The heyday of the Bildungsroman coincided with the early years of the bourgeoisie.
The end of the feudal order was followed by the industrialization of Europe, and the academic bourgeoisie was the new class that drove it forward.
The nineteenth-century idea of progress seemed to bear the most beautiful fruits, but then things turned out differently, and the catastrophe of two world wars shattered Europe's optimism.
Their darkest hour was the Shoah.
Hitler's henchmen put the madness of a murderous ideology into practice, and it is amazing: for some survivors of that time - the author Elie Wiesel for example or the psychiatrist Viktor Frankl - their experiences in the death camps became a school of humanity, their lesson they passed on after the war in widely acclaimed works.
The Israeli writer Aharon Appelfeld (1932 to 2018) was also a survivor of the Shoah and, with almost fifty novels about it, is one of the great humanists for whom the years of death have become a lesson in life.
With him, that can be taken almost literally: He was eight years old when Romanian anti-Semites murdered his mother.
He was sent to a labor camp with his father, where they were separated and he managed to escape.
Posing as a Ukrainian boy, he worked as a day laborer on farms and lived in the forests, later joining the Red Army as a kitchen boy.
In the years other children live than their school days, he learned to escape the barbarism.
This experience "educated" him in more than one sense of the word, as many of his novels attest.
In his work about this terrible time, he contrasts the attempt of the barbarians to rob people of their humanity with a process of becoming human.
After the war he came to Palestine and soon became a Hebrew writer, but he refused the Israeli re-education that was in store for him.
The young state was focused on the future and tried for a long time to suppress the wounds of the past, but Appelfeld could not submit to this program.
The experiences of his childhood were the source of his creativity, and from them, undeterred by all Zionist ideology, he drew a steadily growing body of novels for six decades.
Appelfeld has its very own signature
He spent the first years of his childhood in Chernivtsi, which at that time no longer belonged to Austria but was still a stronghold of German culture.
Appelfeld learned Ukrainian at school, he spoke Yiddish with his grandparents, but at home they spoke German.
His parents belonged to the city's Jewish upper class, who embraced Enlightenment values, and the novels he later wrote reflect that legacy.
Wherever barbarism is told, the ideas of the Enlightenment can of course no longer be conveyed unbroken.
That is why Appelfeld has developed a special language that runs through all the novels like his personal handwriting.
It is a vanished world that he describes, it only exists in his memory, which can no longer be witnessed by anyone and can therefore not be shared with anyone.
In order to make them accessible, Appelfeld transforms them into symbols that the reader can recognize and translate into his own pictorial world because, like all symbols of the Enlightenment, they are of universal significance.