Bildungsroman

Bildungsroman, term generally applied to novels of “education” or “development”, tracing the protagonist's spiritual, intellectual, and emotional growth, from birth or early childhood, into adulthood and maturity. The word is German (Bildung; education), and has been traced back to lectures given in the early 19th century by Karl Morgenstern, a professor of aesthetics and the history of literature and art. For him, the Bildungsroman was “a moral means of education, as opposed to ... the novel as mere entertainment, pleasure, fantasy, and as an escape from reality”.

According to one academic, James N. Hardin, “there is no consensus on the meaning of the term”, although it is acknowledged that it is a peculiarly German phenomenon and that many of the best literary examples are German. Geschichte des Agathon (1766-1767) by Christoph Martin Wieland is widely thought to be the first. The novel is set in ancient Greece, a place and culture which exerted a fascination over 18th-century men of learning. Wieland, in a preface, identifies himself with the protagonist, Agathon, and even hints that other characters in the book are based on real people.

Undoubtedly the best-known and most-imitated Bildungsroman, though, is Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (published in eight books, 1795-1796), by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It served as a model for the best German fiction of the next 30 years, enjoyed great success with the Romantic generation, and became celebrated in England through a translation by Thomas Carlyle (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, 1824). The novel deals with the stage-struck Wilhelm Meister's disillusioning but formative experiences of love and the theatre, through which he acquires a sense of direction and duty. It is a rambling, discursive book, and contains an extensive and insightful discussion of Shakespeare's Hamlet. In the same tradition as Wilhelm Meister are Ludwig Tieck's Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (1798), Gottfried Keller's Der Grüne Heinrich (1854-1855 and 1879-1880; Green Henry, 1960), Gustav Freytag's Soll und Haben (1855), Adalbert Stifter's Der Nachsommer (1857), and Wilhelm Raabe's Der Hungerpastor (1864). Goethe's most distinguished successor, however, was undoubtedly Thomas Mann, who wrote that novels in the Wilhelm Meister tradition were “typically German”. Three of Mann's longer novels could be said to be ironic instances of the form: Königliche Höheit (1909; Royal Highness, 1916), Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain, 1928), and Joseph und Seine Brüder (1933-1942; Joseph and His Brothers, 1934-1944). The Magic Mountain is perhaps the most intellectually and philosophically complex Bildungsroman. It is set in the period leading up to World War I in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, where Hans Castorp, a young engineer, has come to visit a friend. Castorp is found to be ill himself and stays on. He falls under the spell of two long-term patients, an Italian anti-clerical idealist, Settembrini, and a Jesuitical, nihilistic Jew, Naphta. In a series of lengthy philosophical discussions, the two fight for the soul of the intellectually unformed Castorp, who also experiences sexual initiation at the hands of a voluptuous Russian patient, Clawdia Chauchat. The novel ends with an ironic statement on the “education” Castorp has undergone. At the outbreak of war, he volunteers and is seen taking part in an attack at the Western Front. Joseph and His Brothers is a biblical tetralogy of some 2,000 pages; it is both an expansion upon and an interpretation of Genesis 12:50. Joseph, the main character in the novel, represents, in the early stages, the self-absorbed artist who later matures into a man of wisdom, judgement, and influence.

Mann's near contemporary Hermann Hesse (1877-1962) wrote novels in which the protagonist is often engaged on a journey of self-discovery: in Peter Camenzind (1904; trans. 1962), the journey is that of a developing writer. Siddhartha (1922; trans. 1954) and Morgenlandfahrt (1932; Journey to the East, 1956) explore attempts to gain enlightenment and self-knowledge through Indian mysticism.

Examples of the Bildungsroman in English literature include Thomas Carlyle's semi-fictional Sartor Resartus (1833-1834); David Copperfield (1849-1850) and Great Expectations (1860-1861) by Charles Dickens; The Way of All Flesh (1903) by Samuel Butler; Sons and Lovers (1913) by D. H. Lawrence; Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1914-1915) by James Joyce; and The Longest Journey (1907) by E. M. Forster. Instances of the genre in French could include L'Éducation Sentimentale (1869), by Gustave Flaubert, and, most recently, a posthumously published novel by Albert Camus, Le Premier Homme (1994; The First Man, 1995), about an Algerian pied-noir childhood and adolescence. It has a strongly autobiographical flavour to it.

There is some overlap between the Bildungsroman and the Zeitroman, a novel in which the author offers an interpretation of his time. What characterizes the Bildungsroman as essentially German is perhaps its reflection of the strong German philosophical tradition.