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 child-
hood, 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 es-
sential 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 noth-
ing 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 relat-
ing 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 repeat-
ed. 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 spir-
it taken shape, in everyone creation suffers, in everyone is a redeemer
crucified.
Few to-day know what man is. Many feel it, and for that reason die the
easier, as I shall die the easier, when I have finished my story.
I must not call myself one who knows. I was a seeker and am still, but I
seek no more in the stars or in books; I am beginning to listen to the
promptings of those instincts which are coursing in my very blood. My sto-
ry is not pleasant, it is not sweet and harmonious like the fictitious stories. It
