‘Demian’, Part 1: A hardship less than hard
“I wanted only to live the life that was struggling by itself to come out of me. Why was this so very hard?” Thus reads the motto prepended to Hermann Hesse’s coming-of-age novel, ‘Demian’, which was first published in 1919. More a cry than a question, these fervent words must have established for Hesse the central issue of the story. In fact, living that life wasn’t so very hard, at all.