The German Genius

favor of sorts. There is no question that, as a novel, as a story, Wilhelm Meister was not only a masterpiece: it was also the first of a genre, a particularly German genre, which became known as Bildungsroman .
    A Bildungsroman is typically a novel of ideas. William Bruford, professor of German at Cambridge after World War II, devoted an entire book to the German Bildungsroman, in which he shows that Goethe’s model was followed by many others in Germany. Here is his definition of the form: “[W]e are shown the development of an intelligent and open-minded young man in a complex modern society without generally accepted values…We see him acquiring a point of view but above all a ‘ Weltanschauung ,’ a lay religion or general philosophy of life…In a Bildungsroman the centre of interest is not the hero’s character or adventures or accomplishments in themselves, but the visible link between his successive experiences and awareness of worthy models and his gradual achievement of a fully rounded personality and well tested philosophy of life.” 34 It is a journey inward as much as forward.
    In Goethe’s story, Wilhelm is born into a bourgeois family and, as his adventures go by, he comes to understand the limitations of his original existence as a “carefully brought-up son” in the middle classes. He lives for a time among theater people, engrossed by the charm of their spontaneity; elsewhere, he is introduced to “the lesser talents” of being a gentleman, talents that are mainly negative—a gentleman “does not show his feelings,” he understates everything, he never hurries; later, Goethe has Wilhelm wounded in an attack by armed bandits. Through it all, he meets a raft of women—older women, capricious women, women from a higher social class. He observes which men are successful with the opposite sex and what their secret is. 35 He immerses himself in the works of Shakespeare, discovering a rich world he never knew existed. Eventually, he marries a woman from a large family and—part of the point of the book—begins to achieve a measure of control over, and understanding of, his life.
    Goethe had a serious aim. He had told Caroline Herder that he had lost his belief in divine powers in the summer of 1788 and the purpose of life, when there is no god, he is saying in the book, is to become , to become much more than one was. 36 “The ultimate meaning of our humanity is that we develop that higher human being within ourselves, which emerges if we continually strengthen our truly human powers, and subjugate the inhumane.” 37 Some non-Germans have found it too much. Henry Sidgwick, the Cambridge-based late nineteenth-century philosopher, is said to have reprimanded a German visitor who observed there was no word in English equivalent to “ gelehrt ” (cultivated). “Oh yes there is, we call it a prig.”
    Goethe’s most famous masterpiece, however, and this is true both inside and outside Germany, is Faust. This, “the most characteristic product of his genius,” was written at intervals over sixty years, in four bursts of creative energy. 38 It was by no means a new story, being a well-known medieval legend, made into a play by Christopher Marlowe, though Goethe wasn’t aware of Marlowe’s work until he had written more than half of his own version. 39
    The legend may even be grounded in fact. There was a Georg Faust alive at the turn of the sixteenth century who wandered through central Europe claiming to possess recondite forms of knowledge which gave him special healing powers. After his death he gradually acquired a slight change of name and an academic title, as Dr. Johannes Faustus, a professor at Wittenberg. In his lectures, he was alleged to “conjure up at will” personages from classical Greece, and he was notorious too for allegedly playing tricks on both the pope and the emperor. There was a price to pay for this license and in his case it was said that he had agreed to “a term” of twenty-four years with the devil, whereupon his body would be “torn to pieces by demons.” Faust was often featured in puppet plays, which is where Goethe may have encountered the story as a child. 40
    According to the legend, Faust becomes disillusioned with the many forms of secret knowledge he has tried out, and the devil, Mephistopheles, makes a wager with God that he can tempt Faust into his world. Mephistopheles sees to it that, in the course of his researches into magic and