“Steile Gegenden” and “Umwege”: Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–96)

The Bildungsroman: An Obsolete Interpretive Model?

In 1984 Hans-Jürgen Schings proposed reading Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre using the category of “Heilung” or “Genesung,” offering this as an alternative to what he called the “erstarrte[s] Modell Bildung.” Indeed, the energies of Germanists in the post-1945 period were for a long time consumed in an inconclusive debate as to whether Goethe's novel should really be called a Bildungsroman. The Lehrjahre has been regarded as the archetype of that genre since the term was first applied to it by the academic Karl Morgenstern. It was to be expected that dissenting voices would make themselves heard just when the German tradition of selfcultivation appeared irreparably tarnished by the recent experience of totalitarianism. Bildung was seen as an institution deeply implicated in the beginnings of a modernity that had so recently come to a catastrophic end. Thus commentators like Karl Schlechta felt the need to separate Goethe from a compromised tradition and to portray him as a farseeing critic of the destructive tendencies within it. Similarly, in the 1970s a new generation of critics felt compelled to disavow the link between Wilhelm Meister and Bildung. Stefan Blessin's reading of the novel as a document of bourgeois false-consciousness whose protagonist has “nichts gelernt” is characteristic of the ideology-driven criticism then prevalent.

Doubtless the new readings helped to overcome the discipline's onesided fixation on the theme of education and cast new light on “die erstaunliche und unerhörte Mannigfaltigkeit” of a work that had exerted an unparalleled influence on the German novel in the nineteenth century.