SOURCE: Niven, Bill. “The Green Bildungsroman.” In Green Thought in German Culture: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Colin Riordan, pp. 198-209. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1997.

In the following essay, Niven identifies and discusses three works that demonstrate the inversion of the Bildungsroman concept: Frisch's Homo faber, Uwe Timm's The Snake-Tree and Friedrich Cramer's Amazonas.

The term Bildungsroman is traditionally used to apply to novels in which characters learn to adapt to the norms of society. In this [essay] I suggest that modern writers in the German-speaking world frequently focus on the portrayal of the opposite process: namely the gradual disengagement of a fully adapted individual from the dominant social, intellectual and professional norms. This process is one of unlearning, of coming to question and even discard accepted wisdoms. To underpin the above thesis I will concentrate on three recent works which I believe exemplify best this...