Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman (review)

Goethe Yearbook 285 closure, but nevertheless believes that the poet may point in the direction of enlightenment. The period of political reaction and repression after the abortive revolutions of 1848 stimulated a new interest in the league novel as a vehicle for postrevolutionary politics. Karl Gutzkow saw Die Ritter vom Geiste as a political Wilhelm Meister. The idea of a secret society in opposition to repressive authority gains an aura of moral legitimacy. In sharp contrast, Thomas Mann looked on the Freemasons as the embodiment of various forces that had undercut Germany in the First World War, and Der Zauberberg represented what Mann termed "an antiromantic disillusionment and a European call to life." (He added that "it is often read wrongly.") Mann tried to discredit Naptha, Peeperkorn, and Settembrini, echoing Goethe and Hofmannsthal on the lure of symbols of Freemasonry, while questioning their claim to transcendence. In the aftermath of the Nazi era, Günther Grass is also suspicious of the manipulation of symbols and rituals. While the narrators of Blechtrommel and Hundejahre are not specifically concerned with Freemasonry, they are cognizant of the power of symbols and secret societies in seeking political advantage. In discrediting his narrators Grass undercuts the promise of such symbols, thereby discrediting their claim of overcoming the past or neutralizing guilt. In his exploration of the semiotic tension between the sign and its promise, between the ambivalent claims of political neutrality and the political manipulation of ritual, Grass shares a concern common to Schiller, Goethe, Gutzkow, Hofmannsthal, Mann and others. For each the Freemasons and the league novel provided a powerful means for addressing the allure and the limits of symbols and their claims of closure. As Abbott shows, the influence of Freemasonry was not confined to the political sphere, but extended to the creation of a rich and suggestive body of fictions . Armstrong State College Thomas L. Cooksey Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman, ed. James N. Hardin. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 1991Roughly the first third of the essays in this collection are extremely helpful in conceptualizing the problems raised by the genre of the Bildungsroman. This grouping of theoretical studies examines such tensions as those between action and reflection (Hardin's introduction), the Nebeneinander of possible selves and the Nacheinander of linear time (Martin Swales), and the European novel of society and the German novel of inner life (Hartmut Steinecke). A couple of these contributions originally appeared in German (Fritz Martini, Steinecke), whereas others summarize or rehearse arguments presented elsewhere (Swales, Jeffrey L. Sammons, 286 Book Reviews Dennis F. Mahoney). Assembled together here, these essays provide a useful handbook to students and teachers alike. Along with the bibliography that closes the collection, they guide the interested reader to other relevant investigations. The rest of the book analyzes various canonical Bildungsromane from Wieland's Agathon (Michael Minden) to Christa Wolfs Kindheitsmuster (Michael Beddow). There are chapters devoted to the issue of Bildung in E.T.A. Hoffmann (James McGlathery) and Thomas Mann (Gerald Gillespie). Often, however, the impasses and contradictions reviewed in the opening essays are not taken up in the individual readings, as if inclusion in the canon automatically labeled these works as constituting the genre, with the result that much of the debate surrounding the viability of the generic label is not even broached. Those essays that do place the individual novel in terms of its tradition and explore the ensuing contradictions benefit from the juxtaposition. Thomas P. Saine, for instance, questions whether Wilhelm Meister achieves "the harmonious development of his talents and faculties that has been posited by so many interpreters of the novel" (132). Wulf Koepke powerfully suggests that Jean Paul's keen portrayal of actual conditions in Germany cannot be reconciled with the ideal of Bildung: "Bildung as a structural principle is not strong enough to hold [the components of Titan] together. If the story achieves unity, it is as the representation of the—in part tragic—downfall of the world of the eighteenth century" (251)· Gerhart Hoffmeister sees Ahnung und Gegenwart resembling less the Bildungsroman than the novel of spiritual development, whose prime examples include Parzival and Simplicissimus. Especially those essays that find the...