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Reviewed by:
  • Auswandern in die Moderne. Tradition und Innovation in Goethes Roman by Günter Saße
  • Ansgar Mohnkern
Auswandern in die Moderne. Tradition und Innovation in Goethes Roman Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre. Von Günter Saße. Berlin und Boston: de Gruyter, 2010. viii + 284 Seiten. €99,95.

Writing a book-length study on a novel that perniciously tends to exceed the limits of its form has always been an ambitious project. No doubt, Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre is one of these books. The resistance against most, if not all attempts to reach a firm ground from which Goethe’s last novel would appear in the light of coherence and continuity may paradoxically be considered one of the last continuities in the tradition of reading classical German literature. Like any critical intervention that is in search of such a firm ground, Günter Saße’s study faces elements of such resistance.

Like a quintessential statement about the guiding interest of a study on Goethe’s perhaps most unsettled literary venture, Saße soberly states: “Goethe gestaltet in den Wanderjahren den Übergangsprozeß von der traditionalen zur modernen Gesellschaft” (256). In an attempt to reconstruct this transformative process from a pre-modern to a modern world while also situating the novel in its historical context, the study elaborates on some of the most crucial passages of the novel. Saße’s book offers a reading of these passages in order to assess Goethe’s novel as a contribution for a better understanding of a historical period in which rapid and radical cultural, economic, political, intellectual, and certainly aesthetic transformation took place. For the purpose of making these transformations readable insofar as they are reflected in the Wanderjahre, the study offers chapters on the St. Joseph episode, on the pragmatically functional principles of the Pedagogical Province, on the narrative of Wilhelm Meister’s journey to the Lago Maggiore, on utilitarian elements of Wilhelm’s [End Page 146] position in the world as a doctor, on the editorially as well as hermeneutically ambivalent figure of Makarie, on the novel’s description of the weavers’ socioeconomically precarious existence on the eve of the industrial revolution, on functional-technocratic implications of Lenardo’s emigration project, and finally one that situates the novel within aesthetic debates in the light of relinquishing an emphatic idealist understanding of art in an increasingly functional, if not utilitarian, cultural and socio-political context.

Scholarly literature on the Wanderjahre could, at least in relation to the research on the Lehrjahre or on Faust, almost be considered manageable in its entirety. Along with other critical interventions in recent years, however, Saße’s study reflects an increasing interest in Goethe’s last prose project. Unlike others though, the author of this study chooses to focus almost exclusively on the novel itself. Therefore, its strength is clearly the patience and attention to detail with which it explores the multiplicity of voices in which the novel speaks as “kollektives Werk” (Eckermann on the Wanderjahre). Saße thus offers a detailed and informed discussion of a variety of aspects which are otherwise (too) often discussed only in isolation, while their function for the project of the Wanderjahre as a whole is partially neglected. Saße’s readable study provides one of the most comprehensive collections both of Goethe’s own material in and around the novel and of secondary literature (which is extensively dealt with in footnotes).

The study’s strength, however, simultaneously shades into its weaknesses. While the title promises the reconstruction of how the concept of wandering contains the idea of a historically teleological progress towards the goal ‘modernity,’ it remains unclear to what extent we have to take this modernity simply as a given entity into which the novel’s dynamics evolve. Offering a rather vague catalogue of criteria about what modernity actually is, in approaching the transformation from a pre-modern world to modernity the study sometimes loses a clear sense of the fact that this transformation may not necessarily be a goal-oriented operation, but one that simultaneously contains elements of divergence. These elements, for example, certainly include erratic and a-teleological movements of an incomplete, rather disruptive type...

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