In this fascinating monograph, Schäfer traces a prehistory of the “theatricalization of education,” culminating in the attitude of “lifelong learning” (lebenslanges Lernen) that has come to dominate discourses around the labor market in the West (and beyond) since the 1990s. In Schäfer's usage, the term “lifelong learning” extends beyond the notion of “adult education” to denote the attitudes, practices, and philosophies associated with a precarious, neoliberal labor market that demands that the individual constantly learn and relearn new modes of performing him- or herself, all the while maintaining that the performance is one of authenticity. Work thus becomes a matter of “virtuosic” performance, to use Paolo Virno's terminology, and leisure too is made productive at the very least through the formation of contacts it enables. Moreover, as Schäfer points out, the contemporary labor market reactivates the traditional eighteenth-century distinction between the “hot” and “cold” actor. As theorized in Diderot's Paradoxe sur le comédien (1773), the “cold” actor subdues his own passions in order to embody a character and feign emotions effectively, whereas the “hot” actor invests emotional energy into his or her roles, often at the risk of becoming overwhelmed by feeling and thus unable to perform. In the twenty-first-century labor market, workers are like “hot actors” who are expected to perform authenticity and “passion.” However, the self-styled “passionate” worker may lose control of the performance, resulting in failure, awkwardness, and even depression as he or she fails to live up to the demands of the theatricalized world of work.

As Schäfer argues in the book's introduction (“Vorspiel”), this apparent interrelation between theater, theatricality, and the optimization of the self through Bildung is no invention of late-stage capitalism, but rather is prefigured by eighteenth- century pedagogical literature. This complex of themes is embodied in the “pedagogical province” in Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre, which banished theater and theatricality from their domain in the service of producing “stable” and unified subjects. Drawing on the insights of Luhmannian and Foucauldian social theory as well as the mimetic theory of Philippe Lacoue- Labarthe and others, Schäfer situates Goethe's “pedagogical province” within a larger trajectory of theatricalized education in Western modernity.