Bildung and its Critique in Interwar Novels: a German-Italian Comparison

This thesis examines the problematic aspects of the Bildungsroman in interwar novels from German and Italian Literature, namely Massimo Bontempelli’s La vita intensa (Intense Life, 1920) and La vita operosa (Productive Life, 1921), Erich Kästner’s Fabian (1931), Irmgard Keun’s Das kunstseidene Mädchen (The Artificial Silk Girl, 1932) and Ada Capuana’s La città nuova (The New City, 1934). Engaging with Bildungsroman scholarship, I show that these novels reappraise the concept of Bildung and its ideological ramifications staging, within their specific national context, a tension between personal desire and society demands in the face of the complex process of modernization affecting Italian and German post-WWI society. This also involves an examination of how some of the motifs central to the genre, like the picaresque and the confessional, as well as the (arche)type of the Young Man and Young Woman from the Province, are reworked in the context of the city in the interwar years. My analysis highlights the ways in which these texts reappropriate, often ironically, an aesthetico-spiritual Bildung in the fight against institutionalized forms of self-cultivation in capitalist society, thus partaking in the modernist double gesture of recuperation and critique of Bildung. Moreover, the focus on the interweaving of gender and genre, shows how these novels problematize woman’s claim to Bildung in a period of changing gender roles, debunking common assumptions about women’s agency in patriarchal society. The emphasis on the open endings of most of these narratives aims at giving a new, more positive interpretation of these texts, challenging their common reading as anti-developmental narratives or as expression of the impasse dominating Europe and its literature in the sombre years between the two wars.