Recycling Bildung: From the Humboldt-Forum to Humboldt and Back

This article addresses persistent attempts to rework and rehash the concept of Bildung since its Romantic-era inception.¹ The tendency for individuals and institutions to return to “classical” ideas of Bildung has been on show most recently in Berlin, with the 2010 two-hundred-year anniversary of the Humboldt University and the project to rebuild the Prussian Royal Palace on the Museum-sinsel, but it has also been a consistent feature of modes of scholarship and cultural representation throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Why and to what end do contemporary institutions recycle Romantic ideals and ideologies of Bildung? What is the significance of invocations of Bildung at various historical moments, both as establishment boilerplate and as oppositional points of leverage? I explore these questions by cycling back through several engagements with the concept, including Friedrich Nietzsche’s consideration of the fate of early nineteenth-century reforms, Wilhelm von Humboldt’s theory of Bildung as individual and philosophical-historical development, and the large-scale rebuilding of the Prussian Royal Palace and the housing of the “Humboldt-Forum” therein, a project that broke ground in the summer of 2013 (see Apin).

It goes without saying that the notion of Bildung is deeply implicated in German official culture, academic life, and national identity. On the one hand, this concept is closely tied to the emergence of the modern research university. A certain dominant account of the history of the German university relies on narratives of continuity between the contemporary institutional framework and the emphatic notion of Bildung from the reform period around 1810. Not surprisingly, narratives of discontinuity between the present and a “classical,” Hum-boldtian past also proliferate: the ideal of individual or collective Bildung is unrealizable in the modern university, so the argument goes, due to specialization and disciplinary differentiation, the fact that so-called Humboldtian ideals were never implemented in the first place (see Paletschek), or recent misguided reforms that have bureaucratized every last bit of freedom, individual self-exploration, and spontaneity out of higher education. It is characteristic of the continuity narrative, however, that it sets in motion what might be called a recycling or recursive² operation, for reflections on Bildung and its institutional articulations involve turning back the Romantic-era ideas, texts, and leading figures and thereby generating new interpretations of the original theoretical formations and their implications. Again, this structure of repetition and reworking can be valued in different ways, depending on whether one sees Bildung more as ideal or ideology.

Furthermore, it would seem that these historical recyclings themselves mirror certain cyclical patterns and structures at work in visions of the notions of Bildung itself, including on the levels of philosophical concept, literary form, and institutionalized knowledge production.³ In philosophical writings, Bildung is described as a developmental dynamic that depends on the catalyzing interrelation of subject and object. Wilhelm von Humboldt, G. W. F. Hegel, and others suggest that Bildung is implicated at the deepest levels in the constitution of self-consciousness as a structure of relationality between individual and world. Literary narratives that employ related conceptions of Bildung such as the Bildungsroman likewise use to great effect structures of repetition and return to depict individual development.⁴ And from an institutional-historical perspective, the theory of Bildung emergent around 1800 might well be described as a reconceptualization of long-standing practices of classical scholarship. Much of the theorization of Bildung in secondary and higher education at this time emerged out of the reworking of the humanistic curriculum via Idealist philosophy and nascent notions of disciplinarity or Wissenschaft. Seen in terms of patterns of reworking and returning, humanistic Gelehrsamkeit has always been about the recapitulation of the classical past. In turn, it is fascinating that modern disciplinary consciousness emerged in good part by reworking Altertumswissenschaft while at the same time applying this reworking to other disciplines not related to antiquity (see La Vopa).

Taking such philosophical, literary, and historical patterns of repetition and return as a point of departure, I want to suggest that one thing that unifies these various aspects of Bildung is...