"In Demian, it is - in analogy to Dante’s Divine Comedy - first the girl Beatrice who wrenches the boy Sinclair from the grip of depression and leads him from “inferno” to “paradiso.” He later realizes that the passionately admired woman Eva is, in the Jungian sense, only a “symbol of his inner being,” and experiences, through the exploding shell projected into her, a visionary"

- ~Gunter Baumann, 9th International Hesse Colloquium in 1997, Page 3