German dualism shows itself in the young Hesse in the serious struggle between mind and matter, spiritual and physical life. The young Hesse longs for the simple, the unsophisticated. His most famous fictitious character, Peter Camenzind, gladly gives up art to be a child of nature, living close to lake and mountain. Peter Camenzind, published in 1904, is, to a degree, autobiographical: Hesse has always lived in small villages hidden somewhere in the mountains. Autobiographical too is Hesse's next novel, Unterm Rad ("Under the Wheel"), the story of a theological student who breaks down under the strain of study. There is a rebellious spirit in these early novels, a revolt against oppression by parental and professional authority, against the soul-killing tutelage to which modern society subjects the individual. Other novels, like Gertrude (in English "Gertrude and I") and Rosshalde, mirror the rebellion of an artist, a musician, and a painter respectively against the fetters of unhappy marriage. The restless, thwarted German youth applauded; these novels were a call for Innerlichkeit [inwardness], rather than wild attacks on the foundations of contemporary society such as the tales of Heinrich Mann or the plays of Frank Wedekind. Written in a lucid, simple, easy-flowing, and well-tempered prose, these romantic and slightly effeminate novels appealed to the average German citizen, who, however frustrated he may have been, would revolt only if he got his magistrate's permission in writing.
An entirely different Hesse—the one who merited the Nobel Prize that was given him—was thrust upon a desperate postwar world when his Demian appeared in 1919, originally under the pen name of Emil Sinclair. Like most of Hesse's novels, it is a typical German Bildungsroman, an account of the unfolding of a young soul to self-realization under the influence of a friend, but the relative meekness of earlier years is gone. A sincere book, as outspoken and frank as the confessions of a Saint Augustine or Rousseau, it shows the development of an adolescent, almost ruined by the domination of parents and teachers, maturing under the guidance of his friend Sinclair: sex, first repressed, finally bursts into flame. The taboos of the bourgeois world are more scathingly satirized than in the earlier novels; the split of the hero's personality into a Jekyll and a Hyde is more strongly emphasized than before.
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