At the end of the holidays, without seeing my friend again, I went to St. My parents both came with me and, with every possible care, handed me over to the protection of a boys’ boarding house with a teacher at the high school. They would have been frozen in horror if they had known what kind of things they were letting me get into.

The question was still whether, over time, I could become a good son and a useful citizen, or whether my nature would point me towards other paths. My last attempt to be happy in the shadow of my father’s house and spirit had taken a long time, was almost successful at times, and finally failed completely.

The strange emptiness and loneliness I felt during the holidays after my confirmation felt it for the first time (how I got to know it later, this emptiness, this thin air!) didn’t pass so quickly. Saying goodbye to my homeland was remarkably easy; I was actually ashamed that I wasn’t more wistful; the sisters cried for no reason; I couldn’t do it. I was amazed at myself. I had always been an emotional child, and basically a pretty good child. Now I was completely transformed. I remained completely indifferent to the outside world and spent days just listening to myself and listening to the streams, the forbidden and dark streams that were rushing underground within me. I had grown very quickly, only in the last six months, and looked at the world bloated, thin and unfinished. The boy’s kindness had completely disappeared from me, I felt that I couldn’t be loved like that, and I didn’t love myself at all. I often longed for Max Demian; but not infrequently I also hated him and blamed him for the impoverishment of my life, which I took on like an ugly disease.

In our school boarding school I was neither loved nor respected at first, I was teased, then withdrew from me and saw me as a duck and unpleasant eccentric. I enjoyed the role, even exaggerated it, and resented myself into a loneliness that on the outside constantly looked like manly contempt for the world, while secretly I was often subject to all-consuming attacks of melancholy and despair. At school I had to rely on the knowledge I had accumulated at home, the class was a bit different from what I used to be, and I got used to looking at my peers somewhat contemptuously as children.

It went on like this for a year or more, and even the first holiday visits home didn’t bring any new sounds; I was happy to go away again.

It was at the beginning of November. I had gotten into the habit of taking short, thoughtful walks in all weathers, on which I often enjoyed a kind of bliss, a bliss full of melancholy, contempt for the world and self-loathing. So one evening in the damp, foggy twilight I strolled through the surroundings of the city, the wide avenue of a public park stood completely deserted and invited me in, the path was thick with fallen leaves in which I rummaged with my feet with dark lust, it smelled damp and bitter, the distant trees appeared eerily large and shadowy from the mists.

At the end of the avenue I stood indecisive, staring into the black leaves and breathing greedily in the wet scent of weathering and decay, which something inside me responded and welcomed. Oh, how bland life tasted!

A person came out of a side path in a flowing collared coat. I wanted to move on when he called to me.

“Hello, Sinclair!”

He came up, it was Alfons Beck, the oldest in our guesthouse. I always liked seeing him and had nothing against him other than the fact that he was always ironic and avuncular with me and with all the younger people. He was considered extremely strong, was supposed to be the master of our pension and was the hero of many high school rumors.

“What are you doing here?” he called affably in the tone that the older ones used when they occasionally condescended to one of us. “Well, let’s bet you make poetry?”

“I can’t think of it,” I said harshly.

He laughed, walked next to me and chatted in a way I was no longer used to.

“You don’t have to be afraid, Sinclair, that I don’t understand that. There’s something about walking in the fog in the evening, with thoughts of autumn, that makes you like making poems, I know. Of dying nature, of course, and of the lost youth that resembles it. See Heinrich Heine.”

“I’m not that sentimental,” I protested.

“Well, let it go! But in this weather, it seems to me that it would be good for people to find a quiet place where they can have a glass of wine or something similar. Will you come with me for a bit? I’m all alone right now. — Or don’t you like it? I don’t want to be your seducer, dear, in case you’re a model boy.”

Soon we were sitting in a small suburban bar, drinking some dubious wine and clinking our thick glasses. I didn’t like it at first, at least it was something new. But soon, unaccustomed to wine, I became very talkative. It was as if a window had been opened inside me, the world seemed to come in – how long, how terribly long, I hadn’t said anything to myself! I began to fantasize, and in the middle of it I recited the story of Cain and Abel!

Beck listened to me with pleasure – finally someone I gave something to! He patted me on the shoulder, he called me a devil and a brilliant bitch, and my heart swelled with the joy of letting pent-up needs for speech and communication flow out, to be recognized and to be valued by someone older than me. When he called me a brilliant bitch, the word flowed into my soul like a sweet, strong wine. The world burned in new colors, thoughts flowed to me from a hundred bold sources, spirit and fire burned within me. We talked about teachers and comrades, and it seemed to me that we understood each other wonderfully. We talked about the Greeks and paganism, and Beck definitely wanted to get me to confess about love affairs. I couldn’t have a say in that. I had experienced nothing, nothing to tell. And what I felt within myself, constructed, had fantasized, it was burning inside me, but the wine hadn’t solved it and made it communicable. Beck knew a lot more about the girls, and I listened to these fairy tales with enthusiasm. I learned something incredible there, things that had never been thought possible became reality and seemed self-evident. Alfons Beck, at perhaps eighteen years old, had already gained experience. Among others, they said that it was such a thing with girls, they wanted nothing but to beautify and have gallantry, and that was quite nice, but not the real thing. We can hope for more success with women. Women are much smarter. For example, Ms. Jaggelt, who ran the shop with exercise books and pencils, was easy to talk to and everything that had happened behind her counter didn’t go into any book.

I sat deeply entranced and dazed. Admittedly, I couldn’t exactly have loved Mrs. Jaggelt – but at least it was unheard of. There seemed to be springs flowing there, at least for the older ones, that I had never dreamed of. There was a false sound to it, and it all tasted lower and more commonplace than, in my opinion, love should taste – but at least it was reality, it was life and adventure, there was someone sitting next to me who had experienced it, who had experienced it seemed obvious.

Our conversations had descended a little, had lost something. I was no longer the brilliant little guy either, I was now just a boy listening to a man. But even so – against what has been going on for months and months My life had been my life for months, this was delicious, this was paradise. Besides, as I only gradually began to feel, it was forbidden, very forbidden, from sitting in the tavern to what we spoke. I, for one, tasted spirit, tasted revolution in it.

I remember that night with the greatest clarity. As we both made our way home late in the cool, wet night past the dimly burning gas lamps, I was drunk for the first time. It wasn’t pretty, it was extremely painful, and yet even that still had something, a charm, a sweetness, it was a riot and an orgy, it was life and spirit. Beck took care of me bravely, although he bitterly criticized me for being a complete beginner, and he half-carried me home, where he managed to smuggle me and himself in through an open hallway window.

But with the disillusionment to which I woke up in pain after a very short dead sleep, a senseless woe came over me. I sat up in bed, still wearing my day shirt, my clothes and shoes were lying around on the floor and smelled of tobacco and vomit, and between the headache, nausea and raging thirst, an image came to my mind that I hadn’t thought about for a long time had looked in the eye. I saw home and parents’ house, father and mother, sisters and garden, I saw my quiet bedroom at home, saw the school and the market square, saw Demian and the confirmation hours – and all of this was light, everything was surrounded by splendor, everything was wonderful, divine and pure, and everything, everything that – I now knew – had belonged to me, waiting for me, just yesterday, hours ago, and was now, only now in this hour, sunk and cursed, no longer belonged to me, but me out, looked at me with disgust! All the love and heartfelt things that I had ever experienced from my parents, all the way back to the most distant, golden gardens of my childhood, every kiss from my mother, every Christmas, every pious, bright Sunday morning at home, every flower in the garden – everything was devastated, everything I had trampled under foot!

So this is what I looked like inside! I who went around despising the world! I, who was proud in spirit and thought along with Demian’s thoughts! That’s what I looked like, all sputum and piggy, drunk and filthy, disgusting and vile, a savage beast overtaken by hideous urges! This is what I looked like, I who came from those gardens where everything was purity, splendor and sweet delicacy, I who had loved Bach’s music and beautiful poems! With disgust and indignation I heard my own laugh, a drunken, uncontrollable laugh that burst out in fits and starts and silly. That was me!

Despite everything, it was almost a pleasure to suffer these torments. I had crawled along blind and dull for so long, my heart had sat silent and impoverished in the corner for so long, that even this self-accusation, this horror, this whole horrible feeling of the soul was welcome. It was a feeling, flames rose, a heart twitched in it! Confused, I felt something like liberation and spring in the midst of misery.

Meanwhile, from the outside, things were going downhill for me. The first rush was soon no longer the first. There was a lot of drinking and allotria going on at our school, I was one of the very youngest of those who took part, and soon I was no longer a tolerated and small person, but a leader and star, a famous daring one Pubgoers. I once again belonged entirely to the dark world, to the devil, and in this world I was considered a great guy.

I felt miserable at that. I lived in a self-destructive orgiasm, and while my comrades regarded me as a leader and devil, a darned dashing and witty fellow, deep within me I had a fearful soul fluttering with fear. I remember once tears came to my eyes when, as I was leaving a pub on a Sunday morning, I saw children playing in the street, bright and cheerful with freshly combed hair and in their Sunday best. And while I, between pools of beer at the dirty tables of small inns, amused and often frightened my friends with outrageous cynicisms, in my hidden heart I was in awe of everything that I mocked and lay on my knees, inwardly crying, before my soul, before my past, in front of my mother, in front of God.

There was a good reason why I never became one with my companions, that I remained lonely among them and therefore suffered so much. I was a bar hero and a mocker after the hearts of the roughest, I showed spirit and showed courage in my thoughts and speeches about teachers, school, parents, church – I also withstood insults and even dared to make one myself – but I was never there when my friends went to see girls; I was alone and was full of ardent longing Love, hopeless longing, while after my speeches I should have been a hardened connoisseur. Nobody was more vulnerable, nobody more shameful than me. And when I ever saw the young bourgeois girls walking before me, pretty and clean, light and graceful, they were wonderful, pure dreams to me, a thousand times too good and pure for me. For a while I couldn’t go to Mrs. Jaggelt’s paper shop anymore because I blushed when I looked at her and thought of what Alfons Beck had told me about her.

The more I knew that I was constantly lonely and different in my new society, the less I could get away from it. I really don’t know anymore whether I ever actually enjoyed drinking and being famous, and I never got so used to drinking that I didn’t always feel the embarrassing consequences. It was all like a compulsion. I did what I had to because I didn’t know what else to do start with me. I was afraid of being alone for long periods of time, I was afraid of the many tender, shy, intimate impulses to which I always felt inclined, I was afraid of the tender thoughts of love that came to me so often.

One thing I missed most was a friend. There were two or three classmates that I really enjoyed seeing. But they were among the good ones, and my vices were no longer a secret to anyone. They avoided me. Everyone thought I was a hopeless player with the ground shaking beneath my feet. The teachers knew a lot about me, I had been severely punished several times, my eventual dismissal from school was something that was awaited. I knew that myself, I hadn’t been a good student for a long time, but I was struggling and cheating my way through, with the feeling that it couldn’t last much longer.

There are many ways in which God can make us lonely and lead us to ourselves. He took this path with me back then. It was like a bad dream. Over dirt and stickiness, over broken beer glasses and cynically chatty nights, I see myself crawling, a spellbound dreamer, restless and tormented, an ugly and unclean path. There are such dreams in which, on the way to the princess, you get stuck in pools of excrement, in back alleys full of stench and rubbish. That’s how it was for me. In this not very subtle way, I was destined to become lonely and to put between me and my childhood a closed gate of Eden with mercilessly shining guards. It was a beginning, an awakening of homesickness for myself.

I was still frightened and had twitches when, for the first time, alerted by letters from my pensioner, my father appeared in St. and unexpectedly confronted me. When he came for the second time, toward the end of that winter, I was already hard and indifferent, scolded him, made him beg, made him remember his mother. At the end he was very upset and said that if I didn’t change my behavior, he would have me expelled from school with shame and shame and put me in a reformatory. He wants! When he left, I felt sorry for him, but he had achieved nothing, he had no longer found a way to me, and for a moment I felt that he was being served right. —

What would happen to me didn’t matter to me. On my strange and not very pretty way, with my tavern sitting and showing off, I was at odds with the world; this was my form of protest. I was destroying myself in the process, and sometimes things looked something like this for me: If the world didn’t need people like me, if it didn’t have a better place for them, or a higher task, then people like me were ruined. May the world have the damage.

The Christmas holidays that year were quite unpleasant. My mother was shocked when she saw me again. I had grown even more, and my gaunt face looked gray and wasted, with sagging features and sore rims around my eyes. The first hint of the mustache and the glasses I had recently started wearing made me even more strange to her. The sisters backed away and giggled. It was all unpleasant.The conversation with the father in his study was unpleasant and bitter, greeting the few relatives was unpleasant, and especially unpleasant was Christmas Eve. Since I was alive, that had been the big day in our house, the evening of celebration and love, of gratitude, of the renewal of the covenant between my parents and me. This time everything was just depressing and embarrassing. How else did my father read the Gospel about the shepherds in the field, “who looked after their flock there?” how else did the sisters stand beaming in front of their gift table, but the father’s voice sounded unhappy, and his face looked old and narrow, and my mother was sad, and I felt embarrassed and unwanted about everything, gifts and congratulations, gospel and tree of lights. The gingerbread smelled sweet and exuded thick clouds of sweeter memories. The Christmas tree smelled and told of things that were no longer there. I longed for the end of the evening and the holidays.

It went on like this all winter. Only recently I was warned urgently by the teachers’ senate and threatened with expulsion. It wouldn’t be long. Well, as far as I’m concerned.

I had a particular grudge against Max Demian. I hadn’t seen him in a while. I wrote to him twice at the beginning of my time as a student at St., but received no reply; That’s why I didn’t visit him during the holidays.

IIn the same park where I met Alfons Beck in the fall, it happened in the beginning Spring, just as the thorn hedges were starting to turn green, a girl caught my eye. I had gone for a walk alone, full of disgusting thoughts and worries, for my health had become poor, and besides, I was constantly in financial difficulties, owed money to comrades, had to invent necessary expenses in order to get something from home, and had to go to several shops Allow bills for cigars and similar things to mount. Not that these worries were very deep – when my time here came to an end and I went into the water or was taken to a reformatory, then these few little things wouldn’t matter. But I always lived face to face with such unpleasant things and suffered from them.

That spring day in the park I met a young lady who really attracted me. She was tall and slim, elegantly dressed, and had a clever, boyish face. I liked her immediately, she was the type I loved and she began to occupy my fantasies. She was probably not much older than me, but much more finished, elegant and well-defined, almost quite a lady, but with a touch of cockiness and boyishness on the face, which I really liked.

I had never been successful in approaching a girl I was in love with, and I wasn’t successful with this one either. But the impression was deeper than any before, and the influence of this infatuation on my life was enormous.

Suddenly I had an image standing before me again, a high and revered image – oh, and no need, no urge was as deep and strong within me as the desire for reverence and adoration! I gave her the name Beatrice because I knew about her, without having read Dante, from an English painting whose reproduction I had kept. There it was an English-Pre-Raphaelite girl figure, very long-limbed and slender with a long, narrow head and spiritualized hands and features. My beautiful young girl did not quite resemble her, although she too showed that slenderness and boyishness of form that I loved, and something of the spirituality or animation of the face.

I didn’t say a single word to Beatrice. Nevertheless, she had the deepest influence on me back then. She placed her image before me, she opened a sanctuary to me, she made me to pray in a temple. From one day to the next I stayed away from the pubs and nighttime forays. I could be alone again, I enjoyed reading again, I enjoyed going for walks again.

The sudden conversion earned me enough ridicule. But now I had something to love and worship, I had an ideal again, life was once again full of foreboding and colorful, mysterious twilight – that made me insensitive. I was home with myself again, although only as a slave and servant of a revered image.

I cannot think of that time without a certain emotion. Once again I tried with all my heartfelt efforts to build a “light world” for myself out of the rubble of a collapsed period of life; again I lived with the sole desire to get rid of the dark and evil within me and to dwell completely in the light, on my knees before the gods. After all, this current “light world” was to some extent my own creation; It was no longer a matter of fleeing and crawling back to my mother and irresponsible security; it was a new service, invented and demanded by myself, with responsibility and self-discipline. The sexuality I suffered from and before I, who was always and always on the run, was now to be transfigured into spirit and devotion in this holy fire. There was to be nothing dark, nothing ugly, no moaning through the night, no heart palpitations at lewd images, no eavesdropping at forbidden gates, no lust. Instead of all this, I set up my altar with the image of Beatrice, and in consecrating myself to her, I consecrated myself to the spirit and the gods. The portion of life that I withdrew from the dark forces, I sacrificed to the light ones. My goal was not lust, but purity, not happiness, but beauty and spirituality.

This cult of Beatrice changed my life completely. Yesterday I was a precocious cynic, now I was a temple servant with the goal of becoming a saint. I not only dismissed the evil life to which I had become accustomed, I tried to change everything, tried to bring purity, nobility and dignity into everything, thought of this in food and drink, language and clothing. I began the morning with cold ablutions, which I initially had to force myself to do with difficulty. I behaved seriously and with dignity, carried myself upright, and made my gait slower and more dignified. It may have looked strange to onlookers, but inside me it was a loud church service.

Of all the new exercises in which I sought expression for my new attitude, one became important to me. I started painting. It started with the fact that the English picture of Beatrice I owned didn’t resemble that girl enough. I wanted to try painting them for myself. With a completely new joy and hope, I brought together beautiful paper, paints and brushes in my room – I had recently had my own – and prepared palettes, glass, porcelain bowls and pencils. The fine tempera paints in small tubes that I bought delighted me. There was a fiery chromium oxide green that I think I can still see glowing for the first time in the small white bowl.

I started with caution. Painting a face was difficult, I wanted to try something else first. I painted ornaments, flowers and small fantasy landscapes, a tree near a chapel, a Roman bridge with cypresses. Sometimes I lost myself completely in this playful activity and was as happy as a child with a box of paints. But finally I started painting Beatrice.

Some sheets failed completely and were thrown away. The more I tried to imagine the face of the girl I ever met on the street, the less she wanted to leave. Finally I gave up on that and simply started painting a face, following my imagination and the guidance that came naturally from what I had started, from paint and brush. It was a dreamy face that emerged, and I was not dissatisfied with it. But I continued the experiment immediately, and each new sheet spoke a little more clearly, came closer to the type, although by no means to reality.

I became more and more used to drawing lines with a dreamy brush and filling in areas that were without precedent, that emerged from playful touch, from the unconscious. Finally one day, almost unconscious, I made a face that spoke to me more powerfully than the previous ones. It wasn’t that girl’s face, it never should have been. It was something different, something unreal, but no less valuable. It looked more like a boy’s head than a girl’s face, the hair was not light blonde like my pretty girl’s, but brown with a hint of red, the chin was strong and firm, but the mouth was blooming red, the whole thing a bit stiff and mask-like, but impressive and full of secret life.

As I sat in front of the finished sheet, it made a strange impression on me. It seemed to me to be a kind of idol or holy mask, half male, half female, ageless, as strong-willed as it was dreamy, as rigid as it was secretly alive. This face had something to say to me, it belonged to me, it made demands on me. And it looked like someone, I didn’t know who.

The image accompanied all my thoughts for a while and divided my life. I kept it hidden in a drawer so that no one could catch it and mock me with it. But as soon as I was alone in my little room, I took out the picture and had company with it. In the evening I pinned it to the wallpaper across the bed from me with a pin, looked at it until I fell asleep, and in the morning I saw it for the first time.

It was precisely at that time that I began to dream a lot again, as I had always done as a child. It seemed to me that I hadn’t had any dreams for years. Now they came back, a completely new species of pictures, and often and often the painted portrait appeared in them, living and talking, friendly or hostile to me, sometimes distorted to the point of a grimace and sometimes infinitely beautiful, harmonious and noble.

And one morning, when I woke up from such dreams, I suddenly realized it. It looked at me so fabulously familiar, it seemed to be calling my name. It seemed to know me, like a mother, seemed to have always looked after me. With my heart pounding, I stared at the page, the thick brown hair, the half-feminine mouth, the strong forehead with the strange brightness (it had dried up like that by itself), and closer and closer I felt the realization, the rediscovery, the knowledge within me.

I jumped out of bed, stood in front of the face and looked at it up close, straight into the wide-open, greenish, staring eyes, the right one of which was slightly higher than the other. And suddenly this right eye twitched, twitched slightly and delicately, but clearly, and with this twitch I recognized the image. . .

How could I have found this so late! It was Demian’s face.

Later I compared the sheet often and often with Demian’s real features as I found them in my memory. They weren’t the same at all, although similar. But it was Demian.

Once, one early summer evening, the sun shone slantingly and redly through my west-facing window. It became dark in the room. Then I had the idea of ​​pinning Beatrice’s or Demian’s portrait to the window cross and watching the evening sun shine through it. The face blurred without outline, but the reddish-rimmed eyes, the brightness of the forehead, and the violent red mouth glowed deeply and wildly from the surface. I sat opposite it for a long time, even after it had already gone out. And gradually I got the feeling that it wasn’t Beatrice or Demian, but – myself. The picture didn’t look like me – it shouldn’t, I felt – but it was what made up my life, it was my inner self , my fate or my demon. This is what my boyfriend would look like if I ever found one again. This is what my lover would look like if I ever got one. Such would be my life and such my death, such was the sound and rhythm of my fate.

During those weeks I began reading something that made a deeper impression on me than anything I had read before. Even later, I rarely experienced books like that, perhaps only Nietzsche. It was a volume of Novalis, with letters and sentences, many of which I didn’t understand, but which all attracted and enthralled me unspeakably. One of the sayings now came to mind. I wrote it with a pen under the picture: “Fate and mind are names of one concept.” I now understood that.

I still met the girl I called Beatrice often. I no longer felt any movement, but always a gentle agreement, an emotional feeling: You are linked to me, but not you, only your image; you are a piece of my fate.

Ma longing for Max Demian became powerful again. I knew nothing about him, nothing for years. I met him once during the holidays. I see now that I left this short encounter out of my notes and see that it was out of shame and vanity. I have to do it again.

So once on vacation, when I was with him When I strolled through my hometown with the blasé and always somewhat tired face of my time at the tavern, swinging my walking stick and looking into the old, same-old, despised faces of the Philistines, my former friend came towards me. As soon as I saw him, I jumped. And in a flash I thought of Franz Kromer. Demian really wishes he had forgotten this story! It was so unpleasant to have this obligation to him – actually a stupid children’s story, but an obligation nonetheless. . .

He seemed to be waiting to see if I wanted to greet him, and when I did so as calmly as possible, he shook my hand. That was his handshake again! So firm, warm and yet cool, masculine!

He looked intently into my face and said: “You have grown up, Sinclair.” He himself seemed completely unchanged to me, the same age, the same young as ever.

He joined me, we went for a walk and talked about nothing but trivial things, nothing from back then. It occurred to me that I had once written to him several times without receiving an answer. Oh, he wished he had forgotten that too, these stupid, stupid letters! He didn’t say anything about it.

There was no Beatrice or portrait back then; I was still in the middle of my wild times. Outside the city I invited him to come with me to an inn. He went along. I boastfully ordered a bottle of wine, poured it, toasted it and showed that I was very familiar with student drinking customs and also emptied the first glass in one gulp.

“You go to the inn a lot?” he asked me.

“Oh yes,” I said lazily, “what else can you do? It’s still the funniest thing in the end.”

“Do you find? It can be. There’s something very beautiful about it – the rush, the baccism! But I think that this has been completely lost on most people who spend a lot of time sitting in pubs. It seems to me as if going to a pub is something really philistine. Yes, for one night, with burning torches, to a real, beautiful rush and frenzy! But doing this over and over again, one little little at a time, surely that’s not the truth? Can you imagine Faust sitting at a regulars’ table every evening?”

I drank and looked at him with hostility.

“Yes, not everyone is a Faust,” I said briefly.

He looked at me a little suspiciously.

Then he laughed with the old freshness and superiority.

“Well, why argue about it? In any case, the life of a drunkard or libertine is probably more lively than that of the blameless citizen. And then – I read this once – the life of the libertine is one of the best preparations for the mystic. It is always people like St. Augustine who become seers. Before that he was also a connoisseur and bon vivant.”

I was suspicious and didn’t want to let him control me at all. So I said smugly: “Yes, to each his own taste! Frankly, I don’t care about becoming a seer or anything like that.”

Demian flashed knowingly at me with slightly narrowed eyes.

“Dear Sinclair,” he said slowly, “it was not my intention to say anything unpleasant to you. By the way, we both don’t know why you’re drinking your bottle now. The thing in you that makes your life already knows. It It’s so good to know that there is someone inside us who knows everything, wants everything, does everything better than we ourselves. — But forgive me, I have to go home.”

We said a quick goodbye. I sat there very disgruntled, drank the rest of my bottle, and when I was about to leave I found that Demian had already paid for it. That annoyed me even more.

My thoughts stopped again on this little incident. They were full of Demian. And the words he said in that inn outside the city came back to me, strangely fresh and never lost. — “It’s so good to know that there is someone inside us who knows everything!”

I looked at the picture that hung in the window and had completely gone out. But I saw the eyes still glowing. That was Demian’s look. Or it was the one inside me. The one who knows everything.

How I longed for Demian! I didn’t know anything about him, he couldn’t be reached. All I knew was that he was probably studying somewhere and that his mother left our city after he finished high school.

Back to my story with Kromer I looked for all the memories of Max Demian in me. How much of what he had once said to me resonated again, and everything still made sense today, was current, and concerned me! What he had said about the libertine and the saint at our last, so not pleasant, meeting suddenly stood out clearly in my mind. Wasn’t that exactly what happened to me? Hadn’t I lived in intoxication and filth, in numbness and forlornness, until the exact opposite came to life in me with a new drive to live, the longing for purity, the longing for the holy?

So I continued to reminisce, it had long since become night and it was raining outside. I also heard it raining in my memories; it was the hour under the chestnut trees where he had once questioned me about Franz Kromer and guessed my first secrets. One thing after another emerged: conversations on the way to school, the confirmation lessons. And finally I remembered my very first meeting with Max Demian. What was that all about? I didn’t think of it right away, but I took my time, I was completely immersed in it. And now it happened again, that too. We were stood in front of our house after telling me his opinion about Cain. He had spoken of the old, blurred coat of arms that sat above our house gate, in the keystone that widened from bottom to top. He had said he was interested and that one should pay attention to such things.

That night I dreamed of Demian and the coat of arms. It was constantly changing, Demian held it in his hands, often it was small and gray, often huge and multicolored, but he explained to me that it was always one and the same. But finally he forced me to eat the coat of arms. When I had swallowed it, I felt with immense shock that the devoured heraldic bird was alive in me, filling me up and beginning to consume me from the inside. I woke up in fear of death.

I woke up, it was the middle of the night, and heard rain coming into the room. I got up to close the window and stepped on something light on the floor. In the morning I found that it was my painted sheet. It was lying on the ground in the wet and had rolled into bulges. I stretched it between sheets of paper in a heavy book to dry. As When I looked at it again the next day, it was dry. But it had changed. The red mouth had faded and become somewhat narrower. It was now all Demian’s mouth.

I now set about painting a new page, the heraldic bird. I no longer knew clearly what it actually looked like, and I knew that some things about it couldn’t be clearly seen even up close because the thing was old and had often been painted over. The bird was standing or sitting on something, perhaps a flower, or a basket or nest, or a treetop. I didn’t bother about it and started with what I had a clear idea of. Out of an unclear need, I immediately started with strong colors; the bird’s head was golden yellow on my sheet. Depending on my mood, I kept working on it and finished the thing in a few days.

Now it was a bird of prey, with a sharp, bold sparrowhawk head. He was stuck with half his body in a dark globe, from which he worked his way up like a gigantic egg, onto a blue sky. As I looked at the sheet for a longer time, it seemed to me more and more as if it were the colored coat of arms that had appeared in my dream.

It wouldn’t have been possible for me to write a letter to Demian, even if I had known where to go. But I decided, in the same dreamlike ancestor with which I did everything back then, to send him the picture of the sparrowhawk, whether it reached him or not. I didn’t write anything on it, not even my name, trimmed the edges carefully, bought a large paper envelope and wrote my friend’s former address on it. Then I sent it away.

An exam was approaching and I had to work harder for school than usual. The teachers had accepted me again since I suddenly changed my mean ways. I probably wasn’t a good student even now, but neither I nor anyone else thought about the fact that six months ago my punitive dismissal from school had seemed likely to everyone.

My father now wrote to me more in the same tone as before, without accusations or threats. But I had no desire to explain to him or anyone else how the change had taken place in me. It was a coincidence that this transformation coincided with the wishes of my parents and teachers. This change brought didn’t let me go to the others, didn’t approach anyone, just made me lonelier. She was aiming somewhere, towards Demian, towards a distant fate. I didn’t know it myself, I was right in the middle of it. It had started with Beatrice, but for some time now I had been living in such an unreal world with my painted pages and my thoughts about Demian that I had completely lost sight of her and my thoughts. I couldn’t have told anyone a word about my dreams, my expectations, my inner transformation, even if I had wanted to.

But how could I have wanted this?