This chapter combines a general overview of the genre that emerged in eighteenth-century Europe with a more specific analysis of the German Bildungsroman. It focuses primarily on the ways in which several prominent authors reflect in their works on the question of German national identity, broadly construed. Far from being the genre best suited to a ‘non-political’ nation of poets and thinkers, the German Bildungsroman is an intrinsically political genre that explores in various ways the relation between the cultural nation (Kulturnation) and the political state. This view challenges those who claim that the Bildungsroman expresses the mysterious essence of the German soul by arguing that the genre responds to the specific conditions of German history. The chapter illustrates this thesis with succinct readings of several canonical German Bildungsromane, including Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship, Gottfried Keller’s Green Heinrich, Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, and Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum.