Oldal 109 [109]
RITUAL AND THEATRICALITY
IN GOETHE’S WILHELM MEISTER
——~<~o»—___
JENNIFER A. HERDT
As Goethe’s character Wilhelm Meister outgrows his aspirations to a life in
the theater, so the novel Wilhelm Meister asks whether the formative powers
of drama, and with it ritual, have been outgrown in the prosaic world of mo¬
dernity. Taking its point of departure from the ritual scene in which the Tower
Society reveals itself to Wilhelm, this essay will argue that even as Goethe seeks
to write a novel capable of serving as “secular scripture,” he wrestles with the
question of the role of ritual for the modern individual, tasked with taking
responsibility for his own self-formation.
Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship is a novel that reflects extensively
on the theater and at a key turning point incorporates a ritual, upon which it
then reflects.! In part, the novel is taking stock of the relative significance for
ethical formation — Bildung, the ethical formation of modern, mature human
individuals — of theater on the one hand and the novel on the other.’ It is also
asking whether Kunstreligion — the religion of Art — can and should replace
inherited religions, and what place ritual might have in Kunstreligion.* As
Goethe’s character Wilhelm Meister outgrows his aspirations to a life in the
1 This essay is a modified version of portions of chapters 5 and 6 of Jennifer Herdt: Forming
Humanity: Redeeming the German Bildung Tradition, Chicago, University of Chicago Press,
2019.
Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship was hailed as an exemplary Bildungsroman; it
was published in 1795, just as Schiller launched Die Horen, a literary journal in which Goethe
was a key collaborator; it was a moment in which literature, and the novel in particular, was
seen as playing a key role in the project of aesthetic education, itself envisioned as a path to
political maturity and emancipation. See Herdt: Forming Humanity, 133-155; Todd Kontje:
Private Lives in the Public Sphere: The German Bildungsroman as Metafiction, University
Park (Pa.), Penn State University Press, 1992, 3-9; Todd Kontje: The German Bildungsroman:
History ofa National Genre, Columbia (S.C.), Camden House, 1993, 5-6; Rolf Selbmann (ed.):
Zur Geschichte des deutschen Bildungsromans, Vol. 640 of Wege der Forschung, Darmstadt,
Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1988, 64-66.
On Kunstreligion, see Herdt: Ibid., 121-122; Wolfgang Braungart: Literatur und Religion in
der Moderne, Paderborn, Fink, 2016, 200; Dorothea E. von Mücke: The Practices of the En¬
lightenment. Aesthetics, Authorship, and the Public, New York, Columbia University Press,
2015, 65.
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