"Alles, was uns begegnet, läßt Spüren zurück. Alles trägt unmerklich zu unserer Bildung bei." ("Everything we encounter leaves traces behind. Everything contributes imperceptibly to our education.") J.W. Goethe
Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1842) has long been viewed as one of Germany’s great cultural heroes. Arguably the greatest: a quintessential intellectual in a country that has historically prided itself on its tradition of writers, philosophers, scientists and musicians. He is, in other words, one of those dead white men that contemporary academic thought teaches us to regard with suspicion. But, in my opinion at least, Goethe has the advantage of being a great deal quirkier than your typical DWM. His rendition of Faust is a sprawling, rambling, unperformable mess—and it also happens to be fantastic. His novel Die Leiden des jungen Werthers (The Sorrows of Young Werther) was fueling teenage angst decades before The Catcher in the Rye. His total body of work is massive, and disregards all boundaries of genre, subject and style.
Goethe also happens to have been a huge fan of travel. He wrote extensively on the subject: the book Italienische Reise (“Italian Journey”) is a travelogue adapted from the journals he kept during his travels in Italy in his mid-thirties. In college, I dismissed this branch of Goethe’s work out of hand. The expoundings of a thirty-something German Romantic on the sublime beauties of the Italian Alps or the curious ways of quaint Italian village-folk seemed entirely irrelevant to my life as a young twenty-something in the twenty-first century. But now, on the verge of my own Deutsche Reise, I’m reevaluating my position and, with the help of that great boon to research, Google, I’ve turned up a couple of ideas worth pondering.
As I’ve said already, Goethe was a huge advocate for the merits of travel. Specifically, he believed strongly in the importance of travel as it pertains to Bildung. Bildung is one of those great German words, like Wissen, Dasein, Weltanschauung, the meaning of which the English translation— in this case, “education”— doesn’t quite capture. Education is in there, certainly, but it shares the stage with a sense of development (if you’re reading this with a solid grasp of basic literature vocabulary, you might remember Bildungsroman, which is translated in English to “novel of development”), and of experience. Just because we English-speakers don’t have a word for this phenomenon doesn’t mean that we don’t recognize it, don’t aspire to it. Thinking about myself and my friends—particularly those who were at Kenyon with me—it seems to me that what we’re all after, at least in part, is Bildung.
According to Goethe, the best opportunities for Bildung are to be found, not in tiny liberal arts colleges on hills in Ohio, but on the road. “Die beste Billdung findet ein gescheiter Mensch auf Reisen,” (“A clever person finds the best education in travel,”) he writes at one point in the novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. (I’ve already admitted that my primary research source on this subject has been Google, so I trust you won’t hold it against me when I tell you that I haven’t actually read this novel and therefore don’t know in what context this statement is made, by whom, or to what extent the reader is meant to take it seriously. I’ve graduated, I’m lazy, and I, like most people, have a fondness for snappy capsule-quotes that seem to say something meaningful about Life, the Universe, and Everything.) If I’m interpreting the opinions of Germany’s foremost Geistesmensch correctly, he believes that travel is important because it forces us into contact with different languages and foods, different ways of thinking and of doing things, different value systems and different points of view. In other words: Goethe, off in fuddy-duddy Dead White Man land, advocates travel for much the same reasons as our living, breathing college professors do when they urge us to study abroad. I can almost imagine Professor Goethe at a small liberal arts college today, in a tweed jacket with worn elbows, a rumpled, food-stained shirt and loosened tie, sitting in his book-cluttered office across from a bright-eyed undergrad and saying, “Go. Travel. See. Learn. It’s the best way to become a person.”
So that’s what I intend to do. It’s what programs like Fulbright are for, if you think about it: I’m going to see new things, hear new things, smell and touch and taste new things (in short: five senses, prepare to be rocked). I’m going to talk to new people whose backgrounds and perspectives differ radically from my own and, when it’s all said and done, the theory goes, I’ll a better person for it. While that may sound selfish and not suitably idealistic, I’m certainly not out to achieve world peace by teaching English in upper-class urban Frankfurt, and I think it would be much worse to claim that I was. I guess the idea is that I do ultimately do something with my gebildet-ness (though, like all good German abstracts, Bildung is a Platonic ideal, something not to achieve but to constantly strive toward). Something that—I don’t know—advances human understanding, makes the world a better place. But I’d be kidding myself if I claimed, at twenty-two, to know what that something might be.
Here’s a question to wrap up on, then: what does it mean to be gebildet in our increasingly globalized, ever-more fragmented twenty-first century world? In Goethe’s time, it meant a solid grasp of philosophy and science and language, and an appreciation for the finer things in life, like music and art and literature. But while those are all still noble pursuits, and things that any good Gebildete should try to attain, I think our modern world might call for more emphasis on other ideals, like cultural literacy or tolerance or progressiveness. These are the qualities the world might be in need of, going forward; and while it may not necessarily pay all that well to become gebildet, at least we can rest easy knowing that the world will never be short on idealistic young globe-trotters to follow Goethe's advice: “Die beste Bildung findet ein gescheiter Mensch auf Reisen.”
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