On the Nature of the Bildungsroman

is often used innocuously, to refer to almost any novel that focuses on the development of a young protagonist, matters look rather different in the more secluded world of academic german departments. here, the Bildungsroman is the object of fierce debates that illustrate how even such arcane fields as classificatory genre studies tenuously float on ideological undercurrents. The word was introduced to popular usage by Wilhelm dilthey in Poetry and Experience (1906), though he had already used the term in the earlier life of schleiermacher (1870), a book that fittingly appeared on the eve of german unification under bismarck. in Poetry and Experience, dilthey argued that the Bildungsroman was a distinctively german achievement, a product of unique political circumstances and an antithesis of the french and en glish novels of social realism. This claim was repeated with increasing nationalistic fervor by Thomas mann and others during the time of the first World War and became, in due course, an ideological commonplace of the Third reich. after 1945, a younger generation of scholars eager to break with the sins of the past drew conclusions that were the inverse of dilthey’s but retained his basic premise: suddenly, the Bildungsroman was regarded as a literary symptom of the german sonderweg, the separate path into modernity that had paved the way for fascism.1 This is the background that one needs to keep in mind if one wishes to understand the importance of fritz martini’s 1961 discovery that dilthey, though he popularized the term, by no means invented it. This honor belongs, rather, to Karl morgenstern (1770–1852), a professor of aesthetics at the university of dorpat (now Tartu in estonia), who first used the new name in public in 1819, in a lecture called “on the nature of the Bildungsroman” (“Uber das Wesen des bildungsromans”).2 This lecture, delivered at a provincial university and then published in an equally provincial journal a year later, had little immediate impact, and, while martini argues that goethe criticism in translation