Individualitat in Goethes Wanderjahren

Abstract

Schwamborn, Claudia. Individualitat in Goethes Wanderjahren. Paderborn: Schoningh, 1997. 187 pp. DM 63.00 paperback Claudia Schwamborn's Individualitat in Goethes Wanderjahren is a decidedly modernist and predominantly ethical interpretation of Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. Despite its claim to problematize individuality, it neither considers alternative conceptions (e.g., a link in a chain of signifiers or an illusory manifestation of supra-individual forces or currents) nor takes up Goethe's point that Erscheinung und Entzweien sind synonym (Gedenkausgabe 17: 700.). The book mentions the Auswanderers' lamentation about the isolation of the individual (112) but, except in saying that Wilhelm is an outsider (165), does not explore this germane topic (see, by contrast, Heinz Politzer, No Man is an Island: A Note on Image and Thought in Goethe's Iphigenie, The Germanic Review 37 [1962]: 42-54). It does not question whether such an essence as unfractured individuality can be identified in its Einmaligkeit, Unverwechselbarkeit und Wurde (106) or how this is subject to Bildung (114-115-there is a discussion of Bild and Bildung, 144-47). Rather, it takes for granted that Goethe's novel both affirms the autonomy of its characters and addresses the stable if dynamic individuality of its readers, confronting them with multiple perspectives and challenging them to leben und sich [zu] entfalten (171). The primary issue for Schwamborn as for earlier students of the Wanderjahre, here explored on the basis of Blankertz's Die Geschichte der Padagogik (1982), is that of the claims of the individual versus those of society. Schwamborn's book is not about the problem of individuality alone, but also about the relationship between fiction and reality and the novel and the reader (58). It observes that at times the reader is drawn into the novel itself-made to wander with Wilhelm Meister-- though prevented, the author believes, from identifying with him (141). For much of the way, the unparticularized, almost impersonal Wilhelm of the Wanderjahre is recognized as a reader of the texts that are framed by the story of his travels. The painter whom Wilhelm meets in the Lago Maggiore episode knows Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, and Wilhelm knows the beautiful widow from reading Der Mann von funfzig Jahren (137). Schwamborn's dissertation announces its divergence from a still dominant view of the Wanderjahre as Roman der Gemeinschaf ten (11) according to which the work is said to narrate, in the categories of the Bildungsroman, the movement of a central character away from egocentrism and toward integration in a congenial group, to whose purposes, in an act of Entsagung, he learns to subordinate his own private desires. Schwamborn's thesis is die Wanderjahre Individualitat im Horizont des Epochenumbruchs um 1800 problema-- tisieren und diskutieren, und dass dieses Thema ein bedeutendes Ferment der Textstruktur ist (13). Quoting Clemens Lugowski and Hannah Arendt, she posits two types of individuality-that of the Daimon as described in Goethe's first Orphic Primal Word, then an individuality defined by a life trajectory and complete only when the life in question is over. The second is the operative schema in the Wanderjahre, the individuality of whose characters is ablesbar anhand ihrer einzigartigen Lebenskurve (14)-a trajectory that is dynamically interdependent with time and environment (= nature) and whose meaning is subjektives Konstrukt, eine psychische Notwendigkeit (91). The interdependence of life and nature is not simply told or shown in Goethe's novel. Rather, its characters and the reader meet with experiences and materials, e.g., texts in a variety of genres, which challenge them to erarbeiten their individuality (15). Materials for the reader to work through include the interpretations of the manifestly limited Redaktor, who makes a fiction out of the available shards and fragments (17). …