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8 Demian: Chiliastic Vision
- Wilfrid Laurier University Press
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I don’t really believe that life can be improved, that social conditions in Germany and in Europe can be transformed; I believe that the rotten leaf will have to fall of its own accord to make way for the new.… I don’t believe that anybody living in Germany today will be around to witness the new epoch. I think there will be a long interlude of desolation and barbarism between the breakdown of our way of life and the advent of the new spring. —hermann hesse, in a letter to Ernst Kapff, 18961 H esse’s first two novels reflected his early conception of cultural decline, a prominent theme of European thought at the turn of the twentieth century, as evidenced by the popularity of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West. The Pietism Hesse grew up in had, Hesse felt, become “rigid,” “meager and transitory,” an “outdated and almost extinct” form of religion.2 The world of elite Latin schools and universities, home to the German mandarins, was increasingly under attack for its abusive authoritarianism and complicity with German nationalism and imperialism. Avant-garde artists, as Hesse depicted the scene in Peter Camenzind, were awash in narcissism and decadence, making “solemn devotions before statues and paintings in their modish houses” but “ashamed to bow before God.”3 Yet in spite of the criticism Hesse heaped on these three potential life worlds—Pietist, scholar, artist—he managed a certain degree of compromise with bourgeois society. Living on the shores of Lake Constance with his new wife and young family, in the years leading up to the First World War Hesse had the feeling of having arrived: “I had become a poet … my relations and friends, who had previously been in despair about me, now smiled encouragingly. I had triumphed … I was greatly charmed by myself … the warm breeze of recognition did me good and I began to be a contented man.”4 91 8 Demian chiliastic vision But then “came the summer of 1914, and suddenly everything looked different, inwardly and outwardly.” In rapid succession, war, the death of his father, and the dissolution of his marriage signalled the “coincidence of inward and outward suffering” and so began Hesse’s “initiation into life.” European culture was not merely in decline and faced with many social and cultural problems—Europe was entering a conflagration. Simultaneously— and not, in Hesse’s view, coincidentally—his father’s death (1916) marked the end of an era and a way of life, his personal life was in disarray, and what was left of Hesse’s aestheticism after Peter Camenzind was the target of severe self-criticism: “the poet was hardly to be distinguished from a writer of cheap fiction.” The outer world and Hesse’s inner world were simultaneously ending.5 Yet in the midst of this chaos, Hesse would detect the seeds of a new birth, intimations of something new struggling to emerge. As Hesse would write in Demian (1919), the fictional product of war, marital strife, the loss of his father, and intensive psychoanalysis, “deep down, underneath, something was taking shape. For I could see many men,” recalls the novel’s protagonist Emil Sinclair, reflecting on his participation in the battle of Flanders Fields, whose “bloody task was merely an irradiation of the soul, of the soul divided within itself,” filling them “with the lust to rage and kill, annihilate and die so that they might be born anew.”6 In his study of the central themes and structures of Hesse’s novels, Theodore Ziolkowski argues that “chiliastic vision is an integral part of Hesse’s thought and works.” Hesse himself recognized this. In his 1932 essay “A Bit of Theology,” Hesse abstracted from his works a three-phased developmental pattern of individuation, a “triadic rhythm of the sort ideally represented by the Christian conception of an original state of grace, followed first by the fall into sin and despair and, finally, the ultimate redemption. From the standpoint of a humanity enmeshed in the despair of the second stage, the millennium represents the chiliastic dream of ultimate redemption.”7 In his conception of this tripartite individual and historical development, Hesse was drawing on both his Pietist and Romantic roots. M.H. Abrams has shown that the narrative structure of many Romantic works, such as Hölderlin’s Hyperion, is a secularized version of Christian salvation history. Mediating this Christian eschatological narrative to German Romanticism during the eighteenth century were the...