| Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship | |
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Title page of first edition |
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| Author(s) | Johann Wolfgang von Goethe |
| Original title | Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre |
| Language | German |
| Genre(s) | Bildungsroman |
| Publisher | Johann Friedrich Unger (Berlin) |
| Publication date | 1795-1796 |
| Preceded by | Wilhelm Meister's Theatrical Calling (Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung) (1777-1785) |
| Followed by | Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years (Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre) (1821/1829) |
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship (German: Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre) is the second novel by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, published in 1795-96. While his first novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, featured a hero driven to suicide by despair, the eponymous hero of this novel undergoes a journey of self-realization. The story centers upon Wilhelm's attempt to escape what he views as the empty life of a bourgeois businessman. After a failed romance with the theater, Wilhelm commits himself to the mysterious Tower Society composed of enlightened aristocrats.
Further books patterned after this novel have been called Bildungsroman ("novels of formation"), despite the fact that Wilhelm's "Bildung" ("education", or "formation of character") is ironized by the narrator at many points.[1]
The novel has had a significant impact on European literature. Romantic critic and theorist Friedrich Schlegel judged it to be of comparable importance for its age as the French Revolution and the philosophy of Johann Gottlieb Fichte.
Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship represents one of the important moments in the eighteenth-century German reception of the dramas of William Shakespeare: the protagonist is introduced to these by the character Jarno, and extensive discussion of Shakespeare's work occurs within the novel's dialogues. Wilhelm and his theater group give a production of Hamlet, in which Wilhelm plays the lead role. Shakespeare's work had begun to be translated into German in the 1740s, and had attained tremendous popularity and influence in Germany by the end of the century.
Goethe's work on the novel begins in the 1770s. An early version of the work, unpublished during Goethe's lifetime, was discovered in the early twentieth century, and published under the title Wilhelm Meister's Theatrical Calling (Wilhelm Meisters theatralische Sendung). When the Apprenticeship was completed in the mid-1790s, it was to a great extent through the encouragement and criticism of Goethe's close friend and collaborator Friedrich Schiller that it took its final shape. Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre ("Wilhelm Meister's Journeyman Years"), the sequel to the Apprenticeship, was planned already in the 1790s, but did not appear in its first edition until 1821, and in its final form until 1829.
According to Andrew Crumey, "while Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship is billed as the classic coming-of-age tale, or Bildungsroman, it’s really far more than that: a story of education and disillusionment, a novel of ideas ranging across literature, philosophy and politics, a masterpiece that resists all pigeonholing."[2]
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The opera Mignon by Ambroise Thomas is based on Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.
The film The Wrong Move by Wim Wenders is a free adaptation of Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship.
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