Demian

[Autom. eng. transl.] Published in 1919, immediately after the First World War, this novel, which initially appeared under the pseudonym of Emil Sinclair and which met with enormous success among contemporaries, remains one of Hesse's most discussed and disturbing narrative outcomes. Point of caesura with the previous works, underlined by the author right up to the choice of hiding from the public (at least until it was discovered) the true authorship of the work, Demian is the story of a boy who, in the most critical moment of his growth, he finds himself faced with the choice between good and evil symbolically embodied by two peers and his difficult and labyrinthine search for an authentic maturation that frees the ego from the conditioning of social conventions to make it reborn as a more fluid subjectivity and more available to be realized, in the superior harmony of nature and the cosmos. An emblematic novel, which has exercised and will continue to exert its fascination especially on generations of young people from all over the world.