The Artist Unbound: Tieck's Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen (1798)

The Literary Appropriation of the Wanderschaft

In Franz Sternbalds Wanderungen we encounter a narrative of wandering that resembles Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre in its adoption of the paradigm of the Gesellenreise. In Franz Sternbald, Tieck imagines a pupil of Albrecht Dürer who sets out from Nuremberg “um in der Fremde seine Kenntnis zu erweitern und nach einer mühseligen Wanderschaft dann als ein vollendeter Meister zurückzukehren.” The protagonist is therefore a traveling artisan, whose journey, it appears, will be determined by the requirements of his guild. The keywords “Wanderschaft” (which still had the dominant sense of the regulated artisan's journey) and “Meister” (which specifically denotes the status aspired to by the journeyman) suffice to set up these expectations. This is an important departure from Goethe's novel, which — while alluding to the practices of journeymen in certain details, such as the Lehrbriefe conferred upon initiates into the Society of the Tower — is not actually about a journey of this sort. Indeed, Wilhelm Meister's travels (and travails) are as far removed from those of a journeyman as the Tower is from a tradesman's guild. Nevertheless, Goethe's novel undoubtedly played a part in suggesting the narrative framework of the Wanderschaft to Tieck. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre could not have failed to have influenced Tieck, not least because of the possibilities for identification that Goethe's protagonist afforded the young author, with his passion for the theater, his lifelong engagement with Shakespeare, and his own extended wanderings in the company of his friends.