Hermann Hesse’s Demian reflects the crisis in the author’s life that began in 1912 with the serious illness of his son Martin and the family’s move from Gaienhofen to Bern. It continued as his wife’s mental condition deteriorated, finally resulting in their permanent separation and eventual divorce. During the years before the novel’s publication in 1919, Hesse’s deep emotional turmoil about the war, his father’s death, and personal and professional repercussions of his journalism aggravated the crisis equally as much as his enormous workload. In 1916, while writing Demian, Hesse received psychotherapy from J. B. Lang, who soon became his close friend.

Most interpreters locate Demian within an ideological matrix of religion and psychology, centering on ideas of Jung, Bachofen, Nietzsche, and Hölderlin, as well as on Gnostic notions. Wackenroder, Novalis, and Keller are also seen as influences, a modest selection given Hesse’s comprehensive knowledge of literature. Efforts to establish the novel’s unifying themes and an over-arching, coherent meaning have met with only limited success, owing precisely to how evident the sources and literary influences are. Most commentators emphasize a particular point of view to lend consistency to their arguments, which ultimately pits advocates of religious interpretations against those favoring psychological approaches. As neither C. G. Jung nor Nietzsche, named most frequently as influences, can readily be assigned to a particular discipline, readings differ less as to the materials cited than in the rigidity of the conclusions drawn from them. These analyses, often pedantic attempts to link each character to a Jungian concept, are the very opposite of readings that focus on dominant ethical and political ideas. Though both sides present accurate, significant observations, neither approach represents convincingly the novel’s total scope.

In contrast to Peter Camenzind and Unterm Rad, Gertrud (1910) and Roßhalde (1914) were artistically conventional and received little acclaim. Hesse knew that he had to act decisively as an artist to prove his mettle as an author to himself and to a literary marketplace transformed by the war. There was a danger, however, that his political ideas, his ever stronger pacifism, would alienate the bourgeois public. He had to achieve four goals at once: first of all, he had to advance artistically beyond his own pre-war ideas and styles, so that he could influence the literary discourse under circumstances that the war had changed utterly.