Emil Sinclair is ten years old when he tells a lie to impress a local bully, Franz Kromer, who then blackmails him into petty theft and months of fear. Rescue comes from an unlikely source: Max Demian, an unnervingly self-possessed new classmate who offers Sinclair an unsettling reinterpretation of the Cain and Abel story and talks Kromer out of tormenting him for good.
Years later the two are reunited, and Demian draws Sinclair into a way of thinking that rejects the tidy division of the world into good and evil. Through a church organist named Pistorius, Sinclair studies Abraxas, a god who contains both light and dark, and slowly separates himself from the conventional, sheltered household he grew up in. He drifts through boarding-school rebellion, an idealized infatuation he calls Beatrice, and a deepening friendship with Demian's mother, Frau Eva, who becomes the clearest embodiment of everything he has been searching for.
The novel closes with the outbreak of the First World War, which pulls Sinclair and Demian into the army and toward a final, quiet parting. First published in 1919 under the pseudonym Emil Sinclair, Demian is Hermann Hesse's account of a young man's break from inherited belief in search of a self entirely his own.