SOURCE: “Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre: An Apprenticeship toward the Mastery of Exactly What?” in Colloquia Germanica, Vol. 30, No. 2, 1997, pp. 99-119.

In the following essay, Ammerlahn discusses Wilhelm's process of mastering his creative imagination in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre.

Some 200 years after the publication of Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, the high regard for Goethe's most influential novel as well as the arguments over its central meaning are thriving unabated.¹ The majority of knowledgeable authors and critics, from Schiller to James Joyce and Thomas Mann, from Friedrich Schlegel to Dilthey and Lukács, are united in their praise of this work. As the artistic pinnacle of Goethe's classical period and as the best known embodiment of the ambiguous prose genre, Bildungsroman, this novel according to Hermann Hesse “ist … Vorbild und Ideal geblieben, hundertmal nachgeahmt, studiert, umgefühlt [worden], nie wieder erreicht …”²

Beyond such unison of acclamation, however, uncertainty abounds.³ Even the most...