Imagination und Wahrheit: Goethes Künstler-Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Struktur, Symbolik, Poetologie (review)

Goethe Yearbook 221 Faust story in other media such as painting (e.g., Delacroix) or film (e.g., Murnau) are irrelevant to the myth's history. But if Kreutzer's account leaves its own overall structure and central terms under-examined, it provides a detaUed and engaging discussion of Goethe's Faust as a kind of pre-musical composition; and it usefully situates in historical relation to each other a series of additional literary and musical texts that have occupied themselves with the Faust story, and some of which are Ukely to be unfamiliar to many of Kreutzer's readers. The narrower Kreutzer's focus, the more satisfying the results. The book offers productive insights Ui its examination and comparison of individual works, and may provoke others to think more about the relation between the Faust story and the particular media in which it has been represented. Rutgers University Nicholas Rennte HeUmut Ammerlahn, Imagination und Wahrheit: Goethes KünstlerBildungsroman Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Struktur, Symbolik, Poetologie. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2003.448 pp. Hellmut Ammerlahn's Imagination und Wahrheit: Goethes KünstlerBildungsroman 'Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre] a "symbolische und psychomorphologische Deutung" of one of Goethe's most ambitious prose works, draws on the author's broad knowledge both of Goethe's ltfe, art and science and his command of the critical literature on all aspects of Goethe's work. Ammerlahn knows the Theatralische Sendung and the Wanderjahre as well as he knows the Lehrjahre and cross-references these works and other parts of the Goethean oeuvre in Uluminating ways. His survey of Goethe's views on the creative imagination and on such matters as the relationship between intuition, knowledge and faith, as well as on the analogy between religious awakening and the artistic or scientific apprehension of an essential insight or a higher Anschauung (238),λ is subtle and instructive. Not just one book among others in the voluminous secondary literature, Imagination und Wahrheit is a learned, thoughtful and persuasive exposition that future Goethe scholarship wUl always take into account. Ammerlahn knows that the characters and events in Goethe's novel are far more than figures and conflicts in a realistic tale or "picture and criticism of society" and shows that as elements in a complex tapestry of wholeness—for Goethe is "einer der frühen Pionere des modernen Ganzheitsdenkens" (12)— they symbolize the world as it is, as it ought to be, and as it might stand a chance of becoming.The Lehrjahre, in Ammerlahn's view, is a "BUdungsroman des denkenden imaginativen Dichters," an "innere Autobiographie" (38, 415), of its author, for whom WUhelm serves as an "Eben- and Abbild" (369), elsewhere , a "BUdungsroman des Künstlers" (59, 177), or a "BUdungs- und Künstlerroman" (189) and a product of Goethe's classical period. According to Ammerlahn, WUhelm Meister progresses from subjectivity and narcissism over detours such as Wilhelm's theatrical career and bumpy roads— "BUdungsstufen" (199,200)—to self-knowledge and mastery as an artist and a constructive member of society2 who knows that art is rooted in, but different from nature, "eine andere Natur" (374, 411). As in Dichtung und Wahrheit, the protagonist's development portrays the "Meisterwerdung des Menschen und Dichters" (l6l, 376) or the "Meisterwerdung der künstlerischen 222 Book Reviews EinbUdungskraft" (269). The plot of the Lehrjahre moves from WUhelm's loss of his beloved Mariane toward the "Neugewinnung einer durchdachten, ausgebUdeten und wohlbegründeten Ganzheit" (13). It is informed, then, by the figure of the spiral, of which we know Goethe to be fond3 and which M. H. Abrams, in Natural Supernaturalism, discerns in every Romantic narrative , including Wordsworth's Prelude, Hegel's Phenomenology of the Spirit, and HölderUn's Hyperion—a revolution from original innocence toward an extreme of loss and alienation and back to wholeness but in a higher "durchdachten , ausgebildeten und wohlbegründeten" Form. "Einheit, Zwiespalt und höhere Synthese" is the trajectory (15), mirrored in the loss and eventuaUy the recovery of WUhelm's grandfather's Italian art collection, of, Ui particular, by the picture of "der kranke Königssohn," to which WUhelm at first resonated only because of its content, but from which, as "der genesende Königssohn...