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The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: 'Bildung' from Humboldt to Thomas Mann
In a lecture in 1923, Thomas Mann said that the ordinary middle-class German had never considered culture to include an interest in politics, and still did not do so. The idea of the true freedom which comes to the man who lives as much as possible in the invisible world of culture and accepts as a kind of fate his social, political and material circumstances was indeed at the heart of the German idealism of Goethe's day, and unworldliness went along with very great achievements in literature, scholarship and philosophy. Bildung, self-cultivation, came to be as natural a requirement of educated, middle-class life as sport was in England. In this book, originally published in 1975, Professor Bruford provides a sequel to Culture and Society in Classical Weimar 1775鈥�1806 and shows how the ideal of self-cultivation entered into the thought of a number of highly individual German philosophers, theologians, poets and novelists, each in his own corner of the rapidly changing world of the nineteenth century.
- GenresGermany
304 pages, Paperback
First published March 28, 1975
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December 1, 2016
Thomas Mann lectured in 1923:
The finest characteristic of the typical German, the best known and also the most flattering to his self-esteem, is his inwardness. It is no accident that it was the Germans who gave to the world the intellectually stimulating and very humane literary form which we call the novel of personal cultivation and development. [ed: the Bildungsroman] Western Europe has its novel of social criticism, to which the Germans regard this other type as their own special counterpart; it is at the same time an autobiography, a confession. The inwardness, the culture ['Bildung'} of a German implies introspectiveness; an individualistic cultural conscience; consideration for the careful tending, the shaping, deepening and perfecting of one's own personality or, in religious terms for the salvation and justification of one's own life; subjectivism in the things of the mind, therefore, a type of culture that might be called pietistic, given to autobiographical confession and deeply personal, one in which the world of the objective, the political world, is felt to be profane and is thrust aside with indifference....(p. vii)
Bruford's aim is to find out whether this inward-lookingness is somehow inherently defective, and whether it reveals "itself before it was put to the supreme test in the Second and Third Reichs". To put it crudely, perhaps educated Germans were so busy looking in that they couldn't be bothered to look out, or to make judgments about or take action on the political developments around them. His research involves studying aspects of Bildung in at least one major work from various German writers, thinkers, philosophers: the letters of Wilhelm von Humboldt; Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre and Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre by Goethe; Friedrich Schleiermacher's Monologen; Arthur Schopenhauer's Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit; Adalbert Stifter's novel Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer); Friedrich Theodor Vischer's novel Auch Einer; Nietzsche's Also Sprach Zarathustra; Theodor Fontane's novel Frau Jenny Treibel; and Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. The final chapter is a discussion of Mann's The Conversion of an Unpolitical Man.
What is a Bildungsroman?
In a typical 'Bildungsroman' we are shown the development of an intelligent and open-minded young man in a complex, modern society without generally accepted values; he gradually comes to decide, through the influence of friends, teachers and chance acquaintances as well as the ripening of his own intellectual and perhaps artistic capacities and interests as his experience in these fields grows, what is best in life for him and how he intends to pursue it. We see him learning to deal with the common problems of personal and social relationships, acquiring a point of view in practical matters and above all a 'Weltanschauung', a lay religion or general philosophy of life, or perhaps one after another. Adventurous episodes may be introduced by the author to maintain interest, but in general there is enough variety if the hero meets well contrasted friends in different social milieux, and of course falls in love with more than one kind of girl, some appealing to his senses and some to his mind. The novel usually ends when he has attained to some degree of maturity, and what he does with his life later is not revealed to us. There is often a large autobiographical element in such novels, so the favourite hero is a writer or artist, not a man of action. (p. 29-30.)
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