Herman Hesse's 1919 novel Damien profoundly influenced thinking in Germany after World War I and helped establish his own fame in this story of Emil Sinclair, a boy who could have grown up to have an ordinary life but who has the course of his life altered by his encounters with a number of different people, including perhaps most importantly the title character.
Max Demian is at least a quasi-mystical character who, when they are both children, befriends Emil Sinclair. As he matures, Emil seeks to become spiritually more aware and Demian is his most important guide in this respect even though he is only an intermittent presence in Sinclair's life, appearing from time to time rather like a deus ex machina when he is needed.
One of the most important influences that Demian has on Sinclair is his insistence both in his own life and for Sinclair as well not simply to accept blindly the conventional morality. This was, of course, a topic that was of immense concern for Germans in 1919 since many of them felt that they had been too easily lead into war by a government that assured them that all they needed to do was to just be good Germans. (How well they learned this lesson was, of course, called into question by the actions of so many Germans in the 1930s and 1940s).
One of the most important points that Hesse makes in this novel - through the character of Demian - is that the forces of history and society that we may object to so much in the world outside of us are in fact precisely the same psychological forces that exist within us. (It should be clear how deeply Hesse was influenced by the psychological models of Carl Jung, for this is nothing more or less than Jung's model of process individuation.)
The book is in many ways a description of Sinclair's process individuation, for throughout the novel we see Sinclair become an individual, become his own person. While at the beginning of the novel we see him as a very conventi...