and boyishness in her face, and this was what I liked above all.
I had never managed to approach a girl with whom I
had fallen in love, nor did I manage in this case. But the
impression she made on me was deeper than any previous
one had been and the infatuation had a profound influence
on my life.
Suddenly a new image had risen up before me, a lofty
and cherished image. And no need, no urge was as deep or as
fervent within me as the craving to worship and admire. I
gave her the name Beatrice, for, even though I had not read
Dante, I knew about Beatrice from an English painting of
which I owned a reproduction. It showed a young pre-
Raphaelite woman, long-limbed and slender, with long head
and etherealized hands and features. My beautiful young
woman did not quite resemble her, even though she, too,
revealed that slender and boyish figure which I loved, and
something of the ethereal, soulful quality of her face.
Although I never addressed a single word to Beatrice,
she exerted a profound influence on me at that time. She
raised her image before me, she gave me access to a holy
shrine, she transformed me into a worshiper in a temple.
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From one day to the next I stayed clear of all bars and
nocturnal exploits. I could be alone with myself again and
enjoyed reading and going for long walks.
My sudden conversion drew a good deal of mockery in
its wake. But now I had something I loved and venerated, I
had an ideal again, life was rich with intimations of mystery
and a feeling of dawn that made me immune to all taunts. I
had come home again to myself, even if only as the slave and
servant of a cherished image.
I find it difficult to think back to that time without a
certain fondness. Once more I was trying most strenuously to
construct an intimate “world of light” for myself out of the
shambles of a period of devastation; once more I sacrificed
everything within me to the aim of banishing darkness and
evil from myself. And, furthermore, this present "world of
light" was to some extent my own creation; it was no longer
an escape, no crawling back to mother and the safety of
irresponsibility; it was a new duty, one I had invented and
desired on my own, with responsibility and self-control. My
sexuality, a torment from which I was in constant flight, was
to be transfigured into spirituality and devotion by this holy
fire. Everything dark and hateful was to be banished, there
were to be no more tortured nights, no excitement before
lascivious pictures, no eavesdropping at forbidden doors, no
lust. In place of all this I raised my altar to the image of
Beatrice, and by consecrating myself to her I consecrated
myself to the spirit and to the gods, sacrificing that part of life
which I withdrew from the forces of darkness to those of light.
My goal was not joy but purity, not happiness but beauty, and
spirituality.
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This cult of Beatrice completely changed my life.
Yesterday a precocious cynic, today I was an acolyte whose
aim was to become a saint. I not only avoided the bad life to
which I had become accustomed, I sought to transform myself
by introducing purity and nobility into every aspect of my life.
In this connection I thought of my eating and drinking habits,
my language and dress. I began my mornings with cold baths
which cost me a great effort at first. My behavior became
serious and dignified; I carried myself stiffly and assumed a
slow and dignified gait. It may have looked comic to outsiders
but to me it was a genuine act of worship.
Of all the new practices in which I sought to express
my new conviction, one became truly important to me. I
began to paint. The starting point for this was that the
reproduction of the English picture I owned did not resemble
my Beatrice closely enough. I wanted to try to paint her
portrait for myself. With new joy and hopefulness I bought
beautiful paper, paints, and brushes and carried them to my
room–I had just been given one of my own–and prepared my
palette, glass, porcelain dishes and pencils. The delicate
tempera colors in the little tubes I had bought delighted me.
Among them was a fiery chrome green that, I think, I can still
see today as it flashed up for the first time in the small white
dish.
I began with great care. Painting the likeness of a face
was difficult. I wanted to try myself out first on something
else. I painted ornaments, flowers, small imagined landscapes:
a tree by a chapel, a Roman bridge with cypress trees.
Sometimes I became so completely immersed in this game
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that I was as happy as a little child with his paintbox. Finally I
set out on my portrait of Beatrice.
A few attempts failed completely and I discarded them.
The more I sought to imagine the face of the girl I had
encountered here and there on the street the less successful I
was. Finally I gave up the attempt and contented myself with
giving in to my imagination and intuition that arose
spontaneously from the first strokes, as though out of the
paint and brush themselves. It was a dream face that
emerged and I was not dissatisfied with it. Yet I persisted and
every new sketch was more distinct, approximated more
nearly the type I desired, even if it in no way reproduced
reality.
I grew more and more accustomed to idly drawing
lines with a dreaming paintbrush and to coloring areas for
which I had no model in mind, that were the result of playful
fumblings of my subconscious. Finally, one day I produced,
almost without knowing it, a face to which I responded more
strongly than I had to any of the others. It was not the face of
that girl–it wasn’t supposed to be that any longer. It was
something else, something unreal, yet it was no less valuable
to me. It looked more like a boy’s face than a girl’s, the hair
was not flaxen like that of my pretty girl, but dark brown with
a reddish hue. The chin was strong and determined, the
mouth like a red flower. As a whole it was somewhat stiff and
masklike but it was impressive and full of a secret life of its
own.

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110
“But I always lock it.”
"Not very long ago you forgot and I sat inside. Usually I
stand outside or sit on the curb."
"Really? Next time you can come inside, it’s warmer.
All you have to do is knock at the door. But you have to bang
hard and not while I’m playing. Go ahead now–what did you
want to tell me? You’re quite young yet, probably a student of
some sort. Are you a musician?"
"No. I like listening to music, but only the kind you play,
completely unreserved music, the kind that makes you feel
that a man is shaking heaven and hell. I believe I love that
kind of music because it is amoral. Everything else is so moral
that I’m looking for something that isn’t. Morality has always
seemed to me insufferable. I can’t express it very well.–Do
you know that there must be a god who is both god and devil
at one and the same time? There is supposed to have been
one once. I heard about it."
The musician pushed his wide hat back a little and
shook the hair out of his eyes, all the while peering at me. He
lowered his face across the table.
Softly and expectantly he asked: "What’s the name of
the god you mentioned?"
"Unfortunately I know next to nothing about him,
actually only his name. He is called Abraxas."
The musician blinked suspiciously around him as
though someone might be eavesdropping. Then he moved
closer to me and said in a whisper: "That’s what I thought.
Who are you?"
“A student at the prep school.”
“How did you happen to hear about Abraxas?”
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“By accident.”
He struck the table so that wine spilled out of his glass.
"By accident! Don’t talkshit, young fellow! One doesn’t hear
about Abraxas by accident, and don’t you forget it. I will tell
you more about him. I know a little."
He fell silent and moved his chair back. When I looked
at him full of expectation, he made a face.
“Not here. Some other time. There, take these.”
He reached in his coat, which he had not taken off,
and drew out a few roasted chestnuts and threw them to me.
I said nothing, took them, ate and felt content.
“All right,” he whispered after a moment. "Where did
you find out about–Him?"
I did not hesitate to tell him.
“I was alone and desperate at one time,” I began.
"Then I remembered a friend I had had several years back
who I felt knew much more than I did. I had painted
something, a bird struggling out of the globe. I sent him this
painting. After a time I found a piece of paper with the
following words written on it: "The bird fights its way out of
the egg. The egg is the world. Who would be born must first
destroy a world. The bird flies to God. That God’s name is
Abraxas.'"
He made no reply. We shelled our chestnuts and drank
our wine.
“Another glass?” he asked.
“No, thanks. I don’t like drinking.”
He laughed, a little disappointed.
"As you like. It’s different with me. I’ll stay but you can
run along if you want."
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112
When I joined him the next time, after he had played
the organ, he was not very communicative.
He led me down an alley and through an old and
impressive house and up to a large, somewhat dark and
neglected room. Except for a piano, nothing in it gave a hint of
his being a musician–but a large bookcase and a desk gave
the room an almost scholarly air.
“How many books you have!” I exclaimed.
"Part of them are from my father’s library–in whose
house I live. Yes, young man, I’m living with my parents but I
can’t introduce you to them. My acquaintances aren’t
regarded very favorably in this house. I’m the black sheep. My
father is fabulously respectable and an important pastor and
preacher in this town. And I, so that you know the score at
once, am his talented and promising son who has gone astray
and, to some extent, even mad. I was a theology student but
shortly before my state exams I left this very respectable
department; that is, not entirely, not in so far as it concerns
my private studies, for I’m still most interested to see what
kinds of gods people have devised for themselves. Otherwise,
I’m a musician at present and it looks as though I will receive a
small post as an organist somewhere. Then I’ll be back in the
employ of the church again."
As much as the feeble light from the small table lamp
permitted, I glanced along the spines of the books and noticed
Greek, Latin, and Hebrew titles. Meanwhile my acquaintance
had lain down on the floor and was busying himself with
something.
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“Come,” he called after a moment, "we want to
practice a bit of philosophy. That means: keep your mouth
shut, lie on your stomach, and meditate."
He struck a match and lit paper and wood in the
fireplace in front of which he sprawled. The flames leapt high,
he stirred and fed them with the greatest care. I lay down
beside him on the worn-out carpet. For about an hour we lay
on our stomachs silent before the shimmering wood,
watching the flames shoot up and roar, sink down and double
over, flicker and twitch, and in the end brood quietly on
sunken embers.
"Fire worship was by no means the most foolish thing
ever invented," he murmured to himself at one point.
Otherwise neither of us said a word. I stared fixedly into the
flames, lost myself in dreams and stillness, recognized figures
in the smoke and pictures in the ashes. Once I was startled.
My companion threw a piece of resin into the embers: a slim
flame shot up and I recognized the bird with the yellow
sparrow hawk’s head. In the dying embers, red and gold
threads ran together into nets, letters of the alphabet
appeared, memories of faces, animals, plants, worms, and
snakes. As I emerged from my reveries I looked at my
companion, his chin resting on his fists, staring fanatically into
the ashes with complete surrender.
“I have to go now,” I said softly.
“Go ahead then. Good-by.”
He did not get up. The lamp had gone out: I groped my
way through the dark rooms and hallways of the bewitched
old house. Once outside, I stopped and looked up along its
façade. Every window was dark. A small brass plate on the
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front door gleamed in the light from a street lamp. On it I read
the words: “Pistorius, pastor primarius.”
Not until I was at home and sat in my little room after
supper did it occur to me that I had not heard anything about
either Abraxas or Pistorius–we’d exchanged hardly a dozen
words. But I was very satisfied with my visit. And for our next
meeting he had promised to play an exquisite piece of old
music, an organ passacaglia by Buxtehude.
Without my being entirely aware of it, the organist
Pistorius had given me my first lesson when we were
sprawled on the floor before the fire in his depressing
hermit’s room. Staring into the blaze had been a tonic for me,
confirming tendencies that I had always had but never
cultivated. Gradually some of them were becoming
comprehensible to me.
Even as a young boy I had been in the habit of gazing
at bizarre natural phenomena, not so much observing them as
surrendering to their magic, their confused, deep language.
Long gnarled tree roots, colored veins in rocks, patches of oil
floating on water, light-refracting flaws in glass–all these
things had held great magic for me at one time: water and fire
particularly, smoke, clouds, and dust, but most of all the
swirling specks of color that swam before my eyes the minute
I closed them. I began to remember all this in the days after
my visit to Pistorius, for I noticed that a certain strength and
joy, an intensification of my self-awareness that I had felt
since that evening, I owed exclusively to this prolonged
staring into the fire. It was remarkably comforting and
rewarding.
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To the few experiences which helped me along the
way toward my life’s true goal I added this new one: the
observation of such configurations. The surrender to Nature’s
irrational, strangely confused formations produces in us a
feeling of inner harmony with the force responsible for these
phenomena. We soon fall prey to the temptation of thinking
of them as being our own moods, our own creations, and see
the boundaries separating us from Nature begin to quiver and
dissolve. We become acquainted with that state of mind in
which we are unable to decide whether the images on our
retina are the result of impressions coming from without or
from within. Nowhere as in this exercise can we discover so
easily and simply to what extent we are creative, to what
extent our soul partakes of the constant creation of the world.
For it is the same indivisible divinity that is active through us
and in Nature, and if the outside world were to be destroyed,
a single one of us would be capable of rebuilding it: mountain
and stream, tree and leaf, root and flower, yes, every natural
form is latent within us, originates in the soul whose essence
is eternity, whose essence we cannot know but which most
often intimates itself to us as the power to love and create.
Not until many years later did I find these observations
of mine confirmed, in a book by Leonardo da Vinci, who
describes at one point how good, how intensely interesting it
is to look at a wall many people have spit on. Confronted with
each stain on the wet wall, he must have felt the same as
Pistorius and I felt before the fire.
The next time we were together, the organist gave me
an explanation: "We always define the limits of our
personality too narrowly. In general, we count as part of our
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personality only that which we can recognize as being an
individual trait or as diverging from the norm. But we consist
of everything the world consists of, each of us, and just as our
body contains the genealogical table of evolution as far back
as the fish and even much further, so we bear everything in
our soul that once was alive in the soul of men. Every god and
devil that ever existed, be it among the Greeks, Chinese, or
Zulus, are within us, exist as latent possibilities, as wishes, as
alternatives. If the human race were to vanish from the face
of the earth save for one halfway talented child that had
received no education, this child would rediscover the entire
course of evolution, it would be capable of producing
everything once more, gods and demons, paradises,
commandments, the Old and New Testament."
“Yes, fine,” I replied. "But what is the value of the
individual in that case? Why do we continue striving if
everything has been completed within us?"
“Stop!” exclaimed Pistorius. "There’s an immense
difference between simply carrying the world within us and
being aware of it. A madman can spout ideas that remind you
of Plato, and a pious little seminary student rethinks deep
mythological correspondences found among the Gnostics or
in Zoroaster. But he isn’t aware of them. He is a tree or stone,
at best an animal, as long as he is not conscious. But as soon
as the first spark of recognition dawns within him he is a
human being. You wouldn’t consider all the bipeds you pass
on the street human beings simply because they walk upright
and carry their young in their bellies nine months! It is
obvious how many of them are fish or sheep, worms or angels,
how many are ants, how many are bees! Well, each one of
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them contains the possibility of becoming human, but only by
having an intimation of these possibilities, partially even by
learning to make himself conscious of them; only in this
respect are these possibilities his."
This was the general drift of our conversations. They
rarely confronted me with anything completely new, anything
altogether astonishing. But everything, even the most
ordinary matters, resembled gentle persistent hammer blows
on the same spot within me; all of them helped me to form
myself, all of them helped to peel off layers of skin, to break
eggshells, and after each blow I lifted my head a little higher,
a little more freely, until my yellow bird pushed its beautiful
raptor’s head out of the shattered shell of the terrestrial globe.
Frequently we also told each other our dreams.
Pistorius knew how to interpret them. An example of this
comes to mind just now. I dreamed I was able to fly, but in
such a way that I seemed catapulted into the air and lost all
control. The feeling of flying exhilarated me, but exhilaration
turned to fear when I saw myself driven higher and higher,
becoming more and more powerless. At that instant I made
the saving discovery that I could regulate the rise or fall of my
flight by holding or releasing my breath.
Pistorius’ comment was: "The impetus that makes you
fly is our great human possession. Everybody has it. It is the
feeling of being linked with the roots of power, but one soon
becomes afraid of this feeling. It’s damned dangerous! That is
why most people shed their wings and prefer to walk and
obey the law. But not you. You go on flying. And look! You
discover that you gradually begin to master your flight, that to
the great general force that tears you upward there is added a
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delicate, small force of your own, an organ, a steering
mechanism. How marvelous! Lacking that, you would be
drawn up to the heights, powerless–which is what happens to
madmen. They possess deeper intimations than people who
remain earth-bound, but they have no key and no steering
mechanism and roar off into infinity. But you, Sinclair, you are
going about it the right way. How? You probably don’t know
yourself. You are doing it with a new organ, with something
that regulates your breathing. And now you will realize how
little ‘individuality’ your soul has in its deepest reaches. For it
does not invent this regulator! It is not new! You’ve borrowed
it: it has existed for thousands of years. It is the organ with
which fish regulate their equilibrium–the air bladder. And in
fact among the fish there are still a few strange primeval
genera where the air bladder functions as a kind of lung and
can be used on occasion as a breathing mechanism. In other
words, exactly like the lung which you in your dream use as a
flying bladder."
He even brought out a zoology book and showed me
the names and illustrations of these anachronistic fish. And
with a peculiar shudder I felt that an organ from an earlier
period of evolution was still alive within me.

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had not parted from my parents and their world, the
“luminous” world in a violent struggle, but had gradually and
almost imperceptibly become estranged. I was sad that it had
to be this way and it made for many unpleasant hours during
my visits back home; but it did not affect me deeply, it was
bearable.
But where we have given of our love and respect not
from habit but of our own free will, where we have been
disciples and friends out of our inmost hearts, it is a bitter and
horrible moment when we suddenly recognize that the
current within us wants to pull us away from what is dearest
to us. Then every thought that rejects the friend and mentor
turns in our own hearts like a poisoned barb, then each blow
struck in defense flies back into one’s own face, the words
“disloyalty” and “ingratitude” strike the person who feels he
was morally sound like catcalls and stigma, and the frightened
heart flees timidly back to the charmed valleys of childhood
virtues, unable to believe that this break, too, must be made,
this bond also broken.
With time my inner feelings had slowly turned against
acknowledging Pistorius so unreservedly as a master. My
friendship with him, his counsel, the comfort he had brought
me, his proximity had been a vital experience during the most
important months of my adolescence. God had spoken to me
through him. From his lips my dreams had returned clarified
and interpreted. He had given me faith in myself. And now I
became conscious of gradually beginning to resist him. There
was too much didacticism in what he said, and I felt that he
understood only a part of me completely.
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No quarrel or scene occurred between us, no break
and not even a settling of accounts. I uttered only a single–
actually harmless–phrase, yet it was in that moment that an
illusion was shattered.
A vague presentiment of such an occurrence had
oppressed me for some time; it became a distinct feeling one
Sunday morning in his study. We were lying before the fire
while he was holding forth about mysteries and forms of
religion, which he was studying, and whose potentialities for
the future preoccupied him. All this seemed to me odd and
eclectic and not of vital importance; there was something
vaguely pedagogical about it; it sounded like tedious research
among the ruins of former worlds. And all at once I felt a
repugnance for his whole manner, for this cult of mythologies,
this game of mosaics he was playing with secondhand modes
of belief.
“Pistorius,” I said suddenly in a fit of malice that both
surprised and frightened me. "You ought to tell me one of
your dreams again sometime, a real dream, one that you’ve
had at night. What you’re telling me there is all so–so
damnedantiquarian."
He had never heard me speak like that before and at
the same moment I realized with a flash of shame and horror
that the arrow I had shot at him, that had pierced his heart,
had come from his own armory: I was now flinging back at
him reproaches that on occasion he had directed against
himself half in irony.
He fell silent at once. I looked at him with dread in my
heart and saw him turning terribly pale.
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After a long pregnant pause he placed fresh wood on
the fire and said in a quiet voice: "You’re right, Sinclair, you’re
a clever boy. I’ll spare you the antiquarian stuff from now on."
He spoke very calmly but it was obvious he was hurt. What
had I done?
I wanted to say something encouraging to him,
implore his forgiveness, assure him of my love and my deep
gratitude. Touching words came to mind–but I could not utter
them. I just lay there gazing into the fire and kept silent. He,
too, kept silent and so we lay while the fire dwindled, and
with each dying flame I felt something beautiful, intimate
irrevocably burn low and become evanescent.
“I’m afraid you’ve misunderstood me,” I said finally
with a very forced and clipped voice. The stupid, meaningless
words fell mechanically from my lips as if I were reading from
a magazine serial.
“I quite understand,” Pistorius said softly. "You’re
right." I waited. Then he went on slowly: "Inasmuch as one
person can be rightagainst another."
No, no! I’m wrong, a voice screamed inside me–but I
could not say anything. I knew that with my few words I had
put my finger on his essential weakness, his affliction and
wound. I had touched the spot where he most mistrusted
himself. His ideal way “antiquarian,” he was seeking in the
past, he was a romantic. And suddenly I realized deeply within
me: what Pistorius had been and given to me was precisely
what he could not be and give to himself. He had led me along
a path that would transcend and leave even him, the leader,
behind.
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God knows how one happens to say something like
that. I had not meant it all that maliciously, had had no idea of
the havoc I would create. I had uttered something the
implications of which I had been unaware of at the moment
of speaking. I had succumbed to a weak, rather witty but
malicious impulse and it had become fate. I had committed a
trivial and careless act of brutality which he regarded as a
judgment.
How much I wished then that he become enraged,
defend himself, and berate me! He did nothing of the kind–I
had to do all of that myself. He would have smiled if he could
have, and the fact that he found it impossible was the surest
proof of how deeply I had wounded him.
By accepting this blow so quietly, from me, his
impudent and ungrateful pupil, by keeping silent and
admitting that I had been right, by acknowledging my words
as his fate, he made me detest myself and increased my
indiscretion even more. When I had hit out I had thought I
would strike a tough, well-armed man–he turned out to be a
quiet, passive, defenseless creature who surrendered without
protest.
For a long time we stayed in front of the dying fire, in
which each glowing shape, each writhing twig reminded me of
our rich hours and increased the guilty awareness of my
indebtedness to Pistorius. Finally I could bear it no longer. I
got up and left. I stood a long time in front of the door to his
room, a long time on the dark stairway, and even longer
outside his house waiting to hear if he would follow me. Then
I turned to go and walked for hours through the town, its
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suburbs, parks and woods, until evening. During that walk I
felt for the first time the mark of Cain on my forehead.
Only gradually was I able to think clearly about what
had occurred. At first my thoughts were full of self-reproach,
intent on defending Pistorius. But all of them turned into the
opposite of my intention. A thousand times I was ready to
regret and take back my rash statement–yet it had been the
truth. Only now I managed to understand Pistorius completely
and succeeded in constructing his whole dream before me.
This dream had been to be a priest, to proclaim the new
religion, to introduce new forms of exaltation, of love, of
worship, to erect new symbols. But this was not his strength
and it was not his function. He lingered too fondly in the past,
his knowledge of this past was too precise, he knew too much
about Egypt and India, Mithras and Abraxas. His love was
shackled to images the earth had seen before, and yet, in his
inmost heart, he realized that the New had to be truly new
and different, that it had to spring from fresh soil and could
not be drawn from museums and libraries. His function was
perhaps to lead men to themselves as he had led me. To
provide them with the unprecedented, the new gods, was not
in him.
At this point a sharp realization burned within me:
each man has his “function” but none which he can choose
himself, define, or perform as he pleases. It was wrong to
desire new gods, completely wrong to want to provide the
world with something. An enlightened man had but one duty-
-to seek the way to himself, to reach inner certainty, to grope
his way forward, no matter where it led. The realization shook
me profoundly, it was the fruit of this experience. I had often
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speculated with images of the future, dreamed of roles that I
might be assigned, perhaps as poet or prophet or painter, or
something similar.
All that was futile. I did not exist to write poems, to
preach or to paint, neither I nor anyone else. All of that was
incidental. Each man had only one genuine vocation–to find
the way to himself. He might end up as poet or madman, as
prophet or criminal–that was not his affair, ultimately it was
of no concern. His task was to discover his own destiny–not
an arbitrary one–and live it out wholly and resolutely within
himself. Everything else was only a would-be existence, an
attempt at evasion, a flight back to the ideals of the masses,
conformity and fear of one’s own inwardness. The new vision
rose up before me, glimpsed a hundred times, possibly even
expressed before but now experienced for the first time by
me. I was an experiment on the part of Nature, a gamble
within the unknown, perhaps for a new purpose, perhaps for
nothing, and my only task was to allow this game on the part
of primeval depths to take its course, to feel its will within me
and make it wholly mine. That or nothing!
I had already felt much loneliness, now there was a
deeper loneliness still which was inescapable.
I made no attempt at reconciliation with Pistorius. We
remained friends but the relationship changed. Yet this was
something we touched on only once; actually it was Pistorius
alone who did. He said:
"You know that I have the desire to become a priest.
Most of all I wanted to become the priest of the new religion
of which you and I have had so many intimations. That role
will never be mine–I realize that and even without wholly
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admitting it to myself have known it for some time. So I will
perform other priestly duties instead, perhaps at the organ,
perhaps some other way. But I must always have things
around me that I feel are beautiful and sacred, organ music
and mysteries, symbols and myths. I need and cannot forgo
them. That is my weakness. Sometimes, Sinclair, I know that I
should not have such wishes, that they are a weakness and
luxury. It would be more magnanimous and just if I put myself
unreservedly at the disposal of fate. But I can’t do that, I am
incapable of it. Perhaps you will be able to do it one day. It is
difficult, it is the only truly difficult thing there is. I have often
dreamed of doing so, but I can’t; the idea fills me with dread: I
am not capable of standing so naked and alone. I, too, am a
poor weak creature who needs warmth and food and
occasionally the comfort of human companionship. Someone
who seeks nothing but his own fate no longer has any
companions, he stands quite alone and has only cold universal
space around him. That is Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane,
you know. There have been martyrs who gladly let themselves
be nailed to the cross, but even these were no heroes, were
not liberated, for even they wanted something that they had
become fond of and accustomed to–they had models, they
had ideals. But the man who only seeks his destiny has
neither models nor ideals, has nothing dear and consoling!
And actually this is the path one should follow. People like you
and me are quite lonely really but we still have each other, we
have the secret satisfaction of being different, of rebelling, of
desiring the unusual. But you must shed that, too, if you want
to go all the way to the end. You cannot allow yourself to
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become a revolutionary, an example, a martyr. It is beyond
imagining –"
Yes, it was beyond imagining. But it could be dreamed,
anticipated, sensed. A few times I had a foretaste of it–in an
hour of absolute stillness. Then I would gaze into myself and
confront the image of my fate. Its eyes would be full of
wisdom, full of madness, they would radiate love or deep
malice, it was all the same. You were not allowed to choose or
desire any one of them. You were only allowed to
desireyourself, only your fate. Up to this point, Pistorius had
been my guide.
In those days I walked about as though I were blind. I
felt frenzies–each step was a new danger. I saw nothing in
front of me except the unfathomable darkness into which all
paths I had taken until now had led and vanished. And within
me I saw the image of the master, who resembled Demian,
and in whose eyes my fate stood written.
I wrote on a piece of paper: "A leader has left me. I am
enveloped in darkness. I cannot take another step alone. Help
me."
I wanted to mail it to Demian, but didn’t. Each time I
wanted to, it looked foolish and senseless. But I knew my little
prayer by heart and often recited it to myself. It was with me
every hour of the day. I had begun to understand it.
My schooldays were over. I was to take a trip during
my vacation–my father’s idea–and then enter a university.
But I did not know what I would major in. I had been granted
my wish: one semester of philosophy. Any other subject
would have done as well.

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ever. The rain dripped gently from the branches. Slowly I
walked out into the garden that extended some way along the
river. Finally I found Demian. He was standing in an open
summer house, stripped to the waist, punching a suspended
sandbag.
I stopped, astonished. Demian looked strikingly
handsome with his broad chest, and firm, manly features; the
raised arms with taut muscles were strong and capable, the
movements sprang playfully and smoothly from hips,
shoulders, and wrists.
“Demian,” I called out. “What are you doing there?”
He laughed happily.
"Practicing. I’ve promised the Japanese a boxing match,
the little fellow is as agile as a cat and, of course, just as sly,
but he won’t be able to beat me. There’s a very slight
humiliation for which I have to pay him back."
He put on his shirt and coat.
“You’ve seen my mother?” he asked.
"Yes, Demian, what a wonderful mother you have!
Frau Eva! The name fits her perfectly. Sheis like a universal
mother."
For a moment he looked thoughtfully into my face.
"So you know her name already? You can be proud of
yourself. You are the first person she has told it to during the
first meeting."
From this day on I went in and out of the house like a
son or brother–but also as someone in love. As soon as I
opened the gate, as soon as I caught sight of the tall trees in
the garden, I felt happy and rich. Outside was reality: streets
and houses, people and institutions, libraries and lecture
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halls–but here inside was love; here lived the legend and the
dream. And yet we lived in no way cut off from the outside
world; in our thoughts and conversations we often lived in the
midst of it, only on an entirely different plane. We were not
separated from the majority of men by a boundary but simply
by another mode of vision. Our task was to represent an
island in the world, a prototype perhaps, or at least a prospect
of a different way of life. I, who had been isolated for so long,
learned about the companionship which is possible between
people who have tasted complete loneliness. I never again
hankered after the tables of the fortunate and the feasts of
the blessed. Never again did envy or nostalgia overcome me
when I witnessed the collective pleasures of others. And
gradually I was initiated into the secret of those who wear the
sign in their faces.
We who wore the sign might justly be considered
“odd” by the world; yes, even crazy, and dangerous. We
wereaware or in the process of becoming aware and our
striving was directed toward achieving a more and more
complete state of awareness while the striving of the others
was a quest aimed at binding their opinions, ideals, duties,
their lives and fortunes more and more closely to those of the
herd. There, too, was striving, there, too, were power and
greatness. But whereas we, who were marked, believed that
we represented the will of Nature to something new, to the
individualism of the future, the others sought to perpetuate
the status quo. Humanity–which they loved as we did–was
for them something complete that must be maintained and
protected. For us, humanity was a distant goal toward which
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all men were moving, whose image no one knew, whose laws
were nowhere written down.
Apart from Frau Eva, Max, and myself, various other
seekers were more or less closely attached to the circle. Quite
a few had set out on very individual paths, had set themselves
quite unusual goals, and clung to specific ideas and duties.
They included astrologers and cabalists, also a disciple of
Count Tolstoi, and all kinds of delicate, shy, and vulnerable
creatures, followers of new sects, devotees of Indian
asceticism, vegetarians, and so forth. We actually had no
mental bonds in common save the respect which each one
accorded the ideals of the other. Those with whom we felt a
close kinship were concerned with mankind’s past search for
gods and ideals–their studies often reminded me of Pistorius.
They brought books with them, translated aloud texts in
ancient languages, showed us illustrations of ancient symbols
and rites and taught us to see how humanity’s entire store of
ideals so far consisted of dreams that had emanated from the
unconscious, of dreams in which humanity groped after its
intimations of future potentialities. Thus we became
acquainted with the wonderful thousand-headed tangle of
gods from prehistory to the dawn of the Christian conversion.
We heard the creeds of solitary holy men, of the
transformations religions undergo in their migrations from
one people to another. Thus, from everything we collected in
this manner, we gained a critical understanding of our time
and of contemporary Europe: with prodigious efforts mighty
new weapons had been created for mankind but the end was
flagrant, deep desolation of the spirit. Europe had conquered
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the whole world only to lose her own soul.
Our circle also included believers, adherents of certain
hopes and healing faiths. There were Buddhists who sought to
convert Europe, a disciple of Tolstoi who preached
nonresistance to evil, as well as other sects. We in the inner
circle listened but accepted none of these teachings as
anything but metaphors. We, who bore the mark, felt no
anxiety about the shape the future was to take. All of these
faiths and teachings seemed to us already dead and useless.
The only duty and destiny we acknowledged was that each
one of us should become so completely himself, so utterly
faithful to the active seed which Nature planted within him,
that in living out its growth he could be surprised by nothing
unknown to come.
Although we might not have been able to express it,
we all felt distinctly that a new birth amid the collapse of this
present world was imminent, already discernible. Demian
often said to me: "What will come is beyond imagining. The
soul of Europe is a beast that has lain fettered for an infinitely
long time. And when it’s free, its first movements won’t be
the gentlest. But the means are unimportant if only the real
needs of the soul–which has for so long been repeatedly
stunted and anesthetized–come to light. Then our day will
come, then we will be needed. Not as leaders and lawgivers–
we won’t be there to see the new laws–but rather as those
who are willing, as men who are ready to go forth and stand
prepared wherever fate may need them. Look, all men are
prepared to accomplish the incredibleif their ideals are
threatened. But no one is ready when a new ideal, a new and
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perhaps dangerous and ominous impulse, makes itself felt.
The few who will be ready at that time and who will go forth–
will be us. That is why we are marked–as Cain was–to arouse
fear and hatred and drive men out of a confining idyl into
more dangerous reaches. All men who have had an effect on
the course of human history, all of them without exception,
were capable and effective only because they were ready to
accept the inevitable. It is true of Moses and Buddha, of
Napoleon and Bismarck. What particular movement one
serves and what pole one is directed from are matters outside
one’s own choice. If Bismarck had understood the Social
Democrats and compromised with them he would have
merely been shrewd but no man of destiny. The same applies
to Napoleon, Caesar, Loyola, all men of that species in fact.
Always, you must think of these things in evolutionary, in
historical terms! When the upheavals of the earth’s surface
flung the creatures of the sea onto the land and the land
creatures into the sea, the specimens of the various orders
that were ready to follow their destiny were the ones that
accomplished the new and unprecedented; by making new
biological adjustments they were able to save their species
from destruction. We do not know whether these were the
same specimens that had previously distinguished themselves
among their fellows as conservative, upholders of the status
quo, or rather as eccentrics, revolutionaries; but we do know
they were ready, and could therefore lead their species into
new phases of evolution. That is why we want to beready."
Frau Eva was often present during these conversations
yet she did not participate in quite the same manner. She was
a listener, full of trust and understanding, an echo for each
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one of us who explained his thoughts. It seemed as though all
thinking emanated from her and in the end went back to her.
My happiness consisted in sitting near her, hearing her voice
occasionally and sharing the rich, soulful atmosphere
surrounding her.
She was immediately aware of any change, any
unhappiness or new development within me. It even seemed
to me that my dreams at night were inspired by her. I would
often recount them to her and she found them
comprehensible and natural; there was no unusual turn in
them that she could not follow. For a time my dreams
repeated patterns of our daytime conversations. I dreamed
that the whole world was in turmoil and that by myself, or
with Demian, I was tensely waiting for the great moment. The
face of fate remained obscured but somehow bore the
features of Frau Eva: to be chosen or spurned by her, that was
fate.
Sometimes she would say with a smile: "Your dream is
incomplete, Sinclair. You’ve left out the best part." And then I
would remember the part I had left out and not understand
how I could have forgotten it.
At times I was dissatisfied with myself and tortured
with desire: I believed I could no longer bear to have her near
me without taking her in my arms. She sensed this, too, at
once. Once when I had stayed away for several days and
returned bewildered she took me aside and said: "You must
not give way to desires which you don’t believe in. I know
what you desire. You should, however, either be capable of
renouncing these desires or feel wholly justified in having
them. Once you are able to make your request in such a way
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that you will be quite certain of its fulfillment, then the
fulfillment will come. But at present you alternate between
desire and renunciation and are afraid all the time. All that
must be overcome. Let me tell you a story."
And she told me about a youth who had fallen in love
with a planet. He stood by the sea, stretched out his arms and
prayed to the planet, dreamed of it, and directed all his
thoughts to it. But he knew, or felt he knew, that a star cannot
be embraced by a human being. He considered it to be his
fate to love a heavenly body without any hope of fulfillment
and out of this insight he constructed an entire philosophy of
renunciation and silent, faithful suffering that would improve
and purify him. Yet all his dreams reached the planet. Once he
stood again on the high cliff at night by the sea and gazed at
the planet and burned with love for it. And at the height of his
longing he leaped into the emptiness toward the planet, but
at the instant of leaping “it’s impossible” flashed once more
through his mind. There he lay on the shore, shattered. He
had not understood how to love. If at the instant of leaping he
had had the strength of faith in the fulfillment of his love he
would have soared into the heights and been united with the
star.
“Love must not entreat,” she added, "or demand. Love
must have the strength to become certain within itself. Then
it ceases merely to be attracted and begins to attract. Sinclair,
your love is attracted to me. Once it begins to attract me, I
will come. I will not make a gift of myself, I must be won."
Another time she told me a different story, concerning
a lover whose love was unrequited. He withdrew completely
within himself, believing his love would consume him. The
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world became lost to him, he no longer noticed blue sky and
green woods, he no longer heard the brook murmur; his ears
had turned deaf to the notes of the harp: nothing mattered
any more; he had become poor and wretched. Yet his love
increased and he would rather have died or been ruined than
renounce possessing this beautiful woman. Then he felt that
his passion had consumed everything else within him and
become so strong, so magnetic that the beautiful woman
must follow. She came to him and he stood with outstretched
arms ready to draw her to him. As she stood before him she
was completely transformed and with awe he felt and saw
that he had won back all he had previously lost. She stood
before him and surrendered herself to him and sky, forest,
and brook all came toward him in new and resplendent colors,
belonged to him, and spoke to him in his own language. And
instead of merely winning a woman he embraced the entire
world and every star in heaven glowed within him and
sparkled with joy in his soul. He had loved and had found
himself. But most people love to lose themselves.
My love for Frau Eva seemed to fill my whole life. But
every day it manifested itself differently. Sometimes I felt
certain that it was not she as a person whom I was attracted
to and yearned for with all my being, but that she existed only
as a metaphor of my inner self, a metaphor whose sole
purpose was to lead me more deeply into myself. Things she
said often sounded like replies from my subconscious to
questions that tormented me. There were other moments
when I sat beside her and burned with sensual desire and
kissed objects she had touched. And little by little, sensual
and spiritual love, reality and symbol began to overlap. Then it
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would happen that as I thought about her in my room at
home in tranquil intimacy I felt her hand in mine and her lips
touching my lips. Or I would be at her house, would look into
her face and hear her voice, yet not know whether she was
real or a dream. I began to sense how one can possess a love
constantly and eternally. I would have an insight while reading
a book–and this would feel the same as Eva’s kiss. She
caressed my hair and smiled at me affectionately and this felt
like taking a step forward within myself. Everything significant
and full of fate for me adopted her form. She could transform
herself into any of my thoughts and each of my thoughts
could be transformed into her.

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a crystal in my heart–I knew it was my ego. The chill crept up
to my chest.
Relaxed from this terrible tension I felt that something
was about to happen. I was mortally exhausted but I was
ready to behold Eva step into the room, radiant and ecstatic.
The clattering of hooves could be heard approaching
along the street. It sounded near and metallic,.then suddenly
stopped. I leaped to the window and saw Demian
dismounting below. I ran down.
“What is it, Demian?”
He paid no attention to my words. He was very pale
and sweat poured down his cheeks. He tied the bridle of bis
steaming horse to the garden fence and took my arm and
walked down the street with me.
“Have you heard about it?”
I had heard nothing.
Demian squeezed my arm and turned his face toward
me, with a strangely somber yet sympathetic look in his eyes.
"Yes, it’s starting. You’ve heard about the difficulties
with Russia."
“What? Is it war?”
He spoke very softly although no one was anywhere
near us.
"It hasn’t been declared yet. But there will be war. You
can take my word for that. I didn’t want to worry you but I
have seen omens on three different occasions since that time.
So it won’t be the end of the world, no earthquake, no
revolution, but war. You’ll see what a sensation that will be!
People will love it. Even now they can hardly wait for the
killing to begin–their lives are that dull! But you will see,
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Sinclair, that this is only the beginning. Perhaps it will be a
very big war, a war on a gigantic scale. But that, too, will only
be the beginning. The new world has begun and the new
world will be terrible for those clinging to the old. What will
you do?"
I was dumfounded, it all sounded so strange, so
improbable.
“I don’t know–and you?”
He shrugged his shoulders.
"I’ll be called up as soon as the mobilization order
comes through. I’m a lieutenant."
“You, a lieutenant! I had no idea.”
"Yes, that was one of the ways I compromised. You
know I dislike calling attention to myself so much I almost
always went to the other extreme, just to give a correct
impression. I believe I’ll be on the front in a week."
“My God.”
"Now don’t get sentimental. Of course it’s not going to
be any fun ordering men to fire on living beings, but that will
be incidental. Each of us will be caught up in the great chain of
events. You, too, you’ll be drafted, for sure."
“And what about your mother, Demian?”
Only now my thoughts turned back to what had
happened a quarter of an hour before. How the world had
changed in the meantime! I had summoned all my strength to
conjure up the sweetest of images and now fate looked at me
suddenly with a threatening and horrible mask.
"My mother? We don’t have to worry about her. She is
safe, safer than anyone else in the world today. Do you love
her that much?"
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“Didn’t you know?”
He laughed lightly, relieved.
"Of course I knew. No one has called my mother Frau
Eva who hasn’t been in love with her. You either called me or
her today."
“Yes, I called her.”
"She felt it. She sent me away all of a sudden, saying I
would have to go see you. I had just told her the news about
Russia."
We turned around and exchanged a few words more.
Demian untied his horse and mounted.
Only upstairs in my room did I realize how much
Demian’s news, and still more the previous strain, had
exhausted me. But Frau Eva had heard me! My thoughts had
reached her heart. She would have come herself–if… How
curious all this was, and, fundamentally, how beautiful! And
now there was to be war. What we had talked about so often
was to begin. Demian had known so much about it ahead of
time. How strange that the stream of the world was not to
bypass us any more, that it now went straight through our
hearts, and that now or very soon the moment would come
when the world would need us, when it would seek to
transform itself. Demian was right, one could not be
sentimental about that. The only remarkable thing was that I
was to share the very personal matter of my fate with so
many others, with the whole world in fact. Well, so be it!
I was prepared. When I walked through town in the
evening every street corner was buzzing, everywhere the
word waswar.
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I went to Frau Eva’s. We ate supper in the summer
house. I was the only guest. No one said a word about the war.
Only later on, shortly before I was to leave, Frau Eva said:
"Dear Sinclair, you called me today. You know why I didn’t
come myself. But don’t forget: you know the call now and
whenever you need someone who bears the sign, you can
appeal to me."
She rose to her feet and preceded me into the garden
twilight. Tall and regal she strode between the silent trees.
I am coming to the end of my story. Everything went
very rapidly from then on. Soon there was war, and Demian,
strangely unfamiliar in his uniform, left us. I accompanied his
mother home. It was not long before I, too, took my leave of
her. She kissed me on the mouth and clasped me for a
moment to her breast. Her great eyes burned close and firmly
into mine.
All men seemed to have become brothers–overnight.
They talked of “the fatherland” and of “honor,” but what lay
behind it was their own fate whose unveiled face they had
now all beheld for one brief moment. Young men left their
barracks, were packed into trains, and on many faces I saw a
sign –not ours–but a beautiful, dignified sign nonetheless that
meant love and death. I, too, was embraced by people whom
I had never seen before and I understood this gesture and
responded to it. Intoxication made them do it, not a hankering
after their destiny. But this intoxication was sacred, for it was
the result of their all having thrown that brief and terribly
disquieting glance into the eyes of their fate.
It was nearly winter when I was sent to the front.
Despite the excitement of being under fire for the first time,
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in the beginning everything disappointed me. At one time I
had given much thought to why men were so very rarely
capable of living for an ideal. Now I saw that many, no, all
men were capable of dying for one. Yet it could not be a
personal, a freely chosen ideal; it had to be one mutually
accepted.
As time went on though I realized I had
underestimated these men. However much mutual service
and danger made a uniform mass of them, I still saw many
approach the will of fate with great dignity. Many, very many,
not only during the attack but at every moment of the day,
wore in their eyes the remote, resolute, somewhat possessed
look which knows nothing of aims and signified complete
surrender to the incredible. Whatever they might think or
believe, they were ready, they could be used, they were the
clay of which the future could be shaped. The more single-
mindedly the world concentrated on war and heroism, on
honor and other old ideals, the more remote and improbable
any whisper of genuine humanity sounded–that was all just
surface, in the same way that the question of the war’s
external and political objectives remained superficial. Deep
down, underneath, something was taking shape. Something
akin to a new humanity. For I could see many men–and many
died beside me–who had begun to feel acutely that hatred
and rage, slaughter and annihilation, were not bound up with
these objectives. No, these objectives and aims were
completely fortuitous. The most primitive, even the wildest
feelings were not directed at the enemy; their bloody task
was merely an irradiation of the soul, of the soul divided
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within itself, which filled them with the lust to rage and kill,
annihilate and die so that they might be born anew.
One night in early spring I stood guard in front of a
farm that we had occupied. A listless wind was blowing fitfully;
across the Flemish sky cloud armies rode on high, somewhere
behind them the suggestion of a moon. I had been uneasy the
entire day–something was worrying me deeply. Now on my
dark guard post I fervently recalled the images of my life and
thought of Frau Eva and of Demian. I stood braced against a
poplar tree staring into the drifting clouds whose mysteriously
writhing patches of light soon metamorphosed into huge
series of swirling images. From the strange weakness of my
pulse, the insensitiveness of my skin to wind and rain, and my
intense state of consciousness I could sense that a master was
near me.
A huge city could be seen in the clouds out of which
millions of people streamed in a host over vast landscapes.
Into their midst stepped a mighty, godlike figure, as huge as a
mountain range, with sparkling stars in her hair, bearing the
features of Frau Eva. The ranks of the people were swallowed
up into her as into a giant cave and vanished from sight. The
goddess cowered on the ground, the mark luminous on her
forehead. A dream seemed to hold sway over her: she closed
her eyes and her countenance became twisted with pain.
Suddenly she cried out and from her forehead sprang stars,
many thousands of shining stars that leaped in marvelous
arches and semicircles across the black sky.
One of these stars shot straight toward me with a clear
ringing sound and it seemed to seek me out. Then it burst
asunder with a roar into a thousand sparks, tore me aloft and
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smashed me back to the ground again, the world shattered
above me with a thunderous roar.
They found me near the poplar tree, covered with
earth and with many wounds.
I lay in a cellar, guns roared above me. I lay in a wagon
and jolted across the empty fields. Mostly I was asleep or
unconscious. But the more deeply I slept the more strongly I
felt that something was drawing me on, that I was following a
force that had mastery over me.
I lay in a stable, on straw. It was dark and someone
had stepped on my hand. But something inside me wanted to
keep going and I was drawn on more forcefully than ever,
Again I lay in a wagon and later on a stretcher or ladder. More
strongly than ever I felt myself being summoned somewhere,
felt nothing but this urge that I must finally get there.
Then I reached my goal. It was night and I was fully
conscious. I had just felt the urge pulling mightily within me:
now I was in a long hall, bedded down on the floor. I felt I had
reached the destination which had summoned me. I turned
my head: close to my mattress lay another; someone on it
bent forward and looked at me. He had the sign on his
forehead. It was Max Demian.
I was unable to speak and he could not or did not want
to either. He just looked at me. The light from a bulb strung
on the wall above him played down on his face. He smiled.
He gazed into my eyes for what seemed an endless
time. Slowly he brought his face closer to mine: we almost
touched.
“Sinclair,” he said in a whisper.
I told him with a glance that I heard.
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He smiled again, almost as with pity.
“Little fellow,” he said, smiling.
His lips lay very close to mine. Quietly he continued to
speak.
“Can you remember Franz Kromer?” he asked, I
blinked at him and smiled, too.
"Little Sinclair, listen: I will have to go away. Perhaps
you’ll need me again sometime, against Kromer or something.
If you call me then I won’t come crudely, on horseback or by
train. You’ll have to listen within yourself, then you will notice
that I am within you. Do you understand? And something else.
Frau Eva said that if ever you were in a bad way I was to give
you a kiss from her that she sends by me… Close your eyes,
Sinclair!"
I closed my eyes in obedience. I felt a light kiss on my
lips where there was always a little fresh blood which never
would go away. And then I fell asleep.
Next morning someone woke me: I had to have my
wounds dressed. When I was finally wide awake I turned
quickly to the mattress next to mine. On it lay a stranger I’d
never seen before.
Dressing the wound hurt. Everything that has
happened to me since has hurt. But sometimes when I find
the key and climb deep into myself where the images of fate
lie aslumber in the dark mirror, I need only bend over that
dark mirror to behold my own image, now completely
resembling him, my brother, my master.
The End.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Born in 1877 in Calw, on the edge of the Black Forest,
Hermann Hesse was brought up in a missionary household
where it was assumed that he would study for the ministry.
Hesse’s religious crisis (which is often recorded in his novels)
led to his fleeing from the Maulbronn seminary in 1891, an
unsuccessful cure by a well-known theologian and faith healer,
and an attempted suicide. After being expelled from high
school, he worked in bookshops for several years–a usual
occupation for budding German authors.
His first novel, Peter Camenzind (1904), describes a
youth who leaves his Swiss mountain village to become a poet.
This was followed by Beneath the Wheel (1906), the tale of a
schoolboy totally out of touch with his contemporaries, who
flees through different cities after his escape from school.
World War I came as a terrific shock, and Hesse joined
the pacifist Romain Rolland in antiwar activities–not only
writing antiwar tracts and novels, but editing two newspapers
for German prisoners of war. During this period, Hesse’s first
marriage broke up (reflected or discussed outright in Knulp
and Rosshalde), he studied the works of Freud, eventually
underwent analysis with Jung, and was for a time a patient in
a sanatorium.
In 1919 he moved permanently to Switzerland, and
brought out Demian, which reflects his preoccupation with
the workings of the subconscious and with psychoanalysis.
The book was an enormous success, and made Hesse famous
throughout Europe.
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In 1922 he turned his attention to the East, which he
had visited several times before the war, and wrote a novel
about Buddha titled Siddhartha, In 1927 he wrote
Steppenwolf, the account of a man torn between animal
instincts and bourgeois respectability, and in 1930 he
published Narcissus and Goldmund, regarded as "Hesse’s
greatest novel" (New York Times), dealing with the friendship
between two medieval priests, one contented with his
religion, the other a wanderer endlessly in search of peace
and salvation.
Journey to the East appeared in 1932, and there was
no major work until 1943, when he brought out Magister Ludi,
which won him the Nobel Prize in 1946. Until his death in
1962 he lived in seclusion in Montagnola, Switzerland.