The german tradition of self-cultivation: 'Bildung' from Humboldt to Thomas Mann

In a lecture in 1923, Thomas Mann said that the ordinary middle-class German had never considered culture to include an interest in politics, and still didnot do so. The idea of the true freedom which comes to the man who lives as much as possible in the invisible world of culture and accepts as a kind of fate his social, political and material circumstances was indeed at the heart of the German idealism of Goethe’s day, and unworldliness went along with very great achievements in literature, scholarship and philosophy. Bildung, self-cultivation, came to be as natural a requirement of educated, middle-class life assport was in England. In this book, originally published in 1975, Professor Bruford provides a sequel to Culture and Society in Classical Weimar 1775–1806 and shows how the ideal of self-cultivation entered into the thought of a number of highly individual German philosophers, theologians, poets and novelists,each in his own corner of the rapidly changing world of the nineteenth century. INDICE: Acknowledgements; Introduction; 1. Wilhelm von Humboldt in his letters; 2. Goethe: Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (1795–6); 3. Friedrich Schleiermacher: Monologen (1801); 4. Goethe: Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre (1829); 5. Arthur Schopenhauer: Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit (1851); 6. Adalbert Stifter: Der Nachsommer (1857); 7. Friedrich Theodor Vischer: Auch Einer (1879); 8. Freidrich Nietzsche: 'Also sprach Zarathustra' (1883–5); 9. Theodor Fontance: Frau Jenny Treibel (1892); 10. Thomas Mann: Der Zauberberg (1924); 11. The conversion of an unpolitical man; Conclusion; Notes; Bibliography; Index.

• ISBN: 978-0-521-12900-8
• Editorial: Cambridge University
• Encuadernacion: Rústica
• Páginas: 304
• Fecha Publicación: 22/04/2010
• Nº Volúmenes: 1
• Idioma: Inglés