Bildungsroman
A Bildungsroman deals with the development of a mostly young main character. The genus originated in Germany at the end of the 18th century .
The term comes from lectures by the Dorpater philologist Karl Morgenstern , who saw in the Bildungsroman the "special nature of the novel that most deeply grasps the essence of the novel in contrast to the epic". The German term is also used in many other languages, such as English and French. It is a subgenre of the development novel and the coming-of-age story .
Main features
A Bildungsroman is about the "examination of a central figure with different areas of the world". From a formal point of view, the Bildungsroman thus occupies an “intermediate position between the character and space novel ”. The central figure, the hero , goes through a development that is determined by his relationship to the “different world areas”, that is, his environment . This development mostly takes place in the hero's youth. The time told extends over several years, often even decades. The Bildungsroman thus has elements of a biography .
The structure of the educational novel is often divided into three parts and follows the scheme “youth years - wandering years - master years”. This can be exemplified in Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's years of apprenticeship , this novel is considered the ideal and prototype of the German educational novel. However, not all Bildungsroman are divided into three parts.
Reference to the educational concept of the Enlightenment
In contrast to the pure development novel, a certain educational term plays a central role in the development of the Bildungsroman. Derived from antiquity, the term education since the Enlightenment and the Sturm und Drang has meant the individual development of the individual, free of state and social norms, towards a higher, positive goal. The term includes both the formation of the mind and the formation of the national character. Another characteristic of the historical concept of education is the “formation” of external influences as well as the development and development of existing facilities. Every Bildungsroman refers to this eponymous term.
Educational relationship between author, main character and reader
In the Bildungsroman, education should not only be the subject of the novel, but should also be conveyed to the reader. Similar to the didactic Enlightenment novel, this happens through the "missionary feeling of superiority of a self-confident narrator who [can] assert his educational lead over hero and reader". This distant, often ironic narrator is, along with the hero and the reader, the essential figure of an educational relationship that is called educational history.
content
The hero of an educational novel is initially directly opposed to his environment. While he is still young, naive and full of ideals, he is opposed to a negative, realistic world in which only a few things go according to his ideas. Jacobs speaks of a “break between ideally fulfilled soul and resistant reality”. The consequences are incomprehension and rejection on both sides.
This relationship of the hero to his environment now sets his development, his education, in motion. The hero has concrete experiences in his environment that gradually allow him to grow and mature. It is shown "how he enters life in a happy twilight, searches for related souls, encounters friendship and love, but how he now struggles with the harsh realities of the world and so matures under manifold life experiences".
This development ends in a "harmonious state of balance" with the environment. The “hero's process of change [has brought him]… to clarity about himself and about the world”, the hero has thus reconciled himself with the world and takes his place in it. For example, he takes up a profession “and becomes a Philistine as good as the others too” and thus a part of the world that he previously despised.
As a further feature of the educational novel, reviews and reflections of the hero are inserted at important points, at the "pivots of development". On the one hand, these are intended to structure the novel formally, on the other hand, they serve to clarify the development: They separate the individual stages of this development from each other and conclude them.
Examples
Christoph Martin Wieland's story of the Agathon, written around 1766, is considered the first Bildungsroman . Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's apprenticeship years then prevailed as the prototype of the genre , although here the hero strives for a noble educational ideal, the uniform training of body and mind, and denies his bourgeois origin.
The green Heinrich von Gottfried Keller isone of the most important German literary novels of the 19th century, alongside Goethe's Wilhelm Meister and Stifters Nachsommer . Keller worked out two versions (published in 1855 and 1880 respectively), whereby the second version, which is more common today, in contrast to the first, is kept exclusively in the first person.
Demian (1919) is a well-known Bildungsroman with autobiographical elements by Hermann Hesse . The story had - as Thomas Mann reports in his foreword to the American edition of the book - on the young generation after the First World War an "electrifying effect and hit the nerve of the times with uncanny accuracy," similar to Goethe's Werther , whose effect Thomas Mann with the des Demian compares.
In the laboratory atmosphere of a lung sanatorium on the Davoser Zauberberg (1924), Thomas Mann recalls Western cultural history in front of his young hero Hans Castorp, before he surrenders to the perversion of all education and goes to the First World War. In confessions of the impostor Felix Krull (1922/1954), the Bildungsroman is linked with the picaresque novel and is thus to be understood as a parody of the Bildungsroman.
Negative Bildungsroman
Between 1785 and 1790, Karl Philipp Moritz wrote the example of a failed educational path with the autobiographical Anton Reiser and thus a work that is referred to in literary studies as a "negative Bildungsroman".
Later educational novels show that those in which the hero either fails, for example in Gottfried Keller's Der Grüne Heinrich , or in which the goal of education has become questionable, such as in Adalbert Stifter's Der Nachsommer, are often of higher literary quality . The parodistic Bildungsroman Heine Steenhagen wöll ju dat wiesen also belongs to the genre of negative educational novels! The story of an ambitious man (1925) by Friedrich Ernst Peters , who quotes Keller or other classics such as Wilhelm Raabe's Stopfkuchen and, as a bilingual Low German-High German work, is a novelty in the history of the genre.
Modern
A modern Bildungsroman, which refers directly to the tradition of the genre, is The short letter for the long farewell from Peter Handke , which appeared in 1972. Also in 1995 published novel Faserland of Christian Kracht and in some ways even elementary particles of Michel Houellebecq 's 1998 can be understood as a Bildungsroman.
In 2006, Hannes Anderer wrote with slight autobiographical echoes about his childhood and youth in Ostbelgien from 1934 to 1954. At its core, this is a confrontation with the prevailing Catholicism there and the departure from it in the form of a radical change in relation to the career plans of the Growing. As with Mann, the second book reproduces essential parts of the cultural history of the West.
literature
- Hans Heinrich Borcherdt : Bildungsroman. In: Reallexikon der deutschen Literaturgeschichte. 2nd edition 1958, Volume I, pp. 175-178
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel : Lectures on the aesthetics. Published by Friedrich Bassenge, Berlin 1955
- Jürgen Jacobs: Wilhelm Meister and his brothers. Studies on the German Bildungsroman. Wilhelm Fink Verlag, Munich 1972, ISBN 978-3-7705-0879-2 (2nd, unchanged edition 1983).
- Karl Morgenstern: The Bildungsroman . The two fundamental lectures on a globally used term. With afterword and bibliography. Eutin: Lumpeter & Lasel 2020. ISBN 978-3-946298-20-5 .
- Rolf Selbmann: The German Bildungsroman. Metzler, Stuttgart 1984, ISBN 978-3-476-10214-0 .
- Joseph Campbell: The Hero in a Thousand Figures . New edition: Insel, Frankfurt am Main 2011 (first edition 1953), ISBN 978-3-458-34256-4 (= Insel-Taschenbuch , volume 2556).
- Franco Moretti: The way of the world. The Bildungsroman in European Culture.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ↑ Ueber das Wesen des Bildungsromans, in: Inländisches Museum 1 (1820), issue 2, pp. 46-61, issue 3, pp. 13-27, here issue 2, p. 61
- ↑ a b c d Jürgen Jacobs: Wilhelm Meister and his brothers. Studies on the German Bildungsroman. Munich 1972, p. 271
- ↑ a b c Jürgen Jacobs: Wilhelm Meister and his brothers. Studies on the German Bildungsroman. Munich 1972, p. 14
- ↑ a b Rolf Selbmann: The German Bildungsroman. Stuttgart 1984, p. 39f.
- ^ Hans Heinrich Borcherdt: Bildungsroman. 1958, p. 177
- ^ Rolf Selbmann: The German Bildungsroman. Stuttgart 1984, p. 23
- ^ Rolf Selbmann: The German Bildungsroman. Stuttgart 1984, p. 2.
- ^ Rolf Selbmann: The German Bildungsroman. Stuttgart 1984, p. 37
- ^ Rolf Selbmann: The German Bildungsroman. Stuttgart 1984, p. 40
- ^ Rolf Selbmann: The German Bildungsroman. Stuttgart 1984, p. 27
- ^ A b Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel : Lectures on Aesthetics. Berlin 1955, pp. 557f.
- ^ Wilhelm Dilthey : The experience and the seal. Lessing, Goethe, Novalis, Holderlin. Four essays. Leipzig 1906, pp. 327-329
- ↑ Walther Killy: Literature Lexicon. Volume 13, p. 119
- ^ Preamble from Suhrkamp Taschenbuch 3369 1st ed. 2002
- ↑ Full text Heine Steenhagen wöll ju dat wiesen! The story of an ambitious one