[In the following essay, Mahoney proposes that Bildungsromane have a unique impact and influence upon their readers.]

When dealing with the novels of German Classicism and Romanticism, sooner or later one must consider the question whether the term Bildungsroman is useful for understanding and interpreting these works.¹ That the term has a long history no one can deny; as Fritz Martini has shown, Karl Morgenstern had begun to use the word Bildungsroman as early as 1810 to describe the novels not only of Goethe and the Romantics, but specifically those of his friend Friedrich Maximilian Klinger.² Above all, however, it was Wilhelm Dilthey who brought the term into general usage. In the Hölderlin essay in his book Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung (1906), Dilthey provided the definition that largely determined the direction future scholars were to follow:

Hyperion is one of the Bildungsromane that reflect the interest in inner culture that Rousseau had inspired in Germany. Among the novels that have established their lasting literary value since Goethe and Jean Paul are Tieck's Sternbald, Novalis's Ofterdingen, and Hölderlin's Hyperion. Beginning with Wilhelm Meister and Hesperus [a novel by Jean Paul published in 1795], they all portray a young man of their time: how he enters life in a happy state of naiveté seeking kindred souls, finds friendship and love, how he comes into conflict with the hard realities of the world, how he grows to maturity through diverse life-experiences, finds himself, and attains certainty about his purpose in the world. Goethe's goal was the story of a person preparing himself for an active life; the theme of the two Romantic writers was the poet; Hölderlin's hero was a heroic person striving to change the world but finding himself in the end thrust back upon his own thought and poetry.³

Dilthey, the founder of Geistesgeschichte (the German forerunner of intellectual history), was concerned about anchoring his definition within a European context and in a specific historical time frame.⁴ Very quickly within Wilhelminian Germany, however, the Bildungsroman came to be viewed as a timeless and specifically German achievement that could only have been created by the folk of “Dichter und Denker.”⁵ Anglo-American literary critics have also adopted Dilthey's term, although they often employ it in connection with English and American fiction from the nineteenth century to the present.⁶ Martin Swales has attempted to reconcile the difference between the Bildungsroman as a specifically German creation, on the one hand, and as a type of novel appearing in other national literatures, on the other, by stressing the lack of political and social elements in the German Bildungsroman: whereas the English “novel of adolescence” documents the concrete societal and psychological constraints against which the youthful hero must struggle, in the German Bildungsroman the problems lie within the realm of human nature itself and therefore cannot be described realistically.⁷ Thus seen, the German Bildungsroman deviates markedly from the development of the European novel of the nineteenth century; instead of a suspenseful story or the extensive depiction of social conditions, the German Bildungsroman concentrates on introspective analyses of the inner life of the main character laden with philosophical depth and metaphysical seriousness.

Within the past decade a lively debate has taken place not only over the question whether individual novels are Bildungsromane but also over whether the genre itself is as important and prevalent as has been assumed. In his examination of the German novels of the nineteenth century, for example, Jeffrey Sammons comes to the conclusion that the Bildungsroman is “a phantom genre,” with at most three novels in the tradition of Wilhelm Meister.⁸ And while Hartmut Steinecke does not dispute the fundamental importance of Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre for the development of the German novel in the nineteenth century, he contends that in the years between 1830 and 1870 German novelists and theoreticians attempted to find compromises between Wilhelm Meister and the Western European novel of society; only after Dilthey was Wilhelm Meister viewed as a narrowly conceived type of novel that was then praised as being typically German.⁹ Furthermore, if one surveys the development of scholarship on Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, it becomes clear that even for this novel—of exemplary importance for the development of the theory of the Bildungsroman—there is no consensus on the question of to what goal the hero is being educated.¹⁰ No wonder, then, that scholars such as Steinecke or Hans Vaget have proposed new categories such as the “Individualroman”¹¹ or “novel of socialization”¹² in the hopes of better describing the content and goals of the novels in question and linking them to developments within other European literatures.

My proposal is a different one: instead of attempting to define the novels of Goethe and the German Romantics according to their content, why not consider their intended effect upon the reader? In point of fact, Karl Morgenstern's early nineteenth-century definition includes a reader-reception component that is absent from Dilthey's later definition of the term: “It can be called a Bildungsroman, primarily because of its content, because it depicts the formation [Bildung] of the hero up until a certain level of completion, but secondly because precisely by means of this depiction it promotes the cultivation [Bildung] of the reader to a greater extent than every other type of novel.”¹³ In a recent study, Georg Stanitzek has shown how Morgenstern attempted to tie together two hitherto separate eighteenth-century traditions—novels in the wake of Rousseau's Émile that depict either exemplary or problematic lives and works by means of which the reader might judge the author's (and one's own) degree of education and cultivation.¹⁴ But whereas Morgenstern's definition represents more an aggregate than a synthesis of these two traditions, I would argue that Goethe and his Romantic contemporaries attempted to create a new type of reader by means of innovative and daring narrative strategies that challenge the reader to unlock the meaning of their poetic texts; this goal, not the simple telling of a story, constitutes the educative value of these novels. It is in this context that I propose to investigate what the novelists of the Age of Goethe understood by the “cultivation of the reader,” how they intended to bring it about, and what they expected to gain from such an enterprise.

As a point of departure, let us consider the novel that Dilthey used in establishing his own definition of the Bildungsroman, namely Hölderlin's Hyperion, published in two parts in 1797 and 1799. As a result of Lawrence Ryan's studies of the novel there has been a significant change of direction in research on Hyperion. Instead of interpreting the novel from a biographical, experiential perspective, as did Dilthey, or understanding it as a lyrical epistolary novel in the tradition of Goethe's Werther, Ryan traces Hyperion's development through the narration of his life story: it is not his calamitous life history—which includes the deaths of Diotima, his beloved, and of Alabanda, his comrade-in-arms in the Greek war of liberation against the Turks—but his retelling of these events that transforms him into a poet.¹⁵ And thus the words of the dying Diotima in her farewell letter to Hyperion prove to be true: “Sorrowing youth! Soon, soon will you be happier. Your laurel did not ripen, your myrtles faded, for you shall be the priest of divine Nature, and your days of poetry are already germinating.”¹⁶ Because of the high degree of self-reflexivity in Hyperion, Ryan suggests further that this novel should be freed from the framework of the Bildungsroman and instead be viewed in the context of the poetic theory and practice of the early Romantics in Germany, such as Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis.¹⁷

Ryan's placement of Hyperion in its contemporary literary context and his references to the “progressive Universalpoesie” (progressive universal poesy) of the Romantics are valuable contributions to which I shall return. Yet one should not forget why Hölderlin, after laborious and frequent revisions, returned to his original plan for an epistolary novel: by virtue of the long tradition of this genre in the eighteenth century, readers would be accustomed to view themselves as the recipients of Hyperion's letters and to follow with active concern the narration of his story.¹⁸ Not coincidentally, the person to whom Hyperion's letters are addressed from Greece is Bellarmin, a German whom Hyperion had learned to know and love during his otherwise so dispiriting sojourn in that country. Wolfgang Binder has alluded to the symbolic significance of the name Bellarmin, which contains both a reference to Arminius, the liberator of the Germanic tribes from Roman oppression, and a contraction for the word “beautiful.”¹⁹

Seen in this context, Hyperion represents not only the development of a character (Dilthey) and the process of maturation of a poet (Ryan), but also the envisioned formation of a reader who is to have a sense of the Beautiful, in contrast to the majority of Germans. Stages in the apprenticeship of such a reader are the narrator's addresses to Bellarmin, which not only illustrate Hyperion's own gradual maturation but which also suggest to the reader the meaning of the novel itself. Consider as one example Hyperion's words to Bellarmin near the beginning of part 2:

Why do I recount my grief to you, renew it, and stir up my restless youth in me again? Is it not enough to have traveled once through mortality? Why do I not remain still in the peace of my spirit?

It is, my Bellarmin, because every living breath that we draw remains dear to our heart, because all the transformations of pure Nature are part of her beauty too. Our soul, when it puts off mortal experiences and lives only in blessed quietness—is it not like a leafless tree? like a head without locks? … O friend! in the end the Spirit reconciles us with all things. You will not believe it, at least not of me. But I think that even my letters should suffice to show you that my soul is becoming stiller every day. And I will continue to tell you of it hereafter, until I have said enough for you to believe me.²⁰

Just as Hyperion comes to “the resolution of dissonances in a certain character”²¹ through the story of his life sufferings, so too should the attentive reader attain the point of view that the narrator has achieved for himself.

This narrative strategy may be compared with Novalis's procedure in his unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802, translated as Henry von Ofterdingen, 1964). Here the conversations and stories within the story not only play a major role in Heinrich's development into a poet but also illuminate the meaning of the novel by functioning as parallel narratives that provide a running commentary on the significance of the tale Heinrich as a character has yet to discover for himself. A prime example of this self-reflexivity of Ofterdingen is Heinrich's discovery of a mysterious, incomplete Provençal manuscript in the cave of a hermit that contains illustrations recalling his previous life history and providing intimations of what is yet to come. When asked to recount the manuscript's contents, the hermit replies, “As far as I know, it is a novel about the wondrous fortunes of a poet, in which poesy is presented and praised in its manifold relations.”²² That the conclusion of this manuscript is missing signals the fact that Heinrich (and with him the reader) is supposed to carry out these marvelous tales in his own day and age. In like manner, the merchants' tale about Atlantis and the poet Klingsohr's fairy tale in part 1 of Ofterdingen are meant to anticipate what Novalis had planned for the conclusion of his novel: that poetization of the world which was intended to so stimulate the reader that its “Fulfillment” (the title for part 2 of the novel) would become the reader's own “Expectation” (the title of part 1).²³ For Novalis, poetry was not intended to be a self-sufficient realm, but a means of activating already-present potential in his readers. In this respect Lawrence Ryan has done well to point out the affinities between Hyperion and Heinrich von Ofterdingen.

But might not one also consider further examples of an aesthetics of reception in other novels of the period? Todd Kontje, for example, has provided a link between the German novels of the Age of Goethe and the European tradition of self-conscious fiction from Cervantes to Nabokov by demonstrating that novels such as Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795-96), Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and Jean Paul's Flegeljahre (1804-05) “are less realistic depictions of individuals than metafictional reflections on the function of reading and the institution of literature in society. … Reading in this view neither repeats reality nor does it escape reality: instead, it transforms reality, and the Bildungsroman is the genre that examines this transformation.”²⁴ Ever since Cervantes's Don Quixote, European fiction has thematized the hero whose reading of fiction causes him or her to construct an imagined reality and attempt to transform the world accordingly.²⁵ Some of the most stimulating recent interpretations of Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, Goethe's first novel (1774), have stressed Werther's misreadings of literature and dilettantish attempts to model reality according to the works of art he admires so much; his translation of Ossian that he reads aloud to Lotte, for example, is what precipitates their fateful embrace: “They felt their own misery in the destiny of the heroes, felt it together and were united in their tears.”²⁶ But the reading habits of Werther's initial audience were so determined by religious devotional literature and the sentimental novels of the day that many readers were unable to grasp the subtle ironies of the text and instead uncritically admired Werther, sometimes even to the point of emulating his suicide.²⁷

Werther's tendency to fictionalize his own life is shared by figures in a number of major novels of the Age of Goethe, but in these later instances it is Werther himself who provides the model for them, and the aim is to steel the reader against an unreflected aesthetization of existence. In Anton Reiser (1785-90), the autobiographical novel by Karl Philipp Moritz, young Reiser is so influenced by his reading of Werther that his own letters begin to sound like those of his fictional model; and Reiser's attempts to use literature and the theater as a substitute for his deprived and miserable existence receive so penetrating a criticism that the concluding part of Anton Reiser had a decisive impact on Goethe's remodeling of his Wilhelm Meister project into the Lehrjahre as we know it today.²⁸ The novels of Jean Paul²⁹—the most prolific major novelist of the Age of Goethe, whose initial novel, Die unsichtbare Loge, was published in 1793 with the help of Moritz—abound in characters who lose themselves in the abysses of their imagination; perhaps the most prominent example is the figure of Roquairol in Titan (1800-03), who even as a child is obsessed with the figure of Werther and who, after seducing the fiancée of his former best friend, blows his brains out as the conclusion to a tragedy he himself has composed and performed. Similar to Roquairol is the figure of Ferdinand in Klinger's novel Geschichte eines Teutschen der neusten Zeit (History of a German of Our Times, 1798); infected by the Werther fever of the 1770s, Ferdinand is later to seduce the wife of his childhood friend Ernst and indirectly cause the death of his son: “here we are offered a variation on the Werther-Lotte-Albert situation with all the author's sympathies on the side of the wronged husband.”³⁰

Klinger, who wrote in the context of the late Enlightenment's concern for moral betterment through literature, condemned without reservation. Moritz, on the other hand, provides a soul-searching analysis of Anton Reiser's flaws but leaves it to his readers to piece together a positive model of development from the negative image provided. Goethe employs the method of gegenseitige Spiegelung (mutual mirroring) as a means of encouraging his readers to arrive at a critical point of view that is no longer present in the form of a direct authorial comment. One can observe this technique in his addition of the “peasant lad episode” as a parallel to Werther's story in the 1787 revised edition of Werther.³¹ As for Jean Paul, Goethe's great antipode, communication with the reader becomes so important that digressions and addresses to the reader in the tradition of Laurence Sterne predominate, and sometimes the speeches of the characters are directed more at the reader than at one another.³²

In the major German novels of the period between the publication of Werther in 1774 and the appearance in 1829 of the second version of Goethe's fourth and final novel, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, one can observe a multitude of styles and narrative strategies. But central to all of these efforts is the formation of an active, sensitive, and astute reader—and not the depiction of the story of a main character, as Dilthey's understanding of the Bildungsroman would have one believe. If one views a novel such as Hyperion from Dilthey's perspective, as does Walter Silz, one is likely to come to the conclusion that Hyperion, while possessing great poetic beauty, is a failure as a novel.³³ By understanding Hyperion, Heinrich von Ofterdingen, and the novels of Goethe, Jean Paul, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and the other Romantics as Bildungsromane in my sense of the term, they become demanding but stimulating reading experiences. No wonder, then, that Eric A. Blackall writes in the preface to his major study on the novels of the German Romantics, “Something very important happened to the novel during the romantic period. And we of the last quarter of the twentieth century are better able to appreciate it than were the generations of 1850, 1890, or even 1920.”³⁴ Free from the obligation to understand the Bildungsroman in a hidebound, restrictive sense, we can recognize the German novels of the Age of Goethe for what they are—the immediate predecessors of the modern experimental novel. With the reception of such modern classics as Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus and Günter Grass's Die Blechtrommel has come a renewed appreciation of long-neglected novels of the Age of Goethe that proved an inspiration to twentieth-century writers in devising their own literary experiments.

But the tastes of today's readers are obviously quite different from those of the literary public of the Age of Goethe, and it is equally evident that the authors of German Classicism and Romanticism wrote from quite different perspectives than those of present-day novelists. As a guard against an ahistorical understanding of the Bildungsroman of the Age of Goethe, let us call to mind what Goethe and his contemporaries understood when they used the word Bildung and what they hoped to gain by so educating their readers.

Although the words Bildung and bilden were already employed by the medieval German mystics in the sense of purging the soul of impurities and forming it according to its divine model, in the course of the eighteenth century these concepts became secularized and used in increasing frequency with the terms Erziehung (education) and Aufklärung (enlightenment). In contrast to the concept of education, however, Bildung was supposed not just to come from outside mentors but also to represent a process of self-development; contributing to this conception were the animistic views of nature developed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by German alchemists such as Paracelsus and theosophists such as Jakob Böhme that were to survive in modified form in such works as Leibniz's Monadology and Blumenbach's treatise on the Bildungstrieb, the drive for Bildung.³⁵ In contrast to the more reason-oriented concept of enlightenment, Bildung was understood as affecting the entire human being—mind, body, and spirit. Of further importance for the development of this concept was the German reception of Shaftesbury, whose term formation of a genteel character was translated regularly as Bildung.³⁶ While Shaftesbury was interested primarily in the preparation of the young nobleman for a life of public service, eighteenth-century German intellectuals such as Wieland and Herder broadened these ideas to encompass the middle class, or indeed all people possessing the requisite desire to attain such goals.³⁷

At the end of the eighteenth century young reformers like Wilhelm von Humboldt saw in Bildung the complete development of individual human potential unfettered by any state regulation; at the same time, this cultivation of the individual was envisioned as having beneficial effects on the state in which such citizens lived and worked—ideas that decisively influenced Humboldt's reform of the Prussian university system in 1810 and in turn the development of American higher education in the later nineteenth century.³⁸ During the era of the French Revolution liberal German writers argued that the spread of Bildung would not promote revolutionary tendencies, as conservative critics maintained, but rather would enable moderate and necessary reforms and hence work against the spread of revolutionary violence.³⁹ Schiller's collection of letters, Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen, published in 1795, can be understood in this light; by bringing the sensuous, intellectual, and moral sides of the individual into harmony with one another, Art prepares the way for the ideal state in the body politic as well:

Because the State serves as a representative of pure and objective humanity in the breast of its citizens, it will have to maintain towards those citizens the same relationship in which they stand to one another, and it can respect their subjective humanity only in such degree as this is exalted to objectivity. If the inner man is at one with himself, he will preserve his idiosyncrasy even in the widest universality of his conduct, and the State will be simply the interpreter of his fine instinct, the clearer expression of his inner legislation.⁴⁰

Schiller's concept of aesthetic education became a milestone in the development of an idealist philosophy of art in Germany. The early Romantics adopted this idea and universalized it to the extent of expecting a cultural revolution for all mankind to be unleashed by their writings. In Novalis's essay “Die Christenheit oder Europa” (Christianity or Europe), which he delivered in 1799 as a speech to his literary associates in Jena, Novalis foresaw Germany playing a paramount role in spreading a new gospel of religion, peace, and culture to a fragmented and war-weary Europe: “Germany is proceeding, at a slow but sure pace, ahead of the other European countries. While the latter are occupied with war, speculation, and partisan spirit, the German is developing himself [bildet sich] with all industry into a partaker in a higher stage of culture, and this advance cannot fail to give him a great advantage over the others in the course of time.”⁴¹

By the end of the eighteenth century German intellectuals had developed a confidence in the transformational powers of Bildung and specifically of literature that has not been equaled since. Once this belief in aesthetic education became dimmed by the turbulence of the Napoleonic years, and even more so by the restoration of the old regime in Europe after the Congress of Vienna in 1815, Bildung degenerated into a status symbol for the politically powerless middle class,⁴² while the Bildungsroman later became used as a proof of the supposed innate superiority of German Wilhelminian “culture.” But if one regards the Bildungsroman, as Fritz Martini has suggested, “not as a categorical aesthetic form, but rather as a historical form that arose out of definite and also limited historical presuppositions of world- and self-understanding,”⁴³ with the help of this term one can compare German novels of the Age of Goethe and even determine when and where the optimistic dream of Bildung began to lose its luster. It is indicative, for example, that Jean Paul's Flegeljahre—whose fourth volume appeared in 1805, only ten years after Schiller's letters on aesthetic education and the initial books of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre—contains a scathing critique of the ideal of education through the medium of literature.⁴⁴ Joseph von Eichendorff's novel Ahnung und Gegenwart, published in 1815, denounces as a charade the use of literature by an aristocracy ripe for downfall.⁴⁵ And E. T. A. Hoffmann's Lebensansichten des Katers Murr (1819 and 1821, translated as The Educated Cat, 1892), parodies the concept of Bildung by its depiction of the “Months of Apprenticeship” of a self-satisfied tomcat with its half-digested scraps of culture.

Hölderlin's Hyperion stands at a turning point in this development from optimism to self-parody. The unfortunate result of the revolt against the Turks in the second part of the novel—Hyperion's troops plunder, murder their Grecian compatriots, and flee at the first sign of serious resistance—has to do with Hölderlin's conviction, based upon his and Schiller's interpretations of the Reign of Terror in France, that people first have to be changed before a republican state can be established. As the dialogue concerning Athens at the end of part 1 makes clear, Hölderlin believed it was the beauty in spirit of the ancient Athenians that made possible their extraordinary achievements in art, literature, religion, philosophy, and politics. Thus it is only logical that following their visit to the ruins of Athens, Diotima bids Hyperion to become the “teacher of our people,”⁴⁶ so that former glories may come again to a Greece presently dominated by greed, sloth, and cowardice.

On the other hand, Hölderlin's words in the preface to part 1 of Hyperion give evidence of the author's skepticism regarding his own chances for success among the German reading public: “I should be glad if I could promise this book the affection of the German people. But I fear that some of them will read it as a treatise and be too greatly concerned with the fabula docet, whereas others will take it too lightly, and that neither the former nor the latter will understand it.”⁴⁷ Ulrich Gaier understands these prefatory words as a challenge to Hyperion's readers; if they pass the test, they, like Bellarmin, are no longer to be counted among those Germans against whom Hyperion inveighs so fiercely near the conclusion of the novel: “It is a harsh thing to say, and yet I say it because it is the truth: I can think of no people more at odds with themselves than the Germans.”⁴⁸ The almost total neglect of Hyperion among Hölderlin's contemporaries confirmed his skepticism; only a few critics deigned to take brief and disparaging notice of it, while for the broad spectrum of readers interested in a suspenseful story or a tear-filled plot, Hyperion was unappetizing from the start. Only in the twentieth century, particularly in the past thirty years, has this novel received the attention it deserves.

Examples of the scant reception accorded most of the novels written by Goethe and the Romantics can be replicated almost at will. For it was the literary efforts of these writers that raised the serious novel in Germany to a hitherto unknown level but at the same time deprived it of the mass popularity accorded the sentimental family romances, tales of knights and robbers, and Gothic novels of the day.⁴⁹ In 1798 Friedrich Schlegel proclaimed in the Athenäum, the literary journal of the early Romantics, “The French Revolution, Fichte's Theory of Knowledge, and Goethe's Wilhelm Meister are the three greatest tendencies of the age.”⁵⁰ That Schlegel would elevate a novel and the founding document of German philosophical Idealism to the same level of importance as a revolution that was already altering the face of Europe is itself indicative of the emphasis many German writers of the period placed upon transforming the consciousness of their audience. But perhaps of even greater significance for the direction of the avant-garde German novel are the concluding words of this celebrated aphorism, in which Schlegel expresses his scorn for the “noisy rabble” who often overlook the importance of a great book in their midst.⁵¹ Such was to be the fate of many a novel during the Age of Goethe—ignored by its contemporaries and only later awarded canonic status.

If one follows the reception history of Goethe's four novels, it becomes clear that in the course of time between Werther (1774) and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1829) they became ever more inaccessible to the public at large. Towards the end of his life, as he completed work on the Wanderjahre⁵²—a sequel to the Lehrjahre that has hitherto resisted every effort to be accommodated into the Diltheyan concept of a Bildungsroman—Goethe remarked to Eckermann on 11 October 1828,

My works cannot be popular. He who thinks and strives to make them so is in error. They are written, not for the multitude, but only for individuals who desire something congenial, whose aims are like my own.⁵³

Ehrhard Bahr, alluding to the full title of Goethe's final novel, Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre oder die Entsagenden, correspondingly speaks of a “poetics of renunciation” in the Wanderjahre, whereby the abandonment of traditional forms of narration gives far more freedom to the reader than do the novels of the eighteenth century.⁵⁴ And once the elderly Goethe saw and accepted his lack of popularity, he gained the advantage of being able to experiment more boldly with the limits of the novel as a genre than could other novelists of the nineteenth century, who were writing for an already-existing public and who therefore had to work within the accepted conventions. Bahr sees in the Wanderjahre the same thematic and formal “revolutionary realism” as in shorter prose works by Heinrich Heine and Georg Büchner;⁵⁵ indeed, he even compares Goethe's description of the production of wool in the Wanderjahre with a passage in James Joyce's Ulysses.⁵⁶

If Kant's phrase sapere aude—“dare to know”—was the motto of the Enlightenment, one might consider legere aude—“dare to read”—the hidden motif uniting the novels of the Age of Goethe. In this attitude toward the reading public lies the explanation for the initial failure of novels such as Hyperion and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre and for their critical rediscovery in the past few decades. The literary avant-garde of the Age of Goethe wrote for an audience that comprised only a small segment of the general reading public and that even there had to be cultivated in conjunction with the new type of novel they were creating. As Friedrich Schlegel observed in 1797,

The analytical writer observes the reader as he is; accordingly, he makes his calculation, sets his machine to make the appropriate effect on him. The synthetic writer constructs and creates his own reader; he does not imagine him as resting and dead but as lively and advancing toward him. He makes that which he had invented gradually take shape before the reader's eye, or he tempts him to do the inventing for himself. He does not want to make a particular effect on him but rather enters into a solemn relationship of innermost symphilosophy or sympoetry.⁵⁷

Through such ambitious goals Goethe and the Romantics overtaxed even educated readers of their day, but their rigorous “apprenticeship of the reader” has borne fruit in our century. At the same time, these writers were instrumental in creating the rigid division between “high” and “low” culture that is a feature of literary modernism in general but which has been more typical of German intellectual life than that of other European countries. In this respect the German Bildungsroman of the Age of Goethe does occupy a special, if ambiguous, position in the development of the Western novel.

Notes

1. This essay is an expanded version of theses first published in my “Hölderlins Hyperion und der Bildungsroman: Zur Umbildung eines Begriffs,” in Verlorene Klassik? Ein Symposium, ed. Wolfgang Wittkowski (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1986), 224-32, and later developed in my book Der Roman der Goethezeit (1774-1829), Sammlung Metzler: Realien zur Literatur No. 241 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1988). My thanks go to the publishers at Niemeyer and Metzler Verlag for permission to incorporate this material into my arguments here.

2. See Martini's essay in this volume, which takes up Klinger as the author of presumed Bildungsromane.

3. Wilhelm Dilthey, Poetry and Experience, in Selected Works, ed. Rudolf A. Makkreel and Frithjof Rodi (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1985), 5:335. “Der Hyperion gehört zu den Bildungsromanen, die unter dem Einfluß Rousseaus in Deutschland aus der Richtung unseres damaligen Geistes auf innere Kultur hervorgegangen sind. Unter ihnen haben nach Goethe und Jean Paul der Sternbald Tiecks, der Ofterdingen von Novalis und Hölderlins Hyperion eine dauernde Geltung behauptet. Von dem Wilhelm Meister und dem Hesperus ab stellen sie alle den Jüngling jener Tage dar; wie er in glücklicher Dämmerung in das Leben eintritt, nach verwandten Seelen sucht, der Freundschaft begegnet und der Liebe, wie er nun aber mit den harten Realitäten der Welt in Kampf gerät und so unter mannigfachen Lebenserfahrungen heranreift, sich selber findet und seiner Aufgabe in der Welt gewiß wird. Die Aufgabe Goethes war die Geschichte eines sich zur Tätigkeit bildenden Menschen, das Thema beider Romantiker war der Dichter; Hölderlins Held war die heroische Natur, welche ins Ganze zu wirken strebt und sich schließlich doch in ihr eigenes Denken und Dichten zurückgeworfen findet.” In Wilhelm Dilthey, Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung: Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, Hölderlin, 10th ed. (Leipzig and Berlin: Teubner, 1929), 393f.

4. Cf. Dilthey, 336-38 (German text: 395-99), where he attempts to explain the peculiarities of Hyperion as a Bildungsroman in conjunction with the disappointed ideals of the European Romantic poets.

5. For a selection of representative essays documenting the history of Bildungsroman-criticism, see Rolf Selbmann, ed. Zur Geschichte des deutschen Bildungsromans, Wege der Forschung No. 640 (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988).

6. Cf. Jerome Hamilton Buckley, Season of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1974).

7. Martin Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1978), 35. For a discussion of the reception of Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in nineteenth-century England that takes account of social dimensions in both countries, cf. Wilhelm Voßkamp, “Der Bildungsroman in Deutschland und die Frühgeschichte seiner Rezeption in England,” in Bürgertum im 19. Jahrhundert: Deutschland im europäischen Vergleich, ed. Jürgen Kocka (Munich: DTV, 1988), 3:257-86.

8. Jeffrey L. Sammons, “The Mystery of the Missing Bildungsroman, or: What Happened to Wilhelm Meister's Legacy?” Genre 14 (1981): 239.

9. Hartmut Steinecke, “Wilhelm Meister und die Folgen: Goethes Roman und die Entwicklung der Gattung im 19. Jahrhundert,” in Goethe im Kontext: Ein Symposium, ed. Wolfgang Wittkowski (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1984), 89-111.

10. Cf. Mahoney, Der Roman der Goethezeit (1774-1829), 57f.

11. Steinecke, 111.

12. Hans R. Vaget, “Goethe the Novelist: On the Coherence of His Fiction,” in Goethe's Narrative Fiction: The Irvine Goethe Symposium, ed. William J. Lillyman (Berlin & New York: de Gruyter, 1983), 15.

13. Cited by Martini [my translation] in his article in this volume.

14. Georg Stanitzek, “Bildung und Roman als Momente bürgerlicher Kultur: Zur Frühgeschichte des deutschen ‘Bildungsromans,’” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 62 (1988): 416-50.

15. Lawrence Ryan, Hölderlins Hyperion: Exzentrische Bahn und Dichterberuf (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1965). For an English-language study that develops and modifies Ryan's thesis, see Cyrus Hamlin, “The Poetics of Self-Consciousness in European Romanticism: Hölderlin's Hyperion and Wordsworth's Prelude,” Genre 6 (1973): 142-77.

16. Friedrich Hölderlin, Hyperion, or The Hermit in Greece, trans. Willard R. Trask, with a foreword by Alexander Gode von Aesch (New York: Signet, 1965), 159. “Trauernder Jüngling! bald, bald wirst du glüklicher seyn. Dir ist dein Lorbeer nicht gereift und deine Myrthen verblühten, denn Priester sollst du seyn der göttlichen Natur, und die dichterischen Tage keimen dir schon.” In Friedrich Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, ed. Friedrich Beissner (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1957), 3:149.

17. Lawrence Ryan, “Hölderlin's Hyperion: A Romantic Novel?” in Friedrich Hölderlin: An Early Modern, ed. Emery E. George (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1972), 182f.

18. Consider, for example, the preface to Goethe's first novel, Die Leiden des jungen Werthers, which was intended to influence the reading of the novel itself: “And you, good soul, who feel the same anguish as he, derive comfort from his sufferings, and let this little book be your friend, if your destiny or your own fault should prevent you from finding a more intimate one.” In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, The Sufferings of Young Werther, trans. Harry Steinhauer (New York: Norton, 1970), ix. “Und du gute Seele, die du eben den Drang fühlst wie er, schöpfe Trost aus seinem Leiden, und laß das Büchlein deinen Freund sein, wenn du aus Geschick oder eigener Schuld keinen nähern finden kannst.” In Goethes Werke: Hamburger Ausgabe, ed. Erich Trunz (Munich: Beck, 1973), 6:7. That the reader of Hyperion is intended to react with calmness of mind and not with tearful emotion to the narration of its hero's life is what distinguishes Hyperion as a Bildungsroman from the eighteenth-century cult of sentimentality (Empfindsamkeit) to which Werther still partially belongs.

19. Wolfgang Binder, “Hölderlins Namensymbolik,” in Hölderlin-Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Insel, 1970), 211.

20. Hölderlin, Hyperion, 114f. “Warum erzähl' ich dir und wiederhole mein Leiden und rege die ruhelose Jugend wieder auf in mir? Ists nicht genug, Einmal das Sterbliche durchwandert zu haben? warum bleib' ich im Frieden meines Geistes nicht stille?

    Darum, mein Bellarmin! weil jeder Athemzug des Lebens unserm Herzen werth bleibt, weil alle Verwandlungen der reinen Natur auch mit zu ihrer Schöne gehören. Unsre Seele, wenn sie die sterblichen Erfahrungen ablegt und allein nur lebt in heiliger Ruhe, ist sie nicht, wie ein unbelaubter Baum? wie ein Haupt ohne Loken? [sic] … O Freund! am Ende söhnet der Geist mit allem uns aus. Du wirsts nicht glauben, wenigstens von mir nicht. Aber ich meine, du solltest sogar meinen Briefen es ansehn, wie meine Seele täglich stiller wird und stiller. Und ich will künftig noch so viel davon sagen, bis du es glaubst.” In Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:102f. For a study illuminating the significance of Ruhe (stillness, peace, quiet) for Hölderlin's Hyperion, see Mark W. Roche, Dynamic Stillness: Philosophical Conceptions of “Ruhe” in Schiller, Hölderlin, Büchner, and Heine (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1987), 63-119.

21. Hölderlin, Hyperion, 171. “Die Auflösung der Dissonanzen in einem gewissen Karakter;” in Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:5.

22. Novalis, Henry von Ofterdingen, trans. Palmer Hilty (New York: Ungar, 1964), 91. “Soviel ich weiß, ist es ein Roman von den wunderbaren Schicksalen eines Dichters, worinn die Dichtkunst in ihren mannigfachen Verhältnissen dargestellt und gepriesen wird.” In Novalis, Schriften, ed. Richard-Samuel et al. (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1960), 1:265.

23. For a study detailing the importance of tales within a tale for the novel of the Age of Goethe, see Erika Voerster, Märchen und Novellen im klassisch-romantischen Roman (Bonn: Bouvier, 1966).

24. Todd Kontje, “The German Bildungsroman as Metafiction: Artistic Autonomy in the Public Sphere,” Michigan German Studies 13 (1987): 144.

25. For a survey of this tradition in eighteenth-century Germany up to and including Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, see Lieselotte Kurth, Die zweite Wirklichkeit: Studien zum Roman des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1969).

26. Goethe, The Sufferings of Young Werther, 88. “Sie fühlten ihr eigenes Elend in dem Schicksale der Edlen, fühlten es zusammen, und ihre Tränen vereinigten sich.” In Goethes Werke, 6:114. In addition to Lieselotte Kurth's treatment of Werther (Die zweite Wirklichkeit, 169-83), see Bruce Duncan, “‘Emilia Galotti lag auf dem Pult aufgeschlagen’: Werther as (Mis-) Reader,” in Goethe Yearbook 1 (1982): 42-50; and Hans R. Vaget, “Die Leiden des jungen Werthers,” in Goethes Erzählwerk: Interpretationen, ed. Paul Michael Lützeler and James E. McLeod (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1985), 37-72.

27. Cf. Georg Jäger, “Die Wertherwirkung: Ein rezeptionsästhetischer Modellfall,” in Historizität in Sprach- und Literaturwissenschaft, ed. Walter Müller-Seidel (Munich: Fink, 1974), 389-409.

28. Cf. Rudolf Lehmann, “Anton Reiser und die Entstehung des Wilhelm Meister,” Jahrbuch der Goethe-Gesellschaft 3 (1916): 116-34.

29. See Wulf Koepke's essay on Jean Paul in this volume.

30. H. M. Waidson, “Goethe and Klinger: Some Aspects of a Personal and Literary Relationship,” Publications of the English Goethe Society, n.s., 23 (1953/54): 112.

31. For a discussion of Goethe's employment of this practice of “gegenseitige Spiegelung” throughout his novels, see Hans R. Vaget, “Goethe the Novelist,” 7-16.

32. Cf. Kurt Wölfel, “Über die schwierige Geburt des Gesprächs aus dem Geist der Schrift,” Jahrbuch der Jean-Paul-Gesellschaft 15 (1980): 7-27.

33. Walter Silz, Hölderlin's “Hyperion”: A Critical Reading (Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1969).

34. Eric A. Blackall, The Novels of the German Romantics (Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1983), 11.

35. Cf. the essay by Thomas P. Saine, “Über Wilhelm Meisters ‘Bildung,’” in Lebendige Form: Interpretationen zur deutschen Literatur: Festschrift für Heinrich E. K. Henel, edited by J. L. Sammons and E. I. Schürer (Munich: Fink, 1970), 63-81.

36. See Franz Rauhut, “Die Herkunft der Worte und Begriffe ‘Kultur,’ ‘Civilisation’ und ‘Bildung,’” Germanisch-Romanische Monatsschrift, n.s., 3 (1953): 89.

37. Cf. Susan L. Cocalis, “The Transformation of ‘Bildung’ from an Image to an Ideal,” Monatshefte 70 (1978): 403.

38. Cf. Rudolf Vierhaus, “Bildung,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexikon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, ed. Otto Brunner et al. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972), 1:520f.

39. Cf. Vierhaus, 523.

40. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man: In a Series of Letters, trans. with an introduction by Reginald Snell (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1954), 33. “Weil der Staat der reinen und objektiven Menschheit in der Brust seiner Bürger zum Repräsentanten dient, so wird er gegen seine Bürger dasselbe Verhältniß zu beobachten haben, in welchem sie zu sich selber stehen, und ihre subjektive Menschheit auch nur in dem Grade ehren können, als sie zur objektiven veredelt ist. Ist der innere Mensch mit sich einig, so wird er auch bey der höchsten Universalisierung seines Betragens seine Eigenthümlichkeit retten, und der Staat wird bloß der Ausleger seines schönen Instinkts, die deutlichere Formel seiner innern Gesetzgebung seyn.” In Schillers Werke: Nationalausgabe, ed. Julius Petersen et al., (Weimar: Böhlau, 1962), 20:317f.

41. Novalis, “Hymns to the Night” and Other Selected Writings, trans. with an introduction by Charles E. Passage (New York: The Liberal Arts Press, 1960), 57. “Deutschland geht einen langsamen aber sichern Gang vor den übrigen Ländern voraus. Während diese durch Krieg, Spekulation und Partheygeist beschäftigt sind, bildet sich der Deutsche mit allem Fleiß zum Genossen einer höhern Epoche der Cultur, und dieser Vorschritt muß ihm ein großes Übergewicht über die Andere[n] im Lauf der Zeit geben.” In Novalis, Schriften, 3:519.

42. Cf. Vierhaus, 532.

43. See Martini's article in this volume.

44. Cf. Kontje, 149f.; and Gerhart Mayer, “Jean Pauls ambivalentes Verhältnis zum Bildungsroman,” Jahrbuch der Jean-Paul-Gesellschaft 11 (1976): 51-77.

45. See Gerhart Hoffmeister's essay in this volume.

46. Hölderlin, Hyperion, 101. “Erzieher unsers Volks;” in Sämtliche Werke, 3:89.

47. Hyperion, 171. “Ich verspräche genre diesem Buche die Liebe der Deutschen. Aber ich fürchte, die einen werden es lesen, wie ein Compendium, und um das fabula docet sich zu sehr bekümmern, indeß die andern gar zu leicht es nehmen, und beede Theile verstehen es nicht.” In Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:5.

48. Hyperion, 164. “Es ist ein hartes Wort und dennoch sag' ichs, weil es Wahrheit ist: ich kann kein Volk mir denken, das zerrißner wäre, wie die Deutschen.” In Hölderlin, Sämtliche Werke, 3:153. Cf. Ulrich Gaier, “Hölderlins Hyperion: Compendium, Roman, Rede,” Hölderlin-Jahrbuch 21 (1978/79): 90.

49. For a study of the book market and popular fiction in Germany during the eighteenth century, see Albert Ward, Book Production, Fiction, and the German Reading Public: 1740-1800 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1974).

50. Friedrich Schlegel, “Dialogue on Poetry” and Literary Aphorisms, trans., introduced, and annotated by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc (University Park and London: Pennsylvania State UP, 1968), 143. “Die Französische Revolution, Fichtes Wissenschaftslehre, und Goethes Meister sind die größten Tendenzen des Zeitalters.” In Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe, ed. Ernst Behler et al. (Munich, Paderborn and Vienna: Schöningh, 1967), 2:198.

51. “Dialogue on Poetry,” 143. “Die lärmende Menge” in Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe 2:198f.

52. See Ehrhard Bahr's essay in this volume, which analyzes the distinctly modern quality of the difficult novel. And it goes without saying that the Wanderjahre is much more than just a sequel to the Lehrjahre. Ed.

53. Goethe, Conversations with Eckermann, trans. John Oxenford (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), 220. “Meine Sachen können nicht popular werden; wer daran denkt und dafür strebt, ist in einem Irrtum. Sie sind nicht für die Masse geschrieben, sondern nur für einzelne Menschen, die etwas Ähnliches wollen und suchen und die in ähnlichen Richtungen begriffen sind” [Eckermann's emphasis]. In Johann Peter Eckermann, Gespräche mit Goethe in den letzten Jahren seines Lebens (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau, 1982; Munich: Beck, 1984), 253.

54. Ehrhard Bahr, “Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre oder die Entsagenden,” in Goethes Erzähtwerk, 379-89.

55. Ehrhard Bahr, “Revolutionary Realism in Goethe's Wanderjahre,” in Goethe's Narrative Fiction, 174f. And see his contribution in this volume.

56. Bahr, “Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre,” 367-74.

57. Dialogue on Poetry, 131f. “Der analytische Schriftsteller beobachtet den Leser, wie er ist; danach macht er seinen Kalkül, legt seine Maschinen an, um den gehörigen Effekt auf ihn zu machen. Der synthetische Schriftsteller konstruiert und schafft sich einen Leser, wie er sein soll; der denkt sich denselben nicht ruhend und tot, sondern lebendig und entgegenwirkend. Er läßt das, was er erfunden hat, vor seinen Augen stufenweise werden, oder er lockt ihn es selbst zu erfinden. Er will keine bestimmte Wirkung auf ihn machen, sondern er tritt mit ihm in das heilige Verhältnis der innigsten Symphilosophie oder Sympoesie.” In Kritische Friedrich-Schlegel-Ausgabe 2:161.