Study Guide to Demian by Hermann Hesse

Sinclair must live because he is a representative of that new humanity in which lies the hope of the human race. Possessed now of self-realization and Frau Eva’s blessing, it would make no sense for Hesse to bring him all this way only to have him die at the very moment when he is finally prepared to go out into the world and proclaim, Zarathustra-like, what Ziolkowski (The Novels of Hermann Hesse) calls “The Gospel of Demian.”

“We create gods and struggle with them and they bless us.” What Sinclair is alluding to here is the process of projection and re-internalization of unconscious images which will undergo on his road to totality. And as a matter of fact, it is immediately after the encounter with Knauer that Sinclair is able, for the first time, after many false starts and unsuccessful attempts, to paint the all-important picture of Frau Eva.

Sinclair tells him that each person must find his own answers to the problems of his life

He realizes their essential identity, he sees in both of them that realized Self-hood based on totality or the synthesis of opposites which he is striving to attain. Their unity is expressed in the fact that they are mother and son, and also at the end of the novel when Demian gives Sinclair Frau Eva’s kiss. It is Frau Eva’s blessing but it is imparted by Demian. And yet there are some differences. Sinclair’s soul comes to resemble Demian’s completely at the end of the novel, but this identity is accomplished by internalizing the projections of Frau Eva, not Demian. It is the ashes of her painting he eats, not Demian’s portrait. It is Frau Eva, not Demian, who is the means whereby the peaceful synthesis of the warring opposites in Sinclair’s soul is effected, for only she is uniquely able to function as the common object both of Sinclair’s spiritual devotion and physical desire, and this simultaneously, whereby the “light” and the “dark” sides of Sinclair’s nature are brought together.

last not least Hesse’s perennial preoccupation with the problem of the dichotomy between nature and spirit.

Ziolkowski points to the Nietzschean, Biblical and existential influences that figure in Hesse’s novel;

Chapter eight is called “The Beginning of the End” because it marks the outbreak of World War I, the beginning of the end of the old, pre-war world with its false values. The title also refers to the beginning of the end of Sinclair’s search for himself, a quest whose completion is noted at the very end of the book when Sinclair realizes that now, at last, he is like Demian who was his friend and guide.

The answer lies here in becoming independent of the empirical person Frau Eva by internalizing her essence. This process, begun when Sinclair ate the ashes of her image in chapter six, is continued in chapter seven and finished in chapter eight, at the end of the novel, when Demian imparts to Sinclair Frau Eva’s kiss.

“I had arrived at a high point in the road,” he says, “from where I could see the further path, broad and magnificent, striving towards lands of promise.” It is clear from Sinclair’s use of this road metaphor to describe his encounter with Frau Eva that she represents, in the last analysis, but a station on Sinclair’s journey to himself, albeit the most important or highest one. (Notice too how Sinclair says “a goal” in the quotation above and not “the goal.”). Just as Sinclair had to outgrow Beatrice and become independent of Pistorius, so, too, he must not lean on Frau Eva, for there can be no self-realization without self-reliance.

To be sure, Demian is Sinclair’s friend and spiritual guide, but Frau Eva is the object of that new kind of love which overwhelmed him after the Beatrice episode. Frau Eva, that is, is at the center of that whole complexly interwoven web of Sinclair’s sexuality, spirituality, identity and fate.