A God Within

DEMIAN by Hermann Hesse, translated by Roloff and Lebeck. 171 pages. Harper & Row. $4.50.

Gerhart Hauptmann, Thomas Mann, Hermann Hesse: three glum Dutch uncles dominated the tone of German literature in the first half of the 20th century. The first two were world-famous figures--Hauptmann as a grim Grossvater of a social realism (The Weavers), Mann as a laboriously brilliant intellectual who wrote the era's most imposing novel of ideas (The Magic Mountain). Hesse, who died in 1962, was little known outside Central Europe, even after he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1946.

Happily, the injustice is about to be remedied. With this new and generally admirable translation of the novel that established Hesse's reputation in Germany, his U.S. publisher has initiated a series intended to include all his major works and to persuade U.S. readers that Hesse is essential to their ethos. It will not be easy. Hesse is relentlessly esoteric--one of those Faustian fellows who make Moholes out of moleholes. Yet in the judgment of most German critics, he is one of the purest lyric poets since Moerike, and among the most profound of the many novelists who elaborate the drama of modern man in search of his soul.

Merging Cultures. Hesse was born in the Black Forest of Lutheran missionary parents who had spent many years in India. German romanticism and oriental mysticism met in the Hesse household and merged in the boy's imagination. Religion and poetry were his earliest passions, and poetry prevailed. At 14, Hesse dropped out of theological seminary; at 21, he published his first book of verse. In the next 15 years he achieved some closet reputation as a man who had little to say but said it exquisitely.

In the empty bottle, in the glass,

The candle glimmers through the gloom;

It is cold in the room,

Outside the rain falls softly on the grass.

I lie down again as I always do,

Cold and sad lie down again;

Morning comes and evening then

Comes again, but never you.

World War I changed all that. Hesse protested publicly against the Kaiser's policies, suffered an emotional breakdown, was cured by a pupil of Switzerland's Carl Jung, and in 1919 published Demian, the story of a young man's struggle for identity that electrified a generation looking for a way out of moral and political disaster.

Glinting Images. Hesse's hero is obviously himself: the son of a devout and prosperous burgher who in childhood encounters a strange companion named Max Demian. Demian is a boy, but he has "the face of a man, superior and purposeful, lucid and calm, with knowing eyes. Yet the face had something feminine about it too, and was somehow a thousand years old. He was different, like an animal or a spirit or a picture, unimaginably different from the rest of us."

Demian is the hero's daemon, a figure that embodies the latent power of his own personality, the god within him that is evil as well as good. The novel describes how at first the opposites oppose each other but at last are reconciled in the self the hero becomes. In effect, the book is a case history of the integration process as Jung describes it, and as such it frequently suffers from schematism. The characters are concepts and their lives are theories, but somehow the abstractions are all bathed in a luminous and powerful stream of feeling that whirls them along, glinting and then gone and then suddenly welling out of the depths, like images in a dream.

Salvation, in a word, is the theme of Demian--and of all the important novels (Siddhartha, Narziss und Goldmund, Glasperlenspiel) that followed it. In them all Hesse writes with the subtle and mocking simplicity of an oracle; almost every sentence must be sifted for double or triple meanings. And he never condescends to the little tricks of storytelling that make reading easy. He is totally, Germanically humorless, and time and again displays the absurdity of the selfabsorbed: when he tries to be serious about life, he often manages merely to be earnest about himself. Yet at his best Hesse writes with diamantine clarity--not about the psychological self in current fashion, but about the metaphysical self of traditional contemplation. Hesse is not a conventional Christian; he does not believe he can be saved by belief in a god outside himself. He is a Gnostic; he believes he can be saved by experience of a god within himself. To Hesse the self is the end and all of living and man is the measure of all things--or would be, as he suggests ironically, if man could only devise some way to measure man.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.