Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship

• 1. Introduction

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  Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship opens with a woman pretending to be awake. The actress Mariane sits in her dressing room, ignoring a stack of presents from the wealthy businessman Norberg, due to arrive in fourteen days, while she waits for the young man she actually loves. That young man is Wilhelm Meister, a merchant's son with poor prospects and an obsession with the theater. When Wilhelm finally arrives, the reader has already glimpsed the knot at the heart of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's second novel: a world where feeling and practical life refuse to sit still in their separate compartments.

  Published in 1795 and 1796, the novel spans eight books and tracks Wilhelm from his adolescent puppet-theater dreams to something far harder to name. It gave European literature the template for what critics would come to call the Bildungsroman, the novel of formation. Yet the scholar Andrew Crumey would later argue that this label undersells it: the book is, he wrote, a story of education and disillusionment, a novel of ideas ranging across literature, philosophy, and politics, one that resists all pigeonholing. Friedrich Schlegel, writing in the same decade the book appeared, placed it alongside the French Revolution and the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte as one of the defining forces of the age.

  What does it take to actually grow up? That question drives the eight books ahead. And threaded through the answer is a puppet show, a mysterious Amazon on horseback, a secret society, and the ghost of William Shakespeare.

• 2. A Childhood Built of Cardboard

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  Everything begins with a Christmas puppet show. Wilhelm's mother put it on twelve years before the novel's opening, staging the biblical play David and Goliath for the household. For the young Wilhelm, watching from the audience was not enough. He sneaked into the pantry, stole the playbook, memorized every part, and pestered his parents with private performances until a lieutenant gave him a chance to participate in a real staging. Wilhelm dropped his Jonathan puppet during the performance, but he never lost his grip on the dream.

  By the time Wilhelm was fourteen, his family was grooming him for commerce, which his adolescent heart, as Goethe writes, could not bear. He composed a poem in which the Muse of Tragedy argued with a figure of Commerce for possession of his soul. When he discovers Gottsched's "The German Stage," he devours it, always preferring the fifth acts. The detail is precise and a little comic: Wilhelm is drawn to endings before he understands beginnings.

  His infatuation with Mariane lives inside this same theater-world. He tells her his stories about the puppet shows while she falls asleep. He is so blissfully unaware of her drowsiness that Goethe uses it as a gentle joke at the dreamer's expense. The romantic disaster that follows, when a hidden note from Norberg falls from Mariane's scarf, shatters Wilhelm's first illusion. He burns his theater manuscripts and submerges himself in his father's business. The next time a stage beckons, he will have lost Mariane entirely.

• 3. The Road and Its Company

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  On a business trip, Wilhelm detours through the small village of Hochdorf to watch factory workers perform a play. The detour is the first sign that commerce will never hold him. In the next town he finds two remnants of a traveling world: a troupe of acrobats and the scattered members of a theater company. Among the acrobats is the androgynous child Mignon, whom Wilhelm buys from her cruel manager. Among the theater people are Philine and Laertes, who become his companions for the road.

  Mignon is one of the novel's most haunting figures. Her song for the zither, "Kennst du das Land?" (Do you know the land?), which she sings for Wilhelm in Book Three, hints at an Italian origin she cannot fully explain. Her egg dance moves Wilhelm so deeply that he resolves on the spot to treat her as his own child. Later, readers learn she is the daughter of Sperata and Augustin, the Harper, who are themselves siblings, a revelation that colors every earlier scene with tragedy. Mignon's mysterious suffering made her one of the most painted characters of the nineteenth century. Schadow and Bouguereau both depicted her; Scheffer's Mignon desires her fatherland became widely known.

  The Harper himself is another figure who trails catastrophe. He travels with Wilhelm's troupe convinced that an inexorable fate pursues him. Wilhelm must talk him into staying, promising to keep him close. The old man's ballads lift the spirits of everyone around him, even as his own spirit darkens. When a fire breaks out later and the Harper turns threatening toward the child Felix, it is Mignon who intervenes. The road keeps offering Wilhelm new dependents, new obligations, and new reasons why the theater alone cannot sustain a life.

• 4. Shakespeare and the Stage

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  Jarno, a mysterious officer attached to a prince's court, delivers the book that changes Wilhelm's intellectual life. He presses Shakespeare on Wilhelm during the troupe's residence at a count's castle, and Goethe describes the effect in physical terms: Wilhelm was seized, as one would expect, by the torrent of a great genius, which swept toward a limitless ocean in which he completely lost and forgot his own self.

  Shakespeare's work had begun reaching German readers in the 1740s, and by the end of the eighteenth century it had become a cultural force in Germany. Goethe himself had given a speech in celebration of Shakespeare's genius on the 14th of October 1771, in Frankfurt, with a simultaneous celebration held in Strasbourg. In the novel, he has his narrator remark that Wilhelm rejoiced the more that his name was Wilhelm, acknowledging Shakespeare as a namesake, friend, and godfather.

  The production of Hamlet that Wilhelm's troupe eventually stages is the practical culmination of this obsession. To get it onto the stage, Wilhelm delivers a detailed exegesis of Hamlet's character, arguing for a studious reading of the full text to reconcile contradictions and penetrate the author's mind. He simplifies the play's external circumstances at Serlo's insistence. A mysterious note promises that a Ghost will appear at the appointed hour. It does. The performance is a success, but the theater company's internal feuds and the audience's uncultured responses to Hamlet leave Wilhelm exhausted. Success on stage does not translate into a coherent life off it.

• 5. The Women Who Instruct Him

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  Aurelie is the actress who understands Wilhelm's poetic insight while openly mocking his judgment about people. She is Serlo's sister, the mother of a three-year-old son, and a woman still undone by a man named Lothario, whose influence once reinvigorated her hope for the German public and nation. She tells Wilhelm her life story in fragments, breaking off mid-sentence, picking it up days later. At one point she pulls out a dagger and slashes his hand.

  Before she dies, Aurelie places into Wilhelm's hands a manuscript called "Confessions of a Beautiful Soul." This text forms the entirety of Book Six. It is the spiritual autobiography of a woman, later revealed to be the aunt of Natalie, Lothario, and Friedrich, who moves through illness, religious seeking, and moral introspection toward a deeply personal pietistic Christianity. She renounces worldly vanities and finds peace in a direct relationship with God. Wilhelm reads it and reflects on his own life.

  Natalie herself appears first as "the Amazon," a figure on horseback who rides up to the injured Wilhelm with a surgeon in her company, strips off her coat to cover him, and then vanishes. Wilhelm spends his entire convalescence replaying her face. He later notes a resemblance between her and the countess, who is in fact her sister. When he finally meets Natalie in Book Eight, on Lothario's estate, the recognition is total. She is the figure his imagination had already built. The novel places these women not as distractions from Wilhelm's education but as its actual substance.

• 6. The Tower Society's Hidden Hand

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  Jarno had been steering Wilhelm away from the theater long before Wilhelm understood the plan. The Tower Society, a secret organization dedicated to the moral and practical education of its members, had been subtly guiding Wilhelm's development for years. When Wilhelm finally enters their circle in Book Seven, he meets Lothario, the Abbé, and Jarno together, and they explain that the formation they have been overseeing is nearly complete.

  The revelation that Felix is Wilhelm's son, born to Mariane, who died in poverty after Wilhelm left her without knowing she was pregnant, arrives at the same moment. Wilhelm had abandoned Mariane because he did not know she had broken off her relationship with Norberg. The Tower Society delivers both the child and the truth simultaneously. Wilhelm accepts responsibility for Felix.

  The Society's philosophy is the novel's counterpoint to the theater. True self-realization, they argue, comes not through art or solitary striving but through active engagement in the world, renunciation of selfish desires, and service to a greater whole. The narrator ironizes Wilhelm's "Bildung" at multiple points throughout the eight books; the Tower Society's verdict is that his real education was always happening off-stage. Friedrich Schlegel was writing from inside the same cultural moment when he ranked the novel alongside the French Revolution as a defining event of its era.

• 7. A Century of Settings

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  Mignon's song "Kennst du das Land?" became one of the most set texts in the German Lied repertoire. Beethoven composed four settings of "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt" in 1808, gathered as WoO. 134. Franz Schubert set eight poems from the novel, several of them more than once; his Gesänge aus Wilhelm Meister, Op. 62, dating from 1826, are among the most frequently performed.

  Robert Schumann felt a particular affinity for the book. He set "Kennst du das Land" in his Lieder-Album für die Jugend, Op. 79, and in 1849 composed the Lieder und Gesänge aus Wilhelm Meister, Op. 98a, which takes that same song as its opening and sets all but one of the remaining poems in the novel. Also in 1849 he completed the Requiem for Mignon, Op. 98b, a tragic choral work with orchestra setting the passage from Book Eight that describes Mignon's funeral. The two works share an Opus number.

  Ambroise Thomas's opera Mignon, composed in 1866, brought the story to the lyric stage. Three years after that, Tchaikovsky's Op. 6 Romances included "None but the Lonely Heart," setting a Russian translation of the novel's "Nur wer die Sehnsucht kennt." Later composers to set poems from the book include Wolf, Medtner, Reisenauer, and Damrosch. Two films titled Mignon appeared in 1915 and 1922. The best-known screen adaptation is Wim Wenders's The Wrong Move, with a screenplay by Peter Handke and starring Rüdiger Vogler, a free adaptation that carries the novel's questions about self-realization into a modern German landscape. Schopenhauer, writing in his Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit, called Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship one of the four immortal romances, describing it as an intellectual novel of a higher order than the rest.