SOURCE: Sammons, Jeffrey L. “The Mystery of the Missing Bildungsroman, or: What Happened to Wilhelm Meister's Legacy?” Genre 14, no. 2 (summer 1981): 229-46.

[In the following essay, Sammons questions the very existence of a Bildungsroman genre, contending that only—at most—four novels conform to Bildungsroman conventions.]

If a person interested in literary matters commands as many as a dozen words of German, one of them is likely to be: Bildungsroman. And what this person is likely to know about the term is that it denominates a novel genre particular if not exclusive to Germany in the nineteenth century; moreover, he will think of it as a binary term, distinguishing the characteristic German novel from the more familiar English, French, and American traditions of the same time. Here is an example illustrating the diffusion of this belief, drawn, not from scholarly discussion, but from the wider literate environment. It is from an interview with the popular English novelist John le Carré: “… having a largely German-oriented education has made me very responsive to 19th-century German literature. The predominant form of the lately emerging novel in Germany then was what they called the Bildungsroman, a novel of education, in which a single character was taken through a variety of rooms, as you might say—a variety of encounters and experiences—and brought out at the other end a changed and generally morally reformed figure.”¹ Moreover, if one has encountered at all the problem of realism in nineteenth-century Germany, he is likely to be aware that the binary disjunction has a social corollary. While the Western European realistic novel probes a dynamic and differentiated social awareness, the Bildungsroman remains preoccupied with the fate of the individual self, portraying, in the influential words of Erich Auerbach, “the economic, the social, and the political in a state of quiescence.”² Normally this difference is related to the relative stagnation of German society in most of the nineteenth century, the splintered state of the nation and its lack of a capital city, and the impasse of the middle class.

These are very important fundamental literary-historical propositions, for they go beyond questions of genre and literary tradition to considerations on Germany's place in the modern world and the catastrophic course of her history. But I am obliged to report that, after what I regard as some reasonably conscientious inquiry and research, I have been unable to locate this celebrated genre in the nineteenth century. I originally got into this worrisome difficulty some years ago when I decided to develop the subject as a repertory course for graduate students. In customary fashion I first rolled up my sleeves and prepared to breast the sea of secondary literature. To my amazement I found that, at the time, there was no book on the subject. In fact, the first full-length monograph on the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman did not appear until 1972.³ Now this was very disorienting. There is no subject on which Germans have not written books, much less one of such resonance as this. Of course, there was no lack of discussion of the concept in various theoretical and literary-historical contexts. In 1969 there appeared a research report that filled 115 pages of small print.⁴ But, far from guiding me, it communicated a conflicted and diffuse scholarly situation. Bemused though undaunted, I therefore determined to read the novels themselves. But I had great trouble finding them, nor could I find anyone who would name them. By now I was beginning to feel altogether eerie.

My normal inclination is to regard genre categories as instrumental, not ontological, and I am willing to be reasonably permissive about definitions. I am content with the category of the Novelle as a genuinely special phenomenon of the German tradition, despite the lengthy and still inconclusive debate of generic definition that has gone on concerning it, in large part because one can identify, as it were by ostensive definition, some dozens and doubtless some hundreds of texts that can be plausibly adverted to in such a discussion. But I do think that if the category Bildungsroman is to have meaning, it needs to exhibit two features: the term itself, with its rather elaborate and heavily charged connotations, ought to have some relevance to the character of the texts it claims to subsume; and it ought to subsume more than two or three or even a half-dozen texts, especially if large claims are made as to its literary-historical dominance and social representativeness. I should like to address these two considerations in turn.

The term lurks about in non-German usage because it resists easy translation. Sometimes it is rendered, as le Carré did, as “novel of education,” but this is inadvisable because it creates a confusion with another, easily identifiable type with many, though mostly obscure examples properly called the Erziehungsroman.⁵ This kind of novel, which has a clear genesis in the Enlightenment, is concerned about schooling and often has been a vehicle for pedagogical doctrine or institutional criticism. It has identifiable modern descendants: examples are Hermann Hesse's Unterm Rad, Robert Musil's bloodcurdling Verwirrungen des Zöglings Törleß, and the Hanno plot in Thomas Mann's Buddenbrooks along with his brother Heinrich Mann's companion work Professor Unrat, better known to some of us as The Blue Angel. But in all novels, older or modern, that can be denominated as Bildungsromane schools or schooling are either absent or peripherally irrelevant to the protagonist's development. I have on occasion attempted to render the term as “novel of acculturation,” but I do not pretend that this is very satisfactory. The fact of the matter is that one cannot deal with the term Bildung without recourse to Goethe and, in consequence, to his crucial place in the Bildungsroman issue.

Goethe's concept of Bildung is a topic not easily amenable to concise treatment. One compact example of its many expressions is the poem “Urworte: Orphisch” of 1817.⁶ Written in Goethe's sometimes difficult late style, the poem exhibits a version of his concept of the evolution of the self in analogy to the biological process of diastole and sistole, expansion and contraction, here in five steps, each headed with a Greek “primeval word.” The first is daimon, an individual seed with its particular potential, the primordial law of the self that endures through all its morphological phases. Thus the self, unlike Brecht's concept in Mann ist Mann, is not utterly malleable and mutable. The shape around that core, however, is subject to tykhe, accidental determinants; it can be expanded by eros; it is bound again by anangke, invincible necessity; and finally it can blossom beyond its initial shape through elpis, hope, which is here related to the force of imagination. How this morphological process develops in the concrete case is exhibited in the Wilhelm Meister novels, in which a self, initially of rather ordinary dimensions and seriously lacking in accurate self-knowledge, but full of inchoate potentiality, develops through trial and error, activity and love, the assistance of the wisdom of others followed by the acquisition of an independent judgment on it, to the fullness of its own individuality and a recognition of the morphological process.⁷ These works, especially the first of them, cast a very long shadow over the subsequent development of the novel genre in Germany. It is altogether fitting that, when the full-length monograph on the topic at last did appear, its title was Wilhelm Meister und seine Brüder.

There are some caveats to be observed when considering whether Bildungsroman can be a meaningful generic term. In the first place, the concept of Bildung as it developed at the end of the eighteenth century requires a fundamental optimism; it is a child of the Enlightenment, and it is not accidental that it is historically the foundation of the principle of liberal education in American colleges and universities, cohering with our optimistic view of the potentialities of the individual. Goethe was not unaware of the fragility and endangerment of the self in the world, and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre exhibits several characters whose selves, though not without their own richness, are stunted or distorted and end tragically. But, in the exemplary case, at least, there must be a faith that there is world enough and time for self-realization, a confidence in the potential of life and the world for allowing a benign outcome to the growth of the self, “the formal necessity that the reconciliation of inwardness and world is problematic but possible.”⁸ Secondly, the morphological development and enhancement of the self is crucial to the meaning of Bildung. A self whose primordial daimon absorbs the whole personality and remains unaffected in its course through life may undergo learning experiences, but not Bildung. Thirdly, the term escapes specificity if we allow it to apply to any novel recounting the history of a young person entering upon life and the world. The connotations of Bildung then lose their force, and the term becomes a candidate for Occam's Razor. Köhn argues that we excessively restrict ourselves if we demand as a criterion that the “hero must develop on the basis of a … Bildungsidee and grow into expansive reality”; he thinks it sufficient if it exhibits “the epic structure of the ‘searching hero’ in all its multiplicity.”⁹ This passage is revealing, for it shows the urge to retain a term without content by diffusing the content it might be made to subsume. If we employ it in this way, the argument that the Bildungsroman is a form emerging from peculiar German social conditions falls to the ground; there is no reason why it could not subsume Le Rouge et le noir and Illusions perdues, Great Expectations and The Way of All Flesh, along with any number of other familiar examples. This has been done for the English novel by Jerome Hamilton Buckley,¹⁰ but it is very unclear to me what his appropriation of the term has contributed methodologically to his analyses of the novels. Indeed, if understood this way, it may reasonably be asserted that the Bildungsroman is “one of the major fictional types of European realism,” and its reputation as a peculiarly German form goes completely out of focus.¹¹ Hartmut Steinecke, the keenest contemporary student of nineteenth-century German novel theory, has proposed for this type the term “individual novel,” in order to distinguish it, with fluid boundaries, of course, from the multi-centered historical or social novel or the equally crowded kind that attempts to sink a shaft through the synchronic levels of society.¹² This is a good suggestion: the Bildungsroman is an individual novel, but not necessarily vice versa.

Fourth, and as a corollary to the last point, it is misleading to impose the term schematically upon novels that are massively concerned with other matters. A case in point is Jeremias Gotthelf, in particular his novel pair Uli der Knecht (1841) and Uli der Pächter (1849), sometimes mentioned in this connection. These novels do have the structure of fictional biography necessary, I expect, to the Bildungsroman concept, and Uli does develop, in the first volume from a slovenliness born of despair at getting on in the world to competence and self-discipline as a farmhand, and in the second through a crisis of avarice to a moral regeneration. As in the ideal Bildungsroman, he is guided by mentors, in the first by an exemplary master, in the second by his fine, strong wife. But there is no expansive shaping of a self into the realization of its potentialities; like all of Gotthelf's works, the novels are homiletic, demonstrating the necessary accommodation of a self to a strictly conservative moral and social order. Gotthelf's novels are admirable in their own way for their vigorous, earthy realism, but his Christian pastoral horizon is much too low to be associated with the progressive Enlightenment concept of Bildung, and indeed he treats it and its modern cultural connotations with explicit and reiterated contempt. Finally, the Wilhelm Meister tradition is not to be congruently equated with the Bildungsroman. Wilhelm Meister leaves many visible traces in subsequent German novels, but that does not make them Bildungsromane.¹³

Now as to the second consideration: the members of the genre. It is quite astonishing how often in discussions of the subject no actual novels are mentioned. Often such discussions appear to be primarily commentaries on Wilhelm Meister. One can scour the secondary literature and still not come up with a very long list of candidates. In what appears to me the best-informed compact account of the nineteenth-century German novel, Rudolf Majut's in Deutsche Philologie im Aufriß, there is a detectable tendency to avoid the term Bildungsroman as far as possible, and under the less problematic but also less satisfactory larger concept of Entwicklungsroman Majut treats only two authors: Stifter and Gotthelf.¹⁴ Hans Heinrich Borcherdt, in the article “Bildungsroman” in the Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, though he identifies the genre as “the German major form of the novel” which “like no other form of art is able to reveal the decisive essential features of the German character,” names only four nineteenth-century authors: Novalis, Stifter, Keller, and Raabe (two of whom, it might be remarked, were not German).¹⁵ Recently we have Martin Swales' splendidly written English-language contribution to the subject. Swales finds only two nineteenth-century examples worthy of treating in depth: Stifter's Nachsommer and Keller's Der grüne Heinrich. Very much in passing he mentions five more: Novalis' Heinrich von Ofterdingen, Eichendorff's Ahnung und Gegenwart, Immermann's Die Epigonen, Freytag's Soll und Haben, and Raabe's Der Hungerpastor.¹⁶ Space would not permit an examination of every nineteenth-century novel that gets mentioned in this connection, but let us consider briefly those that seem to recur with the greatest frequency: Novalis' Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1800); Joseph von Eichendorff's Ahnung und Gegenwart (1815); Eduard Mörike's Maler Nolten (1832); Gustav Freytag's Soll und Haben (1855); Adalbert Stifter's Der Nachsommer (1857); Wilhelm Raabe's Der Hungerpastor (1864); and Gottfried Keller's Der grüne Heinrich (1854/55; 1879/80). This is not an inclusive list, but it is a representative one and will do for our purposes.

The two Romantic examples are quite clearly conceived as anti-Meisters. The insight into the untenability of the optimistic social accommodation of the individual projected by the idea of Bildung emerges promptly in Goethe's own time among the Romantics and constantly recurs subsequently.¹⁷ After an initial enthusiasm, Novalis dismissed Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre as a “Candide against poesy.”¹⁸ Goethe's realism, his immanence, his indifference to Christianity, and what seemed to contemporaries his moral laxness repelled the Romantic generation. In Heinrich von Ofterdingen the self evolves in a direction opposite to Goethe's enhanced individual specificity; it dissolves into oneness with nature and ultimately with the macrocosmos. Rather than Bildung, the process bears more resemblance to the older mystical concept of Entbildung, the deconstruction of the self in an unio mystica. Here emerges an issue that will plague the Bildungsroman discussion and the efforts to recreate the type for more than a century, right down to Hermann Hesse: the contradiction between the development of the integral individual and the reintegration of the alienated self into world, cosmos, or, eventually, society. In Eichendorff's Catholic version the protagonist's course is a chronicle of wasted time through a gray and discouraging world brightened only, for those few with the requisite sensibility, by a lyrical nature poesy emblematic of a divinely transcendent realm wholly other than the world of society and history. The “present” of his title is a wholly fallen world that yields no sustenance to the moral or poetic self.¹⁹ The motion of the novel is completely circular, and the protagonist elects at the end to become a monk and pray for better times. This is a case, incidentally, of a daimon completely fixed and unalterable from the outset; the protagonist learns and experiences, but he acquires no Bildung, for the social world is inadequate to him and has nothing to give him. Mörike's novel moves even farther from Goethe's crucial optimism. It describes a profoundly pathological quadrangular relationship that ends in catastrophe and miserable death for all four principals.²⁰ There can be little doubt that Goethe would have been horrified by the book.²¹ The increasingly characteristic tendency to make the protagonist an artist, reisted by Goethe, exhibits a movement from the representative, socially integrated self with the potential of realization to the alienated, socially eccentric self with the potential of doom.

Freytag's stupendous mid-century bestseller Soll und Haben is best discussed in terms other than the Bildungsroman, for its thrust is not philosophical but bluntly ideological.²² It does restore an optimistic prospect to the properly conducted life. But in the first place it is complicated by the fact that it is double-plotted, contrasting the successful career of its moral protagonist with the decline and fall of a villainous Jewish contemporary. Furthermore, although the hero makes a serious error by failing to maintain strict adherence to his class allegiances and must learn his way back from this fall, on the whole I would consider his congenital daimon as fixed and perfected from the outset also. Leaving aside the novel's notorious philistine reductiveness, it is anyway not modelled on Goethe but on Dickens' David Copperfield,²³ raising once more the confusions that develop when we extend the term to English examples, with their progress to “adult clarity” and with their “precisely articulated and documented sense of the specific pressures—societal, institutional, psychological—which militate against the hero's quest for self-fulfillment.”²⁴

With Stifter, however, we come to something quite different. Der Nachsommer clearly aspires to the succession to Goethe. In it a self certainly is patiently shaped by effort, experience, love, and wisdom from relatively inchoate potentiality to fulfillment. There are, to be sure, differences that are significant and perhaps ominous insofar as Der Nachsommer is much more artificial and utopian and thus appears to be less representative of reality than shored up against it, with what Roy Pascal has called “glass walls … around the world of the novel.”²⁵ Its disturbingly quiescent manner makes Wilhelm Meister, with its intermittent violence, uproar, and sexual adventure, sound downright noisy by comparison. Though Stifter would no doubt have been dismayed to hear one say so, Der Nachsommer might also be read as an oblique anti-Meister. The protagonist's course is protected throughout; he allows himself no risks, and he gets into no impasses like Wilhelm Meister's hopeless pursuit of a career in the theater. The term Bildung is also undergoing a semantic change; it is no longer an acculturation of active potentialities of the self, but the passive acquisition of culture by exposure to aesthetic and natural objects. There would be much to be said about Stifter's obsessive reduction of the Goethean vision into constricted upperclass domesticity. But no appropriate canon of the Bildungsroman is violated by Der Nachsommer, and therefore we may note with relief that we have at last found one. On the other hand, whatever else one may think of it, it is a very eccentric novel; there is perhaps nothing else resembling it in European literature.

Raabe's Der Hungerpastor is also complicated, like Soll und Haben, by its double plotting contrasting a virtuous Christian with a villainous Jew. Its protagonist's fate is, on the whole, one of abandoned hopes and diminution. But, while this was Raabe's most popular, if not his most accomplished novel, it does exhibit the author's gift for following the motions of the inner self, and since there is gain as well as loss in the process, it might be admissible to the genre. Let me observe, however, that I put it in my sequence because it is the Raabe novel regularly mentioned in this connection, even though another one written about the same time, Die Leute aus dem Walde (1863), is much more congruent with an ideal Bildungsroman pattern. But here at least an effort, if perhaps partly unsuccessful, has been made to assimilate it to the social novel of the normal European type; it bears some resemblance to Dickens' Great Expectations, which appeared a couple of years earlier, or David Copperfield, which Raabe read together with Wilhelm Meister at the time.²⁶ Furthermore, Die Leute aus dem Walde manages to be one of the important German novels dealing with the theme of America. Its exclusion from the general discussion is symptomatic of the curious erasure from the German canon of the writer whom I consider the most important novelist between Goethe and Fontane. I mention this because I will come back to the question of the canon in relation to my subject.

Finally we come to Keller's autobiographical masterpiece, of which a contemporary critic wrote to him perceptively that it is a Bildungstragödie.²⁷ This, too, is a chronicle of wasted time, though much richer and more colorful than Eichendorff's. The protagonist is expelled from school as a boy, which for Keller is tantamount to expulsion from civil society, and he never really finds his bearings. For immature reasons he inefficiently pursues a career as an artist and drifts into a morass of destitution and near starvation into which he drags also his self-sacrificing mother. His excessively imaginative self-absorption throws his personal and erotic relationships out of kilter. He does manage, in the second version, to clamber out of these depths and encounter a modicum of better fortune, but his experiences have stunted the evolution of the self. His subsequent life is diminished in scope and deprived of fulfillment. In Der grüne Heinrich neither self nor the world is adequately constituted, and if ever a novel was marked by the absence of effective Bildung, it is this; in that regard I think it rather resembles Hardy's Jude the Obscure. I sympathize with Swales' statement that it is not a breach with the Bildungsroman tradition;²⁸ clearly it is not formally, but it seems to me to be so in import. One must remember how prominent Goethe is in the development and consciousness of Keller's narrator.²⁹

This is a genre, and a predominant one at that—a category into which we can, on inspection, admit only Wilhelm Meister and maybe two and a half other examples? Let me insert here that I am not engaged in an exercise in eccentricity. The author of Wilhelm Meister und seine Brüder finds himself, like me, continually excluding examples from the genre, whose history is crossed by what he calls the “novel of disillusionment.” In his concluding chapter he characterizes the Bildungsroman as an “unfulfilled genre.”³⁰ Actually Jacobs is only the last in a long series of scholars who have found the Bildungsroman concept collapse when applied to specific cases.³¹ Not only Stifter's Nachsommer has been excluded;³² it has even been argued that Wilhelm Meister is not a Bildungsroman in the accepted sense of the term.³³ That may be going a little far; nevertheless, in the Wanderjahre one of Wilhelm's main mentors, Jarno, pours scorn on the preoccupation with individual development—“your general Bildung and all your efforts for it are tomfoolery”—and he urges Wilhelm to specialize, “to achieve what another in the same environment does not easily do,” advice that propels Wilhelm to a profession as a surgeon.³⁴ If the status of the model text is problematic, then a fortiori the genre itself must certainly be insecure. Borcherdt, after having proclaimed the Bildungsroman as the major form of the German novel, is obligated to remark that “this scheme experienced a dissolution in the realism of the nineteenth century, when the faith and the achievement of a goal of Bildung were lost and thus the typology of the way of Bildung was weakened (for example, in Der grüne Heinrich).”³⁵ This clumsy passage is illuminating, though perhaps not in the way Borcherdt intended. Any naive external observer must get the impression that the Bildungsroman type clustered at the end of the eighteenth century in the era of Humanitätsphilosophie—thus the constantly adduced examples, not only of Wilhelm Meister, but of Wieland's Agathon and the novels of Jean Paul, Hölderlin, and the early Romantics—cast a disruptive but largely ineffective shadow over the novel production of the nineteenth century, and was revived at the beginning of the modern period, a point to which I shall return. The result is a decanonization of the actual German novel of the nineteenth century.

For were these few examples I have mentioned the only novels of the century? Of course not. If we forget all about the Bildungsroman and address ourselves simply to the question of the novel, the books people actually wrote and read, we find a great variety. We find historical, social, and political novels as well as individual novels; we find realistic novels both on large canvases and with strong regional focus.³⁶ In this Germany is in no way eccentric to other Western nations in the nineteenth century; of course there are differences, doubtless reflecting a differently constituted and rather backward society, and the struggle for a valid realism was harder in Germany than in the West, as the careers of several authors, like Raabe and Karl Gutzkow, demonstrate, but I do not think they are differences of genre or mode. Nor were the Germans wholly inwardly turned and out of touch with the international development. There was strong interest in foreign novels, especially English and American ones, which had much influence in Germany: Scott's, for example, on Willibard Alexis, or Cooper's on Charles Sealsfield, or Dickens' on Freytag and Raabe, or Thackeray's on the later Raabe. In the 1860s there emerges the once internationally respected Friedrich Spielhagen, who with his strongly partisan naturalism might be regarded as a German counterpart to Zola. There may be in the German novel a qualitative deficit that accounts for its lack of endurance in literary history and this deficit may have social determinants, but this is a complicated question that does not affect my argument. There may not have been, as is constantly reiterated, a German Balzac or Flaubert, George Eliot or Dickens. But a literary history of European range that can give some attention to writers of the rank of George Sand, Zola, George Meredith, or Anthony Trollope, might also find some time for Alexis, Sealsfield, Raabe, Berthold Auerbach, or Spielhagen. In addition there was a vast amount of theoretical discourse about the novel throughout the century. Indeed, at times one can get the impression that there was more novel theory than there were novels, though this is an optical illusion created by the predilections of modern scholarship. I must say that to my foreign eyes the persistent attention paid to Spielhagen's half-baked novel theory in contrast to an almost complete avoidance of his novels themselves seems quite extraordinary.

How is this possible? How can it have occurred that a phantom genre has been proclaimed as predominant and characteristic, while the broader and more commonplace genre that did exist has disappeared from our range of vision? I am not sure that we are in a position yet to answer this question, but I will suggest some considerations that an explanation would have to take into account.

First. In German literature there is a greater disjunction between artistic quality and public visibility than in our own tradition; this is true of poetry and drama but especially of the novel.³⁷ There is no counterpart in nineteenth-century Germany to the careers of Scott or Dickens, or, for that matter, of Dumas or Eugène Sue. The most popular novels are of lesser quality, while those books that now have canonical standing were obscure and were read, if at all, only by a thinly populated intellectual elite. Pascal has observed: “Our ‘classic’ novels are read by English children with passion; bothered parents have to forbid too much of it and tell them to get on with their ‘work.’ Later on, they get seized by the French and Russians in the same way. But even for Germans, to read the great German novels is mostly a ‘cultural task’—infinitely rewarding, I believe, but never likely to become a dangerous passion in the reader!”³⁸ Moreover, while in all Western countries the novel was an object of suspicion as a trivial, subliterary, perhaps deleterious genre, German poetics had a much more difficult time vindicating the novel, owing, I suspect, in part to the need, codified in Hegel's aesthetics, to subsume the novel under the category of the “epic,” which rather set any novel with pretensions to serious regard into competition with Homer, and created a neurotic worry in the intellectual community about the compatibility of poesy and realism.³⁹

Second. Just as there is much disjunction in German history, so there is much in the literary tradition. The qualitative canon of German literature that we now recognize was actually formed in the Wilhelminian period, a process that only in recent years has begun to come under study.⁴⁰ This relatively modern canonization has two features relevant to our topic. In contrast to the previous nineteenth-century distribution of values, it placed Goethe and Romanticism firmly at the core of the canon. In addition, it was strongly concerned to assert a specific German character in contrast to the culture of other nations. The very term Bildungsroman, though it had occurred sporadically earlier, was put into circulation in its modern meaning by one of the leading critics of that era, Wilhelm Dilthey, who rather vaguely conceived of it as the succession to Wilhelm Meister.⁴¹ In consequence of this, an essentially German tradition was distinguished from the literature that the Germans had actually written and read, with the effect of imposing upon literary history a notion of nineteenth-century Germany as an alien literary landscape, distinct from the rest of the Western world. Yet I find that the more I try to read the books the Germans actually read, which in Germany as elsewhere normally means novels, the less strange a place it seems to be, despite a clear set of distinctive characteristics of the sort that mark off all national literatures from one another. But the canonization process devalued the Enlightenment, realistic, social, and political aspects of the Germans' literature, and previously esoteric writers like Mörike and Stifter were brought into the foreground of criticism. Twentieth-century modernism, neo-Romanticism, and aestheticism accelerated this process, which was given a special cast by the peculiar virulence of German nationalism. In 1925 a Zeitschrift für deutsche Bildung was founded. Its programmatically irrational nationalism led easily into an allegiance to Nazism.⁴² It is in the course of this development that Germany really became estranged from the Western world, not in the nineteenth century, though no doubt certain nineteenth-century trends are hyperbolized in it. The birth of the Bildungsroman legend is to be sought in this process also.

A revealing witness to it is Thomas Mann, who repeatedly propagated the view that the Bildungsroman was the characteristic German form. In 1916 he wrote: “There is a variety of the novel that is German, typically German, legitimately national, and that is just the autobiographically filled Bildungsroman or Entwicklungsroman. We are furthermore, I think, agreed that the predominance of this novel type in Germany, the fact of its particular national legitimacy, is most intimately connected with the German concept of humanity, which, since it is the product of an epoch in which society disintegrated into atoms and made a human being out of every citizen, was lacking in the political element all along.”⁴³ And in the Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, that perverse and self-contradictory compendium of everything the German mind had to get over if it were to rejoin the Western world, Mann, in complete harmony with the thrust of the academic canonization process, set up the inherent German tradition of the Bildungsroman as a defense against the infiltration of the social and political novel. “Bildung is a specifically German concept; it derives from Goethe, from him it has its three-dimensional aesthetic character, has maintained the sense of freedom, culture, and reverence for life … through him this concept has been elevated to an educational principle in Germany as in no other nation.”⁴⁴ I think one can sense in these embarrassing words the price that is paid for falsifying history, even literary history.

Third. The overwhelming magnitude of Goethe and the enormous investment placed in him beginning in the era of canon formation have rather obscured the circumstance that he is in many ways an aberrational figure in the German tradition. He was not representatively German, and people in his own time did not think he was. The direction of his mind, whether in matters social, political, aesthetic, or scientific, diverged greatly from the spirit of his times and at the end of his life he was already fairly isolated, as he well knew himself. It is relevant to note here that all the important post-Goethean Fausts. from Heine to Thomas Mann, abandon Goethe's scheme of the salvation of the striving individual in an ultimately benign universe and revert to the doom of the original Faust legend. Similarly with Wilhelm Meister. It hovers threateningly over the German novel tradition for decades, but the record shows that the most creative minds could not sustain the social and humanistic optimism without which the scheme of Wilhelm Meister collapses; even Stifter's desperate embargo of real experience bears indirect witness to this. A parallel may fairly be drawn with the fate of Hegel's system, which shares many of the values and expectations of the concept of Bildung as developed by Herder, Humboldt, and Goethe. Charles Taylor has remarked that Hegel thought “the horrors and nightmares of history, the furies of destruction and cruelty which remain enigmatic to agent and victim, were behind us. This sense, which Hegel expressed in his philosophy—although he seems to have wavered at times in his private judgment—is just about unrecoverable even by the most optimistic of our contemporaries. … If this vision of expressive pantheism wanes, if the aspiration to unity with the ‘all of nature’ ceases to be meaningful, then the very basis disappears for the Absolute Idea, along with Goethe's Urphänomene, Novalis' ‘magic idealism’ and the wilder creations of the Romantics.”⁴⁵ Both Hegel and Goethe appear to have developed an excessively hopeful perception of an epoch-making watershed in human history around 1800, and the subsequent disillusionments undermined the foundation of their beliefs for subsequent generations despite much verbal allegiance to their thinking. There is no nineteenth-century Bildungsroman genre because no major writer after Goethe could envision a social context for Bildung, and it is perhaps not unfair to say that the concept itself declined in Germany to a reductive shibboleth except among the most refined minds. In fact Julian Schmidt, in his mid-century campaign for realism on English models in the German novel, rejected Bildung itself as possible only to an ideal nobility disconnected from quotidian life.⁴⁶

Fourth. The situation is further obscured by the fact that the Bildungsroman genre definitely occurs in modern German literature. The modernist aesthetic became much more self-conscious about internal literary traditions while its relationship to the broader and dissatisfying historical and social continuum became more attenuated, and writers related to these traditions either as successors or as parodists. Modernist German writers, rejecting the present in an Expressionist search for a new beginning in human affairs, became oriented not on the whole landscape of the literary past, but on the selective canon of Wilhelminian formation. One can see this most clearly in Hesse, who of all writers was the most devoted to succession to the now official German canon. So it is not surprising that he wrote one Bildungsroman after another: Peter Camenzind, Demian, Siddhartha, Narziß und Goldmund, Das Glasperlenspiel. In the hands of greater writers the genre recovered major stature, the axial work being Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg, the novel that I take to be the one genuine successor to Wilhelm Meister; and the ultimate transcendent achievement is what I estimate to be one of the half-dozen surpassingly great novels in German literature, Mann's Joseph und seine Brüder. However, these are only the most visible remnants of what was clearly an extensive literary and cultural development. The Central European crisis of nerve at the beginning of this century revived the Bildungsroman in a search for redemptive alternatives, making it a vessel for all sorts of mystical, philosophical, religious, nationalist visions—anything, so long as it was not rational, realistic, or, for that matter, democratic, at least until Thomas Mann's excruciating rethinking of his own premises.⁴⁷ This literary development appears to be closely linked with the era of canon formation that stood nineteenth-century literary history on its head. In contemporary letters the Bildungsroman, of course, undergoes parodistic transformation, the chief examples being Günter Grass's Die Blechtrommel, which relativizes the genre by conflating it with the antithetical one of the picaro novel, and Siegfried Lenz's more conventional Die Deutschstunde, which connects the Bildungsroman to the school novel but maintains and modernizes the disjunction of the indestructible daimon of the self from the official culture.

Doubtless there are many legends in literary history. I wonder, however, if there is another one so lacking in foundation and so misleading as the phantom of the nineteenth-century Bildungsroman. It is a case that has many ramifications for the intersection of society, genre, and literary reception, which have still to be fully unravelled. But when one encounters the assertion that the Bildungsroman is the characteristic and nationally peculiar genre of the nineteenth-century German novel—and it will be encountered sooner or later—one should recognize the presence of a myth and assume the appropriate posture of reverence and skepticism.

Notes

1. Michael Barber, “John le Carré: An Interrogation,” New York Times Book Review, (Sept. 25, 1977), p. 44. Le Carré goes on: “If that didn't happen, there was an apocalypse of some kind and he was destroyed,” thus promptly raising one of my main problems with the genre.

2. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1953), p. 399. This is not a modern construct, but an issue that preoccupied German writers from early in the nineteenth century. See Jürgen Jacobs, Wilhelm Meister und seine Brüder: Untersuchungen zum deutschen Bildungsroman (Munich: Fink, 1972); Hartmut Steinecke, Romantheorie und Romankritik in Deutschland, Vol. I (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1975), 153-59; Joachim Worthmann, Probleme des Zeitromans: Studien zur Geschichte des deutschen Romans im 19. Jahrhundert (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1974), pp. 10-11; Jeffrey L. Sammons, Six Essays on the Young German Novel (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), pp. 9-10.

3. See Jacobs. There had been books on the pre-Goethean tradition: E. L. Stahl, Die religiöse und die humanitätsphilosophische Bildungsidee und die Entstehung des deutschen Bildungsromans im 18. Jahrhundert (Bern: Paul Haupt, 1934); Melitta Gerhard, Der deutsch Entwicklungsroman bis zu Goethes ‘Wilhelm Meister’ (Halle/S.: Niemeyer, 1926). Monika Schrader, Mimesis und Poesis: Poetologische Studien zum Bildungsroman (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1975), in attempting to define a typological structure relating Bildung not to the protagonist's progress but to the symbolic structure of the novel, confronts Wieland with Musil, thus arching over the whole nineteenth century.

4. Lothar Köhn, Entwicklungs- und Bildungsroman: Ein Forschungsbericht (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1969). This is an expansion of an article originally published in Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, 42 (1968), 427-73, 590-632.

5. See Helmut Germer, The German Novel of Education 1792-1805: A Complete Bibliography and Analysis (Bern: Lang, 1968).

6. Goethe, Werke, ed. Erich Trunz et al. (Hamburg: Wegner, 1949-60), I, 359-60.

7. The elusiveness of the concept is much abridged in this formulation. See, for example, David H. Miles, “The Picaro's Journey to the Confessional: The Changing Image of the Hero in the German Bildungsroman,” PMLA, 89 (1974), 980-92, for whom the process is not so much in the protagonist as in the narrator; and Thomas P. Saine, “Über Wilhelm Meisters ‘Bildung,’” Lebendige Form: Interpretationen zur deutschen Literatur, ed. Jeffrey L. Sammons and Ernst Schürer (Munich: Fink, 1970), 63-82, who locates it in a readiness to perception of art and nature, not an achieved harmonious self. These nuances derive from Wilhelm Meister's notorious passivity.

8. Georg Lukács, Die Theorie des Romans (Neuwied: Luchterhand, 1963), p. 135. Lukács, incidentally, is part of the problem rather than part of the solution; excessive reliance on his remarkably limited reading experience can lead to serious misconceptions about the history of the German novel.

9. Köhn, pp. 87, 88.

10. Jerome Hamilton Buckley, Seasons of Youth: The Bildungsroman from Dickens to Golding (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974). The confusion is quite apparent in the otherwise interesting article of Francois Jost, “La Tradition du Bildungsroman,” Comparative Literature, 21 (1969), 97-115; Jost argues in familiar fashion that the Bildungsroman is the characteristic German form of the nineteenth century, then proceeds to give an extensive list of English, French, and other European Bildungsromane.

11. Marianne Hirsch, “The Novel of Formation as Genre: Between Great Expectations and Lost Illusions,” Genre, 12 (1979), 300.

12. Steinecke, I, 27.

13. For a catalogue, see J. O. E. Donner, Der Einfluß Wilhelm Meisters auf den Roman der Romantiker (Elsinore: Frenckell & Sohn, 1893).

14. Rudolf Majut, “Der deutsche Roman vom Biedermeier bis zur Gegenwart,” Deutsche Philologie im Aufriß, ed. Wolfgang Stammler, 2nd ed. (Berlin: Erich Schmidt Verlag, 1957-69), II, cols. 1363-71. On the distinction among Bildungsroman, Erziehungsroman, and Entwicklungsroman see Jost, pp. 100-01.

15. Hans Heinrich Borcherdt, “Bildungsroman,” Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte, 2nd ed., ed. Werner Kohlschmidt and Wolfgang Mohr (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1958-), I, 174-78.

16. Martin Swales, The German Bildungsroman from Wieland to Hesse (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978), p. 6. Marianne Hirsch mentions only Wilhelm Meister, Keller's Der grüne Heinrich, Stifter's Der Nachsommer, and Immermann's Die Epigonen. A discussion of the last—the first German novel to describe an industrial milieu—would lead too far afield here. See Sammons, Six Essays, pp. 124-50.

17. See Gerhart Mayer, “Zum deutschen Antibildungsroman,” Jahrbuch der Raabe-Gesellschaft 1974 (Braunschweig: Waisenhaus, 1974), pp. 41-64.

18. Novalis, Schriften, ed. Richard Samuel et al., III (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1968), 646.

19. For a similar view and a discussion of Eichendorff's rejection of Wilhelm Meister as excessively secular and realistic, see Horst Meixner, Romantischer Figuralismus: Kritische Studien zu Romanen von Arnim, Eichendorff und Hoffmann (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1971), pp. 121-25.

20. See Jeffrey L. Sammons, “Fate and Psychology: Another Look at Mörike's Maler Nolten,” Lebendige Form, pp. 211-28.

21. S. S. Prawer, “Mignon's Revenge. A Study of Mörike's Maler Nolten,” Publications of the English Goethe Society, N.S. 25 (1956), 74, has remarked acutely that Maler Nolten “begins where Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre had ended: with the hero's entrance into an aristocratic circle and his love for a lady of nobler birth than his own.”

22. See T. E. Carter, “Freytag's Soll und Haben: A Liberal National Manifesto as a Best-Seller,” German Life & Letters, N.S. 21 (1967/68), 320-29; Jeffrey L. Sammons, “The Evaluation of Freytag's ‘Soll und Haben,’” ibid., N.S. 22 (1968/69), 315-23; Peter Heinz Hubrich, Gustav Freytags “Deutsche Ideologie” in Soll und Haben (Kronberg: Scriptor, 1974); Hartmut Steinecke, “Gustav Freytag: Soll und Haben (1855): Weltbild und Wirkung eines deutschen Schriftstellers,” Romane und Erzählungen des Bürgerlichen Realismus: Neue Interpretationen, ed. Horst Denkler (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1980), pp. 138-52.

23. See Roland Freymond, Der Einfluß von Charles Dickens auf Gustav Freytag (Prague: Carl Bellmann, 1912).

24. Swales, p. 35.

25. Roy Pascal, The German Novel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1968), p. 53.

26. The first person I know to have seen this clearly, if perhaps not in a wholly admiring light, is Hubert Ohl, Bild und Wirklichkeit: Studien zur Romankunst Raabes und Fontanes (Heidelberg: Stiehm, 1968), pp. 44-64. Marianne Hirsch (n. 11 above), p. 305, writes: “In the French and English novels [in contrast to the German], the travel from country to city creates a temporal compression, a quickening of crisis. Instead of making gradual adjustments, the hero must learn to cope on the spot. The rhythm of these works is characterized by a series of crises, a number of disillusioning encounters with society. Each encounter is the scene of the demise of one or more of the hero's expectations.” This would not be a bad approximation of what happens in Der Hungerpastor.

27. Hermann Hettner to Keller, June 11, 1855, Der Briefwechsel zwischen Gottfried Keller und Hermann Hettner, ed. Jürgen Jahn (Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1964), p. 135. This refers, to be sure, to the more melodramatic conclusion of the first version, in which the protagonist dies of grief and guilt.

28. Swales, p. 103.

29. One of the major modern interpreters of the novel observed: “what takes place in it is anything but the harmonious unfolding of an individual according to an intrinsic law of becoming adequate to the total condition,” and he goes on to say that the protagonist is altered by accident and external event, not developed. Hartmut Laufhütte, Wirklichkeit und Kunst in Gottfried Kellers Roman ‘Der Grüne Heinrich’ (Bonn: Bouvier, 1969), p. 355. Marianne Hirsch, pp. 302, 307, in my opinion seriously misunderstands the tone of the conclusion of Der grüne Heinrich when she says the protagonist “discovers his authentic self and realizes his personal destiny in the assumption of social responsibility” and that “accommodation and conformity are morally valued as commensurate with maturity.”

30. Jacobs, pp. 271-78.

31. See Köhn, p. 3.

32. Emil Staiger, “Adalbert Stifter, Der Nachsommer,” Meisterwerke deutscher Sprache aus dem neunzehnten Jahrhundert, 2nd ed. (Zurich: Atlantis, 1948), p. 189.

33. Kurt May, “‘Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre,’ ein Bildungsroman?,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, 31 (1957), 1-37.

34. Goethe, Werke, VIII, 282.

35. Borcherdt, p. 177.

36. On the social novel, see the important study by E. K. Bramsted, Aristocracy and the Middle-Classes in Germany: Social Types in German Literature 1830-1900, rev. ed. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1964). On the variety of novel types, see Majut, passim.

37. See Albert Klein, Die Krise des Unterhaltungsromans im 19. Jahrhundert: Ein Beitrag zur Theorie und Geschichte der ästhetisch geringwertigen Literatur (Bonn: Bouvier, 1969), p. 3.

38. Pascal, pp. 303-04.

39. See Steinecke, Vol. I, passim; and Werner Hahl, Reflexion und Erzählung: Ein Problem der Romantheorie von der Spätaufklärung bis zum programmatischen Realismus (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1971).

40. See, for example, Bernd Peschken, Versuch einer germanistischen Ideologiekritik: Goethe, Lessing, Novalis, Tieck, Hölderlin, Heine in Wilhelm Diltheys und Julian Schmidts Vorstellungen (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1972).

41. Das Leben Schleiermachers, Vol. I, 2nd ed. (Berlin: De Gruyter, 1922), p. 317; Das Erlebnis und die Dichtung, 14th ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1965), p. 272. See Jacobs, p. 11; Köhn, p. 1.

42. See Jürgen Scharfschwerdt, Grundprobleme der Literatursoziologie: Ein wissenschaftsgeschichtlicher Überblick (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1977), pp. 100-03.

43. Thomas Mann, “[Der autobiographischer Roman],” Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1960), XI, 702.

44. Ibid., XII, 505.

45. Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge University Press, 1977), p. 545.

46. Edward McInnes, “Zwischen ‘Wilhelm Meister’ und ‘Die Ritter vom Geist’: Zur Auseinandersetzung zwischen Bildungsroman und Sozialroman im 19. Jahrhundert,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, 43 (1969), 500. Marianne Hirsch's distinction, p. 305, that “the French and English novels of formation begin to undermine the teleological sense of development to which the German works still adhere” and her claim (p. 310) that the German novels are “attempts to assert the cohesion of what is already disintegrating” are clearly mistaken.

47. Catalogue in Berta Berger, Der moderne deutsche Bildungsroman (Bern and Leipzig: Paul Haupt, 1942).