Hellmut Ammerlahn (review)

Abstract

MLR, 100.4, 2005 1145 well-researched individual contributions, the lack of a frame makes it difficultto see what the volume as a whole adds to an already vibrant scholarly scene. University College London Susanne Kord Imagination und Wirklichkeit: Goethes Kiinstler-Bildungsroman 'Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre'. Struktur, Symbolik, Poetologie. By Hellmut Ammerlahn. Wiirz? burg: Konigshausen & Neumann. 2003. 448pp. ?39.80. ISBN3-8260-2554-7. This large monograph represents the culmination of a career-long preoccupation with Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. It incorporates Ammerlahn's many substantial articles on the book, and integrates them into an overarching argument. The argument is that Goethe's novel is autobiographical. This is its secret. Following from this basic conviction, Ammerlahn argues that the Lehrjahre is multi-levelled, and that its real meaning is to be found not on the level of novelistic representation, but upon the symbolic one. Because Goethe was an artist (in the broad sense implied by the German word Kiinstler), Ammerlahn has to show that Wilhelm is one also. Obviously, this is dif? ficult, because on the level of the story he isn't, even though he once thought he was. Ammerlahn's main move in answer to this self-evident objection is a daring and seductive one: Mignon is an allegory of a work of art, produced by Wilhelm. She firstrepresents the emotional trauma of the Mariane episode, and then, through a series of stages which are finelydifferentiatedby Ammerlahn, becomes when dead an example of successful artistic Vergangenheitsbewaltigung(p. 314), the compensation fora psychological wound in the achievement of adequate artificial ('symbolic') form. The account of how Wilhelm brings the marionette Mignon to life by imbuing it/her with his own feeling is both persuasive as an allegory of poetic composition and con? vincingly supported by textual details. Ammerlahn's argument further depends upon the claim that all the other charac? ters are also functions ofthe symbolic representation of Wilhelm. Mignon, like other characters fromthe early parts ofthe book, is an externalizationof Wilhelm/Goethe's inner life. The evidently allegorical figuresof the later parts, Natalie, the 'Oheim', the Abbe, and so forth,are ways of representing the relation between Wilhelm/Goethe's inner life and the greater regularities of existence with which it resonates (Nature, Intellect, Taste, ete). But the larger regularities of life, as symbolized by the Society of the Tower, need Wilhelm as much as he needs them, because imagination, which he embodies as an artist, is an essential binding and animating agent. This can either mean that Wilhelm/Goethe as artists are shown findingtheir proper place in the world (a place which does not preclude Goethe from being a scientist, or Wilhelm a surgeon), or else it implies that we are all artists in a way, because we all have imagination to some extent or other. I am not sure which Ammerlahn intends. The basic flyin the ointment, however, is that Ammerlahn confuses talking about art with doing it. This is not something of which one can usually accuse Goethe (although he was not above producing platitudes about what art should be and do, some of which are quoted approvingly here, e.g. p. 318). In some sense, I believe that Ammerlahn does bring out Goethe's real intentions, especially by establishing so clearly the importance ofthe Italienische Reise forthe conception of the Lehrjahre, and by virtue also of many other quotations from elsewhere in Goethe on aesthetic matters. I think one can accept that the novel is a genuinely profound meditation on the relation between art?very broadly understood?and the ideal of humanity of the period. I accept that it is autobiographical (though in so broad a sense as to be either meaningless or obvious). Ammerlahn takes the?beautiful and moving? aesthetic-humane ideal of a time at which the reality of modernity was beginning to 1146 Reviews break upon the cultivated soul of Europe, and treats it as though (a) it were true and (b) Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre were an example of its successful realization in a work of art. Neither of these assumptions is tenable in my view. As to (a), Goethe's and Schiller's ideal for art as a secular religion is entirely...