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JENNIFER A. HERDT
When Goethe picked up work on Wilhelm Meister nearly a decade later, he
retained but extensively reworked the material from the original sketch in
Wilhelm Meister’s Theatrical Mission, which now helps to make up the first
five books of Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship. Thus, Wilhelm’s involvement
with theater remains a strong element in the novel, even if its significance for
the whole is transformed; it becomes, as for Anton Reiser, more an avenue for
self-realization than for public transformation.
As Wilhelm writes to his friend Werner, “Even as a youth I had the vague
desire and intention to develop [auszubilden] myself fully, myself as I am.”®
Now the means have become more evident. A focus on personal formation and
cultivation [“eine ... allgemeine ... personelle Ausbildung”] is possible only
for the nobility; the middle classes are expected to be useful (HA 7.5.3, 291, E
175). No one asks who he is, but only what he has; his capacities, insights, and
knowledge are means to external ends, not organic components of a personal
whole. Irresistibly drawn to the kind of harmonious development [Ausbildung]
of his nature denied to him by his social class, Wilhelm finds it possible only
in the world of theater.
This ideal of harmonious personal development has often been lifted out of
its Book 5 context as a clear statement of Goethe’s own conception of Bildung.
Certainly, it echoes Schiller’s complaints about the mechanical, instrumen¬
talized character of bourgeois existence and his vision of aesthetic education
as therapy. But it has also rightly been noted that this ideal, as grasped and
expressed by Wilhelm at this point, still betrays his own naiveté and a certain
superficiality. For Wilhelm dwells on particulars such as the nobleman’s “for¬
mal grace” and “relaxed elegance,” his sonorous voice and measured manner
(HA 7.5.3, 290, E 174). He himself has made progress in self-cultivation by
devoting himself to physical exercise and overcoming his physical awkward¬
ness, to training his voice and speech so as to become presentable as a public
person." Such preoccupations with external appearances are placed incongru¬
® Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, in E. Trunz (ed.): Goethes Werke:
Hamburger Ausgabe in 14 Banden, Vol.7, Hamburg, Christian Wegner, 1950, 68; reprinted
Munich, Beck, 1981, Vol. 7.5.3, 290; Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, trans. Victor Lange
— Eric A. Blackall (eds.), Princeton (N.J.), Princeton University Press, 1995, 174 (subsequent
references are given parenthetically to HA 7 and E).
° Bruford: Self-Cultivation, 37.
“Goethe one last time caught the reflection of the representative publicness whose light, of
course, was refracted in the French rococo court and refracted yet again in its imitation by
the petty German princes,” Jiirgen Habermas: The Structural Transformation of the Public
Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger, Cambridge (Mass.), The MIT Press, 1989, 13. Habermas focuses
on the contrast between nobility as displaying or embodying authority in his cultivated per¬
sonality, and the bourgeois need to prove oneself through making, production: “the nobleman
was what he represented; the bourgeois, what he produced.” However, what Wilhelm yearns
for is a “freely self-actualizing personality” that he thinks at this point is to be found among
the nobility, as opposed to the bourgeois, but which he must learn is in fact yet-to-be realized;
it is a matter not simply of appearing but of being a certain way.
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