Demian

By HERMANN HESSE
BONI and LIVERIGHT
Publishers :: New York
Copyright, 1923 by BONI & LIVERIGHT, Inc.
Printed in the United States of America
DEMIAN
The Story of Emil Sinclair’s Youth
By Hermann Hesse
I wanted only to try to live in obedience to the promptings which came from my true self. Why was that so very difficult?
In order to tell my story, I must begin far back. If it were possible, I should have to go back much further still, to the earliest years of my childhood, and even beyond, to my distant ancestry.
Authors, in writing novels, usually act as if they were God, and could, by a broadness of perception, comprehend and present any human story as if God were telling it to Himself without veiling anything, and with all the essential details. That I cannot do, any more than can the authors themselves. But I attach more importance to my story than can any other writer to his: because it is my own, and it is the story of a human being—not that of an invented, possible, ideal or otherwise, non-existent creature, but that of a real, unique, living man. What that is, a real living man, one certainly knows less to-day than ever. For men are shot down in heaps—men, of whom each one is a precious, unique experiment of nature. If we were nothing more than individuals, we could actually be put out of the world entirely with a musket-ball, and in that case there would be no more sense in relating stories. But each man is not only himself, he is also the unique, quite special, and in every case the important and remarkable point where the world’s phenomena converge, in a certain manner, never again to be repeated. For that reason the history of everyone is important, eternal, divine. For that reason every man, so long as he lives at all and carries out the will of nature, is wonderful and worthy of every attention. In everyone has the spirit taken shape, in everyone creation suffers, in everyone is a redeemer crucified.