How Germans and Russians Made Their Orthographies: Dealing With the "Spelling Distress" 1666924113, 9781666924114

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How Germans and Russians Made Their Orthographies

How Germans and Russians Made Their Orthographies Dealing With the “Spelling Distress” By Kirill Levinson Translated by Elena Lemeneva

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Levinson, K. A. (Kirill A.), author. | Lemeneva, E. (Elena), translator. Title: How Germans and Russians made their orthographies : dealing with the “spelling distress” / by Kirill Levinson ; translated by Elena Lemeneva. Other titles: Umgang mit orthografischen Problemen im 19. und frühen 20. Jahrhundert im deutsch-russischen Vergleich. English Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2024. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023036358 (print) | LCCN 2023036359 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666924114 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781666924121 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: German language—Orthography and spelling—History. | Russian language—Orthography and spelling—History. Classification: LCC PF3141 .L4813 2024 (print) | LCC PF3141 (ebook) | DDC 431/.52—dc23/eng/20230906 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023036358 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023036359 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgmentsvii Introduction 1 Chapter 1 The Nineteenth Century: Adapting to a Changing World

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Chapter 2 Constructing and Reconstructing the Mistake

75

Chapter 3 Constructing and Reconstructing the Norm

177

Conclusion: The History of Orthography as a History of Society

271

Archival Collections

279

Bibliography283 Index 309 About the Author

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v

Acknowledgments

As I write these lines, helicopters are buzzing outside my window: they are guarding the NATO summit that is taking place in the city today. Not far from here, a war is being waged against Ukraine and the entire democratic world by Russia, one of the two countries discussed in this book, while the other, Germany, is trying its best to prevent the aggressor from winning. They did not antagonize each other in the decades that are described in the book, and their peaceful good neighborly relations were a huge part of the reason for the transfer that is described in the book. I wish the two nations could be friends again, but that, I fear, will not be possible any time soon. And since in this section, one is supposed to give thanks, I thank fate that with German help I was able to leave Russia and now I do not have to kill or die in its insane and criminal war. I thank my German employers, colleagues, and friends who have supported me, and my Russian employers, friends, and colleagues who keep helping and supporting me. Receiving so much help and support, I could not but succeed in completing the American edition of this book. The path to this book’s completion was very long and led through many stations. It began in the distant past, four wars ago. Accordingly, the list of persons and institutions to whom I would like to express my gratitude at this point for having helped me to travel this long path with success is also very long. I formulated the original question about the social construction of the spelling mistake in the spring of 2001, when, thanks to a fellowship granted by the Institute of European History (IEG), I was able to spend six months in Mainz and benefit from stimulating lectures and discussions with other fellows there. To the head of the IEG's Department of Universal History, Heinz Duchhardt, to the members of the IEG, especially Ralph Melville and Claus Scharf, and to its fellows, especially Amy Alrich, Benita Blessing, Aleksandr vii

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Kaplunovskij, Martial Libera, Ines Pepper, and Jiří Stočes, I extend my heartfelt thanks for their encouraging and continuing comments on the lecture in which I presented the first draft of the planned study. Thereafter, a long series of library and archive trips began, with varying degrees of fruitfulness. Some of them yielded finds that I have not or not explicitly used in the present book, but have saved for possible later in-depth investigations on topics only touched upon here. I sincerely thank all archivists and librarians who always advised me competently and helpfully during these visits, which usually took place without prior notice, and who always accommodated me in my record-breakingly extensive and urgent book orders and copying requests. They enabled me to continue working on the project at home during the months and years between my visits to Germany. In 2002, with a grant from the Francke Foundations in Halle/Saale, I was able to explore the incredibly rich archives of this institution, from which a particularly important part of the source material for my study came. I would like to thank Adina Beyer who was my supervisor during my stay in Halle and provided invaluable help. In 2004 and 2005 I stayed in Göttingen thanks to generous fellowships of the Max Planck Institute for History. In addition to research in the city archives there and in the university library, I was able to make archive and library trips from this beautiful university city as far away as Stuttgart and Munich. For the opportunity to discuss my project with prominent historians such as Jürgen Schlumbohm, Hans Medick, Alf Lüdtke, and Hans Erich Bödeker as well as with other fellows and guest researchers at the Institute, from whom I always received valuable comments and advice, I am very grateful to this splendid team of historians, which unfortunately no longer exists in its former institutional form, and some of whose members have since passed away. Particularly extensive and fruitful was the research I conducted in several archives and libraries of Germany, Luxembourg, and Austria from December 2010 to June 2011, thanks to the generous grant from the Andrea von Braun Foundation. I am deeply indebted to the Foundation's Board of Directors, Mr. Christoph-Friedrich von Braun, and Ms. Isabella Weinberger for their flexible and unbureaucratic approach to funding my project. A very fruitful and stimulating discussion of the issues I worked on took place after a public lecture I was invited to present to a mixed audience of academics, psychotherapists, learning advisors, and interested laypersons at the Einstein Forum Potsdam in January 2012. I would like to thank the director of the Einstein Forum Susan Neiman and my esteemed colleague Mischa Gabowitsch who made this possible. In October 2014, the time came when it was clear what the result of my research project would be: a doctoral dissertation, to be defended in

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Germany. So, although I already held a doctoral degree in my home country of Russia for about fifteen years, I became a doctoral student again. This not only helped me to feel fifteen years younger but also broadened the scope of my study considerably. I was accepted as a doctoral student by the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen, specifically by the Institute for Eastern European History and Regional Studies, whose director Klaus Gestwa became my academic supervisor. While my project had originally been geographically limited to the German-speaking area, it now had to be expanded to include a Russian part. This meant it had to become a comparative and transfer study, and I think that was good for the work. In the end, many things became more evident, more convincing, and more interesting, too; many things received an explanation only through the broadened context. I am deeply grateful to my doctoral supervisor for setting me a challenging task but always supporting me in word and deed in solving it, providing encouragement where possible and yet giving me a great deal of freedom in the process. How long a road to my second doctorate still lay ahead of me became clear in December 2015 during the lecture at the Institute for Eastern European History and Regional Studies with subsequent discussion whose participants I would like to thank for their critical and stimulating comments on the presented draft of my newly conceived doctoral thesis. In order to search, sift, and copy sources for the added Russian part of my study, I undertook several trips to Saint Petersburg which were made possible by a doctoral fellowship from the German Historical Institute (DHI) in Moscow generously funded by the Max Weber Foundation. For this support as well as for the opportunity to present my new draft project for discussion to a group of colleagues, I thank the DHI team, especially its then-director Nikolaus Katzer, and Andrei Doronin. I am pleased and honored to be a member of that team today. In March 2017, I presented a work-in-progress report at the Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, where I had once begun my career as a historian, completed my first PhD, and taken the first steps of work on the new project. I would like to thank my esteemed colleagues Julia Arnautova, Marina Bobkova, Dmitrij Charitonovič, Pavel Gabdrachmanov, Anna Gerštejn, Svetlana Lučickaja, Marina Paramonova, and Nina Sokol'skaja whose questions and comments, as always, opened up new angles and perspectives, but at the same time confirmed me in the assumption that I was on the right track. After working for many years on my comparative and transfer study, which is not a historical-linguistic one but rather a piece of social and cultural history, I was given the opportunity in January 2019 for the first time to present its results to representatives of the discipline that one probably thinks of first when thinking of orthography: linguistics. For the invitation to the Institute

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of Slavic Studies at the University of Cologne and for the very productive discussion that followed the talk, I thank the institute’s head Jörg Schulte, Daniel Bunčić, Aleksej Lokhmatov, and other participants in the seminar. I thank my former employer, the Poletaev Institute for Historical and Theoretical Studies in the Humanities (IGITI) at the Higher School of Economics Moscow, for generously granting me the time and resources to advance and complete my work on this project at crucial stages. I am especially grateful to Irina Savelieva, the director of the institute, who always showed understanding and interest in this work and followed the entire doctoral process with great sympathy. In April of 2019, the doctoral colloquium took place at the Institute for Eastern European History and Regional Studies at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen. For their intensive and critical examination of my doctoral thesis, I would like to thank Klaus Gestwa and Tilman Berger, who provided expert assessments, as well as the other members of the examination committee: Dietrich Beyrau, Márta Fata, and Wiltrud Mihatsch. The grade magna cum laude they gave to my dissertation is an honor to me, but I also highly appreciated the thorough, critical, and stimulating discussion during the defense. Without the many friends in various cities and countries who hosted or otherwise supported me during my archival and library travels, encouraged me, and gave me strength, inspiration, and ideas, the success of my project would be inconceivable. I would like to thank in particular Tatyana Bakhmetyeva, Vitalij Bezrogov, Martin Dinges, Igor' Ermačenko, Valerija Garaščuk, Helmut Graser, Tatiana Harris, Marianna Holub, Ingeborg Kalischer, Aleksndr and Ella Kaplunovskij, Emmerich Kelih, Alla Keuten, Eberhard Kögel, Pavel Križevskij, Aleksandra and Stefanija Kulaeva, Hans-Jörg Künast, Friederike and Michael von Lukowicz, Žanna Lur'e, Marina Makarevič, Elena Markasova, Benedikt Mauer, Tat'jana Pfennings, Jan Plamper, Marjorie Elizabeth Plummer, Manfred Sapper, Claudia Stein, Marija Šubina, Ol'ga Svešnikova, Heike Talkenberger, B. Ann Tlusty, Ol'ga Togoeva, Maja Ulrich, and Elena Višlenkova. I thank with all my heart many other people, without being able to mention them all by name, for their help, advice, and support. In particular, I thank Theodor Ickler in Erlangen for the unceasing attention with which he followed and commented on the press releases concerning my public lectures. Now I am looking forward to his comments on the full version of the book. My translator and editor Elena Lemeneva took on the challenging task of making this text, which was originally written in German and for a German academic readership, look as American as possible and, which is more, as Chicago-style as possible, if you know what I mean. I think she faced up to this challenge, and I am very grateful to her. I assume full responsibility for whatever oddities and irregularities of language you may encounter in the

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text. There may be some, indeed, but it’s a book about dealing with mistakes, after all. This book wouldn’t be published in the United States, were it not for the kind attention it got from Eric Kuntzman, who initiated its publishing with Lexington Books, and Jasper Mislak, who has been patiently guiding me through the complex process of adapting the manuscript to the requirements of the publisher. These two acquisitions editors’ friendly and helpful attention fills me with gratitude to them. My wife Anastasija Dzkuja made an invaluable contribution to the successful implementation of the whole project, which is about as old as our relationship. For all the patience she had with me during these years, for her firm belief in my strengths and abilities, but also for her often soberingly critical and always witty comments from a professional perspective as a psychologist, I am as indebted to her as I am to our sons Mikhail and Lev, who never let me forget that there is something more important in my life than work. Hopefully, they will benefit from the fact that I grew much more critical of traditional school teaching methods and much more relaxed about school grades as a result of the insights I have gained in studying school history. I cannot thank my dear parents Alexej Levinson and Vera Schmidt often enough for all the love and support they have always shown me, also and especially during the work on this study. Unfortunately, my mother could not live to see the successful completion of this book. I dare hope she would be glad about it. And she would undoubtedly have agreed with the idea, which shines through in many places in the book, that sincere love for children can make more of a difference than discipline, rules, or reforms. This book is dedicated to her memory. Vilnius, July 2023

Introduction

You should write correctly, shouldn’t you? But why is it so important to write words in a certain way even if one would understand you if you spelled them differently? This book tries to give an answer to this question. It is not a linguistic study, because I am not a linguist—and because it is not all about language alone. Rather, this is a sociohistorical and cultural-historical inquiry and a transfer study. It focuses on societies and how they deal with problems related—at least partially or ostensibly—to spelling. I have tried to find out what societal processes, actors, values, interests, and media played a role in shaping the way orthographic norms and violations thereof have historically been judged. The starting point for my interest in this question were observations I made as a Russian historian working on German topics. First, I noticed that in several respects there was a considerable conformity between the conditions existing in Germany1 and Russia2 in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries: in both societies—at least among persons with some education—the opinion prevails that one must and should write correctly; anyone making spelling mistakes is regarded as showing an intolerable lack of essential sociocultural competences. A person who makes spelling mistakes in a job application has poor chances of getting the job. This kind of normative consciousness is not only noticeable in the competition for career opportunities, but in academic, literary, and private communication as well. The attitude toward spelling mistakes that has reigned supreme for many decades and is now subsiding little by little, if at all, is best illustrated with a text that has been roaming around the web for years—it used to be a statement by a US manager some time ago, but today I found it on an Indian website: “I actually get e-mails from job applicants with misspellings and missing words. They all go to the same place: the garbage. . . . I’m not going to hire 1

2

Introduction

someone who is careless. . . . Even if you’re not looking for a job, you want to be careful. People will judge you subconsciously on mistakes. . . . Don’t look like an ignoramus.”3 Across the globe, in Russia and in India, in America and in Germany, in China and in Brazil, spelling mistakes matter a lot more than, say, bad handwriting or singing flat. But was it always that way? Early modern handwritten and printed texts both in German and Russian bear witness to the fact that the ideas of orthographic correctness and the attitudes to it were different in the pre-modern era: one regularly encounters numerous variant spellings of the same words as well as spellings that, from the point of view of the norms valid at the time, should actually have been considered spelling mistakes. It is known, however, that the people who wrote or printed these texts were highly educated by the standards of the time and that their contemporaries did not reprimand them for spelling mistakes. How can this be explained? The fact that the orthography of living languages does not normally remain constant but evolves, and that, therefore, texts from different eras, which conform to the orthographic norms of their time, look dissimilar, is in itself well known. The development of orthographic norms has long been a subject of research in historical linguistics, and it is not my intention to write a comparative history of German and Russian orthographic norms. With regard to the question formulated at the beginning, the present work is rather an attempt to use sociohistorical means to clarify the impact of extralinguistic factors on dealing with orthographic norms and their violations in Germany and in Russia. For a purely linguistic-historical or sociolinguistic approach wouldn’t explain, for example, why so many German and Russian teenagers around 1900 committed suicide after getting poor grades for their compositions, or why German and Russian orthographic reforms were carried out in the way they were and not otherwise. Proper understanding of the developments in the field of norm-setting concerning writing requires placing them in a broader context that takes into account political, economic, demographic, and sociological dimensions. At first glance, the question of the chronological framework of this inquiry seems to have a straightforward answer: ever since the norm has existed, there have been involuntary deviations from it, called “errors” or “mistakes.” On closer examination, however, it turns out that the matter is somewhat more complicated. The development of spelling rules and their transformation into a universally binding law was a century-long process in both Germany and Russia, as described in studies on the history of language.4 The decisive reform attempts in both Germany and Russia fell in the period between about 1855 and 1918, but the development of normative ideas about what a spelling mistake was, what its causes and significance were, and what

Introduction

3

reaction it called for was a process closely related to the former, yet a different one, with a history of its own. In order to be able to cover its most important stages, the period under investigation in this study will be extended to the entire nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, so that individual significant developments which took place predominantly before, but also partly after this period would not be left out of consideration. The empirical basis of the study is composed of numerous and heterogeneous, mainly textual, kinds of sources. The sequence, in which they are presented below, in no way implies a hierarchy, because different sources have particular relevance for the individual sub-questions dealt with in the work. Rather, this list reflects the course of my research, in which new and newer sources were successively sought out, randomly sampled, and evaluated. In the early stages of my research on the subject of spelling and spelling errors, I placed my hopes primarily in two large categories of source materials. These were, on the one hand, normative sources from which I hoped to obtain detailed wording of the orthographic norm for areas such as publishing, administration, teaching, and so on, which would undergo a comprehensible historical evolution; on the other hand, I expected to be able to extract from various texts testimonies of actual writing practices as counterparts to these norms. In its simple form, this program did not work, mainly because normative sources claiming general validity for German as well as for Russian orthography only came to be later, while—and this was the more interesting finding—relevant discussions and practices took place not only on the basis of, but also long before these codified norms and alongside them, as well as bypassing them. Evidence of these discussions and practices can be found in various printed and handwritten texts, some of which are also typewritten. Both in Germany and Russia, a number of scientific studies on the question of spelling appeared during the period under consideration. Prominent examples of such monographs are the works of Jakov Grot and Wilhelm Wilmanns.5 A disproportionately large number of pamphlets on the topic was published, most of them controversial, more or less sharply polemical or alarmist in character, that reached or at least were intended to reach a wider audience. Despite or, perhaps, thanks to censorship, battles were fought on the pages of these pamphlets that were about more than just spelling. The authors actually raised more fundamental issues in the debates about orthography reform drafts or about the structure of spelling instruction, covering a broad spectrum of topics from childrearing to daily politics. This is even more true of magazines and newspapers. In Germany their range was much broader than in Russia, but for both countries articles in mass media are the most relevant sources when it comes to examining the discourses and opinions represented in the public. Specialist periodicals—for Germany, I drew upon

4

Introduction

the Allgemeine Deutsche Lehrerzeitung and the Zeitschrift für pädagogische Psychologie und Jugendkunde and Verhandlungen der Versammlungen deutscher Philologen und Schulmänner, for Russia, the journals Učitel’, Filologičeskie zapiski, Russkij filologičeskij vestnik6—actively participated in discussions on spelling issues, and not in an academically detached tone but with journalistic acuity, which proved that it was not only, indeed often not so much a question of whether one or the other spelling method or spelling teaching method was more practical, but rather a question of worldviews, notions about the future of the nation and its culture, about its position in the world, and about the appropriate interaction between different generations in a rapidly changing world. As media for discussion, these periodicals are described in more detail in the subsequent chapters. Another relevant media genre, namely the illustrated magazine, was used for entertainment and instruction rather than polemics. The two longest-lived illustrated magazines of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries systematically evaluated here were the most popular magazines of their time. The Gartenlaube hailed from Leipzig (1853–1944; circulation up to 382,000 per year)7 and the Russian Niva—An Illustrated Magazine for Literature and Contemporary Life (1870–1918; up to 240,000 copies per year) was published by Adolf Marks, a native of Stettin (now Szczecin in Poland), in Saint Petersburg. Although these two offered hardly any articles on spelling, they produced many articles on topics relevant to the expansion of the general world of ideas to include a novel area in which reform ideas and discussions could develop in relation to spelling as well. A systematic content analysis of the German and Russian illustrated journals showed that there were certain parallels between them in terms of topics, while the comparison between relevant contributions revealed substantial differences in content, suggesting divergent value systems propping them up. Similarly, individual entries from popular dictionaries and encyclopedias of the time were consulted. Apart from the mass media, real and virtual forums, referred to as “settings,” were used by actors to articulate, exchange and debate opinions, feelings, wishes and arguments and, in certain cases, for decision-making. Therefore, in addition to printed media and letters, meetings such as congresses, conferences, committee meetings, and so on, are also included. In the course of this research, it became clear that educational institutions in particular functioned as the most important settings for the development, discussion, and application of orthographic concepts. Therefore, notebooks or loose sheets of student work, many of them corrected and graded, are very important sources that bear witness to the practical implementation of these approaches. They are found in varying numbers in many German (but almost never Russian) archival collections and represent one of the less researched but very promising source genres. Handwritten minutes of

Introduction

5

teachers’ conferences, which are unfortunately only available in archival form in Germany, are an important testimony to teachers’ everyday discussions and reflections with regard to spelling, among other things. A great advantage of this type of source is the density of the entries, which allow the events in a school to be followed at weekly intervals over a number of years. This study uses the minutes from the boys’ burgher school in the Franckesche Stiftungen Orphanage in Halle an der Saale, now kept in the archives of the Francke Foundation, as an example. Valuable information can be gleaned from published grammar school curricula and examination reports. Such publications were produced annually in Germany as well as in Russia, but in small editions for local use. Those of them that have survived often contain detailed descriptions of written examinations in German or Russian (dictation and composition) and evaluations by supervisory authorities of how successful individual students were and thus indirectly also their teachers. School examination regulations in both countries proved not to be a very productive source, as they hardly contain any precise information on spelling requirements: examination papers were expected to be “orthographically sound” or “free of gross mistakes.” No further details can be found in these texts. The nineteenth century was a time when specialist meetings, congresses, conferences, and consultations of varying size and scope became a major medium for communication and decision-making in many areas of science and public life. Problems of native-language instruction and the improvement of orthography were also frequently debated at conferences in Germany as well as in Russia. However complete and accurate the stenographic transcripts may have been at the time, the minutes of these debates, especially when published, are usually not available in their “raw” form, but only abridged to varying degrees and re-edited in terms of language and content. They should, therefore, not be regarded as faithful representations of the events. Nevertheless, these are indispensable sources that allow us to observe the construction of orthography by interested parties from as close as possible. In the present study, minutes of the two German orthographic conferences of 1876 and 1901, the Petersburg consultations of 1862–1863 and the meetings of the Academic Committee for the Simplification of Russian Orthography of 1904–1912 were examined. The fact that the resolutions of these conferences, with the exception of the 1901 conference, were not implemented, or were not implemented immediately, does not detract from their importance, because the spelling rules that were ultimately adopted later on were basically only modifications of what had been decided at these conferences. Of course, what should be considered right or wrong in orthography or how spelling instruction should best be set up was not only discussed in

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Introduction

public. Many an important exchange of ideas or decision took place within a narrow circle of insiders, while much was discussed in private. We gain access to such discussions and decisions through archived letters exchanged by the departments and individuals involved. In-house and inter-office correspondence, as well as letters sent by interested parties to those in power, are therefore just as important a source genre for the present study as letters exchanged by private individuals. Apart from the letters of Leo Tolstoy and Aleksandr Kireev, most of the letters used in this study have not been published, and many of them have never been evaluated from the point of view of the question we are interested in here. Archival research was carried out in several German and Russian archives. Not only letters were sought, but all documents dealing with orthographic matters; they were also not found in every one of these archives. Often the letters discovered contained no new information or only minor details that were not included in the final version of the book. The most important unedited sources on the orthographic and educational policy of the Russian government and on the congresses of Russian teachers were found in the Russian State Historical Archive (RGIA, Saint Petersburg), the files of the Prussian and German imperial authorities in the Secret State Archive of Prussian Cultural Heritage (GStAPK, Berlin), the estate of Berthold Otto and the records of his private tutoring school in the archival holdings of the Library for Research on the History of Education of the Leibniz Institute for Educational Research and Information (BBF DIPF, Berlin), the records of the Commission for the Simplification of Russian Orthography in the Saint Petersburg branch of the Archives of the Russian Academy of Sciences (SPF ARAN, Saint Petersburg), minutes of teachers’ conferences in the school archives of the Franckesche Stiftungen Foundation in Halle a. d.S. (FS SA), further documents in the Düsseldorf City Archive (StA Düsseldorf), the Kiel Municipal Archive (StA Kiel), the Munich State Archive (StaatsA München), the North Rhine-Westphalia State Archive (LA NRW AW StaatsA Münster), and the Stuttgart Main State Archive (HSA Stuttgart). The individual holdings from which the records were taken are listed in the appendix. Publications from the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries which were used as edited sources were found in state, city, and university libraries of Augsburg, Berlin, Bochum, Bremen, Düsseldorf, Essen, Frankfurt a.M., Göttingen, Halle a.d.S., Mainz, Münster, Munich, Stuttgart, Trier, Tübingen, and Vienna as well as in the libraries of the RGIA and the Russian National Library (both in Saint Petersburg), the Russian State Library and the State Historical Public Library in Moscow. The use of memoirs and similar retrospective records in historical research is known to be associated with considerable source-specific critical problems, but, with due caution, they can provide valuable firsthand eyewitness testimony. They are used sporadically in the present study, mainly to outline the

Introduction

7

worlds of life and imagination, in which the developments that are actually in the focus of attention took place. For the same purpose, reference is made in a few places to poetic and prose works by influential poets such as Heinrich Heine or Leo Tolstoy, who, thanks to their fame, had a considerable influence on contemporary reflection on the spirit of the times. However, statements by famous authors on orthography are not interpreted as prevailing opinions on the subject in each case. In addition to textual sources, the present study also includes an analysis of a number of relevant images, which are not merely evidence of artistic reflection on problems in the school-child-parental triangle. Through the publication of these pictures in illustrated magazines and, to a lesser extent, through their exhibition in public museums, they were made part of the social discourse on school and thus also on the consequences that spelling mistakes had for learners. Of course, in the context of texts and images addressed to the public, the question of reception arises: how were these figurative and verbal messages received? This question is as important as it is difficult to answer, since—apart from famous and much-discussed works—testimonies of contemporary reception are only rarely handed down. The hypotheses on content and impact of these works are, therefore, based on my own interpretations, which are open to critical discussion. This overview provides only general descriptions of the source material evaluated in preparation of this study. More detailed information on the specific source texts or images, on which the explanations are based can be found in the footnotes and in the body text of the sections concerned. This study uses primarily a social constructionist approach with limitations. This means that spelling norms and their flip side—spelling mistakes—are fundamentally denied an absolute, natural and intrinsically linguistic character. Instead, they are seen as social phenomena and the results of human conventions. The limitation is that, firstly, not everything and indeed not every social reality is seen as socially constructed and, secondly, that Peter Berger’s and Thomas Luckmann’s theory is only applied here for research purposes, without wishing to pursue radical social-emancipatory goals beyond that and, for example, call for the abolition or disregard of orthographic norms. For a better understanding of the culture in which we have been living for about a hundred years, however, it seems important to be clear about the fact that the way orthography was seen by large segments of the public in Germany and Russia in the late nineteenth and much of the twentieth centuries and is still quite often handled today is by no means the only possible way and that it was not determined by the nature of things—for example, by the nature of the two languages,—but that it owed its development to certain social developments and forces, the interaction of which might well have proceeded differently and needs to be researched historically, especially in terms of social

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Introduction

and cultural history. The word “construction” here means not only the result, but also the process or several processes, interrelated in different ways, of individual or collective reflection, discussion, determination, and eventual enforcement of conventions with regard to orthographic norms and their counterparts—spelling mistakes, their nature, causes, social significance and the appropriate way of dealing with them and with people who make them. Empirically verifiable answers to these questions, that is, conventions in different phases of consolidation and enforcement, are partly taken in explicit, articulated form from the analyzed source texts, partly reconstructed on the basis of practices and discourses and assigned to social supporters. In order to better understand and explain the social (re)construction of orthographic norms and their violations, i.e. the emergence, content, and fate of respective conventions and their elements in specific historical periods, the study proceeds in three steps. The first step is outlining the crucial social, technical, political, and ideological developments (and, as far as possible, perceptions thereof), which, on the one hand, shaped the new, time-specific part of the human imagination, wherein relevant new ideas of what was important, possible, reasonable, and unacceptable reached a critical mass to enable social acceptance of the new conventions, and, on the other hand, determined the respective lifeworld context8 that gave rise to relevant technical, legal, and institutional constraints. This context description is carried out for both countries so as to show how the individual factors each had a different impact under the specific local conditions and what similarities and differences existed between the imaginary worlds and lifeworld contexts. In the second step, I will trace the (re)construction of the spelling as a social and cultural phenomenon on the basis of case studies. The problem posed in this study and the availability of sources make an “exhaustive” examination of all relevant sources hardly feasible. As a historian of modern time, one has to make a selection. In reviewing a large number of relevant sources, I selected for presentation examples that best illustrated the trends identified, although, of course, I also took into account all contrary examples I came across. The key social actors (individuals and/or social or professional groups) with their interests, goals and values are presented as well as their discourses and the settings they used in either country. By settings I mean both real and virtual forums used by actors to articulate, exchange, and debate opinions, feelings, aspirations, and arguments as well as to formulate and adopt resolutions. Of course, factors that inhibited or hindered the implementation of the adopted decisions shall also be taken into account. Similarities, differences, and links between the imaginary worlds of the many people living in Germany and Russia during the period under consideration shall also be pointed out, especially since the comparison, which makes the different weight of individual factors clear in each

Introduction

9

case, helps to avoid or at least minimize their absolutization. The results of the comparison will be interpreted with an eye to any processes of transfer, mutual influence, borrowing, or rejection. This procedure is carried out twice: first, the construction of spelling mistake is discussed, then the construction of the codified, unified, and improved orthographic norms. This counter-intuitive order is due to the empirically established fact: relevant phenomena in handling spelling mistakes are older than the current orthographic rules. A methodologically no less important third step is the contrasting supplementation of both pictures outlined in the second step with examples of alternative constructs that arose in the same contexts and were known to contemporaries. These genuine alternatives, despite having lost in the competition, are intended to make clear that those constructs of the spelling mistake and the spelling norm that have historically triumphed (at least at the end of the period under examination) could also have looked different, and how exactly they might have done. In the Conclusion, the results of the study are interpreted and the findings summarized. Some remarks need to be made as regards the transcription applied in this book. Instead of Cyrillic characters, the scholarly transcription is used, in which the letter c stands for [ts] in all positions, ch stands for [kh], j is used for iotization in ja, jo, ju, and for i kratkoe. Exceptions are made for a few famous names like Leo Tolstoy and Anton Chekhov, which are spelled in the traditional way in the text but not necessarily in the references, where the reader will find these names spelled Lev Tolstoj and Anton Čechov, respectively, as far as Russian editions of their works are concerned, or according to the spelling rules adopted by foreign publishers. NOTES 1. Unless otherwise stated, the collective term “Germany” stands here and throughout for the German-speaking cultural area, which in the nineteenth century included the numerous successor states of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, then the German Reich, the Weimar Republic, Austria, the Third Reich, the Federal Republic of Germany, and the German Democratic Republic, as well as today’s reunified Federal Republic of Germany. The necessary distinctions are taken into account in each case when dealing with individual topics. 2. Unless otherwise stated, the collective term “Russia” here and in what follows stands for the predominantly Russian-speaking part of the Russian Empire, the Soviet Union, and the present-day Russian Federation. The necessary distinctions are taken into account when discussing individual topics. 3. Accessed on July 12, 2023. https://paavaipathippagam​.blogspot​.com​/2018/.

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4. While the history of orthography itself is very well researched, the question of the cultural and social relevance of orthographic correctness and the factors influencing it has, as far as I can see, never been asked from a comparative perspective. Moreover, apart from Tat’jana Grigor’eva’s very thorough and well-documented book Tat’jana Grigor’eva. Tri veka russkoj orfografii (XVIII–XX vv.) (Moskva: Ėlpis, 2004), there are no recent studies as to the history of Russian orthography in general. For the German language area, сf. the first approaches to the topic in Kirill Levinson, “Ašypki, ili Čto značit pisat’ pravil’no?” Kazus. individual’noe i unikal’noe v istorii, no. 8 (2006): 271–295, and Kirill Levinson, “Ustranenie neobosnovannogo mnogoobarazija: normirovanie nemeckogo jazyka i ego obščestvennyj kontekst,” Odissej. Čelovek v istorii (2006): 221–260. The research problem and approach of the present work emerged from these two papers. However, due to the empirical research carried out in the meantime and in particular the comparative perspective that has been added, some of the theses that were formulated at that time have been revised or further developed here. also Hiltraud Strunk, Einheitliche und einfache deutsche Orthografie: die Geschichte einer (über)nationalen Idee 1870 bis 1970 (Hildesheim; Zürich; New York: Georg Olms Verlag, 2016). 5. Jakov Grot, Russkoe pravopisanie: rukovodstvo, sostavlennoe . . . Ja. K. Grotom (Sankt-Peterburg: Tipografija Imperatorskoj Akademii Nauk, 1885); Wilhelm Wilmanns, Die Orthographie in den Schulen Deutschlands (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1887). 6. The thematic indexing of the latter two journals was facilitated by the reference works: Natal’ja Radišauskajte, ed., Žurnal “Filologičeskie zapiski” (1860–1917). Annotirovannyj ukazatel’ statej (na materialach fonda redkich i cennych izdanij DVGNB) (Chabarovsk: DVGNB, 2016). This index is not complete, though; it covers issues from 1870 to 1914, with gaps; Evfimij Karskij, ed., Russkij filologičeskij vestnik. Ukazateli k tomam 1–70, 1879–1913 (Varšava: v tipografìi M. Zemkeviča i V. Noakovskago, 1913). 7. The analysis of this source was facilitated by the reference work, Alfred Estermann, Inhaltsanalytische Bibliographien deutscher Kulturzeitschriften des 19. Jahrhunderts (München: Saur, 1996 [repr. Berlin; Boston: Saur, 2017]). 8. By lifeworld context, I mean the totality of material, institutional, normative, and ideal circumstances perceived and taken into account by individuals, in which their everyday life takes place. In this respect, this concept comes close to Edmund Husserl’s practical, vivid, and concrete lifeworld or to Björn Kraus’ concept of Lebenslage (which can be roughly translated as condition of life, or life situation) as presented in Björn Kraus, “Macht—Hilfe—Kontrolle: Grundlegungen und Erweiterungen eines systemisch-konstruktivistischen Machtmodells,ˮ Macht in der Sozialen Arbeit: Interaktionsverhältnisse zwischen Kontrolle, Partizipation und Freisetzung, ed. Björn Kraus and Wolfgang Krieger, 4th edition (Lage: Jacobs Verlag, 2016), 106–107.

Chapter 1

The Nineteenth Century Adapting to a Changing World

According to Leopold von Ranke, the historian’s goal can be either to circulate new facts or to present a new perspective on what is already known.1 Much of the factual information mentioned hereafter is, in and of itself, well known, even trivial. No attempt is made here to offer a new history of the nineteenth century or give a complete overview of what is already known. Rather, this chapter aims to examine the information drawn both from primary sources and scholarship on the history of German unification, the age of steam and electricity, and on the study of languages before the advent of modern linguistics from a very particular perspective determined by the question posed by this study. The connections and interdependencies thus established receive an interpretation that should expand our understanding beyond the trivial. The values, discourses, and practices to be analyzed here in relation to orthography can only be adequately understood in the broader lifeworld context that influenced them.2 It therefore seems necessary to trace here at least some of the developments of the age of modernization, which helped shape relevant new patterns of thought and behavior: the more or less rigid factual limitations, the rules, influential models, striking metaphors, associative chains of concepts, and keywords. The outline of this context must begin with a brief general overview of norm-consciousness concerning written language in Germany and in Russia at the beginning of the period in question. Until the nineteenth century, no uniformity existed in German-speaking countries in terms of writing culture. Although Low German had already largely fallen out of use in written communication and High German had asserted itself as the language of official communication, literature, instruction, and business, it was but to a limited extent that written High German 11

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represented a graphic projection of the most diverse spoken dialects. This diversity can be well illustrated by the remark of Karl Weinhold who pointed out as late as 1852 that the application of the old principle “write as you speak,” advocated, among others, by Johann Christoph Adelung, would lead, for example, to the word gut being written in the south of Germany as guot or guet, in Upper Saxony kud, in Brandenburg jud, and in Westphalia, chud.3 Crystallization of the High German spelling norms was a slow and decentralized process of usage becoming rule more or less spontaneously and with a high degree of path dependency. In the nineteenth century, multiple orthoepic and orthographic norms coexisted, none of them being universally accepted as the only correct and/or binding one.4 In addition to individuals’ spelling habits and institutionally limited in-house orthographies of individual editorial offices, publishers, chanceries, companies, and educational institutions, one could opt to follow one of several existing grammars and dictionaries, most of which contained thought-out and well-substantiated orthographic rules and competed for authority.5 Their role, however, could not compare to the absolute authority of the Duden dictionary in the twentieth century, the dictionary of the French Academy, or that of King’s English. Besides, orthographic uniformity and strict observance of the rules, insofar as they could be found in textbooks and dictionaries in the first place, were not necessarily considered compulsory for educated people. The works of the Weimar Classics, for example, were composed in a situation of orthographic freedom that is hardly imaginable today. Schiller, for example, used the forms Augbraun, Augbraune, and Augbranen interchangeably; Goethe wrote Augbraun, Augbraune, Augenbraune, and Augenbraue,6 because he was “always quite indifferent to consistent spelling” as long as it was clear what he meant to say.7 He quite openly admitted to writing “one word . . . in three different ways,” and to “all sorts of bad manners, which I am well aware of and which I only get myself to fight in an external emergency.”8 For private letters he didn’t find it that bad: “Let me be with your spelling mistakes, . . . I make spelling mistakes in every letter and no comma. I usually dictate and don’t proofread.”9 With manuscripts he even insisted that “the copy submitted should be printed accurately, with no changes to spelling, punctuation, and otherwise, even if an error were to remain, it would be better to print it along with the manuscript,” because the publisher’s proofreader sometimes not only corrected mistakes but also eagerly changed whole words and sentences that he thought were wrong.10 In Russian, too, spelling was not uniformly established until the second half of the nineteenth century. Writers and teachers followed the usage, which in many cases had yet to solidify, or the opinions of respected grammarians, or even their own preferences. It was a common practice in Russian as well

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as in German to write the same word in many different ways, even within the same text. In other words, the situation of the first half of the nineteenth century was such that it was quite unproblematic for an adult in case of doubt to pick and choose among several existing spellings at will, without having to follow any consistently. For schoolchildren, however, the benchmarks were set by their teachers and the instructional materials they used. Teachers’ responses to deviations from these norms were not regulated. While individual German and Russian grammarians spoke out in favor of certain innovations in the field of spelling and presented orthographic solutions (including idiosyncratic and controversial ones) in their own works, their influence on the overall development was very limited. Something like a national spelling reform, that is, a centralized change in orthographic norms that would affect all writers, only became conceivable in the second third of the nineteenth century; soon thereafter certain social groups felt such a reform was overdue, but it proved unfeasible on a national level either in the German Empire or in Tsarist Russia. In the early twentieth century, however, people in both countries already felt the reform to be within reach. Long before Berger and Luckmann, a “constructionist” understanding of the issue of norm and error in relation to language was present in public discourse. A German author under a militant pseudonym Quosego (a reference to Virgil’s Aeneid, familiar to any Gymnasium11 graduate) attributed the main roles in the construction process to those who wield power over adults and littles alike: “This is not . . . a given fact or just a question of esthetic taste, it is primarily a naked question of power. . . . If a minister has the necessary power to dictate a new spelling to us, then what was right the day before yesterday suddenly will become wrong the day after tomorrow, and what was wrong will become right.”12 In view of the indisputable fact that since the early twentieth century, it was the state that introduced universally applicable orthographic rules both in Germany and in Russia, the processes of the construction of orthographic norms and errors may seem at first sight to be a pure power play on the part of the respective state. This picture would, however, be distorted, because what was ultimately “dictated” by state power was demonstrably not invented by ministers and, generally, “as to writing, the power of the individual is small.”13 Other forces, directly or indirectly involved in these processes, will be pointed out here.

GENERAL POLITICAL CONTEXT Of course, the importance of state policies must not be overlooked. No matter how little the impact of a ministerial decision alone, political context directly

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or indirectly impacted numerous actors’ conduct and their opportunities to act in the essentially decentralized and independently occurring construction processes at other levels. Even short-lived political configurations often deserve no less attention than those taking years or decades to develop. Without making the utopian claim to offer a complete and comprehensive overview, I will discuss some of these political matters here. Political upheavals opened up opportunities for radical change in many areas at the same time and often provided action models for different kinds of activities. Thus, it was not by chance that the first collective attempt at achieving a “simplification of Russian spelling” was made in 1862–1863, for this was a time when autocracy in Russia, careful not to jeopardize its own power, triggered profound changes in legal and property relations, jurisdiction, local self-governance, the military, and the system of education, the modernizing effect of which on society is comparable to that of the French Revolution of 1789. Already during the preparation of the Great Reforms, the tsar’s power granted society a say in the matter and expressly called upon its upper classes to discuss the reform drafts. Local experts and stakeholders (the state regarded aristocratic landowners as interested parties during the emancipation of the serfs, teachers during the educational reform, etc.) were asked to meet and collectively express their wishes and notes on the reform drafts. It seemed as though Russian teachers, who considered themselves to be both experts and principal stakeholders in matters of orthography, could also exert some influence with regard to spelling. After all, in preparation of the first great reform, that is, the emancipation of the serfs in 1861, proposals of local aristocratic assemblies had actually been taken into account. But in contrast to the nobility, which spoke directly to the monarch, participants of the Petersburg consultations on the simplification of Russian spelling (which are to be discussed in more detail in this chapter) believed the public, especially the press, to be the decision-making authority. In practice, this proved to be an illusion, as the press did not accept the teachers’ suggestions, but the idea certainly reflected the Zeitgeist. At that time, the press seemed to have overarching power, not least because of Mikhail Katkov’s enormous influence. The way things proceeded in 1904, too, was based on a model from the time of the Great Reforms. Similar to the preparations for the 1861 reform “from above,” a committee was formed—then by Emperor Alexander II, now by his nephew, the Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovič Romanov as president of the Academy of Sciences14—to which certain stakeholders and experts were invited. These included representatives of ministries and similar governmental bodies as interested parties/experts ex officio in addition to a certain number of practitioners who seemed to have something to do with the issue at hand: under Alexander II, these were landowners,

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15

whereas now, they were linguists and philologists, teachers, writers, and publishers. The actual work on the draft reform project was entrusted to a smaller subcommission. The meetings of the orthographic subcommission, where every article of the draft was decided based on the majority vote, were as free and relaxed as those of their 1860 counterpart, the ‘Editorial board’ of the Main Committee on the Peasant Question. From the outset, the late-night meetings were held in a friendly atmosphere; people drank tea, smoked, and spoke freely regardless of their office, rank, or age. For the draft, designed by the respective subcommission (which took into account the opinions sent in by private persons and associations), to become a final plan of the reform, it had to be voted on by the large committee. In contrast to the peasant reform, however, the orthographic commission in 1904 did not reach a final resolution. This was due neither to linguistic nor scholarly factors, but rather to the influence of the conservative court circles and the press on the Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovič as chairman of the commission, and later to the changing but always unfavorable political situation in Russia. The second attempt took place during the first Russian Revolution of 1905–1907, during which the autocracy was transformed into a parliamentary monarchy. For our purposes, this revolution was significant in that 315 out of the 512 deputies of the Second State Duma signed a declaration in 1907 on the need to simplify Russian spelling. This was the first time in Russian history that the legislature dealt with the question of spelling, albeit without practical consequences, because the second Duma was soon dissolved by the Tsar, and its declaration did not move either the Ministry of National Education or the Academy of Sciences to see the highly controversial reform to completion. It was only after the October Revolution that the Russian spelling reform was pushed through by the Bolshevik government in 1918.15 In Germany, on the other hand, revolutions did not play the role of windows of opportunity for an orthographic reform. The 1918 November Revolution had no direct effect whatsoever on the construction of the German spelling norm and at best an indirect effect on the construction of the orthographic error in some German and—through (re)intensified GermanRussian contacts and exchange in the field of pedagogy—Soviet schools, as individual reformist pedagogical figures and concepts were briefly in vogue in the Weimar Republic. The failed 1848–1849 revolution was of particular significance to many German countries in that it led to a period of Christianconservative reaction when, among other things, a repressive school culture was called for and established by the state (especially in Prussia), which was to have far-reaching consequences for the fate of the concept of the spelling mistake, to be described in more detail here.

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INTEGRATION OF THE GERMAN COUNTRIES: UNITY MEANS UNIFORMITY Most important for the understanding of spelling reforms in Germany were changes that took place parallel to the “blood and iron” unification efforts but marked the part of the German countries’ integration that was driven forward by way of peaceful negotiations and reforms. Even in pre-modern times, quite a few thinkers in the fragmented Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation realized that political integration, including, among other things, elimination of numerous customs duties, promised many a commercial advantage. Equally obvious for many (but not all!) traders and businessmen was the economic profitability of a uniform currency and a uniform system of measures and weights, since time and money were wasted when converting, changing, weighing, and exchanging. Individual German rulers had tried already in the early modern times to work toward the standardization of measures and weights in their respective territories. A more successful wave of unification came with the French conquest at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Napoleon, however, extended the metric system, already introduced in France, only to areas on the left bank of the Rhine. In the newly ordered successor states of the dissolved Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, numerous old local units were partially unified.16 In their 1833 Zollverein treaties, the member states of the German Customs Union announced their intention to create a uniform system of currency, measures, and weights. The transition did not go smoothly, and its speed and success varied depending on the state and industry. The basic pattern was that the new units were decided on by means of negotiation, initially introduced in addition to the existing ones, and accepted with some resistance. A few characteristic milestones are as follows: on March 22, 1833, the first uniform metric measures of the customs pound (500 g) and the customs centner (50 kg) were introduced by the Customs Union, effective from January 1, 1834. These first appeared alongside the old units and only became exclusively binding for all member states from 1839, but only in trading with each other. Bavaria’s refusal (at least in 1837, according to Hubert Kiesewetter) to accept the customs pound shows that this move was not met with universal approval.17 In 1838, the Dresden Coinage Convention established the Prussian silver Cologne Mark as the conversion unit for guilders and thalers, whereby the old currencies remained in existence for a long time, and even in the German Empire until the end of the nineteenth century, the thaler and other individual remnants of the old currency systems continued to exist alongside the German Mark. In 1848, director of the Prussian Normal Calibration Commission Adolph Brix put up the draft of a “new measure and weight regulation for the United

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Germany” for discussion, but it went unnoticed.18 In 1852, the customs centner also became the official but merely industry-specific “unit of mass for railways” within the Customs Union. In 1857, the customs pound became the weight measure for coins in the Customs Union, in 1862 for items of mail transported by the German-Austrian Postal Union, and in 1858 for medicine and jewelry in Prussia. Indeed, Prussia was somewhat more radical than the Customs Union as a whole, as in May 1856 it legislated the customs pound as the general national measure of weight not in addition to but instead of the abolished old pound, effective from July 1, 1858. In 1868, the North German Confederation adopted the North German Measure and Weight Regulation based on the metric measurement system. On August 17, the king of Prussia signed it into law “in the name of the North German Confederation, upon ratification by the Federal Council and the Reichstag.”19 Many regarded this regulation as a model, according to which the German spelling should now also be standardized: If, now that just over half of Germany has barely been politically united, we have succeeded in establishing a unit of measure and weight based on pure reason, then we have all the more grounds to hope for a radical and generally recognized improvement of German spelling based on equally reasonable principles, since this latter reform would have to overcome much fewer material difficulties than the former.20

Bavaria and Hesse adopted this Measure and Weight Regulation in 1869 by decree, effective from January 1, 1872. In April 1871, the regulation was legislated for the entirety of the newly formed German Empire (also effective from January 1, 1872).21 Clearly, for Germany most of the nineteenth century was “the time of transition—the long time of negotiations.”22 Just as relevant to our topic is the question of the institutional and human actors of reform. At the state level, it was usually the central state power that controlled the unification process and held on to the material basis of the newly introduced system of measurement: for example, the platinum prototype one-meter rod and one-kilogram sphere were in possession of the Royal Prussian Government. In Prussia, where uniform state units of measurement were introduced on May 16, 1816 (not applicable for the provinces that became part of the kingdom later on), the Ministry of the Interior was responsible for measures and weights at the state level; in individual cities, this was within the purview of the chief of police; calibration offices were set up as municipal authorities.23 The balance was ensured at that time by an institution that was not among those exercising state power: the introduction of the metric system in Prussia was delayed primarily due to the position of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences, which insisted with all its

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intellectual authority on keeping what it considered to be the optimal (as the most precisely determined) original Prussian measurement of 3 feet. Through specialist periodicals, daily newspapers, and pamphlets, numerous nongovernmental actors such as professional experts, publicists, and other authors of critical commentaries and/or alternative projects also participated in this process of the social construction of new norms.24 Individuals commissioned by governments, especially at the federal state level, sometimes also played a central role in preparing reforms of measures and weights like, for example, the physicist, astronomer, optician, and entrepreneur Carl August von Steinheil in Bavaria in 1842, or the geodesist Christian Leonhard Philipp Eckhardt, tasked in 1817 by the Grand Duke Ludwig of Hesse and by Rhine with drafting a law on measures and weights for the Grand Duchy.25 At the level of confederations, collective bodies were more often in charge.26 These were mostly ad hoc committees or commissions made up of persons appointed from above. Their members, whose numbers could vary considerably from case to case, were representatives of those departments, territories, professional communities, and social groups, whose interests were somehow affected by the planned reforms, and/or professionals qualified to serve as experts, who conveyed scholarly, rather than institutional viewpoints. The principle of representation was interpreted on a parity basis, that is, the number of commission members (or votes they had) did not depend on the size of the body they represented, nor did experts and industry representatives receive any formal powers of representation or mandates from the professional or academic communities on behalf of which they were to speak. Resolutions were adopted either by majority vote or by consensus. Then the commission presented the result of its work for the ultimate decisionmaking to the body that had engaged it. The most prominent example of such procedure is probably that of the Expert Commission for the Unification of Weights and Measures in the German Confederation set up by the Federal Assembly in Frankfurt am Main in June 1860 and composed of representatives of the confederation member states (Prussian representatives joining in later). In its report of April 30, 1861, the Commission called for the introduction of the metric measurement system, but its proposal was not implemented at the time. In August 1865 the Commission, now with Prussian participation, adopted a new draft, but its implementation was also thwarted by political circumstances, particularly the Prussian-Austrian war and the subsequent dissolution of the German Confederation. The unification of currencies, measures, and weights was only a part of the broader activity aimed at unifying regulations and standards in and across the German countries, which increased throughout the nineteenth century and involved such diverse fields as food, occupational health and safety, patent protection, postal services, and many others.27 One would be tempted

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to assume that a uniform spelling would from the outset be seen as a logical attribute of the desired German confederation (and even more so of the federal state), but this was not the case. It still took many years until the first attempt to achieve a “greater agreement” in spelling in the united Germany, and that attempt failed. It is nevertheless important, on the one hand, to note that in Germany and, mutatis mutandis, in Russia, the attempts at solving the ‘spelling issue’ were based on a method partly similar to the one described earlier. The question, whether this similarity is due to borrowing or common models, must remain open in the context of this study. On the other hand, the unifying laws and regulations enacted before and after 1871 regarding “deviations from the absolute correctness still to be tolerated in public communication”28 did have an impact on our subject matter: by setting the standards of tolerance (“margins of error”), they indirectly paved the way for our modern way of dealing with mistakes. At the marketplace, in the factory, at the train station, in class—everywhere deviations from absolute correctness were graded and, above a certain level, prohibited and punished. The fact that this pattern also had an effect on the field of language is shown by a campaign for the standardization of German pronunciation. Since one of the guiding principles of German spelling was phonetic, the absolutely correct (“clearly sounding”) and uniform pronunciation played a particularly important role in understanding uniform spelling, indeed spelling in general, as early modern grammarians already emphasized. But in comparison to measures and weights, even to orthographic rules, an artificial phonetic homogenization was much more difficult to accomplish and a natural amalgamation took much longer, especially due to a much greater original variety of dialects. Throughout the nineteenth century, High German remained a foreign language for most Germans, not even the second language for many, and its use as a spoken language was limited to a few formal contexts. For example, Friedrich Paulsen, born in Western Schleswig in 1847, wrote in his memoirs that, when he was young, people in his village spoke Frisian at home and Low German while visiting the nearby town or the market (later on, increasingly also in the family). High German was the language of the church, the school, and administration. The latter only resorted to High German in writing, because the officials used Low German for oral communication. Friedrich, who was sent to school at the age of four and a half, could already understand and read High German from before, but only in school learned to speak it a little, and did not acquire fluency until after entering, at age 18, the penultimate grade of the Gymnasium at Altona where he could only use this language to speak to his classmates. His parents spoke and wrote High German well but reluctantly, and his mother never used it to communicate with her son, because it sounded as if she were talking “to a stranger.”29 Half

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a century later, at the beginning of the twentieth century, schoolchildren in a modern metropolis like Leipzig often felt more at home in a dialect than in High German and, although they were taught to write only in High German, quite a few of them would immediately switch back to writing in the Saxon dialect the moment their teacher allowed them to do so.30 This was never the case when it came to dictations. The teacher’s manner of speaking was the most important pattern, from which schoolchildren learned the “correct” pronunciation of a word, which ought to be the key to its correct spelling. The teachers’ speech often, to a greater or lesser degree, reflected dialectal differences.31 If a teacher hailed from the same region, his accent made it easier for children to understand him. But when a teacher came from afar, his strange dialect made it difficult for the students to comprehend and take notes. So it was difficult not only for the first-grade pupils of a Munich Gymnasium, but also for the principal to understand a teacher who came from Prussia: “The pupils hurried to write down every word he would say. His North German language peculiarities (combined with fast talking at times) often made him incomprehensible. He says g like j, k like g, s like ss, etc.”32 How different High German could sound when coming from an academically educated teacher even in the second half of the nineteenth century is quite vividly shown by the fact that during the General German Teachers’ Assembly in 1880 a participant objected against the election of his Bavarian colleague as chairman by citing dialectal differences that would render him unable to perform this function properly.33 As a solution for the problem of phonetic heterogeneity standing in the way of adopting uniform spelling, toward the end of the nineteenth century the proposal was voiced to standardize the pronunciation of the written language and, for this purpose, to make it subject to the rules of German stage pronunciation that were long since “largely in place.” This synthetic supraregional pronunciation oriented predominantly toward High German had been developed by actors in order to be understood at guest performances in different regions. The leading proponent of this idea, the German linguist and historian Theodor Siebs, then an extraordinary professor at the University of Greifswald, later Breslau,34 found, however, that even the stage pronunciation was “not quite the same in different German-speaking regions” and “from a scholarly viewpoint, not to be approved in every respect.” Therefore, in 1896 he turned to the directors of some German theaters to ask how they would feel about its “regulation.” He received positive feedback. In 1897, the General Intendant of the Royal Prussian Plays in Berlin, Count Bolko von Hochberg, informed the General Assembly of the German Stage Association (Deutscher Bühnenverein) that “a committee, to be composed of theater managers and German philologists, would like to discuss this issue.”35 After lengthy deliberations, the Germanist Section of the 44th Assembly of German

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Philologists and Educators (Dresden, 1897) supported Prof. Siebs’ initiative and even described it as a “work of national significance.” A commission of experts and stakeholders was set up in order to produce a “set of equalizing regulations for German stage pronunciation.” At the request of its chairman von Hochberg, the Directorial Committee of the German Stage Association elected a delegation consisting of theater managers von Hochberg (Berlin), Claar (Frankfurt), von Ledebur (Schwerin), von Puttlitz (Stuttgart), Stägemann (Leipzig), and Tempeltey (Coburg); German philologists Sievers (Leipzig), Viёtor (Marburg), Seemüller (Innsbruck), and Luick (Graz) promised their cooperation. Not all of them, however, took part in the consultations, which took place under Hochberg’s chairmanship on April 14–16, 1898, in the Apollosaal of the Royal Theater in Berlin: the names of Puttlitz, Claar and Stägemann do not appear on the final list of participants, and we do not know the reasons for their absence. The academic side was represented by Professors Siebs, Sievers, and Luick; Professors Seemüller and Viёtor were unable to attend and sent in their written reports and suggestions. Siebs described the work of the six-member commission as follows: Once the participants arrived at a complete understanding regarding the basic principles, discussion of the program developed by Prof. Dr. Siebs was begun, . . . prior to talking about consonantism and vocalism, Prof. Dr. Sievers explained the phonetic relations and derived from them the viewpoints for the solution of controversial questions; then each of the participants shared his views and experiences, and only then a resolution was passed.

We have no information on the lines of reasoning presented in the discussion, or exactly how the resolutions were passed, or, for example, what the procedure was in the event of a tie vote, which must have occurred a lot, considering the small and even number of participants, for the publication prepared by Theodor Siebs on behalf of the commission was expressly meant to circulate “not the minutes, but only the results” of the collective work. The report, wherein Siebs specifically emphasized that “equalizing regulation of pronunciation” was not only “desirable for orthoepic reasons for theatrical and educational purposes” but also “important, because any improvements in spelling would one day have to be based on it,”36 was published in 1898. The 45th Assembly of German Philologists and Educators (Bremen, 1899) agreed with the commission’s decisions and declared it “desirable” to also “make them applicable to other fields of German language care, in particular through schools,” which meant that schoolchildren should be encouraged to speak only in keeping with the rules of stage pronunciation and, accordingly, to use this pronunciation as a guideline for spelling in writing. It should also be noted that, although Siebs emphasized that spelling could “never serve as a yardstick for pronunciation,” his reasoning was circular to an extent: the

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stage pronunciation was to be used for oral delivery of previously written texts of theater plays, and the booklet makes it easy to see that the pronunciation guide consisted essentially of reading rules for certain letters and letter combinations. The brochure with the results of the Berlin consultations, known as der Siebs, was until the late twentieth century regarded in Germany (albeit not in Austria) as the most important orthoepic reference work and was reprinted multiple times. This regulation of stage pronunciation by a commission composed of three theater managers and three university professors had an epilogue, which puts it in stark contrast to the two German orthographic conferences, of 1876 and 1901, to which these 1898 consultations are very similar otherwise.37 Theater actors, who had not been invited to the consultations, even though the new rules were intended for them and were based on observations of their pronunciation, took the floor. As Siebs had to admit in a later edition of the German Stage Pronunciation,38 it was “perceived as a shortcoming in theatrical circles” that those most concerned by the proposed regulations had not been asked to contribute; furthermore, “objections to individual points” were raised. Therefore, in 1907, the Guild of the German Stage (Genossenschaft deutscher Bühnenangehöriger) set up a new committee “for the ultimate regulation,” which sent questionnaires to about 200 German theaters in order to compile the “perhaps controversial” points. After the answers had been collected, a conference took place on March 28–29, 1908, in the Chamber stage hall of the German Theater in Berlin, attended by stage directors and German philologists (that is, Sievers and Siebs again; Luick sent in his opinion in writing), as well as elocution masters and actors. At this conference, some changes to German stage pronunciation rules were made, and the rules made applicable to singing. Furthermore, “a spelling corresponding to the requirements of phonetics was discussed,” but no special resolution passed. The results of this conference were presented to the German Stage Association and the Philologists Assembly, accepted by both and recommended “for use in the school in the same sense as those from 1899.” Both actors and German philologists were again asked to make suggestions for improvement, but only a few minor changes were suggested. However, the norm constructed by Siebs and his associates also immediately attracted criticism, because, on the one hand, it represented a mixture of High and Low German phonetic characteristics and, on the other, stage pronunciation was overarticulated for greater clarity in performances of verse dramas and thus in the opinion of one of the experts, the Marburg philologist Wilhelm Viёtor, outside the theater sounded “affected and, therefore, ridiculous.”39 Whether for this reason or because it was too alien to South Germans,

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stage pronunciation was very slow to assert itself in everyday school life, and even then—to a very limited extent. Indeed, it never came to prevail anywhere except for theater, radio, films and, later, television, although, according to Eva-Maria Krech, in 1922 the Prussian Ministry of Culture declared stage pronunciation “universally binding”40 and thus fulfilled the sinister prophecy of the MP August Reichensperger (Center Party), who had had already in 1880 said in the Reichstag that excessive centralization and regulation of orthography would lead “to the state at the Imperial level having to determine how sounds should be pronounced in the individual lands or in all of the country,”41 obviously an absurd idea for him, much less so for Prussian functionaries half a century later, but still unfeasible even then. Despite the powerful influences of the mass media, dialectal peculiarities of German native speakers continued to persist and were still a source of spelling mistakes as researched by linguists in late twentieth century.42 In the Russian Empire, the political situation was different. It was a centralized state, in which particularistic traditions had largely been overcome, as far as its Russian-speaking parts are concerned, and there were neither regional orthographies, nor prerequisites for a national unification movement comparable to that in German-speaking countries. This centralism, though, coexisted with a cultural diversity maintained by the imperial model of governance.43 Thus the linguo-geographic situation was also somewhat different from that in Germany, but no less complex. On the one hand, differences between the individual Russian dialects (govory) were generally less significant than between the German dialects during the period in question, although tangible enough. In the northern Russia, for example, the Russian word for “head” was pronounced as golova, in Moscow it was gylava and in the South, holova. In central and northern Russian dialects there was no difference between the two e sounds represented, respectively, by the letters e and jat, while in what was called “little Russian” dialects (I don’t refer to them as ‘the Ukrainian language,’ because these are a group of dialects that are now spoken in Eastern Ukraine and in Southern and South-Western Russia alike. In Ukraine they are considered to be varieties of Ukrainian, and in Russia, of Russian), these were two distinctly different sounds, so that in the dispute over the abolition of the jat, participants’ respective positions also depended on where they came from. The school was obliged to take dialectal diversity into account: already the Guidelines for Teachers of the Russian Language and Literature in the Gymnasiums of the Petersburg District School Board from May 16, 1852, stated that “the more the local dialect deviates from the generally accepted provisions on the correctness of articulation, the more attention” should be given to the rules of grammar, pronunciation, inflection, and stylistics.44 However, Russian teachers, who received

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no special training in teaching phonetics, were usually underqualified in the crucial area of orthoepy, particularly since relevant differences between the similar sounding dialects are often more difficult to discern and control than between the strongly diverging ones. On the other hand, the ethnic and linguistic diversity in the Russian multiethnic empire was considerably higher than in the German lands, so for many schoolchildren, especially from low-class and lower-middle-class families, Russian lessons were actually foreign language lessons, in which they first had to acquire much of the vocabulary, phonetics, and grammar. Those who already spoke some Russian usually spoke it with an accent due to the interference of their mother tongue, a problem teachers and authors of primers and textbooks were aware of. In the European part of the Russian Empire alone, especially at the elementary-school level, there were numerous Tatar, Jewish, German, Polish, and other educational institutions where Russian was not even the language of instruction. In Gymnasiums in the Baltic provinces, German was widely used as the language of instruction, and in the Kingdom of Poland, it was Polish—until Russian was declared the sole language of instruction under Alexander III in the course of the Russification campaign. This campaign met with some resistance, the high points of which were the two school strikes in Poland at the beginning of the twentieth century, when thousands of pupils protested against switching the language of instruction to Russian. Children of many non-Russian-speaking families in the newly conquered areas on the peripheries of the empire, especially in Poland, were raised in awareness of their own cultural superiority and/or wounded national pride, which left them not exactly enthusiastic about learning the language of their conquerors.45 However, the requirements were the same for all, whereas learning Russian spelling must have been particularly difficult for schoolchildren in non-Russian areas. The phonetic principle, as far as it applied to Russian spelling, was difficult to teach not only for teachers on the peripheries of the empire, who had to overcome their own foreign-language accents and didn’t always succeed in it. Even most Russian native speakers were unfamiliar with what was regarded by linguists as the exemplary pronunciation. In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it was, like in Germany, a stage pronunciation, but only that of a particular theater, the Maly Theater in Moscow.46 A unifying reform was, therefore, unnecessary. No attempts are known to officially oblige all theaters and/or educational establishments of the Russian Empire to use this pronunciation. Most teachers and students who were never in Moscow and never had the opportunity to hear the actors of this theater speak at guest performances in their hometowns, could not imagine what exemplary pronunciation actually sounded like until after the invention of radio and sound record players in the 1920s.

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PRUSSIA’S HEGEMONY: TOEING THE LINE A development that can be described somewhat bluntly and not without exaggeration as “Prussification” was no less significant for the creation of the formative context in Germany. By this I mean the dissemination of certain influences (working sometimes as a model, others as a constraint) of legal provisions, values, and practices which were particularly pronounced in a country whose historical core lay almost symbolically between the Russian Empire and the German states, namely Prussia. The French philosopher Victor Cousin said in the early 1830s that Prussia was “a classic country of barracks and schools, of schools which civilize people, and of barracks which defend them.”47 This statement addresses three issues that are relevant to our topic: the respective functions attributed to the educational system and the military, and the connections between the two. Despite the general compulsory military service formally introduced in Prussia in the nineteenth century,48 not every young man was actually drafted, because there were numerous opportunities to obtain a deferment or exemption from military service, buy one’s way out, or pay someone to serve as a substitute. But in the context of the recently ended War of Liberation against Napoleon and the then-revolutionary motto, “The law is the same for all,” it was all the easier to hold the view that it was not only every citizen’s obligation but also their patriotic duty to be a good soldier and, if need be, fight again for the freedom of their fatherland. During their military service, many German young men—future fathers, teachers, employers, and public opinion makers—went through a hard and thorough “school of life,” where, apart from the combat skills and weapon maintenance, strict discipline, drills, unconditional obedience to superiors and service regulations, as well as uniformity down to the smallest detail of equipment and conduct were taught as the most important “subjects.”49 These values, represented in public by well-respected professional military officers and the much larger number of former military conscripts, were associated with national pride and with the concepts of freedom and equality before the law. They were widely accepted especially by the bourgeoisie. In Prussia, military virtues had positive connotations not only within but also outside the army, for this country, which had originally had a relatively small population, unfavorable geographical location, and weak economy, owed not only its “defense” but also and above all its spectacularly rapid and successful rise to a leading power in the German community of states to its military strength. The army enjoyed the crown’s favor, a privileged status, and a high reputation in society.50 Through conquests and annexations, more and more German territories were incorporated into this increasingly larger and more powerful country, but its influence was also growing in the states not conquered by Prussia. In particular, the wars

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Prussia won made many Germans, their confessional and political differences notwithstanding, look up at this power, its educational system included. Not infrequently, especially at a time when institutions for elementary school teacher training were still small and few in number, former soldiers and sergeants often became teachers and, while teaching math and the ABC, they also instructed primary schoolchildren of either sex in the military code of conduct in town and in the countryside.51 Thus, as early as the first half of the nineteenth century, values such as discipline, obedience, order, uniformity, and accuracy, which, as will be shown here, played an important role in the set of problems discussed here, were affirmed and handed down by the military, by the public drawing inspiration from the military, but above all by the system of education. The famous saying of the Leipzig professor of geography Oscar Peschel about the Prussian schoolmaster winning the Battle of Königgrätz52 was interpreted in many ways: some saw it as a reference to the “Prussian idea,” properly conveyed to children in school, others as an allusion to the greater discipline of Prussian soldiers, disciplined in elementary school from an early age,53 and yet others believed it to mean a higher level of education Prussian non-commissioned officers and soldiers had in comparison to their Austrian counterparts, enabling them to move more freely and purposefully on the battlefield.54 Be it as it may, the essay on the advantages of the Prussian elementary school containing this statement appeared in a magazine published in Munich: Prussia’s charisma was felt quite strongly even in Bavaria, which was in some respects its rival and opponent. In the nineteenth century conditions changed—not only in Prussia, of course, but everywhere in Europe, albeit at different speeds. On the one hand, the dawn of modernity meant a growing influence of values oriented toward commercial competition, financial gain, and social advancement. On the other, the increasingly rapidly changing employment landscape offered new opportunities in state service, trade and commerce, including options that were not about mere “sustenance,” but about career, that is, a regulated promotion. Occupations and industries emerged where the chances of success were much more predictable than on the free market, which, under the influence of capitalism, offered new chances, but also brought new and often fatal problems, especially for the disfavored. In the rapidly growing white-collar sector and in public service, particularly civil service, entry opportunities (and, in some cases, promotion) depended on the level of education.55 For the higher state and church service, for postal and telegraph service, and so on, and later also for the exercise of some “bourgeois professions” such as veterinary surgeon or pharmacist’s assistant, an authorization was required, which could only be obtained through an examination. Once this hurdle was overcome, promotion, salary, and old-age pension depended directly on seniority, conditional on an impeccable lifestyle, discipline, and

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obedience, which were as important to the “sitting army” of civil servants as to the standing army of soldiers.56 Many parents, therefore, no longer saw the appeal of starting their sons off as apprentices or trade assistants and interrupting their career in its uncertain early phase for three years of army service after which they would have to restart searching for “nourishment” again in their early twenties.57 Instead, thousands of Prussian families now preferred to send their sons to Gymnasium so they would be able to obtain a maturity certificate or, as was much more frequently the case, receive a school-leaving certificate after the antepenultimate grade (Obersekunda), get credited for a one-year voluntary service, spend only one year in the army instead of three, and then, as reserve officers, be able to pursue a white-collar career.58 The qualification to one-year voluntary military service—an institution that existed in Russia as well—was after the Prussian model introduced in 1868 in Bavaria and later throughout the entire German Empire, in order, as expressly stated, “to take as little time away as possible from the young people who use their youth to acquire knowledge and higher education in order to secure their future, but also to make themselves useful directly or indirectly to the state” and “to create for the armed forces a pool of non-commissioned and senior officers to draw from at no cost.”59 Two values were thus addressed which, as will be shown here, played a central role in discourses on perfecting writing systems, namely, saving time and expenses. For many German educational institutions, a further consequence of integration into the Prussian state as it grew was that teachers, inspectors, rectors, principals, and other functionaries transferred from other Prussian provinces came to school boards and brought along new ideas about school discipline and the rigor required in teaching. As the senior teacher Paul Falk from Düsseldorf wrote, since the 1830s the state, especially the Prussian state, has drawn ever sharper guidelines for the school . . . . Through the penetration of the military spirit into the school, the curriculum of each type of school, the course of instruction and the number of hours are prescribed with the utmost precision.  .  .  . Everyone must satisfy the average requirement in each subject and must demonstrate this by passing an examination. . . . There is no doubt that since the energetic intervention of the state, higher education has experienced a tremendous, unprecedented upswing; undoubtedly, a great deal of sloppiness and many a perversity have been checked, and it is undeniable that the external image has improved and discipline has become tighter.

But the flip side to the coin, he went on to say, was that individuality was neglected, mediocrity reigned, and “the stifling letter may have smothered a

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good deal of joy.”60 The levelling demands, of which the teacher wrote here, were specified in the increasingly unified examination regulations. The annexation to Prussia also meant for some German territories that official orthographic regulations, insofar as they had previously applied there, were soon repealed. This did not necessarily mean unconditional progress for all provinces in codifying their spelling. For example, Hannover was the first German state to introduce a uniform official body of orthography rules with a word list for all schools and administrative authorities as early as 1855, before anything of this kind existed in Prussia. The Prussian Ministry of Religion, Healthcare and Education demanded without much success in 1862 and then again in 1868 that teachers should agree on uniform spelling rules, at least within the individual educational institutions.61 In 1871, however, the Berlin Association of Humanistic and Non-Humanistic Gymnasium Teachers (Berliner Verband der Gymnasial- und Realschullehrer) produced its own spelling dictionary with a word list, and that was immediately recommended for general use throughout Prussia. The official set of rules based on it was then introduced in 1880 for all elementary and Gymnasiums in the kingdom.62 However, formal incorporation was not even always necessary for Prussian models to be adopted in other German countries: Prussia reigned supreme in the Customs Union, in the North German Confederation, and later in the German Empire, which enabled Berlin to push other states, especially the smaller Central German states, toward unification and led to the “CentralState educational model,” which had existed there during the first two thirds of the century, being replaced by the Prussian model. The influence of the Prussian system was particularly strong in the Gymnasium system: deviations from this increasingly imitated model concerned more the question of the extent of state management and control than the content and methods of teaching and rearing.63 This said, the spreading of Prussian models should of course not be seen as a triumphant march without resistance and setbacks. For political and denominational reasons, the larger and stronger Southern German states in particular resisted Prussia’s growing influence. Besides, even in their mutual relations they often only reached compromise solutions after long and difficult negotiations. For years after the foundation of the empire, traditional particularism of the individual German states, preserved by cultural sovereignty, political Catholicism, and the anti-Prussian attitude of the South counteracted the tendencies toward unification at the imperial level, most of which were marked by Prussification (or perceived as such). The slow coalescence of the states constituting the German Empire can be illustrated by the fate of the resolutions adopted by two so-called orthographic conferences held in Berlin. In 1876, despite the enthusiasm for national unity and the wave of unification in many areas, the First Orthographic Conference’s

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resolutions were met with rejection and could not be enforced, because the governments of the federal states regarded it as unacceptable for their public to have cultural norms dictated from Berlin, especially since the constitutional principle of cultural sovereignty of the federal states forbade any imposition in this area.64 Individual governments then introduced their own sets of rules. These—like curricula, examination regulations, textbooks, and readers—were different, and these differences, however slight, were of fundamental—sometimes symbolic—significance. Some governments adopted orthographic regulations and other norms from each other (i.e., not only from Prussia), thereby prioritizing preservation of their customary sovereignty over nationwide uniformity. It was not until a quarter of a century after the foundation of the Reich that integration had progressed to such an extent that the Bundesrat only had to recommend the resolutions of the Second Orthographic Conference (1901) to governments for acceptance, and, their obvious shortcomings notwithstanding, these uniform rules were quickly adopted by all federal states, thus putting an end to the centuries-long era of orthographic pluralism. Outside of Germany, Prussia’s reputation was ambivalent. Although its cult of the army, military discipline, and uniforms was not viewed with much sympathy by many people in non-German speaking countries, the high degree of Prussian hegemony in Europe in science and education was indisputable. Not only in Spain65 but also in France,66 a culturally quite self-confident nation, the authorities showed great interest in the Prussian system of education despite—or precisely because of—military conflicts. This interest was ambivalent at times, especially in the wake of the “arch-enmity” after the Franco-Prussian War quite a few people in France had mixed feelings about the Prussian-dominated German school system. On the one hand, Professor Célestin Hippeau, who published an extensive survey of German education institutions in 1873, declared with disgust: It is not that I am inclined to attribute the victory at Sadowa, the disaster at Sedan, or the capture of Metz to the superiority of Prussia’s elementary school and the influence of its primary teachers. What I would like to point out is the difference in the results produced on the state of minds, public morality and the degree of civilization. What reigns supreme [in Prussia] is the principle of authority imposing itself everywhere; it is the spirit of submission to power; it is—under the deceptive guise of unlimited independence in the realm of thought—passive obedience in the realm of action, not to law, justice or right, but to force; it is the absolute reign of instructions; it is, in a word, military rule applied to all branches of administration. Public education had to be, more than any other, designed in the same spirit.67

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On the other hand, the government of the Third Republic did regard the Prussian model of child-rearing and military training as the recipe for Germany’s military strength, which the French had only recently experienced for themselves in such a dramatic way. They therefore borrowed things from the German school system despite their anti-German sentiment. While the attitude to “the Germans” in Russia was generally no less ambivalent than in France, as studies conducted within the framework of the project Germany and the Germans through the Eyes of the Russians and, more recently, by Svetlana Obolenskaja have shown,68 many academics in particular held their German colleagues in very high esteem. In Russia, the Prussian school system was already in the eighteenth century regarded as a role model by reformers, of which many came from the Protestant northern Germany or the Baltic provinces, or had studied in German universities. When Catherine the Great planned the introduction of a constitution for the Russian Empire and formed the so-called Legislative Commission (Uložennaja komissija), the latter set up a subcommittee for the school system which recommended adopting the Prussian system. At that time, however, the empress opted for a solution based more on the Austrian model. This, however, in turn was an “adaptation of the Prussian school system to the needs of a multi-ethnic empire.”69 With regard to the Russian secondary education system of the nineteenth century, one can partly speak of a transfer of the Protestant German (which in this context meant primarily Prussian) model. This process took place through several channels, and its actors displayed varying degrees of selection, reflection and adaptation. This will be discussed in more detail in the next chapter. Summing up this section, a system of values largely shaped by the Prussian army model and Prussian civil service, which dominated Protestant northern Germany and to some extent the entire German Empire, produced a system of child-rearing, education, and examination model that was imported to a number of other countries including Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century. This educational model was characterized, among other things, by a high regard for uniformity, discipline, and faultlessness.

TECHNICAL MODERNIZATION: PRECISION AND STANDARDIZATION BRING ADVANTAGES It is a trivial fact that technical modernization, new industrial and transportation technologies, revolutionized the lives of billions over the course of the nineteenth century. But what did the Industrial Revolution mean for the lifeworlds in which spelling classes and orthographic reforms took their historically specific forms?

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One might first think of standardization in the industry: as compared to preindustrial manufacturing, industrial mass production means a much higher degree of uniformity in both the end product and the components. In England, the first standardized screws and tools were introduced as early as the first half of the nineteenth century. They were not only uniform, but unprecedentedly precise, such as gauges with a tolerance of one millionth of an inch.70 Thanks to the simpler and cheaper production and repair of machines, ships, weapons, and so on, the idea of standardization gained wide acceptance, which can be summed up as follows: Same function means same form, as exactly as possible. Whatever is different, does not fit. Industrial standards and norms were gradually established in England for the dimensions and shape of components, for the composition and properties of materials, and for a multitude of parameters previously considered to be very individual, changeable, and unpredictable. Importing these ideas into Germany and Russia, however, was slower. Although many German and some Russian engineers studied in England and many English engineers worked in Germany and the Russian Empire, the establishment of standardized norms in industrial production took place only sporadically until the late nineteenth or even early twentieth century, and then for the most part not nationally but at an internal company level, and individual factories’ standards differed. But when and insofar as this happened, it meant not just a major technological change but also a whole new relationship between the worker and their work. As Thomas Wölker put it, the permissible deviations from the nominal or normal dimensions (tolerances) were now [i.e., around the turn of the twentieth century—K.L.] no longer determined by the user’s arbitrary judgment, but transferred onto a test tool (gauge, mandrel) within the limits previously defined by standards and thus clearly and objectively determined.71

This experience drew an important mental and existential distinction between a craftsman and a modern industrial worker. The latter was not only estranged from the means and purposes of production but also worked in the conditions of increasing error intolerance. It was not the invisible hand of the market, but the foreman or the employer that punished deviations from externally determined standards, the possible consequences of which for the quality of the end product a factory worker couldn’t even assess. In this respect, he or she resembled an apprentice or journeyman—or a schoolchild—all their life. As time passed, a large and constantly growing number of factory workers and engineers became familiar with tolerances and other strict industrial standards and knew that they were considered to be of great importance for the successful operation of companies in terms of production technology and

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economy, and that failing to observe them could have serious consequences (reprimand, punishment, dismissal, apart from accidents at work). And yet, the immediate widespread effect of this pattern can only be seen in the late period of industrialization. In particular, the bourgeois not directly employed in industry were seldom confronted with factory standards in the nineteenth century. Prior to World War I, Loewe was the only company in Germany to publish its company standards, while others held them back as a trade secret.72 However, it was not always important whether a norm could be experienced firsthand in the individual’s lifeworld. Over the course of modernization, the presence and the importance of industrial standards and norms in people’s world picture were increasingly enhanced by mass media depictions, which, depending on the degree of literacy and the development of the media landscape, formed an “augmented reality” for many, especially those from the middle class. If I see it correctly, uniform industrial norms and standards were hardly discussed outside the specialist press, but already in the 1850s, even before German industry could serve as a model, articles in the German press praised the “razor-sharp precision” and “discipline” characteristic of the English industrial companies as “remarkable” and “admirable.”73 As a symbol of this exemplary accuracy, a reporter in the Gartenlaube described the almost erotic touch of a giant steam iron hammer with a fine ladies’ watch placed on the anvil: the glass of the watch was touched by this hammer falling with tremendous force, without breaking it. When forging a crankshaft for a military steamboat, the journalist went on to write, every blow of this hammer was so strongly felt all around that the pen of James H. Nasmyth who sat writing in the office was repeatedly pushed off course. The symbolic aspect of this representation is remarkable: while the steam hammer can be interpreted as a symbol of iron infallibility, technical competence, strength and self-control, and the watch as a symbol of prosperity, elegance and punctuality, but the warship as a symbol of military strength, the subsequent mention of writing also gave rise to an association between these three prestigious and seminal precision mechanisms and the writing process. In Russia, the Industrial Revolution began much later than in England and later than in Germany. In the Niva, the Gartenlaube’s Russian counterpart, a similar picture was not described until 1904, in a completely different way. In an article with two illustrations, the anonymous reporter emphasizes the progressiveness and power of the “colossal” 1000-centner hammer named Fritz, “the most powerful of all those to ever have existed,” installed in 1881 in Krupp’s factory in Essen, which “kneads, hammers and forges” a 70-tonne blank into a ship’s crankshaft 20 sažen (42.6 m) long and 2 aršin (1.44 m) thick. The finished shaft, a “monster that reminds an endlessly long cannon,” is then transported by a freight train on several wagons that “look very impressive.”74 Here, it is only the “colossal” size that the author admires:

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discipline and precision play no role in this narrative. The report even contains a factual error: the text talks about forging, while both captions claim that the crank shaft was cast. One frequently encounters such differences between descriptions of the most important achievements of the nineteenth century in the German and in the Russian press of the time. Depending on perception and interpretation, this sort of media accounts could be read not only as praising the power of a nation’s economy but also as demonstrating the high value of the principles underlying the dream of a clear, rational set of uniform rules, legitimately established by a respected authority and strictly observed in production, the production of written texts included. In what follows, I am going to discuss a few more examples showing how ubiquitous such images were in the lives and imaginations of many people in both countries.

CONFERENCES AS NORM (RE) CONSTRUCTION SETTINGS An assembly of interested parties representing themselves or certain groups and making decisions by vote after a general discussion and deliberation is in and of itself an ancient institution that can be observed in different forms in the history of many peoples and states, especially in the field of lawmaking, where new laws are passed and existing ones revised, and in the judiciary, where the application and observance of existing laws is at stake. Pragmatic decisions that only apply to a specific current situation, as in military staff or industrial board meetings, are in principle made in the same way as decisions on joint actions by large associations, such as when states negotiate and conclude treaties with each other at international conferences, often with unlimited validity, be it the 1648 Peace Treaties of Westphalia or the twentyword tariff established by the first International Telegraph Congress in Paris in 1865, deliberations in the International Committee for the Weights and Measurements (the 1875 Meter Convention) or the First German Stenographers’ Day, at which new rules for shorthand were debated. In Christianity, church councils serve to define dogmas, some of which have the status of the absolute, universal and eternal truth. Since modern western science claimed to possess other truths, which often contradicted the religious ones and yet were more true, or to discover them through experimentation, observation, and analysis, such scientific truths can also be produced by individuals, provided that they carry out the respective heuristic procedures in compliance with uniform and universally applicable rules of science. These rules, however, are of conventional nature. In the nineteenth century, a new institution of the kind mentioned earlier was created in

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Europe—scientific conferences and congresses, at which researchers not only put their work up for discussion and exchanged experiences and opinions but also jointly decided on the rules of research and voted on what, in accordance with these new rules, should henceforth be regarded as the scientifically proven, objective truth. “Hard facts,” such as the number of planets in the solar system or the composition and properties of chemical substances, were and will be defined by scientists in such meetings and later changed, should the definitions and grounds, on which these facts stand and fall, be revised. To put it somewhat more pointedly, it is not uncommon for conference rooms to function as production halls for the social construction of reality. In the nineteenth century, ever new areas became the subject of discussion, determination, and regulation through specialist conferences. Not a year passed without a national or international conference or congress being held somewhere in Europe, at which experts and interest groups negotiated with varying degrees of success in order to establish more or less universal rules and truths by majority vote.75 As one example illustrative of many such cases, it is only worth mentioning the way in which some chemical formulas (today familiar to every schoolchild and taken for granted) were created. Dmitry Mendeleev described the initial situation around the middle of the nineteenth century as follows: And so it was in the fifties. Some took O = 8, others O = 16. Water in the first case would be HO and hydrogen peroxide HO2, and in the second case, as is now generally accepted, water H2O and hydrogen peroxide H2O2 or HO. Disagreement and confusion reigned. In 1860 the chemists of the whole world met at Carlsruhe for the purpose of arriving at some agreement and uniformity of opinion.76

Initiated and sponsored by Friedrich August Kekulé, Karl Adolf Würz, and Karl Welzin, the first international Chemists’ Congress took place in Carlsruhe on September 3–5, 1860. Its goal was to discuss problems of chemical nomenclature and atomic mass, which had accrued to such an extent that they seemed to hinder the progress of science. To illustrate one of these problems, Kekulé demonstrated to those present nineteen (!) different formulas for acetic acid used by chemists. A heated debate broke out between the 127 participants from different European countries. One faction did not believe in detecting atoms and therefore suggested abandoning the hopeless search for the “true” formulas and simply choosing one of the possible formulas for each substance and establishing it as a convention. Another faction united materialistically minded chemists who had no doubts about the detectability of atoms and therefore rejected a convention as a solution: they believed that the only true formulas of chemical substances existed and that scientists could

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and should establish them. The fact that this group ultimately won was by no means a foregone conclusion. The congress organizers did not claim that it should possess the authority to make universally binding decisions. In fact, the letter of invitation, sent out in several languages to all European chemists, explicitly stated the opposite: Knowing that the assembly’s deliberations would not be of a nature such as to reconcile all opinions and eliminate all disagreements immediately, the undersigned believed, nevertheless, that it could pave the way for a muchdesired agreement between chemists in the future, at least regarding the most important questions. A commission was to be established to continue the investigation of these questions and to bring them to the attention of academies or scholarly societies equipped with the necessary means for resolving them. Nevertheless, fundamental conceptual and terminological resolutions were adopted by vote at the congress, which in many respects set the course for the development of the discipline. Of central importance was the fact that the scholarly community ultimately accepted and followed the Carlsruhe decisions. The terminology of organic chemistry was defined by the 1892 Geneva Congress on Organic Nomenclature, the botanical nomenclature by the 1905 International Botanical Conference of Vienna in 1905 (although some were questioning the Conference’s “authority” to do so77), and so on. The series of examples could be continued, but I think the ones already cited are sufficient to make it clear that the nineteenth century was an era in which conferences of interested parties and experts were increasingly used as tools for collective norm construction in science as well as in international politics.

MODERN RATIONALITY AND ITS VALUES: EXACTITUDE, REGULATION, OPTIMIZATION Scientific precision and unequivocal clarity, often emphasized as the opposite of the subjectivity and vagueness allegedly prevailing in the humanities, thus turn out to be a fairly recent historical phenomenon originating largely in negotiations and conventions. In a number of other areas where everything seems to be perfectly unambiguous, it is sometimes possible to identify phenomena pointing in the same direction. As an example of this, but also to illustrate the high value of impeccable accuracy, which became more and more noticeable in Germany not only in the area of material production, but also in other rapidly developing areas of modern life, the financial system should be mentioned. In a world where, according to many contemporaries’ observations, money played an

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increasingly important role and more and more transactions were made not with cash in direct contact with counterparts but in writing, much depended on how conscientious each bank employee or accountant was in counting, calculating, reading, and writing. Not that accuracy in financial transactions was unimportant in pre-modern times, but the number of financial institutions, the range and, in part, the complexity of their services rapidly increased in the second half of the nineteenth century, as did the number of their employees and clients. Those who personally had nothing to do with bookkeeping and did not often go to the bank as a customer could read in a magazine about how, as in the Prussian Bank, this “golden gate of the allcoveted wealth” (just the “thought of the millions piled up here” was supposed to be “intoxicating and tempting” for numerous magazine readers!), even the “slightest carelessness . . . could cause an immeasurable damage.”78 Of course, this carelessness did not necessarily have to be a spelling mistake, but there was no examination, for example, for archiving or bookkeeping, whereas in the area of orthography along with arithmetic and other subjects taught at school, prospective bank clerks and treasurers were examined at length. According to the Examination Regulations for Clerks and Treasurers of Towns and Districts Belonging to the Schleswig-Holstein Association of Towns and Cities (1908), for example, each candidate had to prove during the written examination that he “was able to prepare in a practically usable way simpler documents with an orderly train of thought and without considerable violations of language and orthography.”79 The Regulations on the Admission, Training, and Examination of Civil Servants, Applicants, and Unskilled Workers in the Office, Cash Desk, and Chancellery of the City of Kiel, which came into force one year later, contained stricter requirements: At the end of their probation, civilian and military candidates were to take a preliminary examination in order (note the order, in which the requirements were enumerated) “firstly, to demonstrate confidence in counting, spelling and grammar, and an ability to express their thoughts in writing and orally skillfully and consistently” and only secondly, to prove other knowledge and skills.80 There is every reason to believe that the high position of spelling among the evaluation criteria is due not least to the filter function assigned to it. But also in the financial world there were truths which, as was shown earlier, could one day be revised and redefined by negotiation when the centuries-old traditions of the German state currencies were reformed and unified within the framework of the Confederation. A further example from a completely different sphere of the modern lifeworld and imagination: the development and expansion of new transport routes and means of transportation, both directly and indirectly via their propaganda in the media, contributed significantly to the development of such

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a lifeworld context, which, among other things, made a new, optimizing and intolerant approach to spelling seem possible and necessary in the first place. For what does a highway have to do with spelling? Generally speaking, roads have always facilitated the exchange of commodities (texts included) and ensured better administration, taxation, conscription and policing, which all rely on writing. They have allowed children and teachers to get to their schools and books or newspapers to reach wider readerships. Well-paved roads had existed in some places since Roman times, so they were nothing new in and of themselves, at least south of the Limes. In the age of industrialization and nation-building, however, both the number and the military, economic and cultural significance of good roads, especially in Central and Western Europe, reached completely new dimensions. It would be safe to say that improved and extended road networks and unified language norms were equally important for the integration and homogenization of nations. But now I would like to point out that the way they were built in the nineteenth century was even more important as far as our topic is concerned. In addition to such vivid changes in practical life, people in Germany who did not personally bear witness to road construction or the transportation of troops were also able to get acquainted with the new discourse on these roads, which also differed from the pre-modern discourse in a way that was significant for the matter at hand. The article “Highway” of the 1781 German Encyclopedia dealt only with qualitative properties of a highway.81 In the 1854 Herders Conversations-Lexikon, some general technical aspects were added.82 The article in the 1857 edition of Pierer’s Universal-Lexikon, however, described primarily the technical side by specifying quite exact measurements, which now belonged to the definition of a highway: “A highway . . . shall . . . have not too great a rise from the horizontal surface . . . namely at most 3–5 percent; . . . [the] side ditches [shall] have at least a 1½ inch drop per 100 feet. The width of the bottom of these ditches is 2 ft, the side of the road or the inner slope is 1½ ft, the outer slope is 1 ft,” and so on.83 German encyclopedia articles of this kind (and there were similar articles on many other topics) conveyed the idea that man-made things, which played an increasingly important role in the modern world, were to be made according to precise and uniform rules with high exactitude, the margin of error not exceeding 2%. There was no room left in this world-picture for variability or arbitrariness. In Russia, however, things were different. Although only a few country roads in the empire were paved in some way or another, the concept and value of the highway were already known to the more educated and mobile representatives of the upper class in the first decades of the nineteenth century; however, they were only discussed in terms of their advantages for travelers. Russian encyclopedias of the nineteenth century contain hardly any information on the structure of a highway.84 In public discourse of the

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Russian Empire, the image of a good road played a much different role than in Germany: what mattered primarily, was obviously not that the slope and the curvature of the road and the width of the side ditches conform to the standard percentage, but that there was a road from A to B which was passable all year round and on which one could drive without too much strain. For example, the linguist Lev Ščerba compared the agonizing experience of reading an orthographically incorrect document with a bumpy ride in a cariole on a frozen dirt road.85 The sensorial nature of this comparison was not untypical of the Russian discourse on orthography. In many places, especially in Germany, new means of transportation went hand in hand with impressive anthropogenic changes in the environment, which vividly showed that man is able to regulate and improve on what had previously been thought to be a given (e.g., by God or nature). In the pre-modern era, Europeans by no means always and everywhere inscribed themselves into the existing landscape. Individual, sometimes quite large-scale interventions in nature have taken place since ancient times, be it a river diversion in ancient Rome, or the Dutch dams and dikes that radically changed large sections of the coastline, or extensive canal construction and drainage work in Russia under Peter I and Catherine II. What was new and relevant to the matter in question in the nineteenth century was, firstly, the quantitatively much greater extent of the changes; secondly, the markedly systematic and orderly character of many large-scale projects based on scientific research and theories; and thirdly, their highly public—and positive—interpretation as expressions of the Zeitgeist. In German countries during the entire nineteenth century, many people could be witness to and affected by, or at least informed in detail about how regulating, ordering and rationalizing interventions were carried out on an unprecedented scale in areas that otherwise belonged to the realm of the given and the natural. A particularly large and famous project of this kind was the comprehensive “Rhine Correction.”86 The great “Father Rhine,” sung about by the Romantics, admired by tourists, and perceived by German nationalists as the paradigmatic “German” river, had meandered since times immemorial, had many meadows, islands, river arms, and movable gravel and sand banks, and used to flood large areas. Now, almost along its entire length, it was to become the object of a precisely calculated regulation carried out by engineers sponsored by several participating states. The celebrated “tamer of the wild Rhine” Colonel Johann Gottfried Tulla as State Engineer of Baden presented an expert opinion on How the Rhine at Daxlanden Should Be Put in Order shortly before the turn of the nineteenth century. According to Tulla, the many chaotic loops and river arms had no place under this order, for no river and no stream needed more than one riverbed. Ideally, he argued, all rivers, streams, and creeks in a cultivated

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country should be canals whose course would be determined by the interests of the local population. In 1818, the work of streamlining commenced on the Upper Rhine, carried out jointly by Baden and Bavaria against fierce protests and sometimes violent resistance by local peasants and fishermen. Later, France also joined the venture. In 1826, Hesse, Prussia and the Netherlands appealed against the continuation of the work because they feared major damage from the now much faster flow of the river. After this resistance was overcome through Bavarian diplomacy, numerous further cuts through were made and loops “eliminated.” The “Rhine correction” continued after Tulla’s death in 1828 and was completed in 1879 under the direction of Max Honsell, Director of Hydraulic Engineering and Road Construction in Baden. For the “corrected” Rhine, in addition to the straightest possible course of the river, a constant and exact width was determined within certain sections, namely 240 m in the upper reaches, 300 m downstream from the mouth of the Neckar, 450 m between Mainz and Bingen, and so on. Also, the depth of the river was regulated rationally, on the basis of economic considerations, so as to make it navigable for large steamboats. The rationalizing intervention into nature had an effect on the lives of the residents that could hardly be overlooked. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, steamboats were able to carry goods and passengers up to Basel, and railway lines ran along both banks of the regulated river. As a result of the increase in cargo and passenger traffic, the population of some places— including those where the concentration of mining or industrial operations was not as high as in the Ruhr area—doubled and tripled over a short period of time. The straightening of the Rhine freed the riverbanks from malaria, made large areas arable and produced a considerable economic upturn through improved transport facilities. It caused by no means only a positive major upheaval for the local rural population, because entire branches of the economy that used to be of great importance here, e.g. fishing and gold panning, but also forestry, suffered a devastating blow. The straightening also had other negative or at least ambivalent effects. It led to a lowering of the groundwater level, which caused a massive change in vegetation and, in the southern Upper Rhine region, a veritable “desertification” of the landscape. The dead forests were replaced after 1880 by the forestry administration by less demanding tree species, e.g. Canada poplars, mostly planted as a sole species and in long, straight rows, which made their economic exploitation easier and more profitable but reduced their resistance to wind, parasites and diseases.87 This and other large projects of the kind provoked sharp criticism. An anonymous “German engineer,” for example, published a pamphlet in 1876 claiming that all river straightening carried out in Germany up to that time had been unsuccessful and harmful. He accused German “hydrotects”

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and governments of error and ignorance.88 This criticism did not go unchallenged and was in turn exposed and rejected as “based on a lack of expertise.” Protests and resistance diminished with time,89 however, because the prevailing opinion had come around: “The private interests of some riverbank land owners and natural beauty considerations” could “not possibly be thrown into the scale against the great interests of shipping [companies] of the entire Rhineland in such a way that the shipping should forever yield to them.”90 By the end of the nineteenth century, a number of horseshoe bends of the Oder (1736–1788 and 1888–1897), the Vistula (1889–1895) and several other rivers in the German Empire were straightened. Of course, these individual cut-throughs could not be compared with the great “Rhine correction,” but they became widely known due to the increased passenger throughput on these rivers. Moreover, anyone who was not among the several million Germans directly affected and influenced by these regulatory projects, got news of them through the press. The Gartenlaube praised Tulla and his work by linking the conquest of the Rhine with pride in the victories of the last wars, which further increased the positive impression.91 The Danube cut-through near Vienna, which thanks to this regulation really became “a world marketplace,” was even praised by the magazine as a “human act . . . , to which the people of the present will raise their hats and which will make the descendants think of our times with respect.”92 In the Russian Empire, river regulation works were carried out in the 1870–1890s on the Vistula, the Neman, the Pripyat, the Dnjestr, the Dnipro near Kiev, the Volga near Nizhniy Novgorod and near Saratov, and so on. However, the extent of the interventions, intended mainly to improve the navigability of individual sections of these rivers, was much smaller; they envisaged dredging and dike construction rather than cut-throughs and regulation of the river width. As a result, their impact on the river landscape was less noticeable. The reason for this was partly the less pronounced meandering of the rivers to be regulated, and partly the discoveries made by Russian researchers during investigations of the waterways, which suggested different solutions for what was tellingly called ‘river improvement’ (ulučšenie rek) by the famous Russian hydrologist Vladimir Lochtin.93 In the Russian mass press these attempts to ‘improve’ the natural phenomena such as rivers were not celebrated as much as the spectacular “corrections” were in the German press. In the discourse of the reform sceptics, however, the identification of a spelling reform with an intervention into nature94 played an important role, especially in Russia. The doctrine, according to which language, its written form included, is not God’s work or a natural phenomenon, but the work of man, might be shared or at least taken note of by Russian connoisseurs of Western European linguistics but did not reign supreme as far as the everyday discourse was concerned. Leo Tolstoy, one of the most influential minds of

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his time, said in a conversation with a reporter of the newspaper Rus’ in 1904, “In my opinion, this reform is silly . . . Yes, yes, silly... This is a typical scientists’ invention, which certainly cannot be implemented. . . . Lev Nikolaevič’s voice sounds angry again.—Man cannot and must not change what life creates; it is pointless to try to correct nature, it makes no sense.”95 Whether through straightening or dredging, the throughput capacity of rivers as traffic routes increased. The flourishing inland navigation had farreaching consequences for the life of port cities; but for the ever-increasing number of people who made use of this means of transportation as passengers, the effects were also significant from the point of view of the topic dealt with here. The development of technology, especially steam propulsion, was accompanied by an increase in precision. In mechanical engineering and in engineering in general, which was largely responsible for the celebrated economic progress, the exact determination of the permissible deviation from a standard value played a major role. Steamboat navigation was one of the areas where this specific technical feature of the means of transportation became a consumer value, because steamboats were (at least in general) faster and much more punctual than sailboats. The first steamboats operated on German and Russian rivers and seas as early as the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the first decades they were few and far between, their share in the mobility of the population was still relatively small, both quantitatively and qualitatively, but it increased, and from the 1860s, it can already be assumed that tens of thousands of passengers were carried each year,96 each of whom was confronted with new requirements for precision during the voyage. Nikolaj Novosel’skij, co-founder and managing director of the two most successful Russian steamboat companies ROPiT and Kavkaz i Merkurij, emphasized that for any steamboat company, “a good timetable is of utmost importance. In steamboat transportation, you have to budget for every usable hour.”97 His passenger ships always kept to their timetables, which were calculated to the quarter of an hour, like those of the German steamship companies on the Rhein in the 1850s. The progress was noticeable: in the 1830s, for example, the steamships in Koblenz still departed “at 7½ o’clock in the morning,” which, the contemporaries felt, was as punctually, as only the “mounted messengers and postal wagons at the Royal Prussian Chief Post Office in Koblenz” and “passenger mail coaches (express wagons)” went.98 Even more precise—already in the early 1840s often to the minute—were the railway timetables, which entered the lifeworld of many Europeans soon after the steamboats. The first German railway line using steam locomotives, built in 1835, connected the neighboring cities of Nuremberg and Fürth; the first public railway in Prussia connected Berlin with Potsdam in 1838.99 The first Russian railway, opened almost simultaneously (1837), led from Saint

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Petersburg to Tsarskoe Selo. It was mainly used for entertainment purposes, but within a short period of time railways also emerged in Russia as a means of mass transportation. Especially on long-distance journeys, the train beat all other known means of transport.100 The economic and military advantages that this promised were soon recognized; construction and operation of railways became an important economic sector, and in journalism the railway became a popular, albeit not always positively metaphor.101 It is a trivial fact that railroad was and is often used as a symbol for the fast and unstoppable progress of history. But this means of transportation also had other connotations, which were quite obvious to contemporaries. The tracks could, for example, symbolize the exclusion of arbitrariness. In 1848, Adolf Glaßbrenner, editor of Berlin’s Freie Blätter, remarked that nothing was certain if the events did not follow the course outlined like a train, “The wheels of time move fast, but not along the track; events are rushing along. . . . Who and what is certain at this time? Nothing.”102 A further characteristic of the railway, which also gave rise to metaphorical linguistic usage, is its power to shape behavior: as Lutz Brangsch rightly emphasizes, when Karl Marx described revolutions as “the locomotives of history,” his concern was not to postulate the progressive role of revolutions in world history (an interpretation common in Russia since Lenin), but rather the fact that in the course of revolutionary action the French peasantry was compelled to learn new political and social rules of behavior.103 The perspectives and rules of conduct that life with the railways created or valorized included, as will be shown here, those that could serve as a model for a new relationship with writing. The public discourse on reforms was also influenced by railroad metaphors. In his plea for the unification of German stage pronunciation, which he saw as the basis for “possible improvements in orthography,” Theodor Siebs, for example, resorted to the image of railroad construction as a metaphor for the necessary mercilessness of a rationalizing reform, pointing out that “many a dialect have been sacrificed for the sake of the single German written language—it is much like cutting down trees in the forest through which the railway is to pass.”104 A kindred spirit of Siebs from Paderborn saw a direct, rather than metaphorical, connection between the development of the railways and the need for a unifying regulation of German pronunciation: Uniformity of pronunciation is also required by the unprecedented upturn in the transportation sector. North Germans and South Germans, East Germans and West Germans have been brought closer together by the speed of transport made possible by the railways. According to this, even a purely practical need will lead to the individual discarding his own local peculiarities in order for his dialectal characteristics to be as indiscernible as possible when communicating with people from other regions.105

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It is doubtful and, indeed, no longer possible to verify, whether many rail travelers were actually embarrassed to have their origin detected through oral communication. However, the expansion of railways has certainly led to new standardization requirements in the field of communication. After individual lines and regional rail networks had been built in the 1840–1860s, they were successively connected with each other, which made standardization in the technical area, such as standardization of track gauges, harmonization of timetables and tariffs, necessary. For timetables, price lists, railway guides, and other sources of information necessary for the operation of railroads, in which the alphabetical principle played a structuring role, it was important to establish a uniform spelling for place names such as Cöln/Köln, Coblenz/ Koblenz, Kamenec-Podol’sk/Kamenec Podol’skij, and the like. This need, felt by railway officials, gradually reached the ears of the public. In Cologne in 1898, a unanimous decision was taken by the City Council and supported by the Chamber of Commerce, to file an application for the abolition of the spelling Cöln. Many Prussian ministers supported the initiative. The minister of religious, educational and medical affairs, von Bartsch, approved a uniform spelling of 25 place names, including Kassel, Cologne, Koblenz, and others, in a ministerial decree of 18 May 1899, Regarding the Spelling of Various Place Names Appearing in the State Budget,106 but the emperor ordered on 19 September 1900 to keep spelling them with the letter C. After leaving the army, Major General Hermann Budde was appointed Imperial Minister of State and Prussian Minister of Public Works by the emperor in 1902. In this office he had to deal, among other things, with difficult spelling issues, e.g. how to apply the new spelling rules adopted in 1901 to place names that were not “real” proper names but appellatives, especially railway station names such as Dammthor (which means “dam gate”), Thiergarten (”zoo”), Johannisthal (“John’s valley”), Central-Viehhof (”central stockyard”), Central-Markthalle (“central market hall”), and so on: Should the silent h be omitted or not? The minister decided that spelling of such place names could only be changed with consent of all affected government departments.107 As a former military officer accustomed to uniform action of all units concerned, he probably could hardly fathom how hard it would be to reach such a broad consensus. The sometimes difficult negotiations, the enthusiasm of some collective and individual actors in introducing or changing uniform norms, and the reluctance or hesitation of others show structural similarities with the struggles for the far-reaching standardization of German orthography. Every federal state had its own peculiarities which it did not want to part with. For example, their wagon and wheel frame sizes and track gauges did not match those of their neighbors (which was also done on purpose, in part for military reasons), making it necessary for passengers traveling (e.g., from Magdeburg

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to Dortmund to change trains four times). After the foundation of the German Reich, the gauges of the state-owned German railways were standardized, whereas individual federal states, especially Baden, refused for some time to change their standards.108 In Russia, the railway boom started later and went slower. The first two long-distance lines, between Warsaw and Vienna and between Saint Petersburg and Moscow, were opened in 1848 and 1851, respectively. Railway construction did not begin in earnest until the 1860s, and then again toward the end of the nineteenth century.109 Standardization on the basis of the fivefoot gauge was carried out by the state when the individual lines, which had originally had different wagon and locomotive types, track gauges and clearance profiles, were joined to form a network. The underlying reasoning was not based on comfort of the traveler, but on time, labor, and money savings in railway construction and freight transport. The latter circumstance is not without significance for the matter at hand: railway connections to market and port cities brought a great upswing to the Russian economy, so that businessmen, grain-producing landowners and merchants profited from them above all. In contrast, it was seldom admired and praised as worth imitating by representatives of the social strata most involved in cultural (re)production and thus in debates about spelling, such as aristocratic city dwellers and raznočincy, whose ethos favored the nobleman’s honor or the spiritual values higher than materialistic reasoning, according to which standardization leads to increased profitability and efficiency. Indeed, until the mid–1890s, these people did not travel by train as often or as far: long-distance tickets were quite expensive in Russia, so rail travel over 300 km accounted for only 6% of the approximately 11,000 single trips per year. Although the number of single journeys increased rapidly after the 1894 tariff reduction and in 1913 amounted to well over 200,000 per year, the majority of them were still trips by suburban trains on distances of less than 50 km.110 Nevertheless, in the decade right before World War I, it was no longer possible to imagine the worldview of the urban middle class of European Russia—the class of readers and writers, lecturers and debaters—without the railway journey with all its experiences from an early age. Trains and rails, station names and ticket prices became the subject of unification efforts. Furthermore, in the 1870s, long-distance lines were built or networked in Germany to connect the west of the country with the east. This made it possible to travel fast across the great German Empire. When travelling latitudinally, considerable differences in local time were immediately noticeable. In order to better interlock the new logistical processes on land and water for the increasingly extensive transport network, the timetables of the ships on the Rhine and the trains that ran along its two banks were adapted to one another in the 1840s.111 To make coordinated train and boat timetables

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possible, reforms were introduced to what had never before been changed by human hand: time. First, uniform “railway times” were introduced within individual German states, which coincided with the time of the respective capital (Prussia, the whole of northern Germany, and Alsace-Lorraine have been on the Berlin time since 1874) and applied to the personnel (but not the passengers) of the railways.112 The clocks hanging next to each other in the offices of railway officials thus showed two different times—local time and the time of the respective railway company—which were both correct. Gradually several companies unified their time calculations for internal use, but the differences that still existed often resulted in the need for conversions and the associated risk of error. Therefore, on June 1, 1891, according to the decision of the Association of German Railway Administrations, a uniform time was introduced for all participating railways for internal service communications and service timetables—this was the time of the 15th meridian east of Greenwich, that is, approximately the local time of Stettin (now Szczecin) and Prague. It was called the “Central European Railway time.” Almost two years later, the German Reich joined the international time zone system agreed upon at the Washington Meridian Conference in 1884. This was, among other things, another link in the chain of German unification reforms, as the whole country was now within one time zone. Russia joined the 1884 time zone system in 1919 formally and five years later in practice, when the Soviet government divided the country into eleven time zones. Trains had been running through the vast Russian Empire since 1874 on St. Petersburg time. The introduction of the unified railway time, which was also the time of the country’s capital, was another success on the way toward the appropriation and development of a gigantic and culturally heterogeneous territory. While the spider web-shaped rail transport system was built in such a way that Moscow functioned as its central hub, which was not logistically optimal but was required for historical and cultural reasons, the clocks in station masters’ and telegraph officials’ offices symbolically tied every place on the railway to Saint Petersburg, so that the signal shot of the cannon in the Peter and Paul Fortress reverberated daily at 12 o’clock at every station up to Vladivostok and struck everywhere at noon, despite the fact that local time, regionally unified according to the zone system, may have deviated from it considerably. Thus, in the latter half of the nineteenth century, an idea came to prevail that, in addition to many human and state institutions, time, until then regarded as belonging to no man or state but to God alone or—in the more progressive formulation—as an absolute and objective natural phenomenon, could also be reformed by man or the authorities, no matter how silly Leo Tolstoy may have found it. Agreement through negotiations and resolutions made it possible to apply regulation and standardization to time as well.

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Heinrich Heine said about the railways in 1843, “What marvelous changes must now enter into our methods of perception and action. Even the elementary concepts of space and time are tottering; for by the railway space is annihilated, and only time remains.”113 But the poet of the Rhine was mistaken: space remained, for the railway age meant not only the conquest of space, but also the new subjugation of man to the power of small and smaller spatial differences. The speed, but also the safety of rail transport were guaranteed by the fact that, in contrast to country roads, railway tracks had a precisely defined track gauge that remained the same throughout the country regardless of the landscape, which, by the standards of the time, was an impressive testimony to the necessity and possibility of a nationwide and empire-wide standardization. While the width of the straightened Rhine was fixed to the nearest meter, the tolerance of the railway was in the millimeter range. It is true, by the middle of the nineteenth century one already encountered many and ever more examples of uniformity in everyday life, such as uniforms, coins and banknotes, but each regiment had its own uniform and each state its own money, which, incidentally, was already regarded by many as a nuisance at the time. The gauge of the railways, however, was exactly the same to the millimeter all over the country, and even in multiple countries. The uniformity of the gauge could thus serve to improve international communication, just as rational, simpler, and more uniform orthography could make it easier for foreigners to learn German and thus contribute to better international communication (see following discussion). The effect of the railway as a positive model of externally determined accuracy, rationality, and efficiency was partly related to its importance for the large community, to which the individual belonged. For it was not only a convenient and fast means of transportation for private and business travelers and for cargo transport, but also an important means of state integration and military logistics. The high esteem in which the railway was held by many Germans was due not least to its importance in the war. In Germany, railway trains were successfully used for troop transport as early as 1848/49.114 In the late 1850s, when Helmuth von Moltke, who had been a board member of the Berlin-Hamburg Railway in the 1840s, was the chief of staff of the Prussian Army,115 new war plans were drawn up which provided for troop transport by rail. These plans brought a brilliant success. Prussia’s victories over Denmark and Austria in the next decade were essentially conditioned by two factors: a detailed planning of operations that left no room for error or initiative on the part of the commanders and soldiers, and the rapid deployment of troops with the help of the rail network, which had meanwhile been expanded further. The huge military importance of the railways became even more clear to the public a few years later, during the Franco-Prussian War, when the French “had the advantage of a railway network specially set up for strategic

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purposes. France was ahead of us [i.e. the Germans—K.L.]” and the German General Staff subsequently had to ensure that this would never happen again.116 The reputation of the railway was thus associated with the authority of the victorious Prussian army, regardless of whether and how often it was used by civilians. In Russia, however, the railway did not possess such a charm based on military prestige and triumph because, on the one hand, the military was not held in as high esteem in the Russian Empire as in Prussia. On the other, successes of the Russian army in the second half of the nineteenth century were not only due to using the railroads. The line to the south was only built after the defeat of Sevastopol (1864–1874); the line from Saint Petersburg to Warsaw (1862) played an important role in the suppression of the Polish January Uprising in 1863/64, but showed the weaknesses of railway logistics, since the insurgents burned several railroad bridges and many Polish-born railway officials joined the uprising; in the Russian-Turkish War of 1877–1878, troop transports to the south were as important as they were successful, but there were also train accidents for technical reasons that claimed many victims; the Trans-Siberian Railway (1891–1916, regular train connection between Saint Petersburg and Vladivostok from 1903 onwards) could not prevent the defeat in the RussianJapanese War of 1904/05. Of course, the lack of victories did not mean that strategic considerations of military nature did not play an important role in the planning of the railway network in the Russian Empire.117 The ruling class of the Russian Empire attached increasingly greater importance to the new means of transportation, among other things as a new stage for power representation. In 1896, shortly after the screening of The Arrival of a Train at the Station in La Ciotat by the Lumière brothers in Paris, a film was shot in Russia with the title: The View of the Char’kov Station at the Time of Departure of a Train and the Authorities Standing on the Platform (Vid khar’kovskogo vokzala v moment otсhoda poezda s naсhodjaščimsja na platforme načal’stvom). Its director and cameraman was Alfred Fedeckij, photographer to Her Imperial Highness the Grand Duchess Aleksandra Petrovna. The impact of this film was, of course, limited, as duplication was at the time still impossible and the number of movie theaters small. A little later, the film was destroyed by fire. In contrast, the photographs taken by Fedeckij managed to reach a much wider audience. These showed not only celebrities, but also the railways.118 The general public, however, had rather mixed feelings about the railway.119 Parts of the educated middle class shared in the railway enthusiasm in the early phase, as reflected by the popularity of Nestor Kukol’nik and Michail Glinka’s Travel Song (Poputnaja pesnja, 1840), describing a pleasure train ride, and by numerous contributions to the high-circulation Niva magazine. This weekly published six to ten articles a year on the new means of transportation, especially railways all over the

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world, often with illustrations. In the vast majority of cases, the tenor of these articles ranged from generally positive to enthusiastic. The main emphasis was on the difficulties overcome in building the lines, on inventive construction solutions, construction costs and deadlines, the number of locomotives and wagons, as well as increased comfort of travelers. Punctuality and above all precision in connection with the railway were discussed in the Niva in terms of the negative impact of their occasional absence, e.g. in reports about snowstorms causing train delays or delays in the construction of railway bridges in Russia and the resulting economic losses.120 For critics of the modern age, construction of railways was more of a juggernaut that had claimed many human sacrifices but by no means improved the lives of the common people. For many poor men, the participation in railway construction work, while not mandatory, was worse than any compulsory service and often even fatal due to poor pay and catastrophic working conditions. In a poem titled The Railway (Železnaja doroga, 1864), the famous Russian poet Nikolaj Nekrasov depicted this as one of the many plagues that were imposed on the Russian people and that they, like everyone else, would nevertheless survive in order to break one day, in the distant future, a broad and bright path to a happy life.121 In Russia, fear, mistrust, disapproval, and hatred of the railways were very widespread and long-standing. Last but not least, the attitude of many Russians toward the railway at the end of the nineteenth century was probably made still worse by the railway accident on the line between Kharkov (now Kharkiv in Ukraine) and Kursk in October 1888, in which 23 people died after the derailment of the court train of Emperor Alexander III, and the royal family remained unharmed only by a “miraculous salvation.” A statement of the causes of the accident, supported in particular by railway director Sergej Witte, stated that the train had derailed due to non-compliance with regulations concerning the number of axles and the speed of travel. Precisely because of the link with the two very emotionally charged topics, the Tsar and death, this incident, which became known all through the country through texts and images, may have functioned as another highly compelling testimony to the vital importance of the rules.122 Many peasants, like their horses and cows, feared the locomotives, and many people’s economic interests were harmed by the shifting of trade routes and rising food prices, which furthered popular opposition to railroads. But even Russia’s educated elite was far from being unanimously in favor of them. Among the decisive opponents of the new means of transport was an extremely well-read and widely travelled man like Leo Tolstoy, who believed that the Russian people did not, in fact, need railways at all, but, due to an irony of fate, was to spend his dying hours at a railway station of all places. Tolstoy, a “prophet of the Unmodern,”123 who in a number of his writings (Anna Karenina being the most famous one) presented the iron parts of

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tracks, cars and engines as symbols of coldness, hardness, stress, and mortal danger, was reluctant to travel by train and recommended to his friends to avoid it as well. He wrote in an unsent letter to Ivan Turgenev in 1857: “For God’s sake, go travelling somewhere, too, but not by railroad. The railroad is to travel what a brothel is to love: just as comfortable, but just as inhumanly machine-like and murderously monotonous.”124 It is, furthermore, hardly a coincidence that, while Tolstoy—especially in his younger years—said he was not at all bothered by his own or other people’s spelling mistakes, Turgenev, who spent much of his life in Germany and France and enthusiastically welcomed the construction of railways in Russia, took offense at spelling mistakes. He wrote to his daughter Paulinette in 1858: “It may seem petty to pay so much attention to issues of spelling, but since we have every right to judge someone’s level of education based on how he writes, we can rightly assume that someone who lacks attention in small things cannot but lack it even more in big things. In short, spelling mistakes are uncleanliness; it’s like blowing your nose without a handkerchief.” Even three decades later, Tolstoy highly appreciated Anton Chekhov’s short story The Culprit (Zloumyšlennik, 1885), a small courtroom drama in which poor peasants who, in order to make fishing line sinkers, habitually unscrewed the nuts of the bolts by which the rails were fastened to the sleepers, were counterposed to a constantly writing investigating magistrate, a representation of the rulesetting and punishing state authority. Denis Grigor’ev, the detained peasant in the story, didn’t think that, when unscrewing couple of nuts, he and his fellow villagers were committing a theft and putting many people’s lives in danger. Tolstoy’s sympathy was on the peasants’ side, all the more so since they stole the nuts in order to provide for their families and, as Chekhov’s protagonist emphasized, always prudently left some of the nuts in place, after all.125 Whereas Chekhov, whose short story was based on a real dispute he once had, was deriding the uneducated country folks’ ignorance which, when faced with modern technology, turned them into unsuspecting criminals, Tolstoy was giving their vital interests the priority over the interests of the railway and its users. To him, the railroad was the evil, not the peasants. The image of the railway in many of the most widely read works of the classical Russian literature was at best ambivalent.126 It is not for nothing that Ivan Goncharov in his novel Oblomov (1847–1859)—a paradigm of an educated Russian’s search for identity—described the two protagonists’ attitudes to the new means of transport as one of the many contrasts between them. The busy, capitalist-minded half-German bourgeois Andrej Štolc emphasizes mainly the tourist travel opportunities offered by the modern Western means of transportation and the economic advantages of grain transportation by their Russian counterparts (“your Oblomovka is no longer in ruins . . . some four years hence, it will have a railway-station . . . before long an iron road

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will be carrying your grain to the wharves . . . Such a dawn of good fortune . . .”), whereas the dreamy, comfortable, completely irrational economically, but kind-hearted Russian nobleman Ilya Oblomov finds traveling by boat or rail not just cumbersome but also a restriction of his freedom and insult to his sense of status: by train and steamship one does not go wherever one wants, but only “where everybody goes,” which means being externally controlled and crammed together in a narrow space, possibly even with people of lower social status.127 Examples could be added showing that Nikolaj Leskov, Vasilij Rozanov, and a number of other influential Russian writers were critical of railways. To be sure, such fearsome attitude of many Russians toward railways was not unique. In other countries, too, the railways often caused discontent or even panic.128 The anonymous German engineer cited earlier on the occasion of the Rhine straightening complained in 1876 that governments spent state money on railways, which he felt were detrimental to physical and moral life and a blemish for a country.129 Kings such as Frederick William III of Prussia and Ernst August of Hanover were among opponents of railroads, but their successors showed all the more energy and enthusiasm in promoting the railway system. Hardly anyone denied that the “journey into the modern age” began with the railway, but not everyone was as happy about the “whirring railroad present”130 as contributors to illustrated German magazines were. Although by no means all admired the new means of transportation and not all steamboats and trains were always on time, the introduction of very precise timetables meant an inevitable mental revolution for many people who up to that point used to travel on foot, on horseback, in a horse-drawn carriage or under sail and took the situational flexibility of the times of departure and arrival for their journeys for granted. Complex constellations of factors (one’s own plans and wishes, weather conditions, quality and current condition of the road, the horse and the vehicle, number of fellow passengers, and much more) used to play just as great a role as negotiations with the skipper or the coachman. Distinctive behavior patterns appropriate for one’s social standing mattered, too. Up to the end of the nineteenth century, carriages and sledges in Russian cities traditionally ran the slower, the higher the rank of their passenger was, for only persons who carried out orders were supposed to hurry, while those who gave orders ostentatiously avoided any hustle and bustle. Only later did fast driving become a symbol of a high social status. When travelling by steamboat or train, however, tens of thousands of travelers of every class had to take care every day to meet the equally strict, unrelenting, exact and consistent requirements for all classes and occasions of travel, which they had to comply with if they did not want to jeopardize their travel plans and possibly also lose money if they had reserved passage. There were, of course, exceptions, at least in Russia. With the Obščestvo

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paroсhodstva po Volge (The Volga Steamship Company), founded in 1843, the opposite was explicitly the rule: steamboat captains did not take the timetable all too seriously and waited for the passengers running late, many among whom were high-ranking civil servants and military officials who took their time because they still took it for granted that any means of transportation would wait for them as long as they were doing their business or having their meals in town.131 The overall trend, however, was toward tighter and stricter timetables shaping individuals’ practices and habits. The majority of the 150,000 or so passengers per year carried by German railways around 1870 were commuters from the peripheries of major cities. For many of them, rationally thought-out and iron-clad routines such as train timetables were directly related to financial gains and losses. For example, in 1867 the Royal Prussian Statistical Office complained that the train leaving Lüneburg at 11:19 a.m. was “too late to get to the Hamburg Stock Exchange on time.”132 Even if you were not a stock exchange employee and didn’t take the train (or a horse-drawn carriage, a tram, a subway train, a bus etc., provided that these means of public transport operated according to a timetable, which, unlike railways, was by no means everywhere the case) to work,133 you had to budget time quite differently from before and learned to appreciate time-saving achievements, for example, new, faster writing techniques such as shorthand or new spelling rules that were quicker to learn. Already around the middle of the nineteenth century, long before Georg Simmel’s famous observation about the role of uniformly set clocks in modern city life, people in Germany heard, read and said again and again: “Time is .  .  . money, and punctuality in our modern life, where thousands of shops, railway trains and promises depend on the minute, is an operational capital and credit.”134 Jürgen Osterhammel speaks of the “chronometricization” of modern society and the “obedience” of watch owners and users to the clock’s “mechanical dictate of time,” which intervened in societies in an “ordering and disciplining” manner.135 The implications of this for the approach to spelling in the classroom are discussed here. In connection with this, however, the question arose which would be among the most important not only in connection with time measurement, but also in the context of spelling and, therefore, the later reforms in the field of spelling. In order to meet the demands of modern life, one always needs correctly—meaning, at the time, also uniformly—running clocks, but who determines what is correct? . . . Where is . . . the astronomically recognized correct model sundial? Where is the astronomical clock supported by science and authority? There is nothing of this kind in the fragmented Germany, so that, to be on the safe side, one has to head to the railway station half an hour earlier in order to be on time and thereby must also sacrifice a bit of money in the form of time.136

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The problem was solved by the daily telegraphic comparison of clocks throughout the country. In Germany, all clocks that were supposed to run “correctly” were set according to the Berlin Observatory,137 in Russia according to the chronometer of the St. Petersburg General Staff. Thus a further important innovation of the nineteenth century, the telegraph,138 contributed to further consolidation of the world view, in which uniformity, precision and rationality understood in terms of capitalism had an ever higher value: “Universal written language—a uniformity of time!”139 According to the Royal Prussian Statistical Office in Berlin, it was “under certain circumstances very important” in the commercial trade as early as the 1860s to be able to establish the exact time a dispatch was sent and to have proof of it. The office therefore recommended that “telegraph stations be obligated to certify the hour and minute of the transmission on the receipts.”140 The great importance of the new medium and—as a result—of the new spelling requirements corresponding to it, was impressively demonstrated early on even to those who themselves only rarely or never had to write telegrams, by the regular contributions in the press, which emphasized how important the telegraph and the railway were for the fighting potential of the Prussian army,141 what “tremendous advantages” improvements in transportation and the means of transmitting thoughts were for comfort, convenience, even security of life, for material well-being in every respect, for business dealings, finally for the general education of people, for the dissemination and popularization of ideas, experiences, and knowledge of all kind, for the rapprochement of the different individuals and races towards each other, for the elimination of local prejudices and national antipathies,—in short, for the more and more perfect attainment of that great cultural purpose, which is the goal of man’s earthly aspirations and efforts!142

Initially a military and administrative means of communication, the telegraph soon became accessible to the public. In 1849, Prussia was the first state on the European continent to release the state telegraph for public use; since 1852, the first public Russian telegraph line between Saint Petersburg and Moscow was in operation, and by 1855, telegraph lines had already connected many cities and countries with each other. Immediately, that is to say, years before the Great Reforms, which would give an enormous boost to the increase in correspondence in the economic and administrative sectors, the new means of communication enjoyed a great demand in Russia, despite being relatively pricey in the beginning when the fee for sending a message within a city was 15 kopecks, and each word cost one kopeck—quite a lot for the conditions at that time. Later, zoned tariffs were in force in Russia for years, a domestic telegram under 20 words of length being worth 50 kopecks per zone.

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the number of telegrams sent within the Russian Empire amounted to over 160,000 in 1859, doubled in 1860, and reached 700,000 by the mid–1860s.143 Then, on the basis of an international agreement, the tariffs were lowered in all countries,144 making this means of communication accessible to an even wider circle of users. It not only simplified and accelerated the activities of public authorities, companies, the military and news agencies, but also opened up entirely new opportunities for private individuals. The colossal and global economic and cultural importance of the telegraph was described to the broad German readership by numerous publications in the press (in 1865 alone, seven articles in the Gartenlaube were dedicated to this topic): This is the beginning of the fusion of all peoples, and when the metal arms that stretch out towards the nations reach into the distant steppes of Asia, China and Japan, then civilization will have taken giant steps and the concept of omnipresence will have been made quite true.145

Not everyone was that enthusiastic, though. According to the opinion of the Russian minister of finance, uttered in retrospect in 1896, the telegraph’s significance had been greatly overestimated, even for Western Europe, and was even lower for Russia with its low literacy rate.146 However, those familiar with written correspondence were able to see in the telegraph (along with other technical innovations) a prime example of the typically rapid and rational modern communication, against the backdrop of which irrational and decelerating features of writing systems were all the more discernible: “in the present time, when, thanks to great inventions, an astonishing speed of movement has already been reached, and where by the telegraph and the shorthand this speed is applied even more to the communication of ideas, the frequent use of a superfluous letter in writing is a somewhat strange anachronism,” wrote Jakov Grot in 1873, pleading for the abolition of the functionally meaningless jer at the end of the word.147 In the Niva one could also find appreciative descriptions of the technical possibilities of the telegraph, which, however, were based almost exclusively on examples from abroad. As far as Russia was concerned, in 1904 Russian illustrated magazines still wrote about how telegraph officials’ poor time management and lines damaged by storm slowed down the transmission of news by hours and days; and yet even then the telegraph acted, even ex negativo, as a symbol of modern communication governed by calculation, because in the unanimous opinion of the narrator and the telegraphers, a long text written by the protagonist of the story belonged in a handwritten letter and not in a telegram, which was supposed to be short in order to save money.148 This ambivalence of symbolism—the telegraph being both an unprecedented way to save money and/or time in the big and ideal vs. the habitual money and/or time waste in the small and real—can be found also in

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Aleksandr Kuprin’s short story The Telegrapher (1911). The narrator visiting his friend the telegrapher Vrublevskij raves about the future tremendous progress of transportation and communication systems and repeats—still as a prophecy—Heine’s idea expressed almost 70 years earlier (“The space will almost disappear and the time will race in a gallop”). Then at once he feels uneasy about the idea of a “terrible world of the future—the world of machines, the feverish haste”—all while sitting at a telegraph station, where the educated “servant of mechanical progress,” fluent in three foreign languages and welcoming of women’s emancipation, waits endlessly to be able to pass on an urgent and important dispatch, because the line, as every evening, is carelessly used for flirting by his two young colleagues. And on the way home, the narrator has to “walk far”: a good three kilometers.149 From 1871 to 1872, a conference was held in Rome aiming to unify the collective tariff system, for the first time attended by representatives of major cable companies. The unification of tariffs was not, however, achieved either at this or at the next conference in St. Petersburg in 1875. After having made sure that joint action was not possible, the German telegraph authorities decided to implement the tariff reform at least within Prussia and on March 1, 1876, replaced the 20-word tariff with a new system. From then on, the fee for sending a telegram was composed of two parts: a fixed basic fee of 20 pfennig, plus the per-word of 5 pfennig per word. Words longer than 15 letters had to be paid for twice. Apostrophized double words (like “don’t”) were considered to be two words (“do not”), and hyphenated words were counted as single words. “Contractions or changes contrary to the customary usage” were not allowed.150 But the German telegraph did not have an official reference work, with the help of which one could determine which spellings corresponded to the customary usage and which ran counter to it, and no discussions of this topic took place at conferences. The norm was intuitive yet. Telegraphy thus had a reflection-furthering and possibly a pro-reform effect by confronting its numerous German and Russian users with orthographic questions on the daily basis. The later internationally agreed on telegraph tariff, calculated based on the word count, meant that when composing a telegram, one had to think about spellings, but also to agree with the telegrapher on whether a compound word should be written together or with a hyphen. Millions of adults submitting their dispatches to telegraph officials had to carefully proofread their text and check words for length. The result had immediate consequences for the sender as well as the service provider. As an example, let us cite a case reported by the Reichstag deputy Müller when discussing the German spelling reform, which among other things would have abolished the silent h: I wanted to have a telegram sent [in Berlin], which used the genitive of Kommerzienrath, Kommerzienrathes, for the sake of brevity without any other

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name. So I sent the dispatch there and got it back two hours later, because the messenger did not have the five pfennigs in his pocket, which would have been necessary to pay for the one letter which, in the old orthography, belonged in the genitive of Kommerzienrath. Kommerzienrat, according to the new orthography, is a 15-letter word and is to be paid for as one word. The h makes it 16 letters long, so it had to be paid for twice. The five pfennigs did not matter. What mattered was the fact that the dispatch—an urgent message—was delayed by hours due to such a disagreement over the spelling; that is very worrying.151

In Russia, the telegraph also played a role in promoting the elimination of “superfluous” letters from the alphabet. Since 1856, a Morse code adapted to the Cyrillic alphabet was used in Russian telegraphy, from which the letters ė, i with the dot, ižica and fita were missing from the beginning: they were replaced by the e, i, and f, as the reformers also suggested doing for the Russian alphabet overall, but they did not succeed until 1917. As can also be seen from the extant late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century telegrams, telegraphers often omitted the final jer (although not on a regular basis), which also conformed to the reformists’ proposals and was at the turn of the century practiced by many especially in private correspondence. Last but not least, the new means of transportation and communication were also significant in that their development and dissemination created an increasing need for new skilled workers. This contributed, especially since the 1850s, to the accelerated development of vocational training152 and to the emergence of professional groups, in which economic rationality and technical (including safety153) expediency, precision and uniformity were considered to be essential.154 As another interim conclusion one can state that in the second half of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century the advancements of technology under the conditions of capitalism created new opportunities and compellings, new experiences and values, which all tended to move from the approximate, the arbitrary and the habitual toward the normalized and standardized, the unambiguous and precise, to the rationalized and optimized. In Germany, these effects were tangible much earlier and were more pronounced than in Russia. The decisive role in revolutionizing many contemporaries’ imagination belonged not only to the innovations themselves, but also to their descriptions and interpretations in high-profile press and literature. These show that in Russian discourse, comparatively little emphasis was placed on the disciplining and rationalizing effect of modern technology, while capitalist values such as time and money savings were held in as high esteem as in Germany.155

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A NEW DEMOGRAPHIC, SOCIAL, AND LINGUISTIC SITUATION: POPULATION GROWTH AND THE GREAT MINGLING The development of capitalism and the ways and means of transportation also meant an unprecedented increase in linguistic intermingling, especially among the urban population. The short- and long-term internal migration rapidly rising in the second half of the nineteenth century was encouraged by the new means of transportation as much as by development of new industries, which absorbed large masses of migrants and increased the population of many localities many times over in the span of a single lifetime.156 In Michel Hubert’s estimate, between 1871 and 1914, “every second German carried out one or the other form of internal migration.” Besides, in industrial cities such as in the Ruhr region, which owed their explosive growth to labor migration, the number of children considerably exceeded the national average and was much higher than in historic cities like Berlin or Dresden.157 This meant, among other things, larger and linguistically more diverse school classes, which confronted teachers with unprecedented problems. More and more speakers of various sociolects and dialects, some of them also different languages (Poles, Sorbs, Alsatians, Frisians, Danes, etc.), found themselves in the same class having to speak and write the foreign High German spoken to them by teachers, whose pronunciation diversity and/or uncertainty was discussed earlier. The same was of course true for the fast-growing cities of the Russian Empire, especially Odessa, whose population grew 170 times between 1800 and 1914 to exceed 400,000 and included large Yiddish- and Ukrainianspeaking communities.158 Then there was Kiev (now Kyiv, Ukraine), which on the eve of World War I had nearly half a million inhabitants, about 22 times more than in the early nineteenth century, including at least six large (i.e., more than 2,000 people strong) linguistically determined population groups;159 Warsaw with its population growth of about 1,400% (63,000 to 884,000, roughly one-third of them Yiddish-speaking);160 and Saint Petersburg, which, with population growth of 960% between 1800 and 1914, had about 13.5% non-native Russian speakers and at least 24 different ethnic groups, 13 of them with more than 2,000 members each, according to the census of 1897;161 and Tbilisi, Riga, and other imperial cities with linguistically mixed population makeup. The partly very different regional variants of Russian (govory) spoken by the migrants were not recorded in the censuses. However, they also presented both their respective speakers and the schoolteachers with the problem of phonetic adaptation. In Germany, especially in the federal states endeavoring to ensure that the introduced compulsory education was universal, but also—albeit later, more

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slowly and on a smaller scale—in Russia, the increasing population growth, on the one hand, and the development of new sciences, primarily pedagogy and philology, on the other, led to the appearance and dissemination of a new school model, which has tended to provide formative childhood experiences to more and more people. Pedagogues will be discussed here. Here are some relevant developments in the field of scholarship. The most important prerequisite for attempts to standardize and optimize orthography was the development of linguistics in Germany and in Russia, although it has to be born in mind that the Russian academic scene was much more modest in the nineteenth century in terms of institutions, personnel, and ideas, but also playing a qualitatively different role most of the time. After a late start, Russian philology was able to stand its ground in the twentieth century in the field of linguistics. While Russian literary studies have had considerable achievements, with structuralism making a contribution of lasting importance to international research, no independent Russian schools or theories emerged in the field of orthography.162 Orthography was not usually singled out and treated as a standalone field of research. Scholars discussed orthography in grammar books along with (and usually after) morphology, syntax, and so on, but unlike these, hardly ever studied it. Academics, most of whom were instructors at the same time, occasionally criticized spelling, in contrast to other aspects of grammar, as leaving a lot to desire, and made individual attempts to improve it. This is somewhat different from the earlier period, characterized by works from linguists such as Jacob Grimm, who was less involved in educational networks and did not primarily address his work toward practical purposes. Grimm did teach, but he was not a primary or Gymnasium teacher. At the university, he did not have to systematically teach the students orthography, nor did he have to grade any dictations or compositions from the viewpoint of spelling. His relationship with German orthography was, however, not primarily that of a researcher: he intended to “remedy” the condition of “fluctuating and shameful inconsistency” in the German spelling, whose “infirmity” in his opinion consisted in the “unauthorized and randomly fluctuating accumulation of vocals as well as consonants, which made German writing produce a broad, stiff, and sluggish impression.”163 Grimm’s partly aesthetic conception of the “correct” orthographic norm was closer to the scholarly ideal of a (beautiful) truth for its own sake than the uniforming practice-oriented view of schoolmasters: he propagated to his lectures and in his writings what he believed to be true and beautiful, seemingly without thinking about what problems would arise in school life if his students should carry over the historical spelling he promoted into the teaching, making it collide with the conventional orthographies. While the Brothers Grimm, with their more than 80 helpers, were preparing The German

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Dictionary using their own orthography appropriate to their ideas, they did not immediately concern themselves with the problems of reformability, for their work, innovative as it was, did not position itself as the reform, but only as the first step on the way toward one: It seems that a complete revolution, whereby, with some necessary exceptions of course, spelling would have to be directed again towards the Middle High German one, could only succeed after, in a receptive time, a dictionary based on grammar has fully broken a path for it. The present one can only claim to start blazing this path at some points and to prepare for the change.164

As an alternative to what he called the “barbaric” contemporary spelling Grimm promoted a “historical” one, that is one that he believed to find in medieval texts. Grimm wanted the spelling of German words designed so that their descent from old German “ancestors” would be obvious just like in words of Greek or Latin origin graphic traces of their origin were preserved. This orthographic program, which was based on the romanticist admiration for Middle High German literature, potentially led to major changes in spelling and in the appearance of modern German written texts. It provoked fierce discussions, but Grimm also found many supporters, among others Karl Weinhold, who in 1852 published an influential essay titled On German Spelling.165 Above all, however, it was the audience of Grimm’s lectures at the universities of Göttingen and Berlin, as well as the numerous readers of the texts they wrote or even inspired, who later became teachers promoting “historical” spelling and, since this very obviously contradicted the conventional, caused loud public protests that contributed to the unifying and binding codification of at least school orthography.166 In contrast to Germany, Russian authors wrote their textbooks or manuals of Russian grammar in a much thinner scholarly and intellectual atmosphere. In the nineteenth century, only a small part of the population of Russia was at least partially literate, educated people were few (the total number of university and polytechnical college graduates amounted to several hundred a year) and mostly not in the humanities. Even at the beginning of the twentieth century, despite the huge progress in alphabetization of the lower classes, only about one in three inhabitants of the Russian Empire could read well and write their name, even though there were great social, regional, ethnic, and confessional differences. Aristocrats, Orthodox Christian Old Believers, Jews, Lutherans, and inhabitants of the Kingdom of Poland and the Baltic provinces were mostly active readers (women, too!), and their reading usually included edifying religious writings and light fiction. Among the rapidly growing bourgeois class (meščanstvo, kupečestvo), daily and tabloid press found many consumers; children also read books that were in the school curriculum. However, the readership of intellectually demanding texts, such as the “fat” journals and specialist

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periodicals, totaled hardly more than 10,000 people. The actively communicating philological academic community was very small. There was no conflict of theories, because there were hardly any theoreticians. The fact that there were very few studies and reference works on Russian spelling meant that each one of them was very authoritative and in its time, that is to say, until the next one got published, was considered “official” by many, although it is hard to say which authority could lend it a universally binding status, since Russian educational institutions were subordinate to several different ministries and offices. Whether or not the authors were aware of the authoritative position of their works from the outset, in order not to jeopardize acceptance they ensured that the norms they constructed deviated as little as possible from the established usage. Very few suggestions to reform spelling were to be found in grammar books, although privately Aleksandr Vostokov, for example, is said to have admitted to Jakov Grot that one actually could do without the senseless final jer.167 Finally, it should be noted that in their capacity as authors of reference works and grammar textbooks neither German, nor Russian philologists of the nineteenth century addressed the issue of spelling mistakes. In linguistic treatises, on the other hand, toward the end of the century first attempts to use error-ridden texts for research purposes can already be found. For example, Vasilij Bogorodickij in 1881 pointed out the importance of semiliterate (malogramotnye) writing as a source for exploring dialects, since their typical spelling mistakes might reflect the phonetic and morphological features of their authors’ respective dialects.168 Otherwise, the time of error linguistics did not come until much later.169 During the time period in question, the topic of spelling mistakes concerned not linguists, but mostly teachers. Teachers would become the protagonists of the process of the social construction of the spelling error which is discussed in the next chapter. As an interim conclusion, it must therefore be stated that in addition to processes of political integration, demographic developments brought about by industrialization and the industrial age created a situation in which the needs of mass education necessitated a new approach to dealing with spelling issues—a way that would make teaching easier. Linguistics, however, did not provide innovative solutions to this problem.

NOTES 1. Leopold von Ranke, Englische Geschichte (Wiesbaden: Standard-Verlag, 1957), vol. 1, 5. 2. Cf. Eric Hobsbawm, “From Social History to the History of Society,” Daedalus 100, no. 1 (1971): 20–45. The significance of the “environment of far-reaching

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political, economic, and socio-cultural developments” for the history of orthography is also emphasized by Friedhelm Debus in his foreword to the new edition of the classic work, Wilhelm Wilmanns, Die Orthographie in den Schulen Deutschlands, ed. Friedhelm Debus (Hildesheim et al.: Olms, 2005). 3. Karl Weinhold, “Ueber die deutsche Rechtschreibung,” Zeitschrift für die österreichischen Gymnasien 3, no. 2 (1852): 93–128. 4. Klaus-Wilhelm Bramann, DER WEG ZUR HEUTIGEN RECHTSCHREIBNORM: Abbau orthographischer und lexikalischer Doppelformen im 19. und 20. Jh (Frankfurt am Main et al.: Peter Lang, 1987). 5. Rolf Bergmann, “Zum Anteil der Grammatiker an der Normierung der neuhochdeutschen Schriftsprache,ˮ Sprachwissenschaft, no. 7 (1982): 267–270. 6. Examples from Karl Julius Schröer, “Die Zukunft der deutschen Rechtschreibung. Eine brennende Frage der Gegenwart,” Die Gartenlaube, no. 19 (1880): 306. 7. Goethe’s words are cited in Karl von Holtei, Vierzig Jahre (Breslau: Schulz, 1846), vol. 5, 61. 8. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Brief an Josephine O’Donell, 24. November 1812,” in [Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von], Goethes Werke, herausgegeben im Auftrage der Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen, vol. 116, part 4: Briefe, 1812–1813, vol. 23 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1999 [Reprint of the 1900 edition]), 167–168. 9. [Anonymous], Briefwechsel und mündlicher Verkehr zwischen Goethe und dem Rathe Grüner (Leipzig: G. Mayer, 1853), 120. 10. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, “Brief an Johann Friedrich Cotta, 30. September 1805,” in [Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von], Goethes Werke, herausgegeben im Auftrage der Großherzogin Sophie von Sachsen, vol. 112, part 4: Briefe, 1805–1807, vol. 19 (Weimar: Böhlau, 1999 [reprint of the 1890 edition]), 64–65. 11. The German word Gymnasium is used in this book for secondary schools of the type that was introduced in German speaking countries and then imported to Russia (where they were called gimnazija). 12. Quosego, “Lehrer oder Fehlerzähler?” Der Säemann. Monatsschrift für pädagogische Reform 2 (1906): 311–312. The article is based on the book [Max Rhenius], Wo bleibt die Schulreform? (Ein Weckruf an das Volk der Denker. Gewidmet der deutschen Jugend und ihrem Kaiser) (Leipzig: Dietrich, 1904). 13. Wilmanns, Die Orthographie in den Schulen Deutschlands, 7. Wilmanns believed, above all, that the official orthography “surely is the life force of governance.  .  .  . But if one thinks that it is this state power that bothers the public with orthographic innovations, one is mistaken.” Thus the role of the state consisted, according to Wilmanns, of something else: by asserting “its right over the school,” the state stretched “its protective hand” over it and thus prevented “the most violent reform movement” that would issue from the teacher (Wilmanns, Die Orthographie in den Schulen Deutschlands, 32). 14. Matthias Stadelmann, Großfürst Konstantin Nikolaevič. Der persönliche Faktor und die Kultur des Wandels in der russischen Autokratie (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2012). 15. On the events of 1917 and 1918, which are outside the scope of this study, see in detail Grigor’eva, Tri veka. For testimony of contemporary reflection, see book by

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the Russian linguist Sergej Karcevskij, who fled from the Communists to Germany, but positively assessed and welcomed the orthography reform they had so ruthlessly carried out, noting that since all the cornerstones of Russian life were overthrown, the time of the Bolshevik revolution was most favorable to implementing such a reform (Sergej Karcevskij, Jazyk, vojna i revoljucija (Berlin: Russkoe Universitetskoe Izdatel’stvo, 1923). 16. Within their own territories, Württemberg standardized its weights and measures in 1806, Bavaria in 1809, Baden in 1810, Prussia in 1816, Hanover in 1836, Nassau in 1851 and Saxony in 1856. See Hubert Kiesewetter, Industrielle Revolution in Deutschland: Regionen als Wachstumsmotoren (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2004), 62. 17. Kiesewetter, Industrielle Revolution, 62. 18. Walter Ruske, “Außeruniversitäre technisch-naturwissenschaftliche Forschungsanstalten in Berlin bis 1945,ˮ in Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft: Beiträge zur Geschichte der Technischen Universität Berlin 1879–1979, ed. Reinhard Rürup (Berlin: Springer, 1979), 244. 19. “Maaß- und Gewichtsordnung für den Norddeutschen Bund,ˮ Bundesgesetzblatt des Norddeutschen Bundes, no. 28 (1868), 473. 20. “Ein Brief Jacob Grimms,ˮ Zeitschrift für deutsche Philologie I (1869): 227. In the original, lower case was used for the nouns. 21. As primary sources, see Die Maß- und Gewichtsordnung für den Norddeutschen Bund vom 17. August 1868 together with the amended and supplemented laws of 11 July 1884 and 26 April 1893; Das Gesetz, betreffend die Einführung der Maß- und Gewichtsordnung für den Norddeutschen Bund vom 17. August 1868 in Bayern vom 26. November 1871; Das Gesetz, betreffend die Einführung der Maß- und Gewichtsordnung vom 17. August 1868 in Elsaß-Lothringen vom 19. Dezember 1874. 22. Cornelia Meyer-Stoll, Die Maß- und Gewichtsreformen in Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert unter besonderer Berücksichtigung der Rolle Carl August Steinheils und der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (München: Verl. der Bayerischen Akad. der Wiss. in Komm. bei Beck, 2010) 142. 23. Victor Wang, Die Vereinheitlichung von Maß und Gewicht in Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert: Analyse des metrologischen Wandels im Großherzogtum Baden und anderen deutschen Staaten; 1806—1871 (St. Katharinen: Scripta-MercaturaeVerlag, 2000), 169. 24. Their role is described in detail in Florian Groß, Integration durch Standardisierung. Maßreformen in Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert (Berlin: nomos, 2015), 34, 165, 185, 209–211, 237–240, 268–270, 404–407 et al. 25. See Rainer Göbel, “200 Jahre Eichwesen in Hessen,ˮ Mitteilungen des Deutschen Vereins für Vermessungswesen, DVW Hessen-/DVW Thüringen, 2 (2017): 26. 26. See Groß, Integration durch Standardisierung, 277–368 for details. 27. Gerold Ambrosius, Regulativer Wettbewerb und koordinative Standardisierung zwischen Staaten: theoretische Annahmen und historische Beispiele (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2003). 28. “Bekanntmachung, betreffend die äußersten Grenzen der im öffentlichen Verkehr noch zu duldenden Abweichungen der Maaße, Gewichte und Waagen von

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der absoluten Richtigkeit,ˮ Bundesgesetzblatt des Norddeutschen Bundes, no. 40 (1869): 698–701. A series of laws and ordinances under the same name followed in the 1880s, and in the penal code one could read about the punishment for deviations from absolute correctness. 29. Friedrich Paulsen, Aus meinem Leben. Jugenderinnerungen (Jena: Diederichs, 1910), 25–27. 30. As the Leipzig elementary school teacher K. Schulze reported on his experience in a class at the Second Art Education Day in Weimar in 1903: when he allowed the class to write the German composition on a topic of one’s own choosing, the students promptly interpreted this to mean that they were also free to choose the form of expression. In the end, 28 out of 76 students wrote their papers in the dialect. See Karl Muthesius, “Der zweite Kunsterziehungstag in Weimar,ˮ Deutsche Blätter für erziehenden Unterricht, XXXI, no. 8 (1903/1904): 64. 31. For example, the prominent German general and statesman Wilhelm Groener (1867–1939) recalled his headmaster (Gymnasialrektor) in Ludwigsburg who lectured “with verve in genuine Swabian dialect” in his history lessons. Wilhelm Groener, Lebenserinnerungen: Jugend. Generalstab. Weltkrieg, ed. Friedrich Freiherr Hiller von Gaertringen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1957), 34. 32. Das Rektorats-Tagebuch des Rektors Weiller (1809–1811). StaatsA München. Wilhelmsgymnasium 663. http://www​.peterkefes​.de​/Tageb1​.htm. This North German was Friedrich Thiersch, the founder of Bavarian neo-humanism. 33. Wolfgang Weiß, “Stenographischer Bericht über die Verhandlungen des III. Deutschen Lehrertages zu Hamburg: (Fortsetzung). Nach Gabelsberger’s System stenographirt von W. Weiß,ˮ Allgemeine deutsche Lehrerzeitung: zugleich Organ der allgemeinen deutschen Lehrerversammlungen und des Deutschen Lehrer-Pensionsverbandes 32, no. 24 (1880): 201. 34. Among other things, Siebs was active in the field of dialectology and was one of the first to deal with the dialect orthography. Theodor Siebs, Wie sollen wir die schlesischen Mundarten schreiben? (Trehnitz in Schlesien: Maretzke & Märtin, 1907). 35. Theodor Siebs, Deutsche Bühnenaussprache. Ergebnisse der Beratungen zur ausgleichenden Regelung der deutschen Bühnenaussprache, die vom 14.–16. April 1898 im Apollosaale des Königlichen Schauspielhauses zu Berlin stattgefunden haben. Im Auftrage der Kommission herausgegeben von Th. Siebs (Berlin: A. Ahn, 1898), 7. Unless stated otherwise, the information and quotations in this paragraph are taken from this source. 36. Siebs, Deutsche Bühnenaussprache, 5. 37. For the latter see in detail Dieter Nerius, ed., Die Orthographischen Konferenzen von 1876 und 1901 (Hildesheim; Zürich; New York: Olms, 2002). 38. Theodor Siebs, ed., Deutsche Bühnenaussprache. Nach den Beratungen zur ausgleichenden Regelung der deutschen Bühnenaussprache die im April 1898 in Berlin unter Mitwirkung der Herren Graf von Hochberg, Freiherr von Ledebur, Dr. Tempeltey, Prof. Dr. Sievers, Prof. Dr. Lucik, Prof. Dr. Siebs und nach den ergänzenden Verhandlungen, die im März 1908 in Berlin mit der Genossenschaft deutscher Bühnenangehöriger stattgefunden haben. Auf Veranlassung des Deutschen

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Bühnenvereins und der Genossenschaft Deutscher Bühnenangehöriger bearbeitet von T. Siebs. Zehnte Auflage. 10–12 Tausend, den Gesang berücksichtigend und mit Aussprachewörterbuch (Bonn: Ahn, 1912), 8–9. 39. Quoted after Gerhard Helbig, ed., Deutsch als Fremdsprache (Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter, 2001), 164. 40. Eva-Maria Krech, “Probleme der deutschen Ausspracheregelung,ˮ in Beiträge zur deutschen Ausspracheregelung. Bericht von der V. Sprechwissenschaftlichen Fachtagung des Instituts für Sprechkunde und Phonetische Sammlung der MartinLuther- Universität Halle-Wittenberg vom 1. bis 3. Juli 1960, ed. Hans Krech (Berlin: Henschelverlag, 1961), 9. 41. Quoted after Wolfgang Kopke, Rechtschreibreform und Verfassungsrecht: schulrechtliche, persönlichkeitsrechtliche und kulturverfassungsrechtliche Aspekte einer Reform der deutschen Orthographie (Tübingen: Mohr, 1995), 24–25. 42. See, e.g., Heinrich Löffler, “Dialektfehler. Ansätze zu einer deutschen ‘Fehlergeographie, ’ˮ in Fehlerlinguistik: Beiträge zum Problem der sprachlichen Abweichung, ed. Dieter Cherubim (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1980), 94. 43. See on that Il’ja Gerasimov, Marina Mogil’ner, Sergej Glebov and Aleksandr Semenov, Novaja imperskaja istorija Severnoj Evrazii, Part 2: Balansirovanie imperskoj situacii, XVIII-XX vv (Kazan’: Ab Imperio, 2017). 44. Nastavlenie prepodavateljam russkogo jazyka i slovesnosti v gimnazijach Peterburgskogo učebnogo okruga. 16 maja 1852. §5. Cit. after Natal’ja Nikol’ceva, ed., Načal’noe i srednee obrazovanie v Sankt-Peterburge. XIX—načalo XX veka. Sbornik dokumentov (Sankt-Peterburg: Liki Rossii, 2000), 140–142. The principle of differentiating the teaching of Russian spelling rules according to the particularities of the local dialects (at least the Ukrainian ones) can actually be found in a much earlier source like Ivan Pereverzev, Kratkie pravila rossijskogo pravopisanija iz raznych grammatik vybrannyja i po svojstvu ukrainskogo dialekta dlja upotreblenija malorossijanami dopolnennye v Char’kove (Moskva: Tipografija kompanii tipografičeskoj, 1782). 45. Malte Rolf, Imperiale Herrschaft im Weichselland: Das Königreich Polen im Russischen Imperium (1864–1915) (Berlin; Boston: De Gruyter—De Gruyter Oldenbourg, 2015), an English edition is forthcoming: Malte Rolf, Imperial Russian Rule in the Kingdom of Poland, 1864–1915, trans. Cynthia Klohr (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2023). 46. Michail Panov, Istorija russkogo literaturnogo proiznošenija XVIII–XX vv (Moskva: Nauka, 1990); Grigorij Vinokur, Russkoe sceničeskoe proiznošenie (Moskva: Vserossijskoe Teatral’noe Obščestvo, 1948). 47. In a letter to the French Minister of Education in 1831, Victor Cousin called Prussia, even before he visited it, “un pays classique des casérnes et des écoles, des écoles qui civilisent les peuples et des casernes qui les défendent.”—Victor Cousin, “Lettres a M. le comte de Montalivet, pair de France, Ministre de l’Instruction et des Cultes, sur l’état de l’instruction publique à Francfort-sur-le-Mein, dans le GrandDuché de Weymar et le Royaume de Saxe. Première Lettre,ˮ in Victor Cousin, Rapport sur l’état de l’instruction publique dans quelques pays d’Allemagne, et particulièrement en Prusse. 1re partie. Francfort-sur-le-Mein, Duché de Weymar,

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Royaume de Saxe. Par M. V. Cousin, Conseiller d’État, Professeur de Philosophie, Membre de l’Institut et du Conseil Royal de l’instruction publique (Paris: Levrault, 1832), 17. In Germany, this dictum was sometimes used in a slightly different form. Thus, for example, Friedrich Kopp the Elder from Hamm wrote in 1848 in his Appeal to All German Educators, after describing Prussia as “the educational province of Germany, consequently of the entire world,” that “It was a foreigner who called Prussia the land of schools and barracks; of schools that educate the people, of barracks that defend the schools. Let us make this saying true!” See LA NRW AW StaatsA Münster, Regierung Arnsberg, Schulabteilung, Generalia, no. 31718. Fol. 111r. 48. In Bavaria it was formally introduced in 1805, in Württemberg in 1806, in Baden in 1813, in Prussia in 1814, in Hanover in 1833, in Russia only in 1874. Ute Planert, ed., Krieg und Umbruch in Mitteleuropa um 1800. Erfahrungsgeschichte(n) auf dem Weg in eine neue Zeit (Paderborn et al.: Schöningh, 2009). 49. Gisela Felhofer, Die Produktion des disziplinierten Menschen (Wien: VWGÖ, 1987). 50. Adolf Mürmann, Die öffentliche Meinung in Deutschland über das Preußische Wehrgesetz von 1814 während der Jahre 1814–1819 (Berlin; Leipzig: Rothschild, 1910) 27–30, 98–99. 51. Martin Kitchen, “The Army and the Civilians,ˮ in The Political Influence of the Military. A Comparative Reader, ed. Amos Perlmutter and Valerie Bennett (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 1980), 90–95. 52. There seems to be no evidence to confirm this saying in its best known form, that the Prussian schoolmaster won the battle of Sadowa, or Königgrätz. In Oscar Peschel, “Die Lehren der jüngsten Kriegsgeschichte,ˮ Ausland, no. 29 (July 17, 1866): 695, it says, “We now want to show that when the Prussians beat the Austrians, it was a victory of the Prussian schoolmasters over the Austrian schoolmasters,” and further, “Mathematics is the whetstone, and in this sense, it may well be said that the Prussian schoolmasters have been victorious over the Austrian schoolmasters in the first stage of the Bohemian campaign.” 53. Wilhelm Liebknecht, “Wissen ist Macht—Macht ist Wissen. Vortrag, gehalten zum Stiftungsfest des Dresdener Arbeiterbildungsvereins am 5. Februar 1872 und zum Stiftungsfest des Leipziger Arbeiterbildungsvereins am 24. Februar 1872.ˮ In Wilhelm Liebknecht, Kleine politische Schriften, ed. Wolfgang Schröder (Leipzig: Röderberg-Verlag, 1976), 128: “The drill-loving schoolmaster and the drillloving sergeant both are the pillars of the present state; and besides the sergeant, the schoolmaster has also . . . ‘triumphed at Sadowa.’” Elemér Hantos, Volkswirtschaft und Finanzen im Weltkriege mit besonderer Rücksicht auf Österreich-Ungarn (Göttingen: Hapke, 1915), 30, insisted, however, that this statement was “particularly inaccurate” because discipline in the Austrian army was “just as good as in the Prussian army.” 54. The interpretation attributed to the “liberal press” (without supporting documents) in footnote 67 to Liebknecht, Wissen ist Macht—Macht ist Wissen, 127. 55. Hartmut Kaelble, Soziale Mobilität und Chancengleichheit im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1983), 188–190. For a different

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perspective, see Peter Lundgreen, Margret Kraul, and Karl Ditt, Bildungschancen und soziale Mobilität in der städtischen Gesellschaft des 19. Jahrhunderts (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988). See also Jürgen Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt: eine Geschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts (München: C.H. Beck, 2009), 1120. 56. Tibor Süle, Preußische Bürokratietradition: zur Entwicklung von Verwaltung und Beamtenschaft in Deutschland 1871–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1988), 167–170, 43–44. 57. GStPK I. HA Rep. 76 Kultusministerium VI Sekt. I z Nr.20 Vol.5 Das Gymnasialwesen und Einrichtung des Gymnasial-Unterrichts überhaupt, vol. 5—Feb 1879— Feb 1882. Fol. 105f.: Ausschnitt aus der Volks-Zeitung vom 16. Dezember 1880. 58. Lothar Mertens, “Das Einjährig-Freiwilligen Privileg. Der Militärdienst im Zeitgeist des deutschen Kaiserreiches,ˮ Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte 42, no. 4 (1990): 316–329. 59. Richard Hoffmann, Der einjährige Freiwillige im bayerischen Heere: eine systematische Zusammenstellung und Bearbeitung aller hierauf bezüglichen Gesetze, Verordnungen und Rescripte sowie eine Instruction für den Dienst des einjährigen Freiwilligen (Bamberg: Buchner, 1868), III. 60. Paul Falk, “Wie weit und in welcher Weise kann auch unter den gegenwärtigen Verhältnissen die Individualität der Schüler berücksichtigt und gepflegt werden?” in Beilage zum VI. Jahresbericht der Städtischen Realschule an der PrinzGeorgstraße zu Düsseldorf (Düsseldorf: [no publisher], 1902), 4. 61. Wilmanns, Die Orthographie in den Schulen Deutschlands, 18. In Austria, a similar decree was in force since 1854. 62. Kopke, Rechtschreibreform und Verfassungsrecht, 8–10, 18–21. 63. Sylvia Kesper-Biermann, Staat und Schule in Kurhessen. 1813–1866 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2001), 358. 64. Hans-Georg Küppers, Orthographiereform und Öffentlichkeit. Zur Entwicklung und Diskussion der Rechtschreibbemühungen zwischen 1876 und 1982 (Düsseldorf: Institut für Deutsche Sprache, 1984). 65. Spanish military officers were sent to Prussia to “learn about the Prussian army system,” and a professor came to “study the Prussian school system,” said an item without title and author in the illustrated “monthly for entertainment and instruction monthly of the German people” Der Leuchtturm. Monatsschrift für Unterhaltung und Belehrung für das deutsche Volk 2 (1847): 35. 66. Stefan Fisch and Florence Gauzy et al., ed., Lernen und Lehren in Frankreich und Deutschland = Apprendre et enseigner en Allemagne et en France (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2007), 172–190. 67. Célestin Hippeau, Lʹinstruction publique en Allemagne (Paris: Librairie Académique Didier et Cie, Libraires-Éditeurs, 1873), VI, IX. The book was immediately translated into Russian. 68. Lew Kopelew, ed., West-östliche Spiegelungen: Reihe B—Deutsche und Deutschland aus russischer Sicht (Paderborn: W. Fink, 2009); Svetlana Obolenskaja, Germanija i nemtsy glazami russkich: XIX vek (Moskva: IVI RAN, 2000). 69. Ralph Tuchtenhagen, Zentralstaat und Provinz im frühneuzeitlichen Nordosteuropa (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2008), 267.

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70. Günter Spur, Vom Wandel der industriellen Welt durch Werkzeugmaschinen, eine kulturgeschichtliche Betrachtung der Fertigungstechnik (München; Wien: Hanser, 1991), 174–181. 71. Thomas Wölker, Entstehung und Entwicklung des Deutschen Normenausschusses 1917 bis 1925 (Berlin; Köln: Beuth, 1992), 40, footnote 15. 72. Eckhard Bolenz, Technische Normung zwischen “Markt” und “Staat”: Untersuchungen zur Funktion, Entwicklung und Organisation verbandlicher Normung in Deutschland (Bielefeld: Kleine, 1987), 83–84. 73. “Nasmyth’s Dampf-Eisenhammer,ˮ Die Gartenlaube, no. 21 (1855): 277–278. 74. “Gigantskij parochodnyj val,ˮ Niva. Illjustrirovannyj žurnal literatury i sovremennoj žizni, no. 1 (1904): 17–18. 75. Marina Loskutova, “S’’ezdy russkiсh estestvoispytatelej i professorskoprepodavatel’skij korpus universitetov Rossijskoj imperii (1860–1910-e gg.),ˮ in Professorsko-prepodavatel’skij korpus rossijskiсh universitetov 1884–1917 gg.: issledovanija i dokumenty, ed. Michail Gribovskij and Sergej Fominyсh (Tomsk: Tomskij universitet, 2012), 76. 76. Dmitry Mendeléeff, The Principles of Chemistry, trans. George Kamensky, vol. 1 (London; New York; Bombay: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1897), 322, footnote 18. 77. Otto Kuntze, Protest gegen den vollmachtswidrig arrangierten und wegen vieler Unregelmäßigkeiten inkompetenten Nomenklatur-Kongress auf dem internationalen Botaniker-Kongress in Wien, nebst Kritik der dürftigen Resultate der internationalen Kommission und Vorschlag zu einem baldigen kompetenten Kongress (Leipzig: Felix in Komm., 1905). 78. “Das größte Geschäftshaus Preußens,ˮ Die Gartenlaube, no. 51 (1866): 800. 79. StA Kiel. 33482. Prüfungsordnung für Buerau- und Kassenbeamte der dem Schleswig-Holsteinischen Städteverein angehörenden Städte und Flecken 1908. Unfoliiert. The draft examination regulations from the town of Altona (1908) envisaged a preliminary examination consisting of a dictation, an essay and a few simple arithmetic problems. 80. StA Kiel. 33482. Bestimmungen über die Annahme, Ausbildung und Prüfung der Beamten, Anwärter und Hilfsarbeiter im Büro-, Kassen- und Kanzleidienst der Stadt Kiel 1909. Unfoliiert. 81. Ludwig Julius Friedrich Höpfner, ed., Deutsche Encyclopädie oder Allgemeines Real-Wörterbuch aller Künste und Wissenschaften, vol. 5 (Frankfurt a.M.: Varrentrapp und Wenner, 1781), 481. 82. “Highway .  .  ., a new artificial road, a paved roadway, somewhat curved towards the middle for the rainwater to drain away, hence a ditch on each side; the H. has a possibly firm base, often quarry stones, which is covered with a layer of broken stones, on which a layer of river gravel or small broken stones is placed. Such roads were constructed already in ancient Asia .  .  . , etc.” “Chaussée,ˮ in Herders Conversations-Lexikon: kurze aber deutliche Erklärung von allem Wissenswerthen aus dem Gebiete der Religion, Philosophie, Geschichte, Geographie, Sprache, Literatur,

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Kunst, Natur- und Gewerbekunde, Handel, der Fremdwörter und ihrer Aussprache etc. etc., vol. 2 (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder, 1854), 73. 83. “Chaussée,ˮ in Pierer’s Universal-Lexikon der Vergangenheit und Gegenwart oder Neuestes encyclopädisches Wörterbuch der Wissenschaften, Künste und Gewerbe, vol. 3 (Altenburg: H.A. Pierer, 1857), 888–890. 84. The first Russian universal encyclopedia—the Ėnciklopedičeskij leksikon by Adolphe Pluchart and Nikolaj Greč, modelled on the Brockhaus Conversations Lexicon—contains only one article, “Dorogi” [Roads], as the edition was discontinued before the volume containing the article Šosse [Highway] could appear. In this article, only the legally prescribed width of roads of different classes is quoted, namely, up to 10 sažen’ (approx. 21.3 metres). Cf. Ėnciklopedičeskij leksikon: posvjaščennyj ego veličestvu gosudarju imperatoru Nikolaju Pavloviču, vol. 17: Dio—Djat (SanktPeterburg: Pljušart, 1841), 179–181. Starčevskij’s Spravočnyj ėnciklopedičeskij slovar’ (1847–1855), did not contain an entry on highways. The article “Šosse” in the first edition of Voennyj ėnciklopedičeskij leksikon, а military encyclopedia published under the auspices of the Austro-Russian lieutenant general, university lecturer, and military historian Loggin Ivanovič Zeddeler (Ludwig Franz Xaver Baron von Seddeler), contains only very general information on the history and construction of highways: Voennyj ėnciklopedičeskij leksikon, izdavaemyj Obščestvom voennych i literatorov i posvjaščennyj Jego Imperatorskomu Vysočestvu, Gosudarju Nasledniku Cesareviču i Velikomu Knjazju Aleksandru Nikolaeviču, vol. 14 (Sankt-Peterburg: V Tipografii Imperatorskoj Akademii Nauk, 1850), 161–162. Even this information is missing from the second edition of this lexicon. For a long time after that, there were no dictionaries or encyclopedias going up to the respective volume. Of the major reference works completed before 1917, only the Russian edition of the Brockhaus Conversations-Lexikon (1903) contains an article on highways, which comes close in accuracy to the half-century older German reference work cited earlier. Ėnciklopedičeskij slovar’ Brokgauza i Efrona, ed. Ivan Andreevskij, Konstantin Arsen’ev and Fedor Petruševskij, vol. 39a (Sankt-Peterburg: Tipografija Akcionernogo Obščestva Brokgauz-Efron, 1903), 796–797. 85. Lev Ščerba, “Osnovnye principy orfografii i ich social’noe značenie,ˮ in Lev Ščerba, Izbrannye raboty po russkomu jazyku (Moskva: Učpedgiz, 1957), 49. 86. Mark Cioc, The Rhine: An Eco-biography, 1815–2000 (Seattle; London: University of Washington Press, 2002); David Blackbourn, The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007). 87. Horst-Johannes Tümmers, Der Rhein. Ein europäischer Fluß und seine Geschichte, 2nd ed. (München: Beck, 1999), 171–173. 88. Regulirung oder Kanalisirung der deutschen Flüsse. Eine Zeitfrage mit Randglossen unter Hinweis auf die unserm Vaterlande in immer kürzeren Perioden und in immer schlimmerm Grade bevorstehenden Ueberschwemmungsgefahren. Von einem deutschen Ingenieur (Wiesbaden: Verlag von Chr. Limbarth, 1876), 5. 89. Max Honsell, Die Canalfrage und die Rheincorrection zwischen Basel und Mannheim (Berlin: Springer, 1878), 5–10.

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90. Königliches Statistisches Bureau in Berlin, ed., Preußische Statistik (Amtliches Quellenwerk) (Berlin: Verlag des Königlichen Statistischen Bureaus, 1868), XIX. 91. H. v. C., “Ein alter Reichs-Schlüssel und ein neuer Rhein-Bändiger,ˮ Die Gartenlaube, no. 34 (1875): 571. 92. “Der gebändigte Strom,ˮ Die Gartenlaube, no. 24 (1870): 378–80. 93. Nikolaj Leljavskij, O rečnych tečenijach i formirovanii rečnogo rusla. Doklad vtoromu s’’ezdu inženerov-gidrotechnikov (Sankt-Peterburg: Tip. M-va putej soobščenija, 1893); Vladimir Lochtin, Sovremennoe položenie voprosa o sposobach ulučšenija rek (Odessa: Russkaja tipografija Isakoviča, 1886). 94. Vladimir Feščenko, “L’idée humboldtienne de la ‘langue comme création’ en linguistique, poétique et poésie en Russie au XXe siècle,ˮ in Humboldt en Russie, ed. Patrick Sériot (Lausanne: UNIL, Université de Lausanne, 2012), 33–56. 95. Aleksej Zenger, “U Tolstogo,ˮ Rus’, no. 212 (July 15/28, 1904): 4. 96. The Saint Petersburg-Lübek Society of Steamships was founded in 1830, the Black Sea Shipping Company in 1833. The Russian Steam Navigation and Trading Company (Russkoe obščestvo paroсhodstva i torgovli, ROPiT, established in 1856) in Odessa had 35 ships already two years after its foundation, operating on 12 routes. By 1869, there were already 63 ships that regularly served 20 domestic and foreign destinations on the Black Sea and the Mediterranean. Jurij Trifonov and Boris Lemačko, Russkoe obščestvo paroсhodstva i torgovli (Sankt-Peterburg: LeKo, 2009). The three other large companies for inland waterway transport—Obščestvo paroсhodstva po Volge (est. 1843), Kavkaz i Merkurij (est. 1849/1858) and Samolet (est. 1853)—operated between 10 and 65 steamships two to five times a week on the Caspian Sea, the Volga, the Kama, the Oka and the Belaya. Gleb Aleksušin, Paroсhodnoe obščestvo “Kavkaz i Merkurij” (Samara: Samarskij gosudarstvennyj universitet, 1995); Gleb Aleksušin, Obščestvo paroсhodstva po Volge. http:// www​.riasamara​.ru​/rus​/samara​/about​/31451​/article31991​.shtml; Gleb Aleksušin, Paroсhodstvo “Kavkaz i Merkurij”—2-e krupnejšee na Volge. http://www​.riasamara​.ru​/rus​/samara​/about​/31451​/article31992​.shtml; Gleb Aleksušin, Paroсhodstvo “Samolet”—3-e krupnejšee na Volge. http://www​.riasamara​.ru​/rus​/samara​/about​ /31451​/article31993​.shtml. 97. RGIA F. 107. Op. 1. D. 10. Fol. 72–73. 98. Geschäfts- und Adreß-Kalender des Regierungsbezirks Koblenz für das Schaltjahr 1836 (Koblenz: Bei Johann Friedrich Kehr, [1836]), 32, 34, 36; a timetable of the Betriebsgemeinschaft Kölnische und Düsseldorfer Gesellschaft für Rhein-Dampfschiffahrt of June 9th, 1853, reproduced in Anton Felix Napp-Zinn, 100 Jahre Köln-Düsseldorfer Rheindampfschiffahrt, insbesondere Zerstörung und Wiederaufbau 1939–1953 (Köln: Köln-Düsseldorfer Rheindampfschiffahrt, 1953), 23. 99. Andrew C. O’Dell, Railways and Geography (London: Hutchinson and Co., Ltd., 1956); Ralf Roth, Das Jahrhundert der Eisenbahn: die Herrschaft über Raum und Zeit 1800–1914 (Ostfildern: Thorbecke, 2003). 100. Walter Sperling, Der Aufbruch der Provinz: Die Eisenbahn und die Neuordnung der Räume im Zarenreich (Frankfurt a. M.; New York, NY: Campus-Verlag, 2011); Frithjof Benjamin Schenk, Russlands Fahrt in die Moderne. Mobilität und sozialer Raum im Eisenbahnzeitalter (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2014).

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101. Sergej Kozlov, “Krušenie poezda: transportnaja metaforika Maksa Vebera,ˮ in Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, no. 71 (2005): 23. In Petr Gnedič, “Na okraine,ˮ Niva. Illjustrirovannyj žurnal literatury i sovremennoj žizni, no. 1 (1904): 6, a snowed-up railway track serves as a symbol of the stalled life of a woman whose husband suddenly died. 102. Adolf Glaßbrenner, “[Untitled editorial],ˮ Freie Blätter. Illustrirte politischhumoristische Zeitung 1, no. 1 (1848): 1. 103. Lutz Brangsch, “Revolution: Lokomotive oder Notbremse der Geschichte?” in Lutz Brangsch, Skizzen zur russischen Revolution 1917 (IFG, Rosa-LuxemburgStiftung, 2019), 90. Accessed July 10, 2023, https://ifg​.rosalux​.de​/files​/2018​/09​/Rev​ olut​ions​skiz​zen280818​.pdf. 104. Siebs, Deutsche Bühnenaussprache, 10. 105. Lorenz Link, Die einheitliche Aussprache im Deutschen, theoretisch und praktisch dargestellt (Paderborn: Druck und Verlag von Ferdinand Schöningh, 1898), 8–9. 106. GStAPK VI. HA Rep. Nl Schmidt-Ott (M) B XXXIX Nachlass SchmidtOtt, Deutsche Rechtschreibung. No foliation. Ministerialerlass vom 18. Mai 1899 Betreffend die Schreibweise verschiedener im Staatshaushalts-Etat vorkommender Ortsnamen. 107. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 84a Justizministerium no. 2830/2 Betr. die Orthographie, 1902–1919. Fol. 278. 108. August Haarmann, Das Eisenbahngleis (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1891– 1902), 71. 109. Nikolaj Kislinskij, Naša železnodorožnaja politika po dokumentam archiva Komiteta ministrov, vol. 1 (Sankt-Peterburg: Izdanie kanceljarii Komiteta ministrov, 1902), 29–30; Richard M. Haywood, “The Question of a Standard Gauge for Russian Railways, 1836–1860,ˮ Slavic Review 28, no. 1 (1969): 72–80. 110. Michail Davydov, Dvadcat’ let do Velikoj vojny. Rossijskaja modernizacija Vitte-Stolypina (Sankt-Peterburg: Aleteja, 2016), 345–347. 111. Tümmers, Der Rhein, 236. 112. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, “Railroad Space and Railroad Time,ˮ New German Critique, no. 14 (Spring, 1978): 31–40; Eviatar Zerubavel, “The Standardization of Time: A Sociohistorical Perspective,ˮ American Journal of Sociology 88, no. 1 (1982): 6–8. 113. Heinrich Heine, “Lutetia,” in The Works of Heinrich Heine, trans. Charles Godfrey Leland, vol. VIII (London: William Heinemann, 1893), 368. 114. Christian Schmehl, Vereinheitlichung technischer Spezifikationen im europäischen Eisenbahnwesen als Voraussetzung für Wettbewerb (Hamburg: Kovač, 2008), 35. 115. Dennis E. Showalter, Railroads and Rifles. Soldiers, Technology, and the Unification of Germany (Hamden: Aruchon Books, 1975), 14, 29–31. 116. Gustav Kopal, “Die Elbbrücken der Paris-Hamburger Eisenbahn,ˮ Die Gartenlaube, no. 17 (1872): 274–276. 117. Cf. Peter Gatrell, “The Meaning of the Great Reforms in Russian Economic History,” in Russia’s Great Reforms, 1855–1881, ed. Ben Eklof, John Bushnell and Larissa Zakharova (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 70–72.

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118. Vladimir Mislavskij, “Al’fred Fedeckij. K biografii pervogo rossijskogo kinooperatora,ˮ Kinovedčeskie zapiski, no. 77 (2006): 163–213. 119. Stephen Baehr, “The Troika and the Train. Dialogues Between Tradition and Technology in Nineteenth-Century Russian Literature,ˮ in Issues in Russian Literature before 1917. Selected Papers of the Third World Congress for Soviet and East European Studies, ed. John Douglas Clayton (Columbus, OH: Slavica, 1989), 88. 120. Delays in railway construction were criticized in “Raboty po sooruženiju rossijskich železnych dorog,ˮ Niva. Illjustrirovannyj žurnal literatury i sovremennoj žizni, no. 46 (1876): 776. 121. Nikolay Nekrasov, “The Railway,” in Nikolay Nekrasov, Delphi Collected Poetical Works of Nikolay Nekrasov (Illustrated). Delphi Poets Series Book 69, trans. J. Soskice (Delphi Classics; 1st ed., 2017); Kindle edition. 122. For details of the accident and the public’s reaction to it, see Schenk, Russlands Fahrt in die Moderne, 311–326. 123. Expression borrowed from Edith Hanke, Prophet des Unmodernen: Leo N. Tolstoi als Kulturkritiker in der deutschen Diskussion der Jahrhundertwende (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1993). 124. Lev Tolstoj, Polnoe sobranie sočinenij in 22 tomach (Moskva: Chudožestvennaja literatura, 1978–1985), 133. 125. Anton Chekhov, “The Culprit,” in The Portable Chekhov, ed. Avrahm Yarmolinsky (New York: The Viking Press, 1947), 105–107. 126. Wolfgang Gesemann, “Zur Rezeption der Eisenbahn durch die russische Literatur,ˮ in Slavistische Studien zum VI. Internationalen Slavistenkongress in Prag 1968, ed. Erwin Koschmieder und Maximilian Braun (München: Trofenik, 1968), 350–371. 127. The latter sentence is omitted in the English translation that was available to me: Ivan Goncharov, Oblomov, trans. C. J. Hogarth (London: George Allen & Unwin, Ltd. 1915), accessed July 11, 2023, https://www​.gutenberg​.org​/files​/54700​/54700​-h​ /54700​-h​.htm. Schenk, Russlands Fahrt in die Moderne, 222–223, describes the displeasure of many noble travelers with the “seizure” of trains and stations by the “low people” toward the end of the nineteenth and especially in the early twentieth century. 128. A lot of people all over Europe panicked at least on their first encounter with steam locomotives, but travelers immediately recognized the advantages of the new means of transportation—cf. Tümmers, Der Rhein, 236–237. Karlheinz Jakob rightly points out the ambivalent perception of the new means of transport: “The contemporaries were frightened and inspired.” Karlheinz Jakob, Maschine, mentales Modell, Metapher: Studien zur Semantik und Geschichte der Techniksprache (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991), 274. 129. Honsell, Die Canalfrage, 7. 130. The expression was coined by a passionate opponent of railways Joseph Victor Scheffel, cit. after Guenther Roth, Max Webers deutsch-englische Familiengeschichte 1800–1950: mit Briefen und Dokumenten (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2001), 475. 131. Gleb Aleksušin, Obščestvo paroсhodstva po Volge. http://www​.riasamara​.ru​ /rus​/samara​/about​/31451​/article31991​.shtml.

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132. Preußische Statistik, 51. 133. Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt, 443–445. 134. H.B. “Die allezeit richtig gehende Uhr,ˮ Die Gartenlaube, no. 18 (1865): 280–281. 135. Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt, 121–123. 136. H.B. “Die allezeit richtig gehende Uhr,” 280. 137. George Hiltl, “In der Central-Telegraphenstation zu Berlin,ˮ Die Gartenlaube, no. 4 (1867): 59–62. 138. The telegraph was also metaphorically used, although not as often as the railway, as a symbol of the dawning new era—that of unity. In 1848, Ferdinand Freiligrath called from Cologne on the North of Germany to stand in solidarity with Austria shaken by national freedom movements, by writing: O Germany, a riot! O Germany, a deed! The railways are whistling, the telegraph is twitching— But you remain impassive, you remain asleep!

Ferdinand Freiligrath, “Wien [1848],” in Ferdinand Freiligrath’s Werke in neun Bänden. Fünfter Band: Neuere politische und soziale Gedichte (Berlin; Leipzig: Knaur, 1905), 73. 139. Hiltl, “In der Central-Telegraphenstation zu Berlin,” 62. 140. Preußische Statistik, 86. 141. R. “Die Organisation der preußischen Armee,ˮ Die Gartenlaube, no. 26 (1859): 375–376. 142. Karl Biedermann, “Kulturgeschichtliche Bilder. 3. Die Transport- und Communikationsmittel,ˮ Die Gartenlaube, no. 42 (1854): 498–501. 143. RGIA 2210 Ministerstvo počt i telegrafov. Telegrafnoe upravlenie. Kontrol’noe otdelenie. Stol 5. V S-Peterburge. 14 avgusta 1865 g. no. 257. 144. For example, 20 words from Berlin to Aachen in 1849 cost 16 Mk. 10 Pf., but from 1867 on only 1 Mk. 50 Pf. Meyers Großes Konversations-Lexikon, vol. 19 (Leipzig; Wien: Bibliographisches Institut, 1909), 390. 145. Hiltl, “In der Central-Telegraphenstation zu Berlin,” 59–62. 146. Zamečanija Ministra Finansov po povodu zapiski Ministra Vnutrennich Del “o razvitii i sovremennom položenii počtovo-telegrafnoj časti v Rossii, po sravneniju s gosudarstvami Zapadnoj Evropy.” [1896]. RGIA 2209 Pečatnye zapiski. Ministerstvo vnutrenniсh del. Glavnoe upravlenie počt i telegrafov. Otdelenie IX. Stol 2. 9 oktjabrja 1913. no. 62336, 1–3. Incidentally, hardly anything is known exactly about the literacy rate of Russian population even after the 1897 census, because persons who were at least able to read something were registered as “gramotnyj” (literate). How many inhabitants of the Russian Empire could write has not been determined. Cf. Aleksej Safronov, “Pervaja vseobščaja perepis’ naselenija Rossii 1897 g.: razrabotka dannyсh o gramotnosti, iсh informacionnyj potencial i dostovernost,’ˮ Dokument. Arсhiv. Istorija. Sovremennost’ 3 (2003): 203–220. 147. Jakov Grot, Filologičeskie razyskanija. Materialy dlja slovarja, grammatiki i istorii russkogo jazyka, vol. II (Sankt-Peterburg: Tipografija Imperatorskoj Akademii Nauk, 1873), 318. 148. Gnedič, “Na okraine,” 6.

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149. Alexander Kuprin, “The Telegraphist,ˮ in Alexander Kuprin, Collection of Stories, trans. Nonna Shulga (CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2013), Kindle edition. 150. Amand Freiherr von Schweiger-Lerchenfeld, Das neue Buch von der Weltpost. Geschichte, Organisation und Technik des Postwesens von den aeltesten Zeiten bis auf die Gegenwart (Wien: Hartleben, 1901), 619–622. 151. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 84a Justizministerium no. 2830/1 Betr. die Orthographie, 1876–1919, Fol. 86v–87r.: Reichstagsitzungsprotokoll—38. Sitzung. Donnerstag den 31. Januar 1901. 152. Showalter, Railroads and Rifles, 33. 153. Not only railway workers themselves, but also laymen were repeatedly made aware that in the world of the machines, carelessness can be life-threatening. For maintenance and repair work on locomotives, for example, “a small omission” would often later lead to “a great misfortune.” “Der Locomotivführer,ˮ Die Gartenlaube, no. 27 (1872): 446. 154. Süle, Preußische Bürokratietradition, 44–45. 155. Due to space limitations, many other relevant developments could not be taken into account here, in particular the dissemination and the increasing influence of the sciences with their principle that the fluctuating, arbitrary, contradictory, and erroneous does not meet the requirements of strict scientificity or scientific correctness and should therefore be avoided in a scholarly text. Jacob Grimm recognized this trend early on and therefore pleaded in 1842 at the first German studies day in Frankfurt for the recognition of the special value of the “imprecise sciences” (Jacob Grimm, “Über den Werth der ungenauen Wissenschaften,ˮ in Jacob Grimm, Kleinere Schriften, vol. VII (Berlin: Dümmler, 1884), 563–566). However, he could not stop this trend. The conflict between the various notions of “scientificity” is discussed further here in the section on the alternative projects to improve writing. 156. Reinhard Rürup, Deutschland im 19. Jahrhundert, 1815–1871 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984), 31. 157. Michel Hubert, Deutschland im Wandel: Geschichte der deutschen Bevölkerung seit 1815 (Stuttgart: Steiner, 1998), 164, 128. 158. Anton Borinevič, Rezul’taty odnodnevnoj perepisi goroda Odessy 1 dekabrja 1892 g (Odessa: “Slavjanskaja” Tipografija E. Chrisogelos, 1894); Vsja Odeščina. Adresnaja i spravočnaja kniga na 1926 god (Odessa: Izdatel’stvo Izvestij Odesskogo okružkoma KP(b)U, 1926), 196; Valerij Malachov and Boris Stepanenko, Odessa 1900–1920. Ljudi… Sobytija… Fakty… (Odessa: Optimum, 2004), 259. Data of the First Russian General Census of 1897 are summarized in Nikolaj Trojnickij, ed., Pervaja vseobščaja perepis’ naselenija Rossijskoj Imperii 1897 g. Tablica XIII. Raspredelenie naselenija po rodnomu jazyku i uezdam 50 gubernij Evropejskoj Rossii (Sankt-Peterburg: Central’nyj Statističeskij komitet Ministerstva vnutrennich del, 1903–1905), http://www​.demoscope​.ru​/weekly​/ssp​/rus​_lan​_97​_uezd​.php​?reg​=1665 (on Odessa); http://www​.demoscope​.ru​/weekly​/ssp​/rus​_lan​_97​_uezd​.php​?reg​=1293 (on Saint Petersburg). 159. Pavel Čubinskij, “Obzor dannych o naselenii g. Kieva po odnodnevnoj perepisi, proizvedennoj v 1874 g. — Referat d. čl. P. P. Čubinskogo, čitannyj v

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godičnom sobranii Jugo-Zap. Otdela 23 marta 1875 g.,ˮ Zapiski Jugo-Zapadnogo otdela Imperatorskogo Russkogo Geografičeskogo Obščestva, II (1874): 187–218; Pervaja vseobščaja perepis’ http://www​.demoscope​.ru​/weekly​/ssp​/rus​_lan​_97​_uezd​ .php​?reg​=533 (on Kiev). 160. Pervaja vseobščaja perepis’, http://www​.demoscope​.ru​/weekly​/ssp​/emp​_lan​ _97​_uezd​.php​?reg=4 (on Warsaw). 161. Sankt-Peterburg. 1703–2003: Jubilejnyj statističeskij sbornik, no. 2, ed. Irina Eliseeva and Elena Gribova (Sankt-Peterburg: Sudostroenie, 2003), 16–17; Pervaja vseobščaja perepis’ http://www​.demoscope​.ru​/weekly​/ssp​/rus​_lan​_97​_uezd​.php​?reg​ =1293 (on Saint Petersburg). 162. Grigor’eva, Tri veka, 43–124. 163. [Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm], “Vorrede [1854],ˮ in Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm (München: Deutscher TaschenbuchVerlag, 1984 [reprint of the 1893 Leipzig edition]), LIV. 164. Grimm, “Vorrede,” LV. 165. Weinhold, “Ueber die deutsche Rechtschreibung,” 93–94. 166. Kopke, Rechtschreibreform und Verfassungsrecht, 6–7. 167. Vladimir Šeremetevskij, K voprosu o “edinoobrazii” v orfografii. Po povodu akademičeskogo rukovodstva “Russkoe pravopisanie”. Pedagogičeskij ėtjud prepodavatelja pedagogiki i metodiki russkogo jazyka Vladimira Šeremetevskogo (Moskva: Universitetskaja tipografija, 1891), 77. 168. Vasilij Bogorodickij, “Izučenie malogramotnych napisanij,ˮ Filologičeskie zapiski, no. 3 (1881): 1–32 (2nd pagination). 169. Jan Svartvik, ed., Errata. Papers on Error Analysis. Proceedings of the Lund Symposium on Error Analysis (Lund: Gleerup, 1973).

Chapter 2

Constructing and Reconstructing the Mistake

THE PRINCIPAL ACTORS: OFFICIALS, TEACHERS, AND PARENTS As indicated before, schools (in the broader sense, comprising both primary and gymnasiums) had three explicit functions in Prussia and in other states adopting the Prussian model. They had a “double mission” of teaching children a certain amount of knowledge and skills (lehren in German, uchit’ in Russian) and providing for their secondary socialization, that is, moral education intended to make “good persons” out of them (erziehen in German, vospityvat’ in Russian). Moreover, schools had to regularly test the children, so that only those meeting certain performance requirements could pick certain career trajectories. To see that this triad, taken for granted by many today, is actually not a “natural” essence of any schooling, one needs to think of the privately run “German”1 schools of the Middle Ages on the one hand, and the barely institutionalized Russian teaching practices of the same period on the other: both pursued only one goal apart from Catechism—to teach pragmatic literacy to pupils regardless of age. Systematic secondary socialization and testing were not within their purview. If anything, occasional acts of testing or personality-molding usually had a subsidiary function: teachers disciplined their students in order to be able to teach and control them all more conveniently. They resorted to recitation on a daily basis to see if their pupils had grasped what they had gone through and been given for homework, rather than to certify that the pupil in question was fit or ready for employment or further study. The modern school, largely controlled by the state and the church, was certainly a time-specific phenomenon owing its origins to the needs of the modern state and its limited human resources.2 75

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What follows demonstrates how, under the influence of the social and cultural context outlined in the previous chapter, teachers of different types of schools and officials of different school boards involved in carrying out the three functions of the school adopted a distinct approach to spelling, its rules and their violation, and how parents of the students in turn participated in this process. Afterwards, the handling of spelling errors in a specific milieu of the grown-up world, namely in the everyday work of the highest administrative officials, will be demonstrated through the example of the Prussian and German government. Originally, certification of any kind, up to a gymnasium diploma or a lower-level certificate, could only be obtained by attending what was called humanistisches Gymnasium in German and, later, klassičeskaja gimnazija in Russian, that is, a secondary school whose curriculum included Latin and Greek. In the course of the “fight for qualification,” other types of secondary schools, vocational schools, veterinary schools, agricultural or mechanical engineering schools, seminaries,3 and other postsecondary institutions obtained the right to issue different certificates that qualified their graduates to serve a relatively short term as volunteers in the army instead of serving the full term as conscripts, to enter universities or to take up certain occupations.4 This meant a sharp increase from about 1890 to 1900 in the number of educational institutions wherein grades were of decisive importance for the students’ future career, primarily the grades in German or Russian, respectively, which depended on the number of errors one made in written tests and which “weighed” among the heaviest in the calculation of grades. Although Gymnasium students never accounted for more than 10% of all schoolchildren (for 90%, elementary school was their first and highest level of education), the number and capacity of secondary-level education institutions were still insufficient. This led to fierce competition and—despite it—overcrowding. Academically educated teachers protested, pointing out that the demands placed on education quality in gymnasiums could not be met in giant classes of 35–55 students, and that working with such classes was “beyond a teacher’s physical capacity.” Teachers' conferences, therefore, pleaded explicitly to restrict class sizes by increasing the demands placed on pupils and thus “reducing the army of those who attend our lower and middle classes only for the sake of the one-year certificate.”5 Filters and hurdles that would “eliminate this evil at its root” and keep the “incompetent ballast” away from gmnasiums or at least force them to leave as soon as possible were directly related to our question, because in view of the fierce competition, students’ dissatisfying test results would often be contested by their parents. For teachers’ authority to be better protected, as little leeway as possible had to be left for subjective assessment, discretion, potential objection, contestation and other seeds of trouble. Therefore, educational system representatives6

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constructed an “objective,” formalized method of evaluation and selection in which easily quantifiable and apparently transparent criteria​played the leading role, and all the number of mistakes made in written texts.7 Increasing the requirements in this case meant not only more difficult tasks, but also a stricter approach to grading. The system was used in one form or another not only in Gymnasiums, but in all educational establishments and in all kinds of exams that regulated access to universities, to many offices and professions.8 For example, the Reich-wide 1876 Examination Regulations for a One-YearLong Voluntary Military Service stated that a German composition and two translations (into English and French) had to be written “with some degree of ease and certainty in a literate language” and “without significant violations of orthography, word order, and syntax.” If the result of the written examination turned out to be “quite insufficient,” the applicant was not admitted to the oral examination: “This occurs in particular if the German composition contains gross orthographical or grammatical errors, or if a conspicuous lack of coherence and appropriateness of expression shows from the outset that the examinee does not possess the necessary degree of schooling.” The decision of the Examination Board, made by majority vote, was definitive: there was no way to appeal against it.9 While the criteria for deducting points in the assessment of content were more difficult to formalize and could not always be agreed upon in the case of multi-member examination boards, it was believed that one was always on the safe side when counting violations of spelling. In an examination paper, as a former Prussian municipal school inspector recalled, “there can be a number of factual ambiguities and obscurities, also stylistic deficiencies; the paper is still good enough; but if instead of about six factual deficiencies, there were six orthographical errors—and possibly about as many punctuation errors—then the work would not be good enough, even if the author is an undoubtedly fully mature person,” because the requirements of the school board in the German language “referred mainly to the correctness of the writing in terms of spelling and punctuation! Everything else, that is, the living language itself, was of secondary importance!”10 The 1892 Gymnasium examination regulations stipulated that works in German generally “avoid orthographic and punctuation errors,” which could (also) be construed as a total ban on errors.11 In Russia, humanistic as well as non-humanistic secondary schools (klassičeskie gimnazii and realnye učilišča), and other institutions of secondary education were the settings where the publicly reflected approach to spelling mistakes was practiced the evidence of which has been preserved. In the second half of the nineteenth century, the theory and practice of teaching in these institutions was essentially characterized by a transfer of standards and practices from the West, especially from the Protestant German countries. Educated Russian pedagogues of the nineteenth century actively read

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and discussed works by foreign authors, especially those by Protestant and Pietist German school theorists and practitioners. Russian periodicals published a considerable number of appreciative mentions, reviews, retellings, and translations of German, more rarely Swiss, French or English articles. For example, from the Journal of the Ministry of National Education (Žurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveščenija), Russian readership learned about Friedrich Adolf Diesterweg’s Beginnings of Childhood Education and Karl Schmidt's Letters to the Mother about the Physical and Intellectual Development of Her Children, as well as the essays by Fröbel, Pestalozzi, Friedrich August Wolf, Gustav Friedrich Dinter. They read about Arnold and Stoy’s pedagogical experiences, about seminaries in Prussia, about the history of elementary schools in Germany and the elementary school system in Great Britain and Ireland, and so on. From 1856 onwards, especially essays on the German education system occupied a significant place in the foreign reporting of the Žurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveščenija (Journal of the Ministry of National Education).12 In preparation for the reform of the Russian system of education in 1862, two officials of the Ministry of National Education (J. B. Steinmann and H. Wiedemann) and two Saint Petersburg teachers (N. P. Avenarius and K. K. Saint-Hilaire) were sent to Europe13 to poll Western educators about their views on the reform drafts, while members or deputies of the Academic Committee (Učenyj komitet) visited Western European, especially German Realgymnasiums, Realschulen, technical schools, elementary schools, and seminaries and then reported in detail, often very reflectively and sometimes quite critically.14 Their observations and conclusions were published. Although the expert reports of foreign educators (25 of them from Germany—more than from other countries) on the reform drafts were evaluated too late to be taken into account in designing the final version of the elementary school reform draft, they were, in addition to the opinions of Russian teachers and all relevant press releases, published unabridged. Twelve foreigners, ten of them Germans, received Russian awards for their expert evaluations of the reform project.15 In part, the transfer of German ideas about how a school was to be organized, what the curriculum should look like for each type of school, and how the teacher should work took place not via texts, but rather in real life through civil servants and educators who were born in Germany or had completed their “pedagogical socialization” in German educational institutions. However, some Russian educators criticized their inability and unwillingness “to understand the Russian peasant and especially his children.”16 According to Sergej Loškarev, chairman of the St. Petersburg Literacy Committee, many members of this body were very out of touch with the people, especially the “many Germans,” who were “so convinced of the accuracy and importance of their pedagogical knowledge” that they did not even want to read “what

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men of experience from deep Russia, engaged in teaching peasant children,” had to share.17 Better informed about the peculiarities of the Russian student body, but also significantly influenced by the Prussian teaching model were educators who, although born and raised in the Russian Empire, had spent at least some time at German educational institutions in Russia such as the Petrischule in St. Petersburg or in Gymnasiums and universities in the Baltic provinces or in Germany. This applies in particular to all members of the 1864 Commission for the Revision of the Secondary School Statutes: the Ministry of Education board member Fёdor Aleksandrovič Postel's (Friedrich Christian Alexander von Postels), the previously mentioned head of the Historical-Philological Institute and temporary principal of the Petrischule Ivan Bogdanovič Štejnman (Johannes Friedrich Steinmann), the principal of the St. Petersburg Gimnazija No. 3 Vil'gel'm Christianovič (Wilhelm Christian) Lemonius. But it holds just as true for many other Russian educators and scholars, not only of Russian-German or German-Baltic descent: multiple children of Russian subjects of different ethnic backgrounds attended the German schools in Saint Petersburg and Moscow in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, because they had a reputation for thoroughness; hundreds went every year to Dorpat (now Tartu, Estonia), Göttingen, Heidelberg, Greifswald, Marburg, Leipzig, or Berlin to study,18 and quite a few Russian educators visited German educational institutions during their service and leisure trips. The founder of Russian educational psychology, Pёtr Kapterev, himself a great follower of Fröbel's method of education, later recalled somewhat ironically how in the second half of the nineteenth century Russian teachers “rushed in droves to the Germans” to learn from them, to “see everything for themselves, to spy it out and to take home the last word in German educational science.” “Every” (!) Russian teacher “picked up everything he liked from the Germans.” In short, it was “an orgy of borrowing,” and no-one was allowed to doubt the benefits of these borrowed educational ideas, methods, and techniques.19 When borrowing individually, one could choose something suitable, remodel and adapt it in a reasonably critical and creative way. Apart from a few documented cases, we do not know exactly what was taken home after such visits and how it was actually implemented in the borrowers’ own educational activities. By contrast, we are very well informed about another transfer channel, which involved no individual selection or adaptation. Nikolaj Christianovič Vessel’ (Nikolaus von Wessel), former member of the Academic Committee (Učenyj komitet), later recalled how in 1872 the ministry compiled and introduced “in extraordinary haste” new curricula, syllabi, detailed rules and instructions for teaching, admission, promotion, and matriculation examinations:

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For the most part they were translations of the syllabi and rules issued by the Prussian Ministry [of Religious, Medical and Educational Affairs], with the only difference being that in Prussian Gymnasiums it was left to the teachers to apply these rules and regulations with due regard for local conditions and the developmental level and abilities of the pupils, while the syllabi, rules and instructions of our Ministry were prescribed for unconditional, precise execution, so that the teachers of the gimnazijas were deprived of any possibility of free and independent educational work. As a result, dry formalism and complete lifelessness prevailed in teaching and moral education.20

In its country of origin, the Prussian school model was rooted in an established system of values, a pedagogical tradition that spanned several decades, and an educational policy specific to this time period. In Russia, however, despite the educational policy proclaiming conservative objectives and favoring certain borrowings, there existed a different system of values ​​and a different pedagogical tradition. Although these, of course, could not be described as particularly liberal in that they required a high degree of obedience to one’s elders, superiors and rulers, took floggings as a means of teaching and educating for granted, and fostered the child’s individuality and freedom on paper only, they nevertheless built on a totally different foundation. Discipline, earnestness, diligence, uniformity, and meticulous precision were not considered to be the principal virtues here: they belonged to pragmatic, rather than programmatic requirements. The imported Prussian teaching and upbringing model which in part ran against Russian pedagogical traditions and values was rigorously enforced by the authorities. Among other attributes of this model, its repressiveness, whose origin will be discussed below, came to bear as it was rigidly implemented. Whenever the teachers did not implement the truly humanistic ideas of the famous German educators in a critical and creative way, but instead, whether on the orders of the authorities or due to their own socialization, replicated the bureaucratized, repressive conditions of the German secondary and vocational schools, the end result was often not what the model had been borrowed for in the first place, but what even its German critics counted among its fateful flaws: this kind of school produced too few well-educated officials and professionals, loyal subjects, devout Christians and fathers, and too many nervous, sickly, demotivated, disheartened people who did not even have sufficient skills in writing, arithmetic, and thinking to meet the needs of the state and the national economy. For—and this was felt particularly strongly given the difference in attitudes toward such values as obedience, uniformity, and discipline—the strongest, if not, as some Russian educators claimed, the only moral influence such disciplining education institutions tended to exert on their students was “fear, which helped to maintain discipline in a brutal way.”21

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But why were the schools like that? The school culture of the second half of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had this repressive character due to a combination of three factors. First, in both countries, the school (in Russia predominantly the gimnazija) had the aforementioned “double mission” of teaching and secondary socialization. Second, it had to fulfil this mission under the conditions of political reaction, which occurred after the monarchs, who felt endangered by revolutionary actions, believed that the miseducation of their subjects was to blame for these shattering events and, therefore, demanded that schools instill loyalty rather than foster critical thinking skills. Third, for the same political reasons, vocational training of prospective teachers was deliberately restricted, so that they often did not master effective teaching methods and had to fear for their reputation. In what follows, these this will be shown in more detail for Prussia and for the Russian Empire. After the 1848–1849 revolution, the Prussian king Frederick IV placed the blame squarely on the teaching profession. Speaking to the assembled directors of seminaries, he said: All the distress that has befallen Prussia in the past year is your and only your fault, the fault of superficial education, of the irreligious mundane wisdom which you spread as the real truth and with which you have eradicated the faith and the loyalty from the minds of my subjects and have turned their hearts away from me. . . . the unholy teachings of a modern, frivolous worldly wisdom poison and undermine my bureaucracy, of which until now I believed I could be proud. But as long as the reigns are in my hands, I will know how to handle such mischief.22

Under the conditions of the post-revolutionary political reaction, many pedagogical organizations and periodicals that had existed before 1849 were closed, and Prussian teachers were forbidden to create their own organizations as well as participate in the All-German Teachers' Conference. In 1859, the spokesman for the Ministry of Religious, Medical and Educational Affairs, Privy Councilor Anton Wilhelm Ferdinand Stiehl said in his speech to the Prussian House of Representatives that one of his essential goals was to prevent “an emancipation of the teaching profession from the authorities.” By the Stiehl's Regulations (in force from 1854 to 1872), named after him, the content of teacher education was limited to the basic competencies and skills necessary for the education of subjects in “churchliness, Christian morality, and patriotism.” Subjects such as pedagogy,23 methodology, didactics, anthropology and psychology as well as ancient and German classical literature were strictly prohibited as politically unreliable.24 Stiehl's regulations explicitly required the teacher to have no opinion, but mind only their

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official duties, and rather than giving the students a general education, raise them above all as pious Christians, obedient subjects of the Prussian king, and capable workers. The education as practiced in the past had proven to be “inefficient and damaging,” therefore, everything “superfluous [and] confusing” was to be removed from the curricula of seminaries, grammar included. By virtue of the regulations, a prospective primary school teacher should learn only what he would have to teach: “all subjects within the limits of the elementary school program.” In the seminaries, emphasized Stiehl, “no system of pedagogy must be taught, not even in popular form.”25 Rather, each teacher was to learn a good method directly from their own teaching experience. Examination questions, which prospective teachers had to answer after completing their training, also showed this tendency: As Claudia Schadt-Krämer has established, among the 89 questions that were asked in the years 1856–1871 in exams at the teacher seminary in Moers, for example, only one question had to do with teaching to read and write. Other subjects were dealt with in only a few questions, and only religious hymns and biblical history in seven. The didactic questions were largely about how to ensure “silent attention,” “discipline,” and “obedience” in the classroom.26 A lithographed report by the Minister of Religious, Educational and Medical Affairs von Bethmann-Hollweg from November 19, 1859, which was sent to all provincial school boards and governments in Prussia, shows the extent to which instruction was reduced and informed by intensified social disciplining in the training of young teachers (which was to be the model for the school lessons they would subsequently conduct), for instance, in teaching writing: The samples of the writing and drawing lessons given in accordance with the regulations, which I have seen in seminaries, have met with my full approval. Simple and even handwriting was achieved everywhere, and I was particularly pleased that the regulation of October 1, 1854, according to which all written work to be done by the pupils should be exercises and samples of beautiful writing, and how this method should be used in a sustainable manner for the benefit of intellectual discipline, produced the most favorable results.27

Even seminary instructors and students who had not themselves experienced repressive measures after the defeated revolution were plunged into a state of fear and shame after the monarch—the highest father figure in the state!—had said that teachers were guilty of the misfortune of the fatherland, and felt the constant supervision of the authorities over them. Prospective teachers spent the formative years of their youth in seminaries where insecure, often perplexed and therefore violence-prone educators constantly insisted on discipline and duty and preached on the sinfulness of human nature. Both via explicit learning processes and via hidden curriculum, they conveyed to the

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students their own fear, insecurity and awareness of their own imperfection. The students, especially those who lived in boarding schools and had little contact with the outside world, received neither real-life experiences nor a sufficient theoretical training for their later life and work. They remained aloof and awkward when, upon graduating from the seminary, they arrived as young men without sufficient pedagogical (or even parental) experience and knowledge at schools where classes numbered 80 to 130 (!) children. The Oldenburg elementary school teacher Stührenberg recalled in the late nineteenth century: “I have often asked myself how the authorities could justify entrusting us, 'green boys,' with the task of acting as independent teachers in a school classroom.”28 Due to their poor training and lack of life- and teaching experience, these young assistant teachers were lacking in the necessary self-confidence and authority. Some of them were well aware of how ill-prepared they were for the job. Another former graduate of the Oldenburg seminary wrote in his memoirs: “The evening before we were sent out as assistant teachers, I went for a walk with my classmate X. Suddenly my colleague stood in front of me and asked: ‘Tell me, do you really think you are capable of taking over a class?’ Without thinking, I answered, ‘No!’ To which he replied: ‘Neither do I!’”29 They were talking about a one-year internship that until 1875 had to be completed by students of the Oldenburg seminary after two years of training, that is, at age 16–17. For the poorly prepared young men, this jump into cold water was often a rather traumatic and unsettling experience. A similar development was observed in the Russian Empire, first during the reactionary years following the failed coup of December 14, 1825, then after the riots of 1861, and especially after Dmitrij Karakozov's failed, but nevertheless shocking assassination attempt of emperor Alexander II in 1866.30 Before the Great Reforms, only a small part of the municipal and district schools in Russia belonged to the system of the Ministry of National Education. Many elementary schools were in the hands of the church (i.e., of the Holy Synod, a government agency), others were founded and operated by ministries of traffic and warfare, mining, and state property. The latter, for example, founded around 3,000 elementary schools in the first half of the nineteenth century for Orthodox serfs that belonged to the state, for the most capable of their graduates to subsequently become village or district scribes, assistant physicians, and land surveyor’s assistants.31 Only from the late 1850s onwards was the administration of public educational institutions was gradually concentrated in the hands of the Ministry of National Education. The reason for this was the state’s desire to keep public education under control, especially as in the course of the Great Reforms the local selfgovernance (zemstvo) grew stronger and local communities began to set up schools and teacher seminaries.

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In the middle of the nineteenth century, most elementary school teachers of the Russian Empire had no special training. They were barely literate, knew the four basic arithmetic operations and the most important prayers; they had hardly heard of pedagogy, didactics and psychology. The St. Petersburg teachers' seminary, founded in 1786 (it changed its name several times in the 1800s), trained only 30 people per year.32 Therefore, in the course of the Great Reforms, the Academic Committee of the Ministry of National Education decided to create “teacher institutes” for the training of teachers for village and district schools. Seminaries in Germany and Switzerland were to serve as a model. In order to get acquainted with the work of western seminaries and elementary schools, the ministry sent experts to Switzerland, Belgium, Saxony, and Prussia. A draft, submitted to the Academic Committee for approval in 1865,33 stipulated that 50 to 60 people should study for two years at each institute. According to the curriculum, they should have 24 hours of instruction per week in the first year and 16 in the second year. In the upper level, the trainees had to complete an internship at a special public school affiliated with the institute. Upon matriculation, graduates were required to work as teachers for four years.34 After that, most of the teachers switched to more lucrative and career-promising jobs. Given the giant population of Russia, these seminaries were too few, too small and in fact, even after extending the program by another year, inefficient. The two-year teacher training courses established in 1865 for teachers already working in district schools did not produce satisfactory results either: their graduates were insufficiently prepared for pedagogical work and in the vast majority of cases could impart neither thorough knowledge nor lasting skills in reading, writing and arithmetic (especially to the peasant children in the countryside, who only attended school in winter and forgot much again in summer due to lack of practice). On the other hand, large parts of Russian peasantry did not strive for education: until the twentieth century, most parents were satisfied if their child could read something out of prayer books printed in a “churchly” script. They had no use in their traditional subsistence economy for writing and for more advanced mathematics, for natural history, geography and other scientific or pragmatically oriented subjects, such as, for example, accounting. Therefore, when the statistics claimed that there were so-and-so many elementary schools in Russia whose graduates were “literate,” it usually meant that these children and young people could read “mechanically” and at best knew how to write their own name. Which did not mean, however, that they were not punished for spelling mistakes, as long as their teachers could recognize them, for they were taught to write, albeit mostly without lasting success.35 After Dmitrij Karakozov’s assassination attempt on Alexander II in April 1866, a period of political reaction began. The government, frightened by

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the specter of revolution, sought to ensure the loyalty of its subjects through school education. The new Minister of National Education, head of the Holy Synod Dmitrij Tolstoj was opposed to secular education and did not believe in special pedagogical training. He believed that rural teachers should be recruited from ecclesiastical seminary graduates, who were more likely to be loyal monarchists than, for example, university students. Although he failed to close existing teacher seminaries, he insisted that hygiene, medicine, and natural sciences be removed from their curriculum as “an instrument of materialist propaganda.”36 For a while, no new seminaries were opened. However, due to the active enlightenment work of many zemstvo societies and private individuals who started schools, the demand for teachers in the country grew steadily, and zemstvos began to establish and fund various kinds of teacher seminaries of their own. The minister soon realized that in this way, the matter of public education was about to get out of the government’s control, and was forced to sponsor state seminaries again. By 1882, their number had increased to 48, and the number of graduates to 730 per year.37 According to the new 1870 Rules for Seminaries and the 1875 Instruction for Seminaries of the Ministry of National Education, the curriculum was extended to three years.38 The Instruction contained detailed rules for managing the seminary, the religious and moral oversight of the students, and detailed instructions on the contents of the disciplines taught. The state seminaries aimed not only to produce qualified specialist teachers, but also and above all to turn prospective teachers into pious flock of the Orthodox Church and loyal subjects of the crown. The Ministry of Education purposefully recruited students from the peasantry, as peasants were believed to be more loyal to the authorities than nobles and the raznočincy.39 The behavior and mindset of the students were tightly controlled. During their studies, the 16- to 19-year-old boys were intensely disciplined: they should learn to lead a life that was “neat, punctual, active and free of worldly passions.”40 The Foundations of Pedagogy was back on the curriculum, but the content of this subject was very basic. These seminaries did not train real educators: their graduates as a rule were unable to teach effectively, which is proven among other things by the fact that their former pupils, peasant offspring applying to seminaries after graduating from district schools, were often unable to pass the entrance exams, even though the requirements were quite low. Therefore, from 1870 onwards, preparatory classes for seminaries had to be opened. In the 1860–1870s, the quality of vocational training of most Russian elementary school teachers was therefore generally still very low. The professionalization of the faculty had just begun, and it went hand in hand with two other important processes: the intensification of control over teachers by a government fearful of its subjects, and the de facto transformation of schools and teacher seminaries into repressive disciplining institutions. Their

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graduates were pedagogically incompetent, often intimidated and disheartened by the repressive methods of education. Their own systematic recourse to repressive teaching methods was thus preprogrammed, especially as in the Russian low- and middle-class families, beatings were traditionally considered the most appropriate method of education and teaching. Things were not very different in the higher-level schools of the Russian Empire. During the Great Reforms, the new 1864 Statute for Secondary Schools (gimnazii and progimnazii) adopted under the new Minister of Education (1861–1866) Aleksandr Golovnin had given teachers more independence. The authorities' confidence in the teachers had increased, their opinion was in demand and had even been demanded. In some secondary schools, informal relations had prevailed for some years and penalties had been abolished. All this ended abruptly after Dmitrij Karakozov tried to shoot the Tsar on April 4, 1866. The assassination attempt, although carried out by a lone fighter, was interpreted by the reformist monarch as a breach of loyalty on the part of the entire educated society, because Karakozov had finished a Gymnasium and studied at the university. Just as in Prussia after 1848, the Russian monarch concluded, among other things, that in the education of youth more emphasis should be placed on conservative Christian values and the way in which higher-level schools were carrying out their educational mission should be more strictly controlled. As a result, during the protracted period of reaction that began under the new Minister Dmitrij Tolstoj, supervision and punishment became the main principle of a multi-level system: from the Ministry to the district governors, provincial and municipal administrators, heads of individual educational institutions and teachers down to the students, those lower on the ladder were treated with distrust and severity. Reprisals for failing to comply with circular letters, regulations, rules, and directives became a major concern for everyone involved. The educators' own initiative, self-confidence, and solidarity were incompatible with the “letter of dispositions and fear of the controlling superior,” wrote a contemporary, and had to be abandoned: “the teacher had to consciously crush his own personality and bow to . . . power,” which “strongly demoralized” the faculty. The displeasure, if it arose, could only be suppressed or turned against the weaker ones, that is, against the children. The teaching and socialization activities, marked by fear and aggression, were characterized by the fact that not only politically questionable views or morally questionable conduct, but in general any deviation from a rule, whether committed deliberately or by mistake, could be used as a reason for reprisals, whereby the range of punishments at the lowest level was the broadest and ranged from bad grades, taunting, and reprimands to keeping in after school and punitive letters to cuffs and pulling children by the ears, even though corporal punishment was not officially permitted.41

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Gimnazija teachers were not allowed and hardly could do anything to help individual learners to avoid mistakes or to deal with them in a meaningful way. They could not do that because they had not been taught the necessary pedagogical skills during their studies. As late as 1903, a Russian gimnazija principal urged his peers at a conference in Tiflis (now Tbilisi) to pay attention to the fact that nowadays, those who wish to devote themselves to pedagogical activity take up the teaching profession without a thorough pedagogical and methodical education, immediately after completing their university studies. As a result, new teachers initially make numerous gross errors and mistakes in their teaching and socialization activities, the consequences of which remain perceptible for a very long time.42

Psychological and intellectual peculiarities of the individual learners were ignored: “It is assumed that everyone is tailored to the same measure, the same mandatory workload is taught to everyone in the same way,” reported a contemporary.43 Even with the best of intentions, teachers were barely able to reduce the children's stress caused by the reprisals they had to apprehend for their mistakes, because leniency and consideration for the individual were, despite everything written in the books of famous pedagogues, interpreted as “connivance” (popustitel'stvo) and considered dangerously “liberal.” The latter point might seem exaggerated today. We would be inclined to think that Anton Chekhov was just joking when, amidst the political reaction of the mid-1880s, he derided a fear that the condemning of faulty spelling rules could easily become the beginning of a mutinous line of thought: in his short story A Man of Ideas (Myslitel’, 1885), two friends, the prison warden Jaškin and his guest, the district school supervisor Pimfov, are having lunch and drinking vodka together when Jaškin suddenly says that punctuation is actually an unnecessary thing, and then, as he drinks more, he proceeds to declare “everything in this world” superfluous and unnecessary, including sciences, flies, prisons, human beings and, first and foremost, the letter jat, for the misuse of which he used to be flogged by his school teacher, as is his son now. Jaškin says that if he were Minister of Education, he would soon stop the teachers tormenting people with this letter that makes no difference. Pimfov, who doesn’t mind prisons or even himself being declared unnecessary and superfluous by the drunk prison warden, only takes offence at Jaškin’s “attacking education” when it comes to spelling. As they finally fall asleep after having eaten and drunk a lot, Pimfov thinks, “Thank the Lord he didn't get round to the creation of the world or the hierarchy today,” for that would be “enough to make anyone's hair stand on end.”44

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But Chekhov didn’t think it all up. The opinion that one should not make things easy for schoolchildren, not even in spelling instruction, because otherwise the monarchy would be in danger, was held in all seriousness by conservative contemporaries who had gone through the gimnazija. A lady who claimed to have graduated in 1886 declared in her petition against the planned spelling reform that difficulties in mastering the jat were only “a fable,” invented “by slackers and those gentlemen who want to stuff children's heads from an early age on with all kinds of nonsense and agitation against the government and morality.”45 In 1904, a group of anonymous “Muscovites” petitioned General Glazov, Minister of National Education, asking him to prevent the spelling reform discussed then on, among other things, the following grounds: A similar wish, as a sign of revolutionary ferment, was already expressed in the 60s by that section of Russian society which was carried away by revolutionary ideas. . . . The general illiteracy that will come [after what they called a “demolition of Russian orthography”—K.L.] will pave the way for the revolution. Some of them act consciously, others unconsciously, by enthusiastically making the children's work at school easier.46

In order to keep dangerous ideas away from the school, the authorities regulated every detail of secondary socialization and training there. They meticulously prescribed the teachers the scope and content of the curriculum as well as the political and moral vector for teaching in all subjects. Furthermore, the modernized instruction was characterized by an increasingly precise timing. If the first generation of factory workers, who came from agriculture and handicrafts, were “subjected by clocks, bells, and penalties to a concept of abstractly measured time that was alien to them,”47 the same was true for students and teachers in modern educational institutions as well. Coming in many cases from clockless milieus, especially at an age when, for developmental-psychological reasons, one is not yet familiar with a conscious and self-controlled approach to worktime and pace, primary school children and gymnasium pupils at the lower levels were subjected to a uniform rhythm by clocks, bells, and penalties when completing written tasks in lessons which were now timed to the minute, often leaving hardly any time for reflection and proofreading. This turned the slower learners, thinkers, and writers into “retards” and, often, eventually into “school failures,” while slowing down and demotivating the faster learners. The teachers, too, were under time pressure, as they had to complete certain parts of the lesson within the precisely specified time and often did not have the opportunity to dwell on more difficult teaching content until those at the bottom of the class had understood and mastered it. The increased importance of precisely measured and observed working time in the industrial age had many implications: the

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obligatory adherence to punctuality enabled a better interlocking of modern transport and manufacturing processes, it created the novel need for time-saving production processes (including writing processes), but it also contributed to the increase of haste, stress, and selection based on learning pace. Compliance to all guidelines regarding teaching in terms of method and content was strictly controlled, both in everyday life and in examinations, for which special regulations defined the procedure. But the criteria for evaluating an orthographic error as “minor” or “gross,” caused by ignorance or carelessness and so on, and its respective impact on the final grade were never fully formalized and left room for discretion, even though this made the educational institutions so vulnerable to charge. The judgment of a teacher grading examination compositions could thus be assessed by the controlling functionary of the supervisory authority as “too lenient” or “too strict” and possibly compromised. Nor could a teacher evaluate his students’ performance between examinations really “objectively,” that is, without regard to the requirement to achieve the highest possible grade point average. The Russian Ministry of Education also demanded that in Gymnasiums, not only language instructors, but specialist subject teachers as well have their students write compositions paying “as strict attention to orthography (in the broad sense of the word)” as teachers of the Russian language and grade for spelling as much as content.48 Control was executed in several stages: all teachers were obliged to grade each Gymnasium student’s written exercises “timely and carefully” and to discuss their mistakes with the involvement of the whole class, while principals were obliged to keep tabs on how timely and diligent the teachers’ grading was and, to this end, to review student notebooks from time to time.49 Thus, a mistake was not to remain a private matter of the writer, but should (at least according to the rule) be discussed incessantly in pleno, thereby ensuring that the Gymnasium teacher would not turn a blind eye, because he would be caught out by his superior. Thus everything to do with spelling (and not only that) became part of a comprehensive control system, wherein everyone involved was all the more eager to prosecute errors of their inferiors for fear of sanctions from above. This comprehensive and repressive control system was part and parcel of a school culture that was imported to Russia along with the Prussian school model. In Prussia, Gymnasium teachers were reprimanded for their own mistakes as well as for their students’ mistakes which they overlooked or failed to punish severely enough. This happened when, in the case of matriculation examinations, the corrected and evaluated exams were audited. For example, the following revision remarks are found in the files of the Royal Scholarly Examination Commission from the 1880s:50 Examination at Michaelmas 1880, St. Mary’s Gymnasium in Posen (now Poznań): “In the evaluation of the German compositions, violations of the (old and new) Ortographie51 and

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grammar have not been taken into account when grading; several mistakes of this and other kind have completely escaped Mr. Examiner’s attention .  .  .  . Several time Mr. Examiner’s correction has been incomplete. Some compositions could perhaps have been assessed stricter.” Examination at Michaelmas 1880, Gymnasium at Schrimm: “German: In the German compositions the new orthography is only partially implemented. Mr. Examiner himself (Hopp) writes Conflict, Affecte, and so on; Schooß, allmählig; he lets Tat (twice), tödten, getödtet, Conflikt, Bewustsein (twice), wieß go unnoticed and twice in the composition by Wolff changes deſſen into desſen, but does not suggest improvements for deſſelben, which ought to be replaced with desſelben.” Although spelling errors are less frequently mentioned in the files of 1881 than in those of the reform year 1880, they are just as meticulously enumerated: “Several violations of the new orthography have escaped the diligence of Mr. Examiner,” “In the German compositions, several violations of the new orthography remained unnoticed,” and so on. In foreign-language written exams, attention was also paid to the orthographic competence of teachers and examiners: 1881, Realschule in Posen: “French: Mr. Examiner repeatedly calls the orthography made obsolete by the last edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Academie (1878) ‘the newest.’ He has overlooked a number of orthographic and punctuation errors.” 1881, Gymnasium at Lissa: “French: In three works, a spelling mistake, a wrong accent, and a punctuation error have been overlooked. The assessment seems to have been too lenient.” 1884, Second Royal St. Mary’s Gymnasium in Posen: “Why has the spelling ślachta instead of the generally received szlachta been left unreprimanded?” The similarity of conditions between Prussia after 1848 and Russia after 1866 in the sphere of education notwithstanding, there were, of course, also substantial differences, the most important of which was that in parts of Russian society outside the school walls opposition to the repressive policies of the autocratic regime was probably stronger, sometimes more radical, and soon terrorist organizations appeared on the scene, whose sympathizers and members included many Gymnasium students. Within the Russian teaching community, especially among former university students (which is what Gymnasium teachers were), a self-image was widespread that was characterized by a lower degree of identification with the state: as representatives of the intelligentsia, they saw themselves in a mediating role between “the people” and “the authorities,” dependent on both, serving each in a different way and yet separated from both in terms of worldview. This was expressed, among other things, in the language used to describe the conditions in the school: The teacher, complained Sergej Poljakov, one of the most progressive Russian educators of the second half of the nineteenth century, turned “into a civil servant” during the reactionary period.52 This did not mean the

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civil servant status as opposed to the private person or military officer status. Rather, it was a value judgment, because a “civil servant” (činovnik) has always been a term with negative connotations in the parlance of the progressive Russian intelligentsia alluding to a complete lack of independence in thought and action, to mindless and heartless formalism and bureaucratic hierarchical and disciplinary thinking. And when they said that “the school life in its entirety resembled the activity of a bureaucratic machine,” they did not mean efficiency and smooth operation. According to the “old pedagogue” (as he always styled himself) Evgenij Markov, the “fatal consequence of the strict chancellery-like organization of teaching” was a “systematic distrust of the teacher, the pupil, the head of an educational institution.” This distrust, which, as Markov prudently added, alluding to the trigger of the reaction, “may have been caused by historical circumstances,” lay “like a dead man’s hand on our education system and has turned it into a mechanical performance of duty like any other civil service.”53 In addition to the school culture, which in overt or covert form included such significant portions of mistrust, insecurity, fear and repression, other factors that were not necessarily part of this culture, but were present in many teachers’ everyday experience, also affected their behavior. One such systemic factor was the dissatisfaction of the teachers with the remuneration for their work, which led many of them to increased irritability or a permanent state of being irritated. One of the consequences of progressive urbanization was that a large proportion of the teaching community no longer had direct access to agricultural products that had previously supplemented the wages of village school teachers, but had to pay cash for food and firewood or coal. Besides, living in a city required expenditures that had not existed in the countryside: people usually rented accommodation, had to pay for electricity, water and gas, and in increasingly large cities they also had to buy tickets for public transport. Furthermore, the proper bourgeois lifestyle brought with it new needs: one had to demonstrate at least modest consumption of culture, dress oneself and one's spouse and children decently, pay for services from doctors, pharmacists, hairdressers, and so on. In short, a teacher in the city needed much more money than his or her rural counterpart. However, elementary and Gymnasium teachers in Germany and Russia increasingly felt that they were paid too little money for their work. Before entering the profession, many prospective teachers and seminary students were quite poor (which often led to dangerous diseases such as tuberculosis, etc.), so that of the 32 boys who attended the seminary in Oldenburg between 1881 and 1885, six (!) died during this time or shortly thereafter,54 but this was normal for young people from poor families. Poverty was felt quite differently when these boys became adult working men, yet

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remained poor. While educators in urban, and especially metropolitan schools tended to model their lifestyle and consumption on that of the better-paid military officers and civil servants and their spouses, they could not afford their standard of living55 and therefore felt humiliation and dissatisfaction with their own so unfairly low-paid profession. In the countryside, the teachers were, on the one hand, less likely to face the enviable representatives of the military and civil service, and, on the other, compensated for lower salaries by supplemental income from playing the organ and offering scribal services up until the twentieth century, and as a rule had rent-free housing and other “supplies in kind.” For the latter, however, they almost had to beg from the parents of schoolchildren. Modern research into school history attributes the never-ending complaints about the miserable situation of teachers in the countryside primarily to the degrading form of remuneration, which “was not far removed from begging.”56 Even more than material misery, what affected many teachers was their offended dignity, wounded by a discrepancy between how they saw themselves and how they were seen by others.57 This had a negative effect on the emotional atmosphere in the school: forever plagued by existential worries and fears, these aggrieved people often became erratic, irritable and aggressive. In Russia, the teachers’ standard of living was even lower than in the West. This problem existed in the nineteenth as well as in the twentieth century and caused a negative selection in the profession: The difficult work of the teacher requires peace of mind and security in his livelihood. But if he has to continuously fight [for it], he can never be a good instructor. The present plight of teachers has already prevented many free and capable people from entering this respectable position, and the Ministry of Education is compelled to fill all teacher seminaries with students who study and live at Government expense and are obliged to work off the costs of their training by six years of teaching service. The better ones among them only wait impatiently for the end of this tiresome period and switch to another service that promises them better prospects and more advantages. The less capable cannot hope for such things and, weighed down by their misery, remain in the teaching profession without wanting to do so.58

concerned Education Minister Lieven wrote in 1828. In the following decades, little changed in the remuneration of teachers, but over time they became better informed about the material situation of their colleagues abroad and developed new ideas about what should be appropriate for their profession in material and psychological terms. A study published in 1902 showed, for example, that the salaries of teachers in the Russian Empire were, depending on seniority, only half or at most two-thirds of what their counterparts in Germany and Austria earned. Russian teachers’ pensions, if

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they were entitled to any, were about one-fifth the pensions of Berlin teachers and one-seventh of those in Vienna, whereas the cost of living in Russian cities such as St. Petersburg, Moscow or Odessa was by no means lower than in Berlin or Vienna.59 While male teachers rarely complained about that publicly, female teachers, who had become more self-confident over time (at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century, there were many more women in the teaching profession in Russia than in Germany), addressed the issue of poverty openly and quite critically. The teacher Dandurova emphasized in her speech at the First Congress of Teachers in the Moscow Municipal Public Administration in February 1912: “Pedagogical work, which requires a terrible nervous effort, produces, as has long been known, people who are nervous and irritable and react nervously to the slightest sting given to their ambition.  .  .  . One cannot demand productive work from a teacher who is tired both physically and morally!”60 Teachers gave vent to this bitterness in exchanges with colleagues, but could not hide it from the students either. The resentment and irritability of the teachers greatly contributed to an emotional atmosphere in which benevolent, patient and repeated explanation of complicated spelling rules and exceptions was out of the question, even when the teachers had the necessary expertise. Mistakes that children naturally made again and again were precisely the “stings” that they involuntarily gave to the ambition of their teachers. That certainly did not concern spelling errors alone, but every kind of wrongdoing. “We fear,” wrote the Russian pedagogue Ivan Ivanov, “the misbehavior of our pupils not because it . . . shows that they need our help, but because it is undesirable to us; it hurts our ambition, in our opinion it must not happen.”61 Little wonder that tasks done badly (i.e., with mistakes) entailed punishments in the form of bad grades, name-calling, detention, and so on, which, depending on the character of the child, could also lead to more or less lasting anxieties, among which fear of mistakes took a very prominent place.62 Intimidated and made insecure by their own seminary instructors and/ or superiors, annoyed and frustrated by their less than lucrative profession, with only very limited competence in terms of content and poorly prepared didactically, teachers dealing with overcrowded classes of several dozen children or adolescents were confronted several times a day with the terrifying prospect of losing prestige and control, because for most teachers of the time, according to the observation of the German school reformer Berthold Otto, it was “unthinkable” to occasionally answer a pupil's question with “I don't know that myself” without thereby losing the pupil's respect.63 To protect themselves from their own insecurity and fear, many teachers tended to set up their lessons so that the children were allowed to ask as few questions as possible and instead had to always be prepared to be caught in something that

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would be interpreted and punished as mistake or misconduct. When the Russian teacher Bogoljubova demanded in 1912 that pupils should be “allowed once and for all to ask the teacher how to write the words that cause the children difficulties from an orthographic point of view,”64 it was because this was considered just as improper in Russian schools as in German ones at the time. The teachers did not let themselves be asked questions, but bombarded the children with questions and tasks. Otherwise, “silent attention” in the classroom was demanded. This goal was also explicitly suggested to Russian and German teachers as relevant to secondary socialization of children. The more progressive teachers noted that the desire to repressively control children's behavior turned the school into a “place of hatred, enmity, and fear.” “We disregard the nature of the child,” wrote Sergej Poljakov in 1916, “we consciously ignore the needs of children and adolescents, we tame the children by demanding from them an unconditional submission to the will of adults,” because teachers simply know no other means of “accommodating the demands of outside observers and traditional family opinions regarding external behavior in the school.” Poljakov showed the implacable logic due to which the traditional school system keeps getting in its own way: if the teacher is to make the pupils learn their curriculum, he or she needs their attention in the classroom. Attention is attained by order; hence, it is usually concluded, the students should observe an uninterrupted silence, and an exemplary teacher is one who understands how to keep the class absolutely quiet. But consider, Poljakov goes on to say, how many sacrifices are made to the God of Silence, and how much that harms the cause of teaching in its actual outcomes. The deep silence in the classroom is rarely a sign of deep attention; more often in such silence anxiety drives out not only wantonness but also active attention; the depressed mood greatly reduces the ability to work; at best, only external attention and mechanical memory function intensively.65

As an interim conclusion concerning the school as the principal setting and the teachers as the principal actors in the process of construing the spelling mistake as a social and cultural phenomenon, the following should be noted. In educational institutions mainly preoccupied with teaching orthography, it was also increasingly examined and graded, especially since the middle of the nineteenth century. These grades, which were of great importance to the present and future of the learners, depended to a great extent on the number of spelling mistakes in their dictations, compositions and other written exercises. Under the conditions of repressive school culture, which ultimately stemmed from a politically conditioned multi-level system of distrust, fear, control, punishment and humiliation, teachers constructed spelling mistakes

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as a forbidden and punishable, but hardly avoidable blunder. This is how quite a few of them have kept viewing errors ever since, although after 1968 (when some left-wing theoreticians criticized grading based on error count as a “means of preventing upward social mobility”66) the general attitude changed considerably, and errors came to be regarded by many theorists as valuable for improving both the teaching and the learning. 67 Let us now look what role schoolchildren’s parents played in the social construction of spelling mistakes. Explicit verbal utterances of the students' parents on the subject of spelling errors are difficult to grasp due to scarcity of relevant sources; we have to rely on indirect testimonials. Here is an attempt to describe what may be assumed to have been a common attitude by drawing on popular works of art as sources that bring us at least close to what was probably the most widespread attitude of students’ parents. Since spelling errors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Russia as well as in Germany had a direct and serious effect on grades, rankings, examination results and their consequences for the promotion of primary and secondary school students, the reaction of parents to their report cards can be interpreted, with some reservations, as their indirect reaction to the errors that had led to unsatisfactory grades. It is significant that works of art that addressed parental response to children's school grades, but without problematizing them, seem to have first appeared in high-profile mass media when not only the majority of children, at least in the middle class (Bürgertum), were attending school, but also most parents had attended it and had had relevant experiences. Three such pictures representing typical constellations of emotions will be discussed here. The first picture, titled Another bad Easter report card! appeared in the Gartenlaube in 1873.68 It shows a middle-class German family in a room that has obvious appanages of education, namely a bookcase and a Schiller (?) bust thereon. The mother holds a notebook (apparently with the bad grades) on her lap. In front of her is a boy, about eight to ten years old, with a schoolbag, his head and hands demonstrating repentance: this is the son who has again been given a bad report card. Behind him stands the father, angry, a ruler in his hand. An elderly woman in a black hood, probably the grandmother or aunt, puts her hand on the man's arm and looks at him with a soothing expression. The accompanying text runs as follows: “Just you wait! I shall call you on your laziness! Aren’t you ashamed before your sister, who has again gotten an A, and you, a boy, are an ignoramus and produce exam papers full of blots and stains? Who has no sense of honor, must have blows! Come here, boy!” Many a good father will have delivered a beautiful speech like this at the annual exam time. But no fewer grandmothers or aunts has God created for the

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protection of little sinners to pleadingly put their hands on the arm which, armed with the ruler that is otherwise designed for so peaceful a purpose, is about to start the execution. The mother and the sister, so beautifully praised by the father and looking on intelligently, perhaps give the all too persistent recklessness an appropriate lesson, even if they do not resent the efforts of the all too good peacemaker lady. But the little sister, her brother’s faithful playmate, looks at him quite differently: she is already pouting, and if Daddy sees his sweet darling cry for fear of the blows that hurt himself most, it is quite possible that the ruler will be returned to its original purpose before painful memories become forever associated with its long, hard wood in the service of fatherly wrath. We want to hope for the best for both, for the boy out of fear of the just punishment, and for the good little sister out of the mercy for the repentant and the contrite.69

The second painting, The Good Report Card, printed as an etching after the oil painting by L. Tannert, also in the Gartenlaube (1876),70 shows a family living in a much more modest dwelling, possibly in a basement apartment, because in the background we see a staircase and a window placed very high on the wall. The space is probably the kitchen where the whole life of the family takes place. You can see a basket of turnips, a teapot on the stone slab floor, kitchen utensils on the wall and a coop with two chickens under the ceiling. All this as well as the basic toys and the absence of any features of “education” (books, pictures, etc.), shows that the family depicted here (still) belongs to the uneducated urban lower class. A boy, neatly dressed but without a satchel, notebooks, or books under his arm, stands proudly in front of a rather young-looking woman, probably his mother. The father is not there, which possibly means that he is at work. The mother holds a sheet of paper in front of her, but instead of the report card, looks over at the boy. Whether or not she can read what is in the report card, it is plain to see that she is happy about the news and that it is her son who is building a bridge for the whole family to the world of education. The accompanying text is missing, but the message the depicted scene conveys is probably that a boy who goes to school in spite of poverty and instead of working and does well there may justifiably be proud of himself and that he is on his way toward a social lift, which, as the staircase in the background suggests, will lead him out of the dark basement and into to the light. These two pictures printed in the most widely read German family magazine show very clearly what kind of feelings were or were supposed to be associated with school grades: shame and fear when they were bad, pride and hope for advancement when good. In Russia, the latter motif was not used until the Soviet era: in 1952 by Noemi Gochberg in Polučila 5! (Got an A!) and in 1954 by Nikolai

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Zabolotskij in Opjat pjatёrka! (Another A!), while hardly any Soviet paintings on the subject of school and family have survived from the interwar period. On the other hand, two pictures from the time prior to 1917 depict the same horrible scene: Provalilsja (Failed, 1885) by Dmitrij Žukov71 and Opjat provalilsja (Failed Again, 1891, two versions) by Aleksej Korin72 each show a living room, the decor of which displays features typical of rather modest bourgeois prosperity. Plain floorboards with small carpets on them, shelves with books and houseplants, pictures in massive gilded frames on the walls, in Korin's case a dining table in the middle with porcelain dishes on it. In the middle of the picture, Žukov has a boy aged about 13, Korin—a 15- to 17-year-old boy in a gimnazija uniform, the design of which shows that the boys have not yet moved on to the penultimate grade. The boys’ posture and facial expression reveal that they are utterly embarrassed by the bad grades they got at a promotion exam. The mother is sitting at the table. In Žukov’s painting, this is a workbench with a sewing machine and an unfinished piece of work on it. The mother is dressed in black here, which means she is recently widowed (the portrait on the wall probably shows her late husband looking down on the boy with disappointment) and apparently has to support the family (including a purebred dog and a nurse, also present in the picture) by taking in sewing. Her lips are grimly pressed together, her lowered eyes full of desperation. In Korin’s interpretation, the mother holds a book or perhaps her son’s report card in her hand and does not look at him, but stares out into the room, full of grief and despair: she, too, seems to be very worried about the future of the bad student and the whole family whose only hope he is. In all the pictures discussed here, mothers of failing students are depicted as more concerned, helpless, and sad than angry. A flogging does not seem to be an immediate threat to the boys, but the mothers' reaction is obviously hard enough for them to endure. It is thus shame, despair, and existential dread rather than fear of punishment that dominates the emotional range of this scene. In all three pictures, there is one more child present, which makes the feeling of shame stronger. In Žukov’s, this child of about ten years of age is in bed during the day, apparently sick, which adds to the mother's distress. In Korin’s, the child is sitting at the dining table: it's a girl, probably the student’s little sister. The Kaluga variant shows the girl writing neatly, as a symbol of diligence; in the Salechard variant, the sister directs a reproachful look at her big brother, who must be doubly uncomfortable, since he must believe himself to be her superior due to his sex and age. Moreover, this repeated failure raises fears that the young man is unlikely to make a brilliant career. Since the father of Korin's protagonist is apparently no longer alive either (as indicated by the missing wedding ring on the mother's hand), his delayed graduation from gimnazija due to failing a promotion exam also

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means extending the widow’s financial burden by another year, which the flunker is obviously well aware of. The difference in tone between the three Russian paintings and that of the German etching is striking: here the little boy is threatened with physical violence from the angry father, there the adolescent has to put up “only” with his suffering mother’s passive-aggressive silence. Each in its own way, all four images conveyed a similar message: poor grades caused by mistakes bring about great embarrassment and fear, whether of parents' disgruntlement possibly leading to punishment, or (with age) of forfeiting one’s career chances. One spelling mistake too many in the examination composition could thus have consequences which were catastrophic in the eyes of the persons concerned. Male secondary schoolers carried a particularly heavy burden as compared to elementary school students and girls: since they had hopes placed in them for the future betterment of their families, the performance expectations they had to meet were higher, and so was also the emotional tension associated with grades. While the two German engravings presented before were seen and possibly discussed by many German families as illustrations in a high-circulation magazine, the paintings, especially those by obscure artists, certainly could not achieve a comparable degree of popularity. But the fact that Korin produced two versions of his painting and that neither remained in his possession bears witness to this motive having found a certain demand. Žukov's picture was even published as a postcard (in black and white), which could give the drama it depicted a relatively high visibility. The fact that the motif of consternation and shame because of a bad grade and jubilation because of a good one was taken up again several times in post-war Soviet painting as well73 proves that the basic emotional structure of everyday school life within the framework of the Prussian school model reproduced in the USSR remained unchanged over three generations. Parents of schoolchildren hardly determined (at least very seldom directly and decisively) what was to be regarded as correct and what as wrong in one or the other school subject and what kind of consequences deviations from one or another norm should entail. However, they significantly contributed to the construction of the orthographic error by responding to poor grades and mistakes underlined in red ink in their children's written work. This response ranged from showing disappointment or concern to reprisals. Schoolchildren were thus often in a situation where they did not receive enough help from the teachers to learn the difficult spelling and thus could not avoid making mistakes over and over again, but at the same time were punished and knew that adults disapproved of their mistakes as misconduct. Teachers who, by virtue of their conditioning and circumstances, could not

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view spelling and other errors either as unimportant, or as a potentially constructive element of the lesson, effectively forbade them like any other violations of the school rules, and the children felt this, even if the prohibition was not always explicitly articulated. Even at home, children were rarely spared feeling ashamed and anxious about mistakes, because over time, as the school system expanded, more and more parents, especially the fathers in the bourgeois milieu, were themselves products of a similar education. They had also been judged and punished for mistakes in their childhood, and moreover, they were concerned about their reputation, which was damaged by a child who “did not do well” at school. For many families, hope for a better future rose and fell along with the son’s success at school: were he to succeed, career opportunities awaited him, from which the whole family would benefit. If he failed, then not only would the effort associated with sending him to school be wasted, but also the prospect of higher education and a good job forfeited. Therefore, parents paid very close attention to their offspring’s every school report card, every grade, every mark. In 1908, a reformist teacher noted with regret, Unfortunately, school report cards and rankings . . . still play too important a role in their parental home today. Many students live from quadmester to quadmester under the dull pressure and strive to bring home the best possible grade at the end of the term. The parents immediately turn to the report card . . . . And this often determines the . . . mood during the holiday, which makes home feel like heaven to a good child and hell to a lazy sinner.74

The parents did not always punish their children for poor grades, but many a time they simply could not react calmly to mistakes and the poor grades that resulted from them. Some parents were able to transfer their dissatisfaction onto the teachers and the school who had failed to provide what was expected of them, since “it was precisely based on this more external principle that the general public judged the performance of the school and the quality of the education it imparted,” and still often does today.75 The emotional reactions of the school-aged children and adolescents to the experienced or expected punishments by teachers or parents for inadequate performance at school, fear of exams, expulsion, non-promotion, and the like were, as a study at the turn of the twentieth century demonstrated, the immediate cause of about 40% of all student suicides between 1883 and 1905 in Prussia where, on average, every week a schoolchild committed or at least tried to commit a suicide.76 In Russia, where the suicide rate had traditionally been very low, the number of suicides among university students rose to 164, and among gimnazija students to 106 a year. Regular surveys carried out since 1883 showed that from about 1902 onward, the number of child

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and adolescent suicides generally increased and then, after a break during the 1905 revolution, began to grow at an above-average rate again from 1906 onwards. The well-known St. Petersburg physician Prof. Grigorij Chlopin described in his 1906 study family grievances as the most common (known) suicide reason in children and adolescents, school problems as the second, and exams as the third most frequent.77 In 1910 a special committee spearheaded by physician Grigorij Gordon was established to get to the bottom of this problem. It noted that in children who killed themselves out of fear of punishment, the fears associated with the school ranked first. In the First All-Russian Congress on Family Education in 1912/1913, school was named as the main reason for child and youth suicides,78 because the overcrowding of the classroom and lack of fresh air and light weakened the students physically, while exams led to veritable suicide epidemics,79 so one commonly referred to “exam suicides,” and in 1907 a petition was submitted asking the Ministry of Education to abolish examinations altogether; the government did not respond to it. At the Congress, the school regime was generally described as “lifeless and cruel” because the teachers “treat the students roughly, the punishments take on the character of endless reprisals, which open the door to excessive harassment and petty revengefulness.”80 Brutal and pitiless parents were also blamed, because children who “killed themselves because of bad grades” usually did not do so much out of frustration, hurt pride or injured sense of justice (5%), but rather out of fear of their parents' reaction. This double misery of schoolchildren being reprimanded and punished both at school and at home for their lack of accomplishments and the distress of parents upset about their children's lack of success, formed a bundle of strong emotions, which was discovered by journalists as a “hot” topic that would be guaranteed to appeal to the general public. Discussions in the media were closely followed by the authorities, too. In the files of the Prussian Ministry of Religious, Educational and Medical Affairs are carefully filed newspaper clippings with contributions to discussions such as the polemic in the Berliner Politischen Nachrichten (No. 2 of January 3, 1893) and the Volks-Zeitung of July 1, 1893, about the Christmas report cards (some pleaded for their abolition, because bad grades and the resulting beatings spoiled the festive mood for the whole family), with marginal comments from the Minister, but with no resolution.81 Conclusion: The negative (i.e., ranging from deep concern to punishment) parental response to poor grades or exam results, which were largely due to errors, often had a very distressing or frightening effect on schoolchildren and Gymnasium students. Parents, who had themselves been socialized by the school, often assisted the schoolmasters in constructing the spelling error as a very dangerous misconduct threatening to jeopardize the student’s future career.

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A HIGH TREASON, A SIN, OR A HEALTH ISSUE: DISCOURSES USED IN CONSTRUCTING THE SPELLING MISTAKES Discussions concerning not spelling in general but spelling mistakes usually took place in educational institutions and periodicals, but not only there: statesmen indulged in such discussions too, albeit in a different way. In this section, teachers’ and officials’ discourses will be analyzed. A limited number of such discourses can be singled out. I will start with presenting the discourses of teachers using the minutes of teachers’ meetings from two schools in Halle an der Saale82 and relevant publications by primary and secondary school instructors.83 Let us begin with the minutes of the teachers' meeting at the boys' school in the orphanage of the Francke Foundation (Franckesche Stiftungen) on May 31, 1865. At that time the aim of the German language instruction was seen as “guiding the students towards the ability to properly understand the thoughts of others a[nd] correctly convey one's own, oral[ly] and in writ[ing].”84 This objective appears rather pragmatic, as it evidently places an emphasis on “correctness,” implying that communication which does not follow the rules learned at school is incorrect. A normative consciousness, which places at least as much value on adherence to norms as on practical success in every activity, largely determined the goals as well as the practice of school teaching—and this at a time when the rules themselves did not yet exist in many cases, or when the existing rules were not yet considered the only correct ones, because a uniform and universally valid orthography did not yet exist in Prussia in 1860s. However, the education authorities saw no reason to regard the variety of the spellings as normal. On December 13, 1862, the following order was issued: The uncertainty still prevailing in the principles of German orthography and punctuation is no reason to show leniency towards the pupils’ arbitrariness and carelessness. The school ought to practice in the lower and middle classes the usage established in this field by tradition, and individual teachers within the same institution shall not be allowed to disrupt, for theoretical reasons, the consistency of the uniform procedure to which the teachers of the same institution must agree.85

The “theoretical reasons” refer to reformatory historical and phonetic spellings which will be discussed here. Whether or not teachers of these schools in Halle followed these reformatory theories, we do not know (at any rate, the minutes written by different hands reveal no traces of such influences), but they were obviously struggling to reach an agreement on the orthographic norms. At the meeting dedicated exclusively to German language instruction on November 23, 1865, it was

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admittedly .  .  . also recognized as necessary that an understanding in relation to Orthogr[aphy] first be reached among the teachers. As a basis for such an understanding, the book by Klaunig, Rules a[nd] a Word List f[or] German Orth[ography] could be used. Reference was therefore made to this work, but a decision on it was to be taken later.86

The teachers did not rush to agree on what should be considered correct and what a mistake. The decision-making was repeatedly postponed “till later.” Half a year later, on April 20, 1866, orthography as a whole was also considered a matter “for later discussion,” that is, “an attempt should be made to see whether agreement could be reached at least on the most general matters on the basis of Klaunig's book, Rules and a Word List for German Orthography.”87 It was not until January 21, 1867, that a discussion of this book took place. In the meantime, however, students had to submit their notebooks for weekly examination and received marks according to the teaching objectives for each class announced on May 31, 1865, which pointed out that “orthography . . . [requires] constant consideration from the lowest level onwards and . . . there is still a great deal to be done in this respect, since at present the pupils are very weak in orthography” (this complaint runs like a red thread through the minutes of the meetings to this day) and said that “the teacher may take a look at the notebooks once a week a[nd] mark the mistakes. Whoever has a lot of mistakes has to rewrite the copy once again.” Repeated rewriting was, nevertheless, evidently not considered efficient enough as means against this evil, and another one—“students to be reseated [depending] o[n] mistakes”— was added below. This sorting of the wheat from the chaff made it evident to the schoolchildren who was “good” and who was “bad” based on their orthographic performance. Such visualization of performance had the aim of motivating the children, through ambition and/or shame, to obey the rules that they did not yet know or did not know to be universally valid. It would, of course, be wrong to claim that students' performance was measured only by the number of spelling mistakes they made. Individual teachers might tend to do so, but at least the school management insisted that “the assessment . . . should not be determined merely by the mistakes made. If the presentation of the topic is good, but the orthogr[aphy] bad, then the assessment must address both, and though poor orthogr[aphy] may perhaps lower the overall mark for a composition, but the assessment must not be limited to spelling alone.”88 There seems to have been no consensus among the teachers about the measures to be taken. The differences of opinion are over and over again reflected in the text of the minutes, such as in the sentence, “Work[s] with too many and gross orthogr[aphic] errors must be rewritten; other orthogr[aphic]

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mistakes must be rewritten after the work twice and thrice, even 10 times depending on the nature of the mistake,” where “even 10 times” is crossed out with a pencil.89 Apparently there were one or more opponents of such methods among the teachers of the boys' school, although it could not have been the principal: he always made his notes in ink when reading through and countersigning the minutes. As previously mentioned, on January 24, 1867, the teachers finally began to discuss the book by Klaunig, which, as the principal pointed out, had already “been recognized and introduced in many schools.” The principal expressed hope that “we would be able to make friends with [the principles proposed by Klaunig], even if it would be difficult for some to part with the earlier manner of writing.” He pointed out that “it was desirable that we would, if possible, agree with all the proposed changes so that the book, as intended b[y] t[he] author, could be put into the hands of the students, which is all the more necessary since the spelling in t[he] textbooks introduced is somewhat different.”90 The book was discussed paragraph by paragraph in this meeting and in the four subsequent ones (on January 31, and February 7, 14, and 22, 1867) with “various reservations” voiced, but in the end “no decision was taken on the introduction of the book in the school, because approaching examinations made other work necessary.”91 In this examination, student work was apparently graded with spelling in mind, the lack of guidelines notwithstanding. “In the first quarter of the year two more meetings took place, in which we talked about spelling, without, however, reaching a decision on the introduction of Klaunig's orthogr[aphy],” says an undated teachers’ meeting minute of 1867 or 1868. Years passed without the situation changing. The teachers’ efforts to make the children comply with the not yet clearly formulated, controversial or unclear spelling rules brought moderate success, as shown in the minute of the meeting that took place on June 26, 1869, “The German exercises of Grade 1 (i.e. the graduation class—KL), unfortunately, demonstrated a definite uncertainty in the orthograph[y]. Two note-books from Grade 1 submitted to the meeting contained 20 . . . o[rthographic] mistakes within one exercise, a[nd] what kind of mistakes!” A reprimand92 was issued on the spot, but it took longer to change the situation: “This should lead to the decision to talk about German and specifically about orthography again after the holidays in order to . . . find a remedy. In order to bring about unity as regards the spelling, which is becoming more and more necessary, the text by Klaunig and a second one by Lange (in Berlin) were recommended to the teachers for their perusal in order to make a decision after the holidays.93 Then, on August 7, “the sad experiences that have in recent times had to be made in almost all classes, even in Grade 1, concerning orthogr[aphy]” were lamented and the principal emphasized that “the seriousness of the matter

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was not to be underestimated. Above all, it was stated as necessary for the teachers to show more interest in this branch of German, and next that every teacher had to complete his prescribed workload and limit himself to doing just what was prescribed. In doing so, he must proceed with all severity”94 The fight against violations of orthographic rules was thus a matter of discipline not only of the students, but also of the teachers. Based on the assumption that what is written is a reflection of what is spoken, teachers repeatedly pointed out that “wrong speaking” leads to mistakes in writing. At the end of the nineteenth century, one Gymnasium teacher even quoted Goethe as saying, “Because many a man has not learned to speak properly, and because he considers it disgraceful to change his erroneous pronunciation in later years, writing correctly is so difficult for him.”95 Ironically, as was shown earlier, Goethe himself admitted that he hardly cared about writing correctly. What did the teachers mean when they referred to “wrong” speaking? It was dialect interference that they thought was responsible for “terrible mistakes against the rules of elongation a[nd] shortening the syllables,” sometimes up to 30–40 per dictation,96 which occurred again and again, even though “the teachers were exhorted to diligently practice the orthogr[aphic] . . . rules, so that this evil would be more and more eliminated.”97 Some spelling rule books took this problem into account.98 Up to the present day, this (admittedly ever shrinking) gap between the spoken and the written language is a considerable hurdle on the way to orthographically correct writing for many schoolchildren, not just in Germanspeaking countries.99 This also applies to the Russian multi-ethnic empire, in which not only the linguistic diversity but also social and dialectal differences within the Russian language existed until the mid-twentieth century. Here, too, school teachers and authorities recognized the problem and sought to solve it through the linguistic acculturation of the students, which became more and more difficult over time as a result of the mixing of the population. Incidentally, this could also be the reason why, apart from the earlier quoted 1852 guidance for Russian teachers in gimnazijas of the St. Petersburg school district to pay particular attention to the respective “local dialect,” for later periods there is no evidence of such consideration for students’ local linguistic characteristics: the teachers were simply not equipped with the appropriate orthoepic didactic means. As late as 1912, the teacher Sergi Danelija, who taught Russian at the boys' progimnazija in Georgia, complained that there was neither a specialized Russian textbook nor an adequate pedagogical concept for non-Russian students (inorodcy) and that the prescribed time up to the end of Grade 4 was by no means sufficient for the non-Russian-speaking students to acquire the required spelling proficiency.100

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In Germany, where much of the nineteenth century saw an intense struggle for national unification, the language issue was often discussed in the context of ‘national’ discourse: .” . . the pupil [must] of course only use the language that is offered to us by the current High German in its good phonetic status, and the pronunciation must always be purely sounding and correct. Dialectal features are . . . to be retained but on rare occasions,” postulated the German teacher Felix Koehler from Neisse (Upper Silesia), for “the dialect isolates in its diversity, whereas the uniform New High German encompasses north and south, east and west of our German homeland, and the school must maintain only the national pronunciation.” It was the task of all teachers, Koehler went on to say, “to take great care in all subjects” that the pupils spoke only “our High German,” and did so “clearly and correctly.” The possessive pronoun “our” communicated the claim of the educated class to represent and convey the required national norm, but did not assert that the High German language was the mother tongue and colloquial language for children from all social classes and rural areas alike, and certainly not in linguistically mixed Upper Silesia. The term “purely sounding” (lautrein) described an artificial High German pronunciation which was so different from almost any living local dialect that not only children from uneducated classes, but also many teachers had difficulty following it, of which characteristic errors in the minutes of the Halle teachers' meetings and even in writings published by Gymnasium teachers101 bear involuntary witness. Of course, schoolchildren and secondary school students must have experienced a cognitive dissonance when an authoritative figure such as a teacher told them that “their” language was not the one they spoke from childhood but the language in the books, and that in writing in their supposed “mother tongue” they could not rely on their linguistic competence in their actual native language (as well as that of their family and significant others). But what else should they rely on? The basic principles of spelling, the rules, one’s own memory and the teacher's instructions were to be used as guidelines. But it is impossible for a schoolchild to decide when the etymological and when the historical principle applies and why. The teacher of German and religion Dr. Hüser wrote, for example, that spelling was “still something very uncertain . . . due to the great arbitrariness with which one proceeds. However, this shortcoming does not in any way serve as a recommendation to the young people, as they realize quite well that one does not get very far with the usual orthographic rules.”102 The spelling rules (whether German or Russian) were often too complicated for the child to use and had too many exceptions, so that some teachers even thought that elementary school children would be better off not thinking at all while writing, but should write from memory, because they made more mistakes when they thought than when they quickly reproduced the image of the word that

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they had seen on the blackboard.103 This could work in elementary school, where the written work contains but a few words. At higher levels, dictation included words that some children previously had rarely or never seen before. In the 1860s, a participant of teachers’ meetings in Halle complained that in dictations, [a] whole number of mistakes occurs that the students are not yet in a position to avoid. This leads to a great fragmentation, a[nd] the acquiring of the prescribed portion of orth[ography] cannot take place adequately. In fact, the textbooks, especially for the lower grades, should be edited according to orthography. Since this is not the case, the teacher would have to compose his dictations himself or look for a suitable little book.104

Complaints about useless dictation texts that either contradicted to the spelling adopted in the respective federal state or contained words the spelling of which the schoolchildren had not yet learned, never seized until the early twentieth century. Quite widespread was the ‘moral’ discourse, which assumed that spelling mistakes were due to student’s “faults,” their human imperfection: according to the reasoning within the framework of this discourse, children wrote incorrectly because they “let themselves go in terms of language in their talks during breaks, on their walks or at home . . . out of convenience, habit and lack of firm will,”105 or because they had not paid attention in class and had not properly memorized the rules and exceptions, were not attentive and diligent enough, and so on. The Nuremberg professor Karl Küffner, for example, complained in a pamphlet titled About the Ordeal of Errors in our Schools about the “bottomless levity” and the “carelessness of students in regards to orthography,” which “amounts almost to frivolity.”106 This assumption usually presupposed only one antidote: reprisals. Although condemned by progressive educators, physical violence in the form of regulated corporal punishment as a means of disciplining was perfectly legitimate in school, and as a penalty for tasks done poorly it was very often used, not only by Russian sextons or village scribes giving private lessons. I am not aware of any explicit evidence of corporal punishment for orthographic errors; there is at most some evidence107 that failures due to inattention, laziness, or stupidity could lead to beatings in the classroom. Eduard Bernstein, for example, remembered his teacher wielding the cane and hitting the table with it—or occasionally the backs of “inattentive or exceptionally useless boys.”108 But reprisals did not have to take the form of physical violence. In a system where the student's fate depended largely on the teacher's judgment, strokes in red ink, deduction of points, detention with a written assignment were

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often more noticeable (though by no means always more effective) as punishment than beatings. On April 20, 1866, the minutes of the teachers' meeting at the Halle school for boys recorded that, “Laziness, demonstrated repeatedly, should be punished by detention”—a clear assignment of punitive function to the additional time spent in the classroom, during which, incidentally, written tasks often had to be completed as an additional means of punishment and an educational method, which children found difficult to bear to varying degrees, depending on the type of punishment they were used to at home.109 In a context largely dominated by disciplinary thinking, orthography issues were often discussed less in terms of causes of spelling errors than in terms of the appropriate response of the teacher. For example, at the teachers' meeting in the orphanage in Halle on March 1, 1894, principal Gentsch gave the following instructions regarding the grading of written work: The teacher has to make corrections in exceptional cases only; he usually underlines the error in the context and marks it on the margin with a vertical line110 if he does not choose to explain it to the pupil with a short comment. In the case of a composition, the teacher will in some cases give his judgement with a short comment at the end, but for the sake of clarity he must always summarize this in a number, so that the student is not left in doubt about his performance. In dictation, the mistakes made—regardless of their nature—are added together and their sum is given at the end (0 m[istakes], 1 m[istake], etc.)—without any grading. Later—in the higher classes only as homework—the student has to correct them under the heading “Revision” in the following way: wherever any sign or word in the margin indicates an error, the whole sentence (from the beginning to the end) must always be written correctly. It is of the utmost importance that when the work has a coherent content, the student is strictly instructed to always begin the next new thought on the new line, lest topsy turvy arises. In this way, thoughtlessness is prevented. There must be no listing and correcting of errors according to categories (orthographic, grammatical, logical, etc.).111

It is already evident from the principal’s style and wording that nothing but an obedient execution of his instructions was expected of the teachers. The construction of the error, which took place here via the guidelines for how to react to it, was actually done single-handedly by this man. The other participants in the meeting contributed nothing. Whether and to what extent these apodictically prescribed methods improved students' performance is difficult to assess; however, the principal's dissatisfaction with the status of orthographic proficiency in various classes, which was repeatedly expressed in the following years, suggests that it was not enough to comply with prescribed corrective methods alone. In view of this unsatisfactory situation, Gentsch, contrary to his authoritarian manner, had to let the teachers speak. At the meeting on May 2, 1895, he had complained about “the poor orthography of the public school students,”

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but “at the same time sought to explain it112 by the fact that many pupils from other schools with insufficient previous education had to be admitted.” It was again decided that ways and means to achieve better spelling should be discussed in one of the next meetings. In fact, two such “in-depth consultations” have been recorded in the minutes, but without any substantive information. Only in the entry of November 21, 1895, does it say more concretely, “Remedy will be provided by frequent copying, increase in dictations and omission of compositions at the lower levels.” In this, “omission of compositions” was written in by the principal in place of the erased “reduction in the number of compositions”: whatever may have been said in the consultation, when checking the minutes Gentsch retroactively asserted his opinion. After this principal had retired and Mr. Bachmann had taken his place, the topic of spelling immediately came up again. The new principal also proposed new means of combating errors: when correcting, which now was to be done “moderately,” the teacher had to indicate the nature of each error with one of six different signs (spelling mistakes were number one on the list); in revision, the word was to be rewritten three times in the case of spelling mistakes, and the whole sentence or its relevant part once in all other cases; the old exercise books were to be abolished because they deviated from the normal alphabet and—in 1906, a good two years after the reform came into force!—still had the old orthography.113 For students’ own reference, Principal Bachmann ordered that from Grade 5 onwards, in addition to the textbook, the children should also be given the rule book and that certain chapters of it should be dealt with conclusively at various levels. If the rule book said what was correct, it was the teachers' meeting that decided what was wrong, for example that “confusing the linking word 'da' with relative or demonstrative pronoun [das] is to be considered a grammatical error.”114 On the occasion of an audit, Principal Bachmann found that “typical errors occur throughout several classes.”115 Unlike Gentsch, he decided to get to the bottom of the matter and recommended “making a record of recurrent mistakes to combat this evil.” As an additional analytical tool, “unprepared review dictations” were recommended. In the subsequent discussion, the value of unprepared dictations and the repetition of such dictation material in which mistakes were regularly made, was “acknowledged” by those present. Even if the teachers hardly ever disagreed with the principal's suggestions, it is remarkable that a discussion took place at all. Principal Bachmann apparently reflected on the nature of spelling mistakes and noted that for some reason students made certain mistakes especially often. He wanted to uncover this pattern in order to be able to proceed more purposefully. He repeatedly called for the frequent mistakes to be noted down. Although no particular accomplishments were recorded at first,116 the quest was not abandoned.

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Bachmann not only had his proposals discussed, but also studied existing expert opinions. In the meeting on 4 March 1909, one of the teachers gave a “lecture on 2 books by Lange by order of the principal: 1. How do we boost achievements in German? 2. Against the word image theory.” After the lecture, a discussion took place in which Lange's verdict on “boring” spelling (Buchstabieren) was endorsed and it was also stressed that “the contrasts in writing between different sounds should be sharply highlighted at the lower level.” In addition, in view of the prevalent tendency, it had to be emphasized that “the level of students’ education should not be judged by their spelling.”117 With regard to the latter point, it must be said that orthography nevertheless still played an important role in determining one’s standing, because in the lower four grades, the marks in German (along with arithmetic) counted by a factor of three in calculating a student’s rank and overall grade for the year.118 The ranking affected the seating arrangement, “the top of the class on the left, the foot of the class on the right.”119 Another book discussed in teachers' meetings, incidentally “available in the auxiliary pedagogical library,” was Paul Reiff's Practical Art Education, New Directions in Composition Teaching, 150 Students' Compositions, Prepared by the Students Themselves, with a Methodological Treatise on Composition Teaching Appended. The minute-taking teacher wrote out an entire paragraph in the book in which the author, in an unprecedentedly liberal way, demanded tolerance: It was very important that the teacher allows the child to use his own language first, and from this, slowly and with the utmost care, he develops the High German language. In grading, the teacher should be as tolerant as possible, he should turn a blind eye to orthography and calligraphy lest he spoils the pupil's pleasure in writing. The main emphasis should be on content and the linguistic form.120

In the ensuing discussion, the teachers’ assembly generally agreed with Reiff's views. “Even though the author works under favorable conditions, it would be appropriate for us to follow his example,” say the meeting minutes. Admittedly, no such liberalization occurred; however, a somewhat more liberal atmosphere in the teachers' meetings was undeniable, and it resulted in teachers finding more effective teaching methods in a relatively free exchange of ideas. After several years, an exam produced the following results: “The results in spelling are favorable, progress has been made in all classes . . . .”121 The library of the Bürgerschule in the Halle orphanage contains a whole series of articles from pedagogical periodicals, the authors of which—for the most part secondary school teachers—discuss the topic of orthography and orthography instruction. The range of opinions represented is quite wide. So, for example, Professor Paul Richert from Berlin in his “epistemological

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essay” on language and writing demonstrates a very pragmatic approach: Since the student had to learn the complicated and often illogical German orthography, he would have to waste so much precious time . . . which could be used much more usefully . . . for the really serious sciences. Why must it be that such a vast amount of work is spent on correct spelling, the most elementary of all aids for the real fields of knowledge, when the same objective can perhaps be achieved in half the time? Why shouldn’t things be arranged in such a way that one only has to spend as much or as little time on teaching correct writing as on correct reading? Just because one spares the effort to clean an Augean stable in which centuries of errors have piled up a mass of refuse, one preserves this refuse with all kinds of beautiful sentimental phrases.122

To justify his proposals for simplifying German orthography and bringing it closer to pronunciation by reducing the number of letters, Richert gave the following considerations: The first-grader had eight alphabets to learn: the capital and the small letters, handwritten and printed in Fraktur and Antiqua. If there were fewer letters, there would also be fewer cases in which the pupil did not know how to write a word. He would no longer be in danger of writing f instead of v; and it would not be regarded as a mistake if he wrote 'Vater' with f. And you would not have to put up with illogical spellings anymore. A Minister of Education who would carry out a simplifying orthography reform demanded by Richert (and many other teachers) “would do great service not only to the German written language, but especially to the learning youth, who, by avoiding each of the spelling mistakes made in such great numbers today, would unconsciously pay him a silent debt of gratitude.”123 The idea that the number of spelling errors could be reduced by working out better rules was shared by thousands of teachers in Germany. However, a critical mass that could have initiated a sweeping reform was never achieved.124 For the majority of the authors, however, it was obvious that the children had to be taught the existing orthographic rules in a proper way and that wrong spellings had to be flagged as such, so that the students learned from their own mistakes. Accordingly, it was recommended that children should pay attention to the etymology and lexical affinity of the words, and should be guided by the “correct” pronunciation. Apart from that, it was “especially beneficial to stress diligent spelling in the lower classes, assiduous copying and writing down (also from the head), and frequent dictations.”125 Some authors placed particular emphasis on differentiated marking of errors and proposed systems of error designation they had devised on the basis of their own experience, with orthographic and punctuation errors in particular usually (in the official regulations almost always) the first to be listed.

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Gustav Wendt in the Baumeister's Handbook of Teaching demanded that students’ improvements should be graded as well, “Those who find this requirement exaggerated underestimate the importance of improvement. It is the surest measure of the students’ diligence, sense of order, and conscientiousness, and the more independently it is carried out, the more it encourages them. . . . In order for importance of improvement to be duly taken to heart, credit for improvement should be taken into account in assessing the new composition.”126 The improvement of one composition should thus influence the evaluation of the next. This may be seen as having above all a function of punishment in addition to practicing (the author was less likely to separate the two than is usual nowadays). The introduction of a uniform error marking system, which also gave orthography priority among the aspects to be assessed in evaluating compositions, lecture notes and dictations, must be regarded as an important milestone in the construction of the spelling error. Judging by the official curriculum of a Prussian Gymnasium127 (which may be considered more or less typical in this respect), this occurred in the mid-1890s. It should be noted that opinions and advice published by secondary school teachers at the turn of the century reflect the same problems as the ones that used to afflict lower-grade teachers at the public school in Halle two to three decades (as well as two reforms) earlier. It looks as though the recommended remedies were not very effective in the long run as far as spelling was concerned. On the whole, the combat against errors was not crowned with any noteworthy success: in the twentieth century, on average, students made no fewer violations of orthography per dictation than in the late nineteenth century. The spelling mistake was constructed in such a way that in many cases it was easier to make than to avoid. The violation of the norm did not have to be intentional.128 Despite several reforms, the rules of German spelling remained so arbitrary, variable, partial, controversial and inconsistent that even otherwise obedient schoolchildren made involuntary “blunders.” These were also called “spelling sins” in German. How did it come about that a misspelled word was classified as a moral offence? The answer to this question comes from the consideration of the “moral” discourse on spelling mistakes. An important factor in reactionary school policy was the school's obligation to put more emphasis on the making of more loyal subjects. In addition to explicit indoctrination, an indirect means, as it were, was used for this purpose, namely the doctrine of sin, as set out in particular in Stiehl's brochure, Documents on the History and Understanding of the Three Prussian Regulations (1855): “The doctrine of sin, of human need for help, of the law, of divine redemption and sanctification is a pedagogy which requires only a few

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guidelines from anthropology and psychology for its application by elementary teachers. The seminary only has to lay the right groundwork that will enable to and suffice for schooling.”129 In Karl Borman’s books used in seminaries, the idea of sinfulness was directly related to the teaching process: “Children, too, are naturally in the bondage of sin. It darkens their vision, clouds their joyfulness, fetters their will, drives them to disobedience and contradiction, and is the cause of all the impediments and problems that become apparent in their development. . . . The awareness of their sinfulness must be awakened in the children.”130 The moral education of prospective teachers in Prussian seminaries was all about fighting against “the sins of youth” (including, for example, consumption of anything more nutritious and tasty than the meager food cooked in the school).131 If individual points of Stiehl's regulation were mitigated over time, the spirit of the Prussian school education as a whole remained dominated for decades by the idea that failures in both political behavior and in learning actually stem from or manifest children’s sinful “impairments” and “faults.” As late as in 1905, the reform teacher Ludwig Gurlitt complained that the pedagogy prevalent in Germany “stood on the altogether obsolete theological point of view that the instinct for sinfulness was inherent in the child.”132 Orthography was given a moral value.133 The senior teacher Dr. Heinrich Erdmann, citing “the word of one of our first Germanists,” wrote that “a moral value is inherent in a way of writing that is established according to correct principles and sound tradition.”134 Accordingly, spelling errors could be branded as moral faults, incorrect speaking or writing as a sin.135 Orthography instruction was turned into an arena of disciplining children and fighting against sin. Thus, the existential meaningfulness of following any spelling rules received an additional justification: a school child’s violating or daring to question the contradictory and incomprehensible rules of orthography was considered a disobedience and proof of that child's inability to overcome his weak, sinful human nature. The kind of “help” that was proposed as necessary consisted, as with any other kinds of sin or moral offence, of punishment. This punitive and disciplining tendency typical of many German language instructors has shaped the perception of many generations of students to such an extent that it is sometimes perceived as inherent even to the science behind the orthographic norms: as Rudi Keller put it, “German linguistics is a strange science. Most people encounter it actually only in connection with rebukes, corrections, punishments and sanctions of various kinds in the use of their mother tongue, or for actually or supposedly incorrect use of their mother tongue.”136 And since sin and sinners “required severity” with, at best, a little mercy in individual cases, but no concessions in general, the number of schoolchildren committing spelling sins could not be used as a reason for spelling reform. Although the measures to combat mistakes that were based on the moral causes of orthographic norm violations and had a punitive character failed

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to achieve their declared goal of increasing orthographic accuracy, they nevertheless made an effective and lasting contribution to shaping the personality of the students. The stigmatizing reaction to orthographic errors as something absolutely inadmissible for a person of decency—a sin, in other words—which was typical of the decades to come, was thus integrated into the moral character formation that took place within the framework of school socialization. In Russia, the ‘moral’ discourse worked somewhat differently, although the circumstances looked similar due to the transfer of the Prussian school model. In the Russian Empire, where in the first half of the nineteenth century schools provided “strictly speaking no socialization and only superficial instruction which was given blindly, at random, because the teachers at that time had no idea of the methods of contemporary pedagogy,”137 an innovation in the field of education came in the late 1850s and early 1860s—”of course from the West”—which set a course that is still effective today: the autocratic government decided to make the “upbringing of Man, that is, . . . the all-round and balanced development of all the mental, moral and physical powers of the learning youth”138 one of the main purposes of schools, since “every pupil was recognized as a future member of society and a lawful connection was established between the welfare of the state and the successes of education; one began to speak of pedagogy and of expedient upbringing methods.”139 In order to better control this upbringing of the people, the Academic Committee of the Ministry of National Education considered it necessary to place all the general educational institutions of the empire under its control. This decision was successively implemented and led to an increasingly centralized and uniform policy in the field of elementary education. From the moment when a school was put in charge of moral education of its pupils, every action of the schoolchildren attending, every word they spoke or wrote, and every mistake they made were also judged from a moral point of view as something that characterized these children as good or bad people and taken as a reason for moral educational measures. In German, this is very tellingly reflected in the double meaning of the word Fehler (both “error,” “mistake” and “negative quality,” “flaw,” “fault”). Note the way in which Fehler in the latter sense was used approximating “sin”: That both the virtues and the faults [Fehler] of the teacher are observed daily and hourly by his own pupils, . . . but that even good-for-nothings have excused their own faults [Fehler] and sins by referring to unscrupulous teachers; all this must be firmly imprinted on the young teacher's soul before he takes the first step into his school. He must know by what means the well-known flaws [Fehler] of youth, sloth, volatility, obstinacy, absent-mindedness, etc., can be overcome.140

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Incidentally, this affinity of the two terms for Fehler in the discourse about schoolchildren as a sign of the school’s twofold mission was typical not only for Protestant but also for Catholic educators in Germany. Thus, the Dusseldorf city school principal Dr. Heyer, who presided at the Catholic Female Teachers’ Conference of the Mayor's Office of Dusseldorf on November 27, 1878, urged the assembled lady teachers of municipal elementary schools to “find out the cause of the children's faults (Fehler), whether they be from recklessness or ill will, and especially to affect the will of the children through instruction, habituation, exhortation, and punishment.”141 Only from the context—when it says “that one of the teacher's main tasks is also upbringing”— can it be seen that the faults addressed here were moral missteps or character flaws and not, for example, spelling mistakes or incorrectly solved problems. In Russian there is no similarly ambivalent word for a wrong spelling and a morally reprehensible quality, but there is a term pogrešnost,142 used for incorrect writing, which etymologically refers to grech (sin), but with no connotation of a moral condemnation. Generally speaking, one can say that, although orthographic errors were punished and condemned in the case of learners, in adults they were described as a sign of a lack of education but not as a “sin.” When adults, for example, publishers’ proofreaders, “sinned” against orthography, a critic was inclined to exonerate them, at least morally: the reason lay not in their bad nature, but solely in their lack of training.143 The ‘moral’ discourse on spelling mistakes, which was closely linked to the respective denominational doctrines of sin on the one hand, and to the moral educational mandate of the school existing in both countries on the other, thus exhibited characteristic differences that are informative for our problem. While in Germany disobedience and mistakes were associated with sin, this triangular relationship was less pronounced in the Russian ‘moral’ discourse; instead, another element was prominent here, namely imperative pity for the learners tormented by the overly complicated spelling. Incidentally a suggestion that was in part reminiscent of the ‘Russian-style’ moral discourse came from Austria. Professor Rudolf Löhner from Vienna wrote in 1905, that is, already after the introduction of the uniform orthography in all German-speaking countries, that the teacher should “not pay homage to the view that only one thing can be right and the other must be wrong, he should not forget that the language changes gradually, that transitions exist, that besides the written language, the vernacular language also has its authority . . . . One should beware of pedantry in the face of fluctuations, isolated mistakes in Gymnasium should not be treated indiscriminately with draconian severity.”144 In school life, this discursive mercy was hardly reflected insofar as service regulations determined precisely that and how students should be “tormented with spelling.” In the argumentation of the Russian proponents

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and opponents of the spelling reform, however, this element played a significant role. Among other things, this explains why almost identical reforms were described by their supporters in Germany primarily as a “unification” of spelling, but above all as its “simplification” in Russia. In Russia (especially after 1917) there was also a secularized version of the ‘moral’ discourse, which did not make use of the concept of sin and instead declared respect for fellow human beings as a justification for orthographic correctness: Lev Ščerba, the younger contemporary of the reformers, pointed out—a barely veiled allusion to the Christian maxim of charity—that proper writing is “socially absolutely necessary” for the “very simple reason: it is, so to speak, a consideration for others (mysl' o drugich) . . . . It is social decency and the respectful use of our neighbor’s time that compel us to write correctly (gramotno).”145 The ‘moral’ discourse ruled unchallenged until first experimental psychological studies established a new perspective and medical discourse began to gain influence.146 Difficulties in the acquisition of orthography were also discussed in the medical world of the time, but the contact between medical research and school was mainly in the field of special education, which was developing in Germany at the time. Oswald Berkhan’s work can be regarded as the beginning of the process of medicalization. In 1881 he discovered a “writing malady” in “the less capable or half-idiots,” which consisted in “omitting individual letters in the words written down during dictation or replacing them with others or rearranging them, even adding new ones, just as stammerers do when speaking.”147 Berkhan considered spelling problems in the context of mental impairment or feeble-mindedness, which he was studying. In 1887, Rudolf Berlin, an ophthalmologist practicing in Stuttgart, described this disorder as dyslexia, and in 1916, the Budapest physician and psychologist Paul (Pál) Ranschburg introduced the term Legasthenie into German-language research and defined the phenomenon as a “sustained delay of a higher degree in the child's mental development.”148 Both Berkhan and Ranschburg thus assumed that it was a pathological change in the child's brain that inhibited or disturbed their intellectual development and, among other effects, manifested itself in them being unable to write correctly. In the twentieth century, there was a hiatus in medical research into spelling problems in Germany, caused first by the economic difficulties of the Weimar period and then by the 12 years of National Socialist rule. As an object of study in empirical psychology, on the other hand, it was precisely in the Weimar period that the Germanist and educator Hermann Weimer began to take an interest in mistakes as objectively caused malfunctions and not as flaws of character. His career as a researcher led him from German literary history to the history of pedagogy to the study of mistakes. In his definition, applicable to all subjects and ages, a mistake (Fehler, as

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opposed to aberration (Irrtum) and forgery (Fälschung)) was an act that deviated from what is right against its actor's will. Weimer saw its cause in a failure of mental functions such as attention, thought, or memory. The general classification drafted by Weimer included fluency errors, perseverative errors, similarity errors, mixed errors, emotional or volitional errors (the latter in reference to Sigmund Freud's theory of repression).149 Weimer's works laid the foundations of error psychology, but his ideas did not receive attention until much later. He did have a disciple, though.150 After World War II, dyslexia became the subject of psychological research that was not primarily medicine-oriented. In 1951, the Swiss psychologist Maria Linder cited specific anatomical and physiological deviations in the brain as causes of dyslexia, but tried to refute Ranschburg's definition. She was the first to assume a discrepancy between the reading skill and the child’s general intelligence in the sense of a general cognitive performance and excluded external conditioning factors such as poor teaching, but also lack of motivation and emotional factors: dyslexia, Linder wrote in an article published in the Journal of Child Psychiatry (Zeitschrift für Kinderpsychiatrie), was “a special feebleness in acquiring reading skills (and indirectly also in learning to write correctly in terms of orthography) which falls outside the framework of the other performances, with otherwise intact or (in relation to reading ability) relatively good intelligence.”151 Based on the work of Maria Linder, experiments were carried out to find the causes of dyslexia. Different research vectors offered different explanations. Some looked for the reasons in the perinatal period of the child's development, others thought that left-handed children were at particular risk of dyslexia, yet others thought that the milieu played a big role, because experiments had shown that spelling problems are common in children from lower social strata. The question of intelligence continued to play a major role in the discussion. Finally, it was agreed that children with the IQ between 85 and 115 have “normal intelligence.” In mid–1970s, the first German self-help group was founded by parents, which set itself the goal of directing medical and scientific attention to the problem of dyslexia, to define and explore it, so that funding and therapeutic approaches could be developed. The association grew larger and soon the Association for Dyslexia and Dyscalculia (Verband für Legasthenie und Dyskalkulie) was established as a lobby of parents of afflicted children. Today, a similar association exists in each federal state, and their work has produced considerable success in terms of recognizing the problem as one pertinent both to medical and educational policy. Maria Linder's definition of dyslexia slowly gained acceptance: it was now used in place of Ransсhburg's in almost all relevant decrees of the school authorities. This had far-reaching

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consequences, because it meant a significantly lower stigmatization of the affected children. Thus began a veritable dyslexia boom that lasted into the 1980s and in turn triggered a response: voices were raised claiming that dyslexia was a construct, created for the sole purpose of diverting attention from problems of schools by referring to a quasi-medical problem for which no-one was to blame. This thesis sounded particularly convincing because at that time it was still not possible to find a plausible etiological explanation for reading and writing disorders. It was even thought that the dyslexia problem could be remedied by a targeted reform of German spelling.152 But the triumph of medicalization was unstoppable. Around this time, dyslexia was included in the International Statistical Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems (ICD). In 1985, Schleswig-Holstein issued the so-called Dyslexia Decree, in which pupils with diagnosed dyslexia were granted far-reaching rights, including extra time of up to 50% and grade protection for written work. Today, corresponding legislation exists in all federal states, and since 2003, the German Conference of Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs has also been dealing with the problem of reading and spelling disabilities. The latter is now classified as a “learning disability” and many federal lands have special schools (formerly called Sonderschulen) that specifically address this problem. However, not every schoolchild making spelling mistakes is considered a dyslexic. While about 15% of German elementary students have general reading and writing difficulties, only 3–5% of all schoolchildren are actually dyslexic. In time, the character of medicalization changed. Originally, it consisted of reinterpreting poor spelling performance, previously attributed to sinfulness, lack of willpower, character weaknesses, or moral defects, as a disease or organic dysfunction and thus moving it out of the moral and into the medical sphere, which for children and adults who make spelling mistakes meant above all that they should now not be reprimanded, punished, socialized and discriminated against, but rather treated medically, assessed according to specific criteria and given special educational support. Later on, the World Health Organization’s mandate was extended to include spelling problems, which in the 10th revision of the International Classification (ICD-10-GM, a version adapted to the specific requirements of the German health care system) do not fall under the rubric of “Mental and behavioral disorders,” as “Factors influencing health status and contact with health services” (in the section on “Persons with potential health hazards related to socioeconomic and psychosocial circumstances”). Among these risks are “Problems related to education and literacy,” “Illiteracy and low-level literacy,” “Schooling unavailable and unattainable,” “Failed school examinations,” “Underachievement in school,”

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“Educational maladjustment and discord with teachers and classmates,” “Other problems related to education and literacy (Inadequate teaching),” “Problems related to education and literacy, unspecified.”153 Such diverse problems naturally require not medical, but sociopolitical and cultural-political, sociopsychological, pedagogical, in individual cases also psychological or psychotherapeutic countermeasures. However, the concept of “therapy” based on the notion of dyslexia or dyscalculia as a disease or psychological condition persists. Even if dyslexia is not completely curable, orthographic performance can be significantly improved by therapy. Today, even the Duden supports the medicalized concept of the spelling problem and operates 33 Duden institutes for educational therapy nationwide (except in Schleswig-Holstein, Bavaria, Thuringia, Bremen-, and Saarland). Probably the rarest to observe public discourse on how to deal with spelling errors in school was the pragmatic one, in which the discussion revolved around the pure question of feasibility. While the demand for faultlessness was often taken for granted, especially in class and in exam situations, under the influence of the aforementioned sociocultural developments in and outside of school, some voices were heard which, instead of discussing just how this objective of “absolute correctness” could be achieved, pointed out that in the overwhelming majority of cases it would not be achieved anyway and should rather be given up. Among the very few examples of this discourse was the motto (the original is a hexameter rhyme) formulated by a proponent of the radical reform of German spelling: Good German orthography has little logic and little sense Either improve it from the ground up, or be tolerant! 154

However, the journal, in which the motto appeared, fought only for the “improvement” of the orthographic norms, rather than more tolerance, for example, in the grading of student work. The latter was the case, on the one hand, with the Prussian minister of education's decree not to punish for old spellings as spelling mistakes during the transitional period after the spelling reform155 and, on the other hand, with the demand formulated by a number of Russian elementary school teachers. The Moscow Educational Society (Moskovskoe Pedagogičeskoe Obščestvo) not only called for a spelling reform at the beginning of the twentieth century, but also announced their intention in a submission to the Ministry of National Education to encourage the reduction of orthographic requirements for elementary students. According to Dmitrij Ušakov, similar wishes were expressed by the participants of several teacher congresses in the Russian Empire.156 The linguist Prof. Aleksandr Tomson from the University of Odessa firmly stated that in

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elementary schools with a three-year curriculum, “complete literacy (polnaja gramotnost’) could not be achieved.” The Russian term gramotnost’ means both the writing skill and, depending on the context, the ability to do so without making mistakes. Polnaja gramotnost', therefore, means the ability to write absolutely correctly. Tomson’s conclusion was anything but banal. He considered a spelling reform unnecessary. “Therefore,” he wrote, “the school should not knowingly try to achieve goals that are unattainable. It should teach only what it is able to teach in terms of spelling under the given conditions, without sacrificing other interests of the learners.” But demanding orthographic faultlessness of students in primary schools while knowing full well that these institutions cannot lead them to “complete literacy” is “making seem most important and essential that which in and of itself is not so essential.” Tomson also gave the reason for this, with relentless mercilessness toward the teaching profession: the latter ascribes such a high value to orthographic correctness only because it is “comprehensible and clear to everyone, while what really makes sense can only be deduced through a complicated analysis and eludes definitive counting on the basis of obvious external features.”157 How did these discourses work when orthographic problems were discussed outside educational and exam contexts? This question will be explored based on examples from sources on the everyday work of German administrative officials. After a uniform spelling (the so-called Puttkamer orthography) was introduced in Prussian schools in 1880—the use of which, however, Bismarck forbade to civil servants and Emperor William I for reports addressed directly to himself—a complicated situation arose, which became more difficult the more public servants who had been taught only the new rules entered service. But even older public servants, who were technically familiar with “the spelling generally used in our official communication and taught in a uniform way to our current officials back in school” were confused and sometimes got into trouble. They had their documents, written according to the new spelling, returned to them with underlined words that were written ‘wrong’ depending on the context. The Minister of State and Education Robert Viktor von Puttkamer himself received on March 17, 1880, such a “reprimand” from Rudolf von Bitter,158 just recently ennobled ministerial director in the Ministry of Finance: I have signed the attached draft of a direct report . . . , but only on the express condition that your excellency would be inclined to use the orthography hitherto customary in the penciled passages in the report. I must consider this highly

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questionable, especially in a document to be executed by His Majesty the Emperor as well as in a direct report coming to the knowledge of His Majesty, as long as His Majesty has not ordered such a change in spelling. I therefore kindly ask you to issue the appropriate instructions, and otherwise refer most humbly to the other correspondence that has taken place between us on this matter. I add that until the decision of the royal ministry of state, I will be taking a stand against the authorities beginning to use the newer orthography.159

In a more severe tone, a few days later, von Bitter reprimanded the royal district government president in Arnsberg Georg von Steinmann and the royal high commissioner of Hesse-Nassau Baron August von Ende, to whom he sent almost identical letters of the following contents: While I have taken note with much interest of your excellency’s kind report from the 4th of this month, it has come to my attention that it deviates from the hitherto usual official160 spelling. I therefore humbly request that you inform me as soon as possible of the reason for the use of this hitherto unofficial spelling. I may assume that the same spelling will not have been generally introduced in business communication of your province.

In his reply, Steinmann admitted in a somewhat contrite tone that he had been mistaken in assuming that the new orthography ordered by the minister of education for schools should also apply to official correspondence in general, and asserted that he had reverted to the former spelling for himself, but that he had never issued an order to his department regarding official orthography. The high commissioner of Hesse-Nassau practically excused himself by writing that the ortography [sic] ordered by the Minister of Spiritual, Educational, and Medical Affairs for the schools and applied in the decrees to the provincial authorities has also been used in reports to him. In addition, the new spelling has been observed in documents of the Minister of Public Works. Thus it could happen that it would also be used in the bulletin from the 12th of this month, especially since it could not be assumed that the reports to various Prussian ministries would use different spellings.

Von Bitter strictly controlled compliance with the earlier standard and made inquiries as to which other Prussian provincial governments had remained faithful to the old spelling and which had dared to apply the new one without instructions from above. That repudiation was not all, but that documents were actually not processed because of the wrong spelling is clear based on a message from the

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Director of the Privy Council. Upon noticing that the draft of an order by the Ministry of Finance submitted to him and marked cito had “deviated from the spelling customary in official use” and used “newer” orthography, he felt it necessary, “in order not to delay the execution” of the document to have a fair copy prepared “in accordance with customary spelling.” Likewise, Finance Minister Dombois in 1903 had the documents addressed to the head of the Privy Civil Cabinet Hermann von Lucanus and intended for submission to the emperor for signature returned to him and resent after rewriting, along with the remark: “The use of new spelling was due to our chancellery’s regrettable oversight. Provisions have been made to ensure that in future, existing regulations are complied with.”161 Strangely enough, no established rule seems to have existed for quite a while, because the director of the Privy Council inquired in his message back in 1893, “how to proceed in similar cases in the future.” After Bismarck's resignation, and especially after the Second Orthographic Conference of 1901, the period of orthographic division in Prussian official communications came to an end (except for the documents destined for the emperor). The spelling reform was enforced with less rigor as compared to the situation in the 1880–1890s. On December 30, 1902, for example, the Minister of Justice Karl Heinrich Schönstedt sent a circular to all departments of his ministry, by virtue of which “for the time being, a certain consideration is allowed for the existing habits of older civil servants; in particular, “clean copies made by clerical staff should not be condemned as defective because of minor breaches of the new rules.”162 This prescribed tolerance for minor violations of spelling norms in the written production of Prussian government officials presented a stark contrast to the rigorous attitude not only of the schoolmasters, but also some statesmen.163 In addition, it had implications in certain contexts, which the minister of justice and his colleagues might not initially have been aware of: it could be politically explosive. That orthography is (among other things) a political issue is a thesis that has long been proven to be valid. However, it is usually discussed in relation to spelling reforms that have been politically motivated and/or have led to political disputes, or both at the same time. By contrast, here I will analyze a case in which spelling practice gave rise to a political discussion and decision-making process, whereby the final decision was to maintain the status quo.164 Moreover, the issues debated here reveal important discourses on the orthographic norms and errors that existed beyond the scholarly and educational contexts. Although the original focus of the debate was the orthography of a language that was not German from a linguistic point of view, it was nevertheless also about “German” issues: the relations between the German Empire, which saw itself as a nation state, and one of its ethnic

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minorities, between the state and its officials, between orthography, the legal system, bureaucracy and politics. Let's start by presenting the facts. In winter of 1902–-1903, lawyer Maryan Rożański, J.D., in Gleiwitz (now Gliwice), in then Prussian province of Upper Silesia, refused to accept an income tax assessment letter sent to him because, according to the address written in German, it was addressed to a Mr. Rozansky (which is pronounced Rozanski in Polish, while the lawyer's name sounds as Rožan'ski). After returning the letter, the lawyer turned to the president of the Income Tax Appeals Commission in Oppeln (now Opole) with a request that “the officials in question should be instructed to spell his name . . . as in the church register.”165 He even enclosed in his complaint letter a certified copy of his birth certificate with his surname written in the original Polish spelling. However, the district commission only changed the y to an i—and sent the letter again. Maryan Rożański continued his fight and wrote to the Prussian minister of finance. With this petition, he initiated a long and highly relevant to us exchange of letters between several Prussian and imperial ministries and even a discussion in the cabinet meeting on February 18, 1904. We can only speculate about Rożański's motivation, but there are good reasons to believe that it was not legal pedantry that was driving the lawyer. The dot above the z, the accent above the n and the i at the end of his name were of fundamental importance to him not only because he identified only with this word image and could not relate to any variant spelling, but because he was concerned about the difference between the correct (i.e., Polish) and the incorrect (i.e., distorted by a German official) spelling of his family name. Rożański's biography seems to speak for the fact that in fighting for his surname, he (also) waged a national-political struggle for Polishness and against Germanization.166 His request was not granted. Whether he had been less militant in the past and only this lost battle over the spelling of his last name led him to radicalize or contributed to it, cannot be clearly determined from the sources available to me. What is certain, however, is that he later became an active member of the Polish national movement, was imprisoned for that at least twice (a few years after the events described here), risked his life in armed conflicts between Polish and German nationalists, and took part in the Silesian uprisings of the 1920s. Let us now turn to the other side of this orthographic-political conflict. One can see from the written statements (so-called “votes”) of the ministers and secretaries of state, circulating within the Prussian and imperial German cabinets, that this individual case was not their concern. Rożański's demand was dismissed by the minister of public works and the minister of the interior as “harassment,” with no objections from other participants in the discussion. Some found Rożański's complaint “unfounded,” others believed that the case

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did not need further discussion as the decision on it had already been taken, still others thought that, as there were no other submissions of similar nature, there was no need for a government decision on an individual case. Nevertheless, all ministers agreed that the problem raised by the Silesian lawyer did indeed require consultations and a decision, for political reasons among others. Without addressing Rożański's complaint further, the discussion circled for months around the basics, in particular the ministerial decree of March 11, 1898,167 which regulated the use of diacritics in foreign-language names in civil registry records and stated, among other things, that registrars were not obliged to use characters absent from the German script, such as Russian, Turkish or Chinese. Such names were to be entered in civil documents in the German transliteration. However, in the case of names written in the original spelling with German or Latin letters with dots, accents, and other diacritical marks, the ministerial decree on the contrary made it obligatory for registrars to reproduce them with absolute accuracy. In Prussian provinces where the population had Polish names whose spelling differed from German orthography, the German variant was to be entered in civil status documents first, followed by the Polish variant in brackets.168 The spelling that was “correct” in terms of power politics thus had an unambiguous precedence here, for all to see, over the linguistically correct one that was still binding in other cases. The ministers went on to discuss whether this ministerial decree should be repealed or, on the contrary, have its scope extended to other types of documents and other categories of civil servants. The ministers discussed the topic from different perspectives. Their individual arguments and lines of thought can be analytically classified as representations of three different discourses: The legal discourse is characterized by predominant reference to laws (or executive decrees, such as a ministerial decree); it deals primarily with rights and obligations of citizens, with the interpretation of legal norms and their applicability to individual cases. In connection with this are the questions of the extent, to which the Prussian government at the turn of the century considered itself entitled to set and change orthographic norms, and the extent to which, in the area of communication between offices and private individuals, deviations from normal spellings established by various bodies (church, registry office, tax office, etc.) were considered (im)permissible. The political discourse refers to the interests of state power; it deals primarily with the relationship between the state and its subjects, and with relations between political forces. Here, what is at issue is the extent to which the state is interested in certain orthographic principles or solutions and how it acts out of its own interests in the field of orthographic standard-setting. This discourse touches upon the national one mentioned before. However, since

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the subject analyzed here is the problem of the imperial rule over Polish subjects who are ethnically and linguistically explicitly not German, but rather have yet to be Germanized, who are not considered equal to the Germans and who, on top of that, are for the most part not loyal, a confrontational “us vs. them” rather than an inclusive national “us” is typical of this discourse. Finally, bureaucratic discourse deals with relations between individual government bodies or officials and, in particular, with the way the state as an employer deals with its civil servants at different levels and in different departments. I will show the particularities of communication within and between the authorities when it came to a special question which, if approached according to linguistic principles, would, according to the majority of ministers, present German civil servants with particularly great difficulties. The question of reasonableness represents a point of contact between the bureaucratic discourse and the moral one as advocated by proponents of a simplifying spelling reform. However, the acceptable limit or reasonableness was defined within the bureaucratic discourse in a way that was significantly different from that observed in the school setting. Of course, the three discourses usually coexist and are intertwined in the source texts, often even in the votes of the same ministers, yet the difference between them is often noticeable, and the parties involved were aware of their importance. Within the legal discourse, the discussion focused on three points: (a) whether a Prussian citizen was entitled to have his Polish name written in some or all official documents with all the diacritical marks associated with it in Polish—in other words, whether the question of the correct or incorrect spelling could be the subject of court proceedings; (b) whether it would be legally justified to make it obligatory for officials to use such marks in some or all cases, that is, whether private individuals and civil servants had to meet the same requirements and criteria of correctness when writing proper names; and (c) whether and how the legal basis for any obligations of this kind (meaning, the ministerial decree of March 11, 1898) should be changed. Opinions differed greatly. In the end, no party gained the upper hand. Each of the ministers involved stuck to his legal view. If one or another agreed to abandon his point of view or that of his predecessor in office, they did so under the influence of reasons representing other types of discourse, above all the bureaucratic one, which prioritized the optimal cooperation between departments and the optimally determined limits of appropriateness in the case of civil servants' obligations. The ministers felt tangibly more comfortable in the bureaucratic discourse than in the legal or the political. This can be seen from the higher number and length of passages that represented the bureaucratic discourse.

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A prime example of an interest-driven bureaucratic discourse is provided by the actions of the Minister of War, Karl von Einem, who was primarily concerned with the interests of his ministry. As early as 1899, at the instigation of the War Ministry, double names (Polish and German) were abolished for all localities in Posen (now Poznan). Only German or Polish place names without diacritics were allowed. In addition to cultural-political Germanization efforts, the War Ministry's interest in having new maps printed for the military with exclusively German toponyms played a decisive role, as they were presumably easier for German officers to read and compose.169 in the discussion of surnames, the minister of war, in his vote of January 23, 1905, voiced his misgivings regarding the proposal of the minister of the interior of December 21, 1904, to have the decree of 1898 “not uniformly applied in the correspondence of other Prussian authorities”: in the sphere of military administration and interim occupation authorities, inconsistencies in the spelling of surnames on record would lead to “mistakes, confusion, etc.” in recruitment rolls, national lists of recruits, troop rolls, military passports, national passports, militia and war rolls as well as other lists and military papers, and should therefore be avoided, especially since “the spelling of names is of essential importance in the case of the granting of statutory benefits, allowances etc., the issuing of civilian pension certificates, and in the case of certificates issued during active service in peace or during mobilization.” However, entries in all these documents are made on the basis of extracts from civil registers and birth certificates. Therefore, the minister of war could only call the “complete repeal of the decree” from March 11, 1898, “urgently desired” or at least press for a restriction of the proposal of the minister of the interior, so that the spelling of names in civil-status records would remain authoritative for the military administration and the interim authorities. As a reason for protesting against the amendment or repeal of the Ministerial Decree of March 11, 1898, Rudolf Arnold Nieberding pointed out on March 18, 1904, among other things, that he would not be able to “successfully present the suggested measure in the Reichstag,” because “from a political point of view, it would be questionable to allow the registrars to omit the signs in question.” For such a measure “would undoubtedly be exploited by the Polish side for agitation against the government and would be made the subject of fierce attacks in the Reichstag. Given the attitude, which the Reichstag has hitherto adopted in similar questions,” one may assume that “the Polish faction would be supported in its attacks by the majority of the Reichstag. The Imperial Justice Authority would not be in a position to successfully counter such attacks,” the secretary of state emphasized. Finance Minister Baron von Rheinbaben weighed legal and political arguments against each other: on the one hand, there was nothing legally against

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repealing the ministerial decree of 1898 and allowing Prussian registrars to ignore the diacritical marks in Polish surnames; on the other hand, “after reconsideration, he was inclined to think that the repeal of the ministerial decree, once it has been issued, is not advisable, at least for the time being,” since “this measure, without achieving a corresponding political success, would be perceived as a hardship by the Polish population and would be exploited for political agitation” and, moreover, lead to “undesirable discussions in the Reichstag.” While ministers' opinions differed widely on the legal aspect of this orthographic problem, they largely agreed on its political side. Thus, in his vote of June 19, 1904, the secretary of state (i.e., imperial minister) of the Imperial Interior Authority (Reichsamt des Innern), vice-chancellor, and Prussian minister of state without a specified area of responsibility von PosadowskyWehner spoke against the proposed restriction of the ministerial decree. In contrast to the minister of finance, von Posadowsky-Wehner, who held a doctorate in law, believed that it would also be legally wrong to allow registrars to omit the associated diacritical marks when writing Polish names. Politically, however, he also found it unwise: in his opinion, this measure “would not be a suitable means of combating Polishness, while it could be exploited by the Polish side in an inflammatory manner.” The political discourse of all ministers was characterized by a high degree of fear. On the one hand, the statesmen feared that Polish nationalists would exploit any change regarding the spelling of Polish surnames for their propaganda purposes and thus profit from it. The disagreement was only about how the Poles were likely to do it: some worried that the repeal of the ministerial decree as such would be declared an anti-Polish measure, while others feared that the Poles would celebrate it as their triumph if the effect of the ministerial decree was minimized in practice. Incidentally, the situation in Russian Poland, as local administrators saw it, looked similar. The latter were “very aware” that “even seemingly secondary questions of detail could quickly be linked to the debate on the 'Polish question.’”170 Whatever the St. Petersburg central government might instigate or prohibit, its measures would not be judged primarily by their content in the Kingdom of Poland or in Vistula Land, but would be interpreted primarily as signals of a changing orientation of Polish policy. Therefore, the Russian imperial administrators in Warsaw were primarily concerned with the “symbolic content” of the respective planned measure and its reception by an assumed Polish “public opinion.”171 On the other hand, representatives of the Prussian or Imperial German executive feared difficult debates in the Reichstag, where the mood was often very critical of the government and by no means unambiguously hostile toward Polish-speaking subjects. The ministers were therefore already on the defensive on both fronts and did not expect any victories. How great the risks

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actually were for them and whether they foresaw the future upswing of the Polish national liberation struggle, cannot be assessed here. What remains to be said is that the Prussian ministers were unanimously convinced that any change in spelling norms in this domain would only yield political difficulties. Consequently, at the end of a debate that went on for almost three years, they agreed to leave everything as it was: the ministerial decree of March 11, 1898, would continue to apply to the same extent as before, no other general or specific instructions concerning Polish diacritical marks were to be given to respective ministries, and complaints such as Rożański's were henceforth to be given a “short and dismissive decision.” Thus, the lines of argumentation which were divided into three different discourses here, converged in the end: for legal, political, and bureaucratic reasons, it was thought best not to do anything at all about the orthographic issue under consideration. It should be noted that in correspondence between high-ranking government officials, the deviations from “customary” or “official” orthography made by them or their clerks could indeed be criticized, but were only very rarely described as “mistakes.” This seems to be an indication of the already established (though not necessarily reflective) stigmatizing and marginalizing effect of this term: apparently, one avoided using it against respected representatives of the in-group because of an internalized idea that someone who made spelling mistakes did not belong to this prestigious in-group of administrators and should have no claim to respect. ALTERNATIVE: A DIFFERENT SCHOOL CULTURE The way German and Russian educational institutions of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries handled spelling mistakes constituted the mainstream in the pedagogical practice of the time, but was it the only possible way or were there institutions where deviations from the orthographic norm were dealt with differently? Indeed, there were some. To begin with, there were the humanistic pedagogical concepts of Adolph Diesterweg, Karl Volkmar Stoy, Konstantin Ušinskij, or Nikolai Pirogov. But a closer look reveals that their writings, which made their mark in the history of pedagogy, did not have nearly as great an impact on day-to-day practice as they did on the discussion about it. According to one practitioner's apt observation, one could open almost at random any [book by] Comenius, Rousseau, Pestalozzi and dozens more; one would always encounter . . . truths that have been slapped in the face by the teaching practice of all times. And these are

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certainly truths that are generally honored theoretically; only practice does not care about them.172

For this reason, two cases from the practice will be presented here. One example of an alternative approach practiced in Russia is the school model conceived and operated for a while by Leo Tolstoy (Lev Nikolaevič Tolstoj, also spelled Lev Tolstoi, Lew Tolstoj, Lyof Tolstoï), who at the time was not yet famous as a writer and thinker.173 On his estate Yasnaya Polyana in the Tula Governorate, Count Tolstoy from an early age had very close, comradely relationships with peasant children. He very highly valued their spiritual, intellectual and artistic qualities and in some respects placed them above those of the aristocracy. Already in his twenties he felt the desire to open them the way to education. After a first, not very successful attempt in the 1840s, which will not be discussed here, Tolstoy reopened a private school in Yasnaya Polyana in the autumn of 1859, but organized its work on a completely new basis. This time he approached the matter much more thoroughly, but also much more innovatively. Tolstoy studied works by Montaigne, Comenius, Rousseau, Pestalozzi, Diesterweg, Ušinskij, and so on as well as various textbooks, treating them rather skeptically and critically. He shaped his own pedagogical work in conscious and explicit opposition to Western174 concepts on the one hand, and to the Russian tradition on the other.175 Tolstoy became acquainted with European schools during his almost one year-long trip abroad in 1860–1861. He visited numerous schools in France, Italy, England, Belgium, and Germany. His diary reflects his impressions, but without always specifying the school he attended, for example, on July 17 (29 n.s.), 1860, in Bad-Kissingen: “Visited a school. Terrible. A prayer for the king, beatings, everything by heart, frightened, morally deformed children.”176 Most German schools, according to Tolstoy, fared no better. Somewhat more favorable was his verdict on the school teachers' seminary in Weimar and on Karl Volkmar Stoy’s (whose writings Tolstoy assessed as “skillful and audacious blather”) school in Jena. Tolstoy was convinced that only in complete freedom can a child's abilities unfold and the really relevant and lasting knowledge and skills be acquired, while coercion and heteronomy, which prevailed in the conventional school, also and above all in what he called the “new German” school, only damaged the child because it did not ask what interested the student, but rather taught what the teachers believed to be important. Therefore, this school could only build on coercion. The children taught there were always in what Tolstoy called the “school state of mind” (škol’noe sostojanie duši, a combination of fatigue, fear, boredom, strain on memory and attention) and the teaching is inefficient.177

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No wonder, Tolstoy thought, that school as such then appears to a child as an institution designed to torment children, where the main pleasure and the strongest need for freedom of movement remain unsatisfied, and “obedience and silence”178 are the primary requirements.179 Since the children were taught things in school that they could not understand (e.g., the illogical elements of spelling, both German and Russian, can neither be understood nor explained), and because the children—not only in spelling classes—were forced at school not to speak their own native dialect, but use a language of literacy that was foreign to them, they saw the teacher as their enemy and tormentor, while the teacher usually saw in the pupils his innate enemies who, out of their own malice or that of their parents, did not want to learn by heart what he himself knew by heart. Such a school only caused fear and disgust for learning, reading, and writing. During his stay in Weimar, Tolstoy formulated one of his pivotal ideas, which he noted in his travel diary on April 2 (14) and 4 (16), 1861: “The admixing of the moral educational element (erziehliches Element) has made the school despotic.”180 Hence, “away with moral educating—only training.” For Tolstoy believed that children, especially peasant children, are much better by nature than one (especially a representative of the ruling class) could ever make them through moral education. He disagreed on this point with Adolph Diesterweg, whom he met and talked to in Berlin on the last day of his journey, and with the vast majority of international educationists of his time. The renunciation of the “moral educational element” and the most radical liberalism, in retrospect even classified by many as anarchism, were just as important to the school Tolstoy founded in Yasnaya Polyana, where he himself taught, as they were to the other schools founded in the area, for which Tolstoy instructed the teachers. He described his pedagogical-theoretical thoughts and his practical experiences in the periodical Jasnaja Poljana, which he published specifically for the dissemination of his pedagogical concept.181 According to Tolstoy’s account, the number of schools operating under his system and at times under his personal guidance in the vicinity of Yasnaya Polyana was 23, although at different points in time there may have been fewer or more. The number of students varied according to school and season, but always remained under 40 children per school. The lessons, which took place from October to April, were attended not only by the sons and (fewer) daughters of peasants, domestic servants, soldiers, innkeepers, sextons, assistants and farmhands between the ages of six and thirteen, but also occasionally by adults. As teachers, Tolstoy first appointed seminary graduates, with whom he was mostly dissatisfied, because they tended to drink and show off. From 1861 onwards the teachers he employed were mainly

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students expelled from the university for participating in political riots, whom he considered to be more capable. As a teacher for drawing, painting, geometry and algebra as well as for chemical and physical experiments, Tolstoy engaged during his European tour a 22-year-old from Weimar named Gustav Kaehler, who had studied at a Gymnasium, then at the University of Jena and finally at the Polytechnikum in Karlsruhe. Tolstoy and his comrades-in-arms had neither a pedagogical background nor practical experience in teaching at school. In daily practice they tried out different methods that they knew from books, and without hesitation discarded everything that functioned badly, that is, caused incomprehension, unwillingness, boredom, inhibitions, and protest from the children. After all, only what was well received by the pupils was to be taught, and only in that way. The teachers discussed their experiences with the lessons in regular meetings. Presumably as a basis for these discussions, a diary was kept, but only for a very short time (from February 26 to March 14, 1862) and only at the school in Yasnaya Polyana. Nevertheless, it offers interesting insights into the teachers' ideas about their work. In the following, Tolstoy's reports will be used to outline the practice of his school(s). Tolstoy's school model provided for an absolute freedom for children182 at all levels, from the general organizational to the individual, intellectual and physical. Students could direct lessons toward the matters that appealed to them by asking questions, making suggestions, or showing signs of boredom and unwillingness, and they could protest against a subject matter, topics or tasks that seemed too difficult or pointless to them. They were allowed to move freely around the room during the lesson; everyone was allowed to choose a place on the benches or in an armchair, at, on, or under the table, and so on, and to change it at will. Pupils were allowed to talk, shove, scuffle, or even flock together. Moreover, the teachers never minded students staying out or leaving at any time (which happened two to three times a month).183 The possibility for students to walk away from class was “useful and indispensable as a means of assuring the teacher from very great and serious mistakes and abuses,” opined Tolstoy. I would add that this possibility was also important for children as a means of reducing stress, preventing overtiredness and escaping from exercises in which they felt insecure. The mere reassurance of knowing that they were not doomed to produce written work at a time that was inconvenient for them meant that a student made fewer mistakes and was spared experiences of failure that inhibited learning. Looking at the construction of the spelling mistake in the school of Yasnaya Polyana, we see that the element of inescapability, which depressed so many schoolchildren elsewhere, was largely reduced in it. Tolstoy frowned on “discipline,” as well as “silence,” “order,” and “obedience.” A degree of stillness in the classroom that corresponded to the students’ needs at the moment occurred spontaneously as soon as and as

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long as the children wanted to listen to the teacher or a classmate telling a story or reading aloud, and this was the case more often and for longer than one would think. The teachers also deliberately refrained from controlling the children's bodies: any position of the body, whether sitting, standing or lying down, was permitted, as was taking off or keeping on the outer clothing. Snoozing or sleeping during the lesson was normal. “Correct” physical skills, such as the position of the fingers when writing with a pen or drawing, were demonstrated to the children, but the teachers did not insist on their observance. Freedom in the use of language was very important: the teachers did explain to the children how to use, declinate, or conjugate one word or another according to the rules of literary Russian and Church Slavonic languages. But the use of the literate language was by no means a must. Rather, the students were allowed to speak a language appropriate to their milieu and age, and were by no means declared to be wrong or inferior. On the contrary, despite the grammatical inaccuracies, Tolstoy found the language of the common people, peasant children in particular, much more beautiful, lively and expressive than the literary language of the educated upper-class adults.184 What was “correct” in terms of the literary language norm, was subordinate to what he approved of and respected as “natural.” The introduction of peasant school students to literary language was thus not an end in itself; rather, it was to take place as a side effect of literacy without disturbing the children's linguistic and social-communicative self-confidence and self-esteem. Only the basic principles were observed more or less generally and consistently. Otherwise, according to Tolstoy's own admission, there was no theory, no system to cling to, and teaching was opportunistic, as it were, in that each teacher adapted their teaching methods and contents to the interests and current mood of the children. Leo Tolstoy himself also taught and consulted with the teachers on weekends about what had been tried and what was still to be tried. At the beginning, parents were usually skeptical, because they did not believe that learning could be successful without beating and disciplining. But gradually their confidence was won, and many even took their children from the schools or private teachers who taught according to the oldfashioned method (i.e., spelling words, rote learning, beating for mistakes) and sent them instead to the schools that Tolstoy had set up according to the novel “a and be and no flogging” method, as it was promptly labeled by the peasants.185 Not only peasants, but also many educators reacted to Tolstoy's school model with a shrug, if not indignation. The school in [Yasnaya] Polyana is a school upside down rather than a place of order, discipline and good manners, which children are supposed to obey and

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learn at school because all this is lacking in their parental home. . . . It is easy to mistake this school for a Jewish synagogue or a Gypsy camp, where every boy is given free rein to shout and move about.186

Despite the skepticism, difficulties, and occasional anger, the schools functioned successfully for three years. Their demise was not due to educational causes. Tolstoy had been elected justice of the peace and made many enemies in aristocratic circles through always taking the side of peasants in their disputes with landowners. He was therefore suspected of being a revolutionary and was spied on by the police, probably even denounced. In the summer of 1862, while he was away, his house and all the schools in the area were suddenly searched by gendarmes. They were looking for an illegal printing press, banned books, and people suspected of revolutionary activity. None were found, but during the house search, schoolbooks and textbooks were confiscated among other things and teachers, who were university students living on the estate without a residence permit, arrested. This incident had such a damaging effect on his reputation that the peasants no longer wished to let their children attend the school of the suspicious count. Lev Tolstoy himself was so indignant when he returned and learned of the search and the reasons for it that he gave up all activities in Yasnaya Polyana and in the fall of 1862 moved to Moscow for a long time. There he got married and devoted himself to writing. Without him as the driving force, the schools flagged and were attended less and less. In the spring of 1863, teaching finally came to a standstill. The teachers left. It was not until much later, in the 1870s, that Leo Tolstoy returned to pedagogical activity, by writing fables and readers for elementary schools and giving private lessons to a smaller number of peasant children in Yasnaya Polyana. He and his family taught the students basic literacy and, especially in later times, increasingly indulged in their moral education according to Leo Tolstoy’s own doctrine, known as Tolstoyism (tolstovstvo). For our purposes, therefore, it is mainly the teaching in the years 1859– 1863 that is relevant. To what extent can one speak here of an alternative concept of spelling mistake? The answer to this question will be taken primarily from the literature concerning the school in Yasnaya Polyana. However, since Tolstoy also personally instructed the teachers of the schools in the surrounding area that functioned according to the same principle, despite the lack of primary sources one can assume that violations of orthography were dealt with in a similar way there as well. Tolstoy's guidelines regarding spelling mistakes were as follows: “Correct him [sc. the student—K.L.] not because this or that is against a rule, a definition, or a paragraph, but because it is impossible to understand, awkward and unclear.” As “especially important,” Tolstoy emphasized the principle that

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the teacher should “never, while examining children's works, make for the pupils any observations about the neatness of the note-books, or about the calligraphy, or about the spelling.”187 What is the reason for this attitude toward orthography? Did Tolstoy not care about spelling at all? On the contrary, he was not at all indifferent to orthography as such, especially when it came to its reform. Indeed, he even sought for opportunities to discuss this issue with journalists. In 1905, the year of the revolution, he considered spelling more important than the political events of the day: “Let's talk about orthography, not politics,” said Tolstoy when someone told him “something about the riots and .  .  . some murder” that the newspapers were reporting on shortly after the mutiny on the battleship Potemkin and the uprising in Lodz.188 He felt the existing orthography was endangered by the planned reform, and this worried him a lot. However, to him, orthography as an important cultural phenomenon of public life, and spelling mistakes as occasional violations of its rules by individuals did not have the same significance. He easily admitted, for example, that spelling mistakes were to be found in his own writings, but these did not bother him. In 1851, aged 23, he wrote to his aunt, “I often tear up my letters after rereading them. It's not out of false shame that I do this—I don't mind a spelling mistake, an inkblot or a badly turned phrase; it's because I can't manage to direct my pen and my ideas.”189 He also remarked several times in letters to publishers that there would be numerous spelling errors in the manuscripts he sent them, but did not see this as a reason either to correct the texts by himself190 or to apologize.191 When publishing his students’ compositions in the supplement to his journal Jasnaja Poljana, he sometimes noted that he refrained from correcting their spelling. As to teachers, on the other hand, Tolstoy seems to have tolerated their faulty writing, provided he was otherwise satisfied with them. If, however, he disliked a teacher, his spelling mistakes were one more reason to call him unfit for the job. The following account by Tolstoy of his visit to another village school is very characteristic of this attitude: the teacher appeared, limping, with a crutch; he had probably not shaved for a week, his face was swollen, gloomy and cruel. . . . I asked him to show me how he taught. He approached each boy one by one, and I noticed how each of them narrowed his eyes and pulled in his head when the teacher's unshaven face approached his . . . I asked the teacher to write something for me. He went into the next room and sent me from there a three-line note, on which a pupil from Yasnaya Polyana, who accompanied me, corrected four orthographical errors in front of the peasants. The village elder then asked for my opinion of this school, and I said that it was better for the children not to study at all than with such a teacher.192

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This applied not only to school teachers but also to private tutors. Of a would-be home teacher whose letter had “eleven spelling mistakes and a tone of self-assuredness” Tolstoy said that he gave him an “unpleasant feeling” and would not be suitable as a tutor because he “did not know how to write.”193 Tolstoy’s attitude toward spelling mistakes made by school children was completely different. As late as 1908, he insisted that school overall was “harmful” in its spirit because it ascribed importance to things that were not really vital, “orthography, for example. Orthography is considered important, while the knowledge of what constitutes a sin is considered unimportant.”194 But this statement by Tolstoy must not be misunderstood to mean that he neglected orthography in his pedagogical work. By no means! In his primers (ABC 1872, New ABC 1875) there are spelling exercises, created on the basis of his own practical experience teaching at the school in Yasnaya Polyana. Spelling was taught there and attention was often, but not always, drawn to spelling mistakes (as well as grammatical, mathematical and others), not only by teachers, but also by schoolchildren themselves. Already in the 3rd, i.e. lowest, grade, written exercises were as follows: “. . . they took turns in dictating, and all read it over to one another. They printed out the letters, and at first corrected the errors of spelling and syllabification, then those of misused letters.”195 Tolstoy also mentions elsewhere his pupils' passion for correcting mistakes (though without noting that it was originally the teacher who explained the concept of the “orthographically correct/wrong” to the students and set them a task of looking for spelling mistakes in the words written on the blackboard): One writes while the others whisper together, noting his mistakes, and they wait till the end only to correct him of a misused vowel or a misplaced preposition, and sometimes of a misstatement. To write correctly and correct the mistakes of others is for them a great pleasure. The older ones seize hold of any writing which comes under their notice, practise correcting the mistakes, strive with all their might to write well.196

At no point in Tolstoy's diary or essays, however, is there any indication of how the teachers themselves proceeded or were supposed to proceed in correcting and grading. In the opinion of a Soviet researcher, Tolstoy “underestimated the importance of systematic grammatical exercises and practice of grammatical rules by the learners,” because “the composition notebooks of the schoolchildren from Yasnaya Polyana, which have survived to this day and have not yet been published, contain quite a few gross orthographical and punctuation errors made by the children and not corrected by the teachers.”197

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What appeared to the Soviet researcher as well as to some of Tolstoy's contemporaries, as proof of the inadequacy of the teaching method used in Yasnaya Polyana, is actually evidence that teachers at this school were lenient with regard to orthography whenever something else was in the foreground, as Tolstoy had also demanded from the beginning. The students' notebooks were reviewed and their performance graded. The marks, at least most of those entered in the edited diary, usually ranged from “satisfactory” to “very good,” although not without some bad ones as well. The children were only dissatisfied with them if they felt that the evaluation was inadequate: Too bad if he has been trying, and the teacher, through an error, has given less than his deserts! He will give the teacher no peace, and will weep bitter tears unless he can have the record changed. Bad marks, if they have been deserved, go without protest. Marks, however, remain only as a relic of a past system, and are beginning, of their own accord, to go out of use.198

A bad mark, caused usually by a high number of mistakes in an exercise, did not in any way result in the child being treated worse either by the teacher or by their classmates. Rebuking, mocking and other informal ways of punishment for mistakes were also not common199 because, according to Tolstoy, creating “optimal conditions for the student's mental powers” made it crucial that “the student not be put to shame either by the teacher or his comrades” and “(very important) that the student not fear punishment for bad learning, i.e. for not understanding. The human mind can only be active when not suppressed by any external influences.”200 There were no punishments in Tolstoy's schools, no reprimands, no letters to parents, no detentions, no rankings, no seats assigned according to grades, and so on, so that a child who made mistakes did not have to fear any immediate sanctions and to feel ashamed. Even the remote consequences of bad marks for one’s future educational and professional career, which a modern student is always aware of or is reminded of when urged to perform according to their family's expectations, were of no relevance to the village children. Tolstoy explicitly did not see his schools as precursors to higher forms of schooling, for he believed that the kind of education suitable for “the common folk” should not put them on the path to a career or other social advancement ambitions. Thus, since their schooling was limited to an elementary-school program (or simply to leaving after an indefinite period of time), end-of-year grades, examinations and certificates, even if they existed, would play no role in the later lives of school children. The mistake concept as constructed by Tolstoy thus was not threatening either situationally, or existentially.

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The attitude toward spelling mistakes on the part of the teachers as well as students, was therefore largely light-hearted and often lenient, which did not, however, mean that a secure mastery of spelling was considered unnecessary for a peasant and a craftsman. It was not the goal that distinguished Yasnaya Polyana from conventional schools, but only the path it took to achieving literacy. Tolstoy and his associates believed that children had to be and could be taught to write correctly without traumatizing punishments for writing incorrectly. The causes of the mistakes were also determined differently. The teachers did not at all ascribe the mistakes made by the children to stupidity or laziness. Rather, they pointed to other reasons, such as haste or inadvertence. Indeed, they found that the number of mistakes in composition writing depended on the topic, among other things. If, as the instructions for elementary school teachers usually suggested, the pupils were given the task of describing a simple and familiar object from their immediate environment, such as a table or a pig, they struggled, were listless and “made incomprehensible and most ridiculous mistakes in spelling, in language, and in ideas,” but if they were to write an account of an event based on their own experiences, for example, a trip to the city, they wrote more enthusiastically and more correctly. When retelling a Gospel story in writing, the children made more mistakes than when they had to retell one from the Old Testament, because they did not understand the New Testament texts as well.201 The only kind of “error prevention” handed down in the texts of the Yasnaya Polyana teachers thus consisted in the choice of appropriate topics for creative writing. This was in line with Tolstoy's principle that teachers were required to be flexible and teach in a way that was the most convenient for their pupils rather than for themselves. Tolstoy found it most natural and desirable for peasant children to be the masters of the school and, to a large extent, in control of the teaching and learning process.202 Only once, in Tolstoy’s letter to the former Yasnaya Polyana teacher Pёtr Morozov, written in 1874, when Morozov was teaching at the S.V. Ganeshin factory school in Moscow, can we find a different instruction: Very important. When writing, if elder pupils make mistakes concerning the jat in the root of the word, get them to write, whether at home or at school, the word in which the mistake was made about ten times in beautiful handwriting, like in the writing pattern.203

This instruction, a very traditionalist one in methodological terms, is actually uncharacteristic of the teaching practice that—if Tolstoy's published texts are to be believed—existed at the school in Yasnaya Polyana between 1859 and 1862, where there was no homework. This deviation from Tolstoyan earlier principles may be due to the fact that different rules applied in the school where Morozov was teaching at the time. However, one thing

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remains clear: Tolstoy does not seem to have given any instructions specifically concerning spelling for his own school, at least none have survived or can be inferred from what we see in students’ notebooks. Of great importance both for error prevention and for a stress- and fear-free handling of problems, including mistakes already made or apprehended, was also an atmosphere of sincerity in the school that was largely free of latent fears and unreflected aggression. The fundamental absence of any repressive spirit enabled a mutual openness and honesty among the learners and the teachers. Lev Tolstoy himself, for example, had no qualms about writing in the school diary, which could be read not only by all teachers but also by pupils, that he had “got confused” during the presentation in math class. In this diary, the aforementioned teacher Pёtr Vasil'jevič Morozov wrote not only his own observations, such as that certain students had written their compositions “satisfactorily, with not insignificant orthographic errors,” but also the following confessions: “Yes, I fear for myself, because I myself am not too bright,”204 or “This subject [sc. Russian history—K.L.] is as unfamiliar to me as to my listeners. . . . if I had to retell what I have read, to my shame I would be at a loss.”205 This sincerity on Morozov's part did not harm his reputation in the least. On the contrary, the children loved and appreciated him. An expression of this appreciation is the sentence “Pёtr Vasil'evič is a very good teacher” scribbled (almost correctly in terms of spelling) by a student in the margin of one of Tolstoy's manuscripts.206 The fact that the adults did not hide such feelings from themselves, from the children and from their colleagues, but made them a topic of discussion, created a healthy psychological climate in the school and went a long way to ensure that people enjoyed teaching and learning efficiently. Tolstoy's pedagogical concept, which slapped old traditions and modern theories in the face, was not always enthusiastically received, but was also repeatedly criticized, not only by peasants who distrusted the nonviolent teacher but also by renowned pedagogues.207 This criticism was one of the reasons why the model could not become mainstream either then, or later. The low acceptance is evidenced by the fact that Tolstoy's planned teacher seminary never opened due to a lack of potential stockholders and that his journal Jasnaja Poljana didn’t sell particularly well and had to be discontinued for financial reasons after about a year. Despite all this, the model created by Tolstoy was by and large quite viable and could be scaled. According to a report by the experienced educationist Vasilij Zolotov published in the Journal of the Ministry of Public Education, “his school had great significance,” because it was “practical” and “especially because it stood in such sharp contrast to pedagogical pedantry . . . . According to those who knew the school in Yasnaya Polyana well, the students' success was in many ways truly astonishing.”208 According to Vasilij Morozov, a peasant's son who went

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to school under Tolstoy and later published a memoir about it, pupils from Yasnaya Polyana competed with gimnazija students from Tula in all subjects taught there and proved not inferior to them.209 The fact that it worked in over twenty schools testifies to the good reproducibility of Tolstoy’s model. But in terms of institutional history, there is little to suggest its successful, broad and lasting reception, for all the schools Tolstoy founded and supervised were concentrated in a small district (ujezd) around his Yasnaya Polyana estate and depended for their functioning if not on the Count's charisma, then at least on his commitment. As soon as Tolstoy stopped being involved with his schools, their number as well as the number of pupils and teachers, declined rapidly and very soon all these schools were closed. Of course, there were more or less successful imitations elsewhere, but these were individual institutions that were the exception rather than the rule. On the whole, then, the solution practiced by Leo Tolstoy must be seen as an institutionally failed but substantively practicable alternative to the rigorous construction of the spelling error that was gaining ground at the same time.210 The later (and very limited) reception of Tolstoy's pedagogy in Russia and in the West was not brought about by a successful development of the schools he founded, but, without any organizational connection, by the idealistic appeal of his teaching, reinforced by his fame as a writer of genius and by the moral authority of his moral teaching, which he formulated later in life. Tolstoy's pedagogical ideas and practices from the 1850s–1870s only became known in German-speaking countries decades later: still in his lifetime, but after his former schools had long ceased to exist.211 Tolstoy seems to have been known at least to some of German teachers as a pedagogue even before the publication of the German translation of his pedagogical treatises. In any case, he was mentioned in 1905 by the Steglitz reformer educationist Professor Ludwig Gurlitt alongside other respectable figures: “Good educators, such as Christ, Pestalozzi, Froebel, Tolstoy, did not know naughty children.” However, this recognition did not necessarily mean that Gurlitt's and Tolstoy's pedagogical ideals and methods (similar to each other in many respects) were widely accepted by the German teaching community. At the very least, many German Gymnasium teachers seem to have been skeptical of them. The quotation, in fact, comes from the lecture on the cultivation and development of personality that Gurlitt gave at the 48th Assembly of German Philologists and Educators. According to the printed report, the lecture “enjoyed the undivided attention of the audience, even of the many who could not warm up to its rather peculiar content.”212 There is one more reason why reception seems somewhat problematic. Otto Buek's first and, for quite a long time, only translation of Tolstoy's selected educational writings, including some about the school of Yasnaya

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Polyana, appeared in 1907 as part of the Collected Works published by Raphael Löwenfeld in Jena from 1901 to 1911, of which several thousand copies were printed.213 As indicated earlier, this German edition, although reviewed and authorized by the author who knew the language, contained a number of mistranslations which, even though they could not in themselves constitute an unsurmountable obstacle to the reception of Tolstoy's ideas, testified to an enormous difference between his thoughts and practices and his German translators and readers’ worldview.214 This is possibly partly due to the fact that, although Tolstoy was at the time a very influential literary and moral figure worldwide, his early pedagogical achievements had no comparable influence. Tolstoy's legacy found a number of admirers and followers in the West-German leftist to anarchist alternative pedagogical milieu from the 1960s onwards, but no traces are discernible of their (at least explicit) reception in the teaching concepts and practices of Wilhelmine Germany. However, since in many ways Tolstoy and some German educators drew their thoughts from the same sources and in practice fought against the same school model, they often arrived at similar theoretical standpoints and practical solutions. For example, many teachers advocated giving children more freedom in general, especially in the choice of topics for the German composition. The second Arts Education Day in Weimar in 1903 dealt in depth with the topic of language and creative writing in German lessons. It was mainly about artistic forms of presentation, composition topics and genres, and especially about speaking. With regard to grammar and orthography, it was once again stated—quite in line with, if not directly related to, what Tolstoy also once claimed—that they restricted the children's spontaneity and emotions. An artistic, more creative, freer use of language was called for, without addressing the nature and significance of mistakes or how to deal with them in a more appropriate way.215 As another example of an alternative to the rigorous construction of the spelling error prevalent in education at the turn of the century, a model from the realm of the so-called German reform pedagogy (Reformpädagogik) shall now be described. The broad, heterogeneous and incoherent phenomenon that emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century as a reaction to the aspects of industrialization, urbanization, and modernization perceived as ominous and labeled as “life reform” or “life reform movement,” manifested itself in the field of education and schooling in the form of diverse and often mutually independent initiatives and practices designated by the umbrella term “school reform” or “reform pedagogy.”216 In the Wilhelmine German Empire and then in the Weimar Republic, reform pedagogical efforts produced several hundred educational institutions (urban, rural and forest schools, communes,

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children's houses, school farms, etc.) of quite different character (from radically conservative to radically innovative, from Christian to anthroposophical, from völkisch to communist, etc.), which formed the beginning of an alternative school movement that still exists today.217 Viewed from a very high level of abstraction, many, if not all, of these institutions had a number of features in common that seem relevant to our research question. According to Ehrenhard Skiera, the pedagogical concepts implemented in these institutions can be described as a “form of reflection and action” that “counteracted unreflected institutional constraints by developing a concept of learning that makes fear-free learning possible.”218 In very brief terms, reform educators advocated freedom instead of coercion; student participation or self-governance instead of obedience; interest, curiosity or the drive to learn instead of duty and fear as motivation; cooperation and camaraderie instead of hierarchy; creativity instead of paternalistic nannying; and individuality instead of uniformity, to name but a few. In contrast to Tolstoy's model, most German reform educators believed that in addition to teaching, the school definitely also (or even primarily) had to provide moral educational of children, and that as a teacher, one should not (only) serve to satisfy the conscious needs of the masses, but also save them from the disastrous effects of the economic, social, cultural and political upheavals of the time. Approaches to spelling norms and their violation in reform pedagogical schools of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries have not been well researched.219 Moreover, the few existing studies are largely based on the programmatic writings of reform educators and thus only to a limited extent reflect the actual teaching practice of the educational institutions in which the declared principles were to be implemented. After reviewing this primary literature on reform pedagogy and the secondary literature on the history of pedagogy, one gets the impression that not much attention was paid to the topic of orthography and spelling mistakes from a didactic and methodological viewpoint. About half a century ago, Günter Sorgenfrei compiled the opinions of German educators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries on the German composition. Some of them also addressed the issue of grading.220 Proponents of the compliant composition (i.e., one that followed the teacher's instructions in terms of topic and execution) insisted that students’ texts should be carefully and repeatedly corrected by the teacher (before and after transfer to the “clean-copy notebook”): the teacher would mark the mistakes and the student would correct them. In the final version, which was then possibly submitted for revision, there were to be absolutely no mistakes. In view of the large number of students in the class, this was a strenuous and tiring task for the teacher, which Jakob Stoffel even described as a “plague,” but nevertheless considered to be a teacher's duty.221

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In contrast, many reform pedagogues were convinced that the composition, if its writing was to be practiced at school at all, had to be completely free not only in terms of subject matter but also form. Heinrich Scharrelmann, for example, championed such a freeform German composition, which would allow the student's creative power to develop and his joy in communicating to be lived out without restraint.222 For this reason, he, or the teacher he instructed, accepted the papers without correcting the mistakes they contained: these were considered irrelevant. In general, many proponents of the freeform composition found corrections incompatible with childlike vitality223 and, moreover, unnecessary, since, according to Fritz Gansberg, “flawlessness” is a “ridiculous notion.”224 Since it was not the form but the content that mattered, the Hamburg school reformers Adolf Jensen and Wilhelm Lamszus believed that the “composition teacher of the future” would “no longer grade” children’s composition notebooks but “study” them.225 According to Otto Anthes, the grading is “almost more pernicious than the composition itself. For it is of almost no use, but leads the teacher . . . surely, if slowly, towards idiocy, or at least towards stupor.”226 An exemplary individual case will be used here to examine in more detail how mistakes were dealt with in everyday life of a reform school. Many of the reform educational institutions established before World War I did not survive the turmoil of the twentieth century. This was not always due to the authorities in the German Empire, the Weimar Republic, the Third Reich, or the SBZ/DDR being dissatisfied with their activities. Private schools often failed because of financial difficulties. However, one of the frequent “causes of death” of reform schools, one rooted in their very nature, was the fact that a reform school was closely linked to the personality of its respective founder, who designed the concept behind it and inspired teachers, pupils, parents, and sponsors. Once the founding father died or relinquished his leadership, the school could not function properly on its own, because “new forms of education were driven by charismatic rule,” and charisma is not transferable.227 Here, however, we will discuss a school that has survived to this day, that is, for over a hundred years. It is the so-called Private Tutoring School (Hauslehrerschule), founded and run by Berthold Otto (1859–1933) in Berlin-Lichterfelde. Its archives and the papers of its founder have been preserved,228 so the study can rely on a good empirical source base. Although there seems to be no continuity or even indirect connection between the pedagogical principles and practices of Berthold Otto and those of Leo Tolstoy as described earlier, both of them (and many others) arrived at partially similar solutions in their confrontation with the theories based on Herbart or Rousseau and the practice of contemporary schools based on authority, order, obedience and fear.

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Significant parallels and differences can also be found between the life trajectories of the two. Both reformers had experience with various educational institutions up to university level (Tolstoy in Kazan', Otto in Kiel and Berlin), whereby Tolstoy dropped out of his studies after attaining a partial degree in Oriental studies and law, whereas Otto studied education, psychology and linguistics, among other things, and after graduation intended to become a university lecturer. Both belonged to the aristocratic upper class and felt a great love for “the people,” which inspired both of them and, in both cases, had negative consequences for their pedagogical careers: Tolstoy's educational efforts brought on suspicion and his schools were ruined by the reputation-damaging house search, while Otto's doctoral thesis on liberalism was rejected because the committee thought that a scientific study dealing with the opinion of the “common folk” would not be defensible. Therefore, he was barred from the intended career as a lecturer. From 1883 on, Otto worked as a private instructor and tutor, later as an editor at the Brockhaus publishing house in Leipzig, and was also active as a writer, although by far not as important and famous as Tolstoy. Otto wrote his books for the common people, for example about Bismarck's life, especially in the “written vernacular,” which should be understandable to every uneducated person.229 Berthold Otto's pedagogical experiences gained in the 1880s were processed into a programmatic work titled Die Zukunftsschule: Lehrgang, Einrichtungen und Begründung (The Future School: Curriculum, Institutions and Rationale),230 also known as the Curriculum of the Future School, first presented ten years later (1897) in a public lecture, then published in 1898 and 1899 in the shortlived journal Die deutsche Schulreform (The German School Reform), which he edited at the time. In 1901 it came out as a book and went through several editions before and after World War I. From 1901, Otto published the periodical Der Hauslehrer. Wochenschrift für den geistigen Verkehr mit Kindern (The Private Tutor: A Weekly for the Intellectual Exchange with Children), in which he propagated both his own convictions and practical solutions, such as texts for parents in the “tutor language” based on the spoken vernacular as well as texts for children in the childlike “age-appropriate language,” which Otto was also the first to make “socially acceptable” both in conventional orthography and among like-minded educators. The basic conviction, on which his concept of homeschooling and education in general was based, was that “in every child there is the drive for the intellectual growth available to it .  .  . ; the task of the teacher therefore is not to impose knowledge or skill on the child, but to give him or her all the encouragement and help they desire in acquiring the knowledge and skills they want.”231 In this he agreed with Leo Tolstoy, among others. Based on the reflections and experiences of the first ten years of his practical career, Otto thought about how the entire education system in Germany

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could be reformed and presented a comprehensive school reform draft, which, however, would only become publicly available years later. Therefore, it seems to make sense to deal here with the points of this draft that are relevant to our research question, in order to compare them with the teaching practice of the Private Tutoring School. Although programmatic texts before Berthold Otto occasionally include specific suggestions regarding spelling instruction, they more often talk about teaching German, or language instruction, or teaching in general, which likely means that these suggestions apply to all fields and subjects. For example, one of Otto's basic principles, to be just as polite to the children and to explain everything to them just as patiently and comprehensibly, as one would “in good company” answer the question of someone unfamiliar with the subject or react to an ignorant response, can certainly also be applied “to every wrong answer the child gives and to every foolish question he asks” in the classroom. The teacher must first ask himself: “How would you behave if you were confronted with this answer, this question, in the drawing room?”232 However, it does not seem to be just a matter of decency and good manners when Otto comments on certain mistakes as something interesting and in some ways even comforting. In 1903, he printed in Der Hauslehrer a contribution by a subscriber who taught German at a girls' gimnazija in Kiev. The excerpts she sent in from the schoolwork of 12-year-old Russian girls contained multiple errors, some of which were due to the influence of Russian and would, therefore, in Otto's opinion, be “very welcome to many readers and also to many students,” because they gave an “insight” into “the kind of difficulties” involved in learning German, which was, after all, the proverbial “difficult language.” Furthermore, Otto said that “the scientific psychological approach to teaching a second language could benefit greatly from the analysis of such transcripts.”233 Berthold Otto's Curriculum of the Future School provided for language instruction in oral form, that is, as elocution, but also grammar lessons (incl. phonetics, word theory and syntax) and literature classes dealing with popular texts. Otto declared the sight-reading method inadequate for elementary reading and writing instruction by resorting to a metaphor that was otherwise untypical of him, but very indicative of the Zeitgeist in his country: I do not want to disparage sight-reading instruction at all. It represented a great advancement at its time, like the transition from the percussion igniter to the firing pin. But for all the praise of this progress, no infantry today would be armed with the victorious rifle from 1866; likewise, in the school of the future, the sight-reading method will no longer be used.234

Spelling, on the other hand, is only mentioned for the first time on page 116, and in a very significant way. Otto tells of the attempt made by Pastor

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Spieser235 in Waldhambach in Alsace in 1897 to teach children through “phonetic observation” and the use of a phonetic transcription236 developed by Spieser, so that they first learned to write what they actually heard and only later switched over to writing orthographically. “Of course, Spieser . . . completely casts aside all the odds and ends of traditional orthography for the beginning lessons,” Otto notes. And “the 'spelling' is then taught later as a conventional misspelling by copying; the child receives the instruction: 'You must see what mistakes are made in the printed word, and you must make all of them, but no others.’”237 So spellings that comply with the official orthography, but not with the phonetic form of the words, are described here as spelling mistakes—obviously in a polemically pointed manner. This corresponds to the superiority, in Berthold Otto's eyes, of speaking and the oral language over reading and the written language. The second and last passage in the Curriculum of the Future School, where Berthold Otto discusses orthography, makes it clear how he viewed contemporary German orthography in general. He divided it into “that which is arbitrary, and so far that is the most troublesome,” and that which “is somewhat reasonable.”238 The latter would not cause any difficulties for the children trained according to his curriculum; the former, on the other hand, he intended to tackle in a way that at first glance seemed paradoxical: what is decisively important here is the students’ reading level, which in turn is proportional to their ability to speak, which can be increased by “just not systematically disgusting the children with books, as is done in conventional school lessons, by abusing them every day as instruments of torture.”239 The pupils of the future school should, therefore, “rather be kept away from books,” then they would “write relatively correctly,” because they “have many strong word images,” and one would not have to worry about spelling “in the slightest.” Incidentally, Otto optimistically considered it “highly improbable” that “the appreciation of book- and letter fetishism should continue for any length of time.” Thus, orthographic flawlessness—only relative, mind you—was, in theory, a learning goal of the school of the future that Otto acknowledged with a certain reluctance, and which he saw as readily attainable. Since the specific construct of a spelling mistake, both in its nature and in its causes and consequences, is more appropriately understood in a larger context, let us now discuss how Berthold Otto imagined the psychological climate of the school, in which people made mistakes among other things and reacted to them. Thanks to his studies in psychology, Otto was always aware that each student's achievements and blunders often have their roots not in their nature but in their momentary state. Since not only is every child different in general and learns differently, but also temporary psychological and physiological phenomena such as fatigue have great significance for the learning process, Otto

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demanded that “in addition to teachers who have pursued specific subject studies,” teachers “for whom pedagogy is the main subject” (today they are known as tutors) should also work in the school, and that “pedagogy” as he envisioned it should primarily consist of theoretical and applied psychology, the basic subjects of which are anatomy, physiology and psychiatry.240 For only the knowledge of the mental processes would allow a teacher to optimally shape the “intellectual exchange” with the children. But not only that: through self-observation, which he presented as the most important method of psychology in accordance with the prevailing opinion of the time, Otto came to realize that “in every teaching we have the tendency, if somehow unexpected difficulties arise, to become angry with the student” and, despite our enthusiasm for pedagogical theories of Plato, Comenius or Rousseau, to justify this with the maxim “Whoever is stupid must be flogged”—for his own good, of course.241 But even if in the future, through studying psychology, prospective educators are made aware of this “natural urge to scold,” the conditions do not fundamentally change. The “relapses into bullying” could only be eliminated to a large extent if the “occasional causes” that always produce them were changed, above all “the obligation imposed on the teacher to 'instruct' the children in something specific at a certain time.” For this reason, there should be no curriculum in the school of the future that binds attainment of set learning goals by all pupils in the class to set deadlines, the non-compliance with which brings a lot of trouble to both the children and the teachers. Berthold Otto shared the insight, that school children can only be free of the constraints and horrors of school if the teachers are too, with numerous German and Russian educators of the time. In addition to appropriate training (which went beyond the reality of teacher training institutions of the time), Berthold Otto also called for behavioral patterns that ran counter to the rigorous style of Prussian elementary schools and especially Gymnasiums. He did not advocate complacency toward the peculiarities and mistakes of others, but rather called for “mutual tolerance,” which he also generally described as one of the most important things that children could learn at school. He was pleased to note that his pupils in the Private Tutoring School were much more tolerant of others than he and his classmates had been. He recognized very well that bad marks, scolding, beatings and other punishments imposed by teachers for lack of performance produce more negative than positive effects in children, and insisted that “the use of stimulation, especially of punishments, .  .  . should be avoided even more carefully in mental than in physical exercise. All mental activity which can only be brought on by such unnatural stimulants must be renounced if the mind is to be kept healthy.”242 Not only explicit punishments, but also seemingly harmless reactions such as laughter and ridicule can do great damage

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to the child's psyche.243 According to Otto, the decisive factor for a nontraumatizing way of dealing with mistakes was, therefore, that teachers set a good example and avoided such bad jokes, because if “the teacher cannot stop joking and mocking during the lesson, yes, of course some of the pupils like to join in. The better the joke, the more they like it. For one can make very good jokes in the service of very bad things.”244 However, even in a healthy psychological climate that would contribute to a constructive attitude of the students toward their mistakes, the latter would firstly not be completely avoidable and secondly, regardless of the eventual reform, would hardly have become obsolete as a grading criterion in the foreseeable future. This is why Berthold Otto in his reform draft started from a purely pragmatic concept of the error as a starting point: “What a terrible thing it is when a magnificently laid out, well-executed composition, into which the Gymnasium student has put a piece of his soul, is censored as ‘unsatisfactory’ or ‘hardly satisfactory’ because there are a few stupid violations of orthography in it!”245 He sought to “protect” the students from having a mistake (“any slip-up”) counted against them. To this end, Otto proposed to introduce sub-examinations, among other things “for official orthography,246 also divided into categories: spelling, syntax, foreign words,”247 for which one could register voluntarily and independently of the class level if one felt well prepared and which, on the one hand, did not represent a necessary precondition for a promotion, so that “in the lower third grade, for example, those who have already taken the exam in official spelling and those who are still saving it for the future can sit peacefully next to each other.”248 On the other hand, the results of such partial examinations, if positive, should then remain valid until matriculation. The matriculation examination should then only be taken in those subjects, for which no partial examination certificates are available, and should be waived if the examinee had at least one “good” and two “satisfactory” grades in the three main subjects. The scores of partial examinations taken at one school would then also have to be accepted at all other schools, so that when transferring from a Gymnasium or an upper Gymnasium to another institution, “for example, with the certificate in spelling, . . . the person concerned . . . should never be excluded from any transfer because of allegedly inadequate performance in this subject.”249 Finally, a passage should be quoted in which Berthold Otto's idea of the importance of spelling mistakes is summed up in a highly emotional way: Thanks to the early passing of the partial examination, for instance in the upper third grade, it is likely that someone who had shown himself to be sufficiently prepared to face all the horrors of this official spelling, would for the rest of his time at school be just as contemptuous of all the dangers that can arise from an inadvertently incorrectly

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placed ß or any other crime against orthography . . ., as the writer is allowed to do, who is confident that the typesetter and the proofreader will fix everything that his different way of thinking about orthography does not allow him to spell right at the moment, then, I believe, a great deal of worry, anguish and bitterness would be removed from the minds of Gymnasium students.250

And another “precaution” should be built in: at the matriculation examination, Otto demanded, instead of a composition on topics from literature or history, everyone would have to write a detailed description of their curriculum vitae—a topic with which they are most familiar. The work was to be “objectively assessed” by two instructors and the language to be evaluated “not for its correctness . . . , but for its authenticity with regard to the examinee's spiritual life,” even in the absence of a partial examination certificate in official writing.251 Berthold Otto's pedagogy is normally described on the basis of his manifestos. Here, an attempt will now be made to analyze also evidence of the teaching practice at his school from this study's specific perspective and to compare findings from both types of primary sources. To what extent did Berthold Otto's pedagogical practice correspond to the radically alternative agenda he outlined in his writings? Otto's book Lehrgang der Zukunftsschule (Curriculum of the Future School) and his journal Der Hauslehrer met with such a broad and positive response that he was able to obtain an annual grant of 3,000 Marks from the Prussian Ministry of Religious, Educational and Medical Affairs “to support his literary work”252 and a permission to establish a private “teaching circle” in Berlin in order “to continue to pursue” “the new paths” taken in his writings “in the narrower circle of home-based and private instruction.”253 According to Otto's own admission, he needed the school as a source of stimulation, information and ideas for his journal and originally intended to teach a maximum of 10 children in it, as he had for several years already accepted a number of other people's children alongside his own “for shared instruction.”254 At Easter 1906, Berthold Otto founded a teaching circle, which he called “a home school,” to emphasize one of its most important characteristics, namely the family-like atmosphere. In fact, the lessons initially took place in the Otto family's apartment, where children sat around a large table. Years later the establishment moved to a building in Holbeinstraße, where part of the Berthold Otto School is still to be found. An official permission was later obtained, not without difficulties. The archived documents of the Private Tutoring School show that the practice of the school partially deviated from what can be read, for example, in Lehrgang der Zukunftsschule or in the Reformation der Schule. The conditions in this school, however, differed fundamentally from those in public

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Prussian schools. In the Private Tutoring School, for example, there was no division into classes of the usual kind with promotions and staying behind, no examinations that granted certain privileges; “homework” was left up to the students and in individual courses submitted by appointment. There were no penalties for laziness and lack of attention. Learning was thus neither enforced nor bought, but based on inner motivation. The lessons in reading and writing did not begin in the first year of school, but only when the respective child was ready, and teachers would “deviate from this principle” “only at the pupil’s express wish.”255 There were usually between 10 and 15 students in a class.256 The children had a large say in the external organization of the school,257 as well as in the topics to be dealt with and the course of the lessons. Of central importance to Berthold Otto's school model was the concept of Gesamtunterricht he designed and introduced, in which complete freedom of questioning and speech prevailed, the traditional boundaries between subjects and the conventional step-by-step structure of the subject matter were abolished, and any topics were discussed on the basis of questions posed by students of all classes assembled in a big room.258 Another difference, which also played a major role in the attitude toward all kinds of mistakes, was that the distance and the power imbalance between the teachers and the students were radically reduced, whereas emotional closeness and dialogue were cultivated and encouraged. Otto often joked without, however, making fun of his pupils, and told not only didactic stories from his store of academic knowledge, but also from his own childhood and the life of his family as well as from what his correspondents had told him in letters. Instead of the formal authority and fear-inducing repressive behavior that came with status, he thus gained the students' attention and respect by not only respecting them and satisfying their curiosity, but also showing them his human side. In addition to Gesamtunterricht, which has received the bulk of attention in the pedagogical tradition and research, there were also “all the specialist courses that the students wished for,”259 for example, algebra, Latin, shorthand and—contrary to the thesis260 advocated in research, which probably reflects Otto's manifestos more than his teaching practice—German was also taught (including German grammar, dictation, composition writing).261 Participation in classes was not obligatory, children did not have to pay attention and were allowed to go outside during the lesson if they found it boring, but unlike in Leo Tolstoy's school model, those who did not want to attend one or the other lesson had to let themselves be excused in advance, possibly by stating the reasons.262 In other respects, too, conditions in Berthold Otto’s school were considered by many contemporaries to be an excess of freedom: the children were not required to maintain the “proper” posture that was compulsory in

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public schools and customary in middle-class families, for example, at the table during meals. They did not sit rigidly at school desks but were allowed to move around and sit on chairs however they wished. Otto's justification for this was quite different from Tolstoy's: for him, freedom was the only criterion of any pedagogy, whereas Tolstoy pointed out that “a strong mental effort always entails physical movements,” the suppression of which in favor of “correct behavior” diverted part of the attention from the actual subject of the lesson.263 Be that as it may, the body-anchored maxim free = wrong = bad = punishable was not included in the hidden curriculum of either school. In each lesson, the teachers were guided by the students' interests,264 but not to the extent that, as in Yasnaya Polyana, for example, instead of calculating, drawing could suddenly become the subject of the lesson. Some excerpts from the classroom minutes show quite clearly how spelling and violations thereof were dealt with in the Private Tutoring School: May 2, 1906. Writing. From 11 to 12 [a.m.] was the first hour we had scheduled for writing. This time we handled it in such a way that someone always went up to the board and then six words were dictated to him by the others in turn. If he had written all six correctly, he was “out,” but if he made a mistake, he was “out of the mix” and was replaced by the next person. Only Felix, who went first, Kurt and Werner got “out.” Strangely enough, Marie failed at the phrase Böhmisches Brauhaus, which she wanted to write without an h and with hyphens. Helmut was the only one who also dared to spell foreign words and failed at a hypotenuse, which he wrote with th. I finished all four lessons very punctually this time, and this had the effect that each time the end of the class was met with loud cries of regret.265 May 26, 1906 12–1 [p.m.] Writing. Richard, Kurt and Wolfgang had let themselves be excused. I had written the words with a double a and a double e on the blackboard, and we spent a large part of the class first memorizing those with a double a. . . . Saying the words with a double a against the clock266 produced the following results: Hellmuth: 20''10'', Irmgard: 18''12 ½'', Werner: 16''10'', Mary: 9''5 ½'', Hans: 11''8'', Siegfrid: 9''10'', Alfred: 15''8'', Sidney: 18''11'', Mr Otto: 4 ½'', Karl: 15''6 ½'', Felix:—, Lice: 12''11 ½'.’ Then, at general request, the writing game was played in such a way that each player could remain at the blackboard until they wrote a word incorrectly and were then replaced by the person who had dictated that word. . . .267 [On August 25, 1906] I dictated a short coherent piece,268 which was then corrected by Miss Fintelmann. Meanwhile, we played the writing game on the blackboard .  .  . At last, Kurt and Helmut started a duel. Each would dictate words to the other and each had half a board at his disposal. But when New York and Kompagniechef had just been written, Miss Fintelmann finished correcting.

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The only serious mistakes that had occurred were Dicktat with a ck and the word Fehler written in lowercase. The rest were insignificant trifles in matters that have been arranged differently several times during the various spelling reforms.269

The examination of the archived documents of the Private Tutoring School shows that spelling lessons did take place there and infringements against orthography were not ignored when it came to learning to write correctly, but the teacher regarded some of them as insignificant. Spelling mistakes in dictations were corrected (using the same-color pencils instead of red ink, so that corrected mistakes only looked corrected and not conspicuously marked) and taken as an opportunity to discuss spelling rules. In compositions by younger students, mistakes were corrected by teachers with black ink without comment, but not always thoroughly.270 In the senior students’ compositions, no corrections were made at all, in line with the opinions of many other reform pedagogues.271 This inconsistency was apparently seen by Otto as part of the freedom that prevailed in the school and therefore not an obstacle to practicing orthography. It was not about demonstrating to the child all his blunders at every opportunity. Rather, in this school, the teachers were assured that the children, when they looked through the correction, were also able to recognize for themselves the mistakes that were similar to those that had been corrected. This was therefore a case of the “discipline despite apparent indiscipline and . . . attentiveness despite apparent inattentiveness,” which the auditor of the Prussian Ministry of Education was pleased to see during his visit to the Private Tutoring School.272 No grades were given in Berthold Otto’s school,273 and even internally, in correspondence between teachers, no conclusions drawn from mistakes about the diligence or laziness, talent or (in)attention of the children. The students were not motivated by fear, shame, or a sense of duty, but rather by ambition, playfulness and a sense of achievement, because error correction was designed as a game of sport274 developed in collaboration with the children, which they enjoyed until it became tiresome and was replaced with another. Participation in such games and dictations was voluntary, which kept the stress level low compared to conventional schools, where it was difficult to escape the scrutiny that was judgmental and potentially life-changing in its consequences. The fact that teachers occasionally took part in contests alongside the students was another sign of a companionable, largely de-hierarchized relationship between them and the pupils, but also offered a chance for one of the children to surpass their teacher in fair competition, that is, the opposite of the feeling typical (indeed often deliberately perpetuated) of many children in conventional schools that they would never be good enough. There are no reports of honors for the winners, rankings, or

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other implications of the competitions in the records of the Private Tutoring School. Nor is it clear from them whether the results of the writing games and the dictation corrections made by students to each other had a lasting effect on the children's position in the classroom. However, the teaching methods used by Otto seem to have had a positive effect on their progress in learning. In general, the students’ parents noted with satisfaction and gratitude a successful acquisition by their children of above-average knowledge and skills as well as an increased motivation to learn: The parents who participated have made the observation that . . . their children have been given not only a solid knowledge of school subjects, but a solid general education, such as no public school, with its excess of students, can impart. While it is an undeniable fact that by far the greater part of the pupils of public educational establishments regard school only as a necessary evil and go there only with reluctance, all of Mr. Otto's students are passionately attached to their teacher and also take part, at their own request, in such subjects that do not belong to the compulsory minimum. . . . So also in intellectual terms . . . Otto's school not only does not lag behind higher level public schools, but even surpasses them.275

Finally, it should be noted that in the teaching records of the Private Tutoring School the students were only referred to by first names, like in a family, while the teachers were named by their surnames with the addition of Mister and Miss. On the other hand, the teachers were not very strict about the spelling of their pupils’ names and occasionally called them Helmut, Marie, and Siegfrid, while other times Hellmut, Mary, and Siegfried. Otherwise, however, the orthographic freedom offered to students in composition classes and Otto's sharp criticism of the current German orthography and of its general overestimation in his publications were definitely neither a general rejection of orthographic correctness nor a consequence of his own orthographic weakness, for, apart from some typing errors, the minutes of the lessons, letters, journal articles and diary entries found in Berthold Otto's papers and in the archives of his school are largely written in accordance with the applicable orthographic norms. One can conclude that Berthold Otto's and his school's construct of spelling errors provided for different variants with regard to the error's acceptability and significance, depending on the context and genre of the text. In a nutshell, the alternative practical way of dealing with mistakes in Berthold Otto's Private Tutoring School can now be described as pragmatic, differentiated, non-rigorous and non-repressive. By applying both conventional and unconventional methods, but above all by consistently implementing the fundamental principles of the Private Tutoring School also to spelling instruction, it was possible to achieve a better result than with the usual teaching

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methods of the time. In this respect, the alternative practiced by Otto was quite successful in terms of content and function. In terms of impact and institutional history, Otto's initiative had a much happier fate than Leo Tolstoy's. Not only did the Private Tutoring School survive for a long time, but it also immediately became famous and enjoyed recognition and high esteem on the part of parents and professional colleagues, and after some time also the government. Berthold Otto was invited by the Ministry of Religious, Educational and Medical Affairs to participate in conferences and give lectures to attendees of the courses for prospective seminary instructors. Although the authorities were repeatedly dissatisfied with Otto's non-compliance with numerous regulations and requirements, they appreciated Otto's “practiced .  .  . way of making children understand intricate processes and problems through simple, childlike exposition and comprehensible linguistic presentation through lectures and practical exercises.”276 Berthold Otto was well aware that his principles and experiences were not easily transferable to other, let alone all, educational institutions: “My school rests primarily on my personality and then on the characters of the pupils I have happened to assemble. So, in my opinion, no one who looks at my school . . . can expect that in a few decades everything we do here will have to be done in every village school,” he wrote.277 But almost daily, numerous observers278 came to see the Private Tutoring School, some of whom were asked to do so by their teachers training school instructors and superiors; to what extent they later imitated in their own work what they had seen, heard and understood there must, however, be left open here. Following the example of the Private Tutoring School, delayed introduction of reading and writing instruction was introduced in many public schools in Germany even before World War I.279 In many respects, the wealth of experience of Berthold Otto's school was also adopted decades later in the development of alternative schools in West Germany.280 Otto's school model can be regarded as institutionally reproducible, since a school was founded in Magdeburg in the Weimar period based on the model of the Berlin Private Tutoring School, which had functioned for years. In Russia, as far as I can see, Berthold Otto’s Private Tutoring School was just once discussed at length in the specialist press before World War I, namely in the journal Svobodnoe vospitanie (Free Upbringing),281 which, according to Ulrich Klemm, was founded and published as the “journalistic mouthpiece of Russian reform pedagogy following Tolstoy” by his comrade-in-arms Ivan Gorbunov-Posadov.282 Otherwise, the Private Tutoring School was only ever mentioned in Russian publications, and that, too, mostly in overviews translated from German.283 However, at least the German-speaking educators in

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the Russian Empire were well aware of Der Hauslehrer and Berthold Otto’s School as “the most liberal school in the world,” and its pedagogical principles also “in a moderated form” found their way into a real’noe učilišče in St. Petersburg. In the fall of 1912, Otto made a trip to Russia284 and gave a lecture in St. Petersburg about the school of the future, which, according to a report in the German-language St. Petersburger Zeitung, was well attended and provoked a lively discussion.285 The debates showed that although the audience, largely made up of educators, agreed with the basic principle of the speaker, they doubted the possibility of the practical execution of his program, which the speaker was apparently unable to resolve completely with his arguments based on practical experience. For the year 1914, Otto promised his cooperation to the Petersburg educational monthly Russkaja škola, according to its advertisement, but this—probably due to the war—did not seem to have come about.286 Otto's pedagogy received somewhat more attention n the early Soviet Union, where it was increasingly labelled as “bourgeois.”287 In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, his name reappeared in several works on the history of Russian pedagogy, but without any practical relevance.288 As an interim conclusion, it can be stated that a non-repressive approach to orthographic errors as part of a child-friendly school culture was possible and successfully practiced in Russia as well as in Germany, but could not advance to the mainstream without state support. The comparison between two alternative school models presented here, which developed independently of each other and yet were so similar, also helps to overcome a lopsided interpretation of the Russian model which sees it primarily as a patriotic one steering clear from the “alien” ideas imported from the West, an interpretation certainly facilitated by Tolstoy's defiance against what he saw as pedantically stupid German concept of popular education. Like many others in Russia, Tolstoy interpreted obedience, discipline, love of order, and thoroughness, which in the Prussian sphere of cultural influence were widely considered to be principal goals of socialization, as a lack of freedom,formalism, and pedantry. He believed them to be “the characteristics of Germanness,” the bearers of which in Russia were generally seen as “humorless, pedantic, and schoolmasterly.”289 Thus Tolstoy's criticism of the dominant school model was actually tinged with xenophobic stereotypes. But its objective core and thus the core of the alternative school concept become visible and recognizable in their actual value when we see how Berthold Otto, a thoroughly patriotic representative of the German camp of Reformpädagogik, came to a similar critique of the content of this model and a similar alternative solution.**

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NOTES 1. These schools were called “German” to distinguish them from the ecclesiastical “Latin” schools, where Latin was taught to the extent that it enabled children to sing church anthems correctly. 2. At the time when enlightened absolutist regimes aimed for a mass, programbased spiritual and moral education for their subjects, only the local church possessed the necessary number of literate cadres who were practiced in instruction due to the long parochial school tradition. However, the tension-filled history of relationships between the state, the church, and the school in the nineteenth century cannot be dealt with in detail in this study. 3. The word seminary is used in this book for specialized teacher training institutions both in Germany (Lehrerseminar) and in Russia (Učitel’skaja seminarija). 4. Otto Büsch, ed., “Das 19. Jahrhundert und Große Themen der Geschichte Preußens,ˮ in Handbuch der preußischen Geschichte, ed. Wolfgang Neugebauer and Frank Kleinehagenbrock (Berlin; New York: de Gruyter, 1992), 758–765. 5. O. Hesse, “Die Schülerzahl in den preußischen höheren Lehranstalten für die männliche Jugend,ˮ Deutsches Philologen-Blatt. Korrespondenz-Blatt für den akademisch gebildeten Lehrerstand 21, no. 1 (January 2, 1913): 7. 6. The people behind this invention and its implementation could probably be precisely identified. However, this must be reserved for further study. 7. The order of the marking criteria in an instruction received by teachers at a primary school in Düsseldorf from their headmaster is significant, “Evaluation of the essays should not be based on a single parameter; rather, necessary information should be given on errors, writing and expression.” StA Düsseldorf, Altes Archiv, Akten, 0–1–8 Akten der Schulverwaltung ab 1826 (alt: Bestand VIII), 813, Volksschule an der Citadellstraße, Düsseldorf, Protokollbuch [der Lehrerkonferenzen] 1911–1931, 24. Konferenz am 8.2.1913. 8. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso Ed., 1983), 98; Ruth Meyer, “Das Berechtigungswesen in seiner Bedeutung für Schule und Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert,ˮ Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft; Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics 124, no. 4 (October 1968): 763–776. The lists of professions and study opportunities, filling several pages, for which one was entitled under the Prussian system by obtaining a certain type of degree or passing an examination, see in Ludwig Adolf Wiese, Das höhere Schulwesen in Preußen: historisch-statistische Darstellung (Berlin: Wiegandt und Grieben, 1864), 618–621; Otto Kübler, ed., Geh.R. Dr. L. Wiese‘s Sammlung der Verordnungen und Gesetze für die höheren Schulen in Preußen. Dritte Ausgabe, bearbeitet und bis Anfang 1886 fortgeführt (Berlin: Wiegandt und Grieben, 1886), 450–475; Wilhelm Lexis, ed., Die Reform des höheren Schulwesens in Preußen (Halle a.d.S.: Verlag der Buchhandlung des Waisenhauses, 1902). 9. “Prüfungsordnung zum einjährig-freiwilligen Militärdienst,ˮ ADLZ 28, no. 4 (1876): 27–28.

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10. O. Kästner, “Orthographie und Grammatik,ˮ Der Säemann: Monatsschrift für pädagogische Reform 1 (1905): 247. 11. StadtA Göttingen, Bestand Max-Planck-Gymnasium, Bestell-Nr. MPG no. 62. Referate zu Unterrichtsfragen. “Die schriftlichen Prüfungsarbeiten und ihre Beurtilung nach Maßgabe der neuen Lehrpläne.” Pannenborg 12.10.1902, 19. 12. For an overview of articles on German, English and French education in this periodical, see Joachim Krumbholz, Die Elementarbildung in Rußland bis zum Jahre 1864: ein Beitrag zur Entstehung des Volksschulstatus vom 14. Juli 1864 (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1982), 65–121. 13. Krumbholz, Die Elementarbildung in Rußland, 186. 14. The best-known accounts are those by Konstantin Ušinskij, probably the most famous Russian pedagogue. He was sent abroad for five years to undergo medical treatment and to study the education system of West European countries. During this time, he visited Switzerland, Germany, France, Belgium, and Italy, where he saw women's schools, kindergartens, orphanages, and schools, especially those in Germany and Switzerland because they were considered the most progressive. Ušinskij published his notes, observations and letters from this time in a long essay with the somewhat misleading title, A Pedagogical Journey through Switzerland: Konstantin Ušinskij, “Pedagogičeskaja poezdka po Švejcarii,ˮ in Konstantin Ušinskij, Sobranie sočinenij, vol. 3: Pedagogičeskie stat’i 1862–1870 gg (Moskva; Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Pedagogičeskich Nauk, 1948), 87–252. 15. See Krumbholz, Die Elementarbildung in Rußland, 186–213, for details. 16. Quoted in Ekaterina Kostyleva, “Polikul’turnye aspekty organizacii, struktury i soderžanija pedagogičeskogo obrazovanija v Rossijskoj imperii XIX—načala XX st.,ˮ Učenye zapiski Tavričeskogo nacional’nogo universiteta imeni V.I. Vernadskogo. Serija “Problemy pedagogiki srednej i vysšej školy,” 27/66, no. 4 (2014): 72. 17. From Sergej Loškarev’s letter to Leo Tolstoy of 25 January 1863, quoted in Nikolaj Gusev, L.N. Tolstoj. Materialy k biografii s 1855 po 1869 god. Glava desjataja. Pedagogičeskaja sistema Tolstogo. Žurnal “Jasnaja Poljana,” http:// tolstoy​-lit​.ru​/tolstoy​/bio​/gusev​-materialy​-1855–1869/pedagogicheskaya​-sistema​-tolstogo​.​htm. 18. See Trude Maurer, Hochschullehrer im Zarenreich. Ein Beitrag zur russischen Sozial- und Bildungsgeschichte (Köln; Weimar; Wien: Böhlau, 1998) for details. 19. Petr Kapterev, Istorija russkoj pedagogiki (Sankt-Peterburg: Izdatel’stvo O. Bogdanovoj, 1909), quoted after the reprint edition Sankt-Peterburg: Aleteja, 252–254. 20. Nikolaj Vessel’, Naša srednjaja obščeobrazovatel’naja škola (Sankt-Peterburg: Ottisk iz Russkogo Vestnika, 1903), 21. 21. This is the judgment of the Petersburg pedagogue Vladimir Stojunin, quoted in Sergej Poljakov, “Iz prošlogo russkoj srednej školy [1905],ˮ in Sergej Poljakov: K voprosu o reforme srednej školy. Sbornik statej S.N. Poljakova (Tula: Tipografija E.I. Družininoj, 1916), 38.

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22. Cit. after Claudia Schadt-Krämer, Die pädagogische Bildung der Volksschullehrer im 19. Jahrhundert dargestellt am Beispiel der rheinischen Lehrerseminare von 1819 bis 1926 (Hamburg: Hamburger Buchwerkstatt, 1990), 154–155. 23. It was not until the beginning of the 1860s that academic teaching of pedagogy was resumed, initially only in Leipzig and only for future Gymnasium teachers. Cf. “Akademische pädagogische Seminare,ˮ Die Gartenlaube, no. 40 (1861): 639. 24. Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, vol. 3: Von der “Deutschen Doppelrevolution” bis zum Beginn des Ersten Weltkrieges: 1849–1914 (München: Beck, 1995), 401–404. 25. Cit. after Schadt-Krämer, Die pädagogische Bildung, 201. 26. Schadt-Krämer, Die pädagogische Bildung, 222–223. 27. LA NRW AW StaatsA Münster Regierung Arnsberg, Schulabteilung, Generalia, no. 31722. No foliation. 28. Cit. after Karl Steinhoff, “Das Seminar in Oldenburg,ˮ in Geschichte der Oldenburgischen Lehrerbildung, ed. Karl Steinhoff and Wolfgang Schulenberg, vol. 1: Karl Steinhoff and Wilhelm Purnhagen, Die evangelischen Seminare (Oldenburg: Holzberg, 1979), 84–85. 29. Steinhoff, “Das Seminar in Oldenburg,” 81–82. 30. Ekaterina Isakova, “Obrazovatel’nyj uroven’ prepodavatelej mužskiсh gimnazij Zapadno-Sibirskogo učebnogo okruga v konce XIX—načale XX v.,ˮ in Voprosy istorii, meždunarodnyсh otnošenij i dokumentovedenija. Issue 7. Sbornik materialov Rossijskoj molodežnoj naučnoj konferencii (Tomsk: Izdatel’stvo Tomskogo universiteta, 2011), 121–122. 31. Olga Perova, “Formirovanie normativno-dokumental’noj bazy dejatel’nosti pravitel’stvennych učitel’skich seminarij v Rossii v 60–80 godach XIX veka,ˮ Vestnik TGPU 99, vol. 9 (2010): 149. 32. Elementary school teachers were also trained in small numbers at the Pedagogical Institute (from 1820 to 1822 and from 1838 to 1848) as well as in teacher seminaries in Dorpat and Warsaw, and in the specially established classes at the gimnazija in Stavropol.’ Their graduates taught in local, that is, Estonian, Polish and Caucasian, educational institutions. See Nikolaj Kuz’min, Učitel’skie seminarii Rossii i ich mesto v podgotovke učitelej načal’noj školy (Kurgan: Kurganskij Gosudarstvennyj Pedagogičeskij Institut, 1970), 2. 33. RGIA F. 734. Op. 3. D. 2. Fol. 254–269. 34. [Anonymous], Zamečanija na proekt ustava obščeobrazovatel’nych učebnych zavedenij i na proekt obščego plana ustrojstva narodnych učilišč. Part 1 (Sankt-Peterburg: Tipografija Imperatorskoj Akademii Nauk, 1862), 17–24. 35. See Ben Eklof, Russian Peasant Schools: Officialdom, Village Culture, and Popular Pedagogy, 1861–1914 (Berkeley et al.: University of California Press, 1986) for details concerning the difference between peasants elementary schools and gimnazijas. 36. RGIA F. 734. Op. 3. D. 5. Fol. 1394. 37. Kuz’min, Učitel’skie seminarii Rossii, 73. 38. Genrich Fal’bork and Vladimir Čarnoluskij, Nastol’naja kniga po narodnomu obrazovaniju. Zakony, rasporiaženija, instrukcii, ustavy, spravočnye svedenija

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i pr., vol. II (Sankt-Peterburg: Izdatel'stvo Tovariščestva “Znanie,” Tipo-litografija B.M. Vol'fa, 1901), 1152–1191. 39. The reasoning behind this tactic was clear already to contemporaries: сf. Petr Afanas’ev, “K zakonoproektu ob učitel’skich seminarijach,” Žurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveščenija, no. 1 (1916): 45–63. 40. [Anonymous], Zamečanija na proekt ustava, 124. 41. The most sinister examples of the physical and psychological violence that was common in European schools is presented in Katharina Rutschky, ed., Schwarze Pädagogik. Quellen zur Naturgeschichte der bürgerlichen Erziehung (Frankfurt a.M.; Berlin; Wien: Ullstein, 1977). 42. [Anonymous], “Voprosy i mysli, kotorye, po mneniju gg. direkotorov učebnych zavedenij, želatel’no bylo by sdelat’ predmetom obsuždenija v sobranii direktorov sredne-učebnych zavedenij, imejuščem byt’ v gor. Tiflise v dekabre mesjatse 1903 g.,ˮ in Žurnaly zasedanij popečitel’skogo soveta Kavkazskogo učebnogo okruga 15–23 dekabrja 1903 g. v Tiflise (Tiflis: Tip. Kanc. Glavnonač. gražd. č. na Kavkaze, 1904), 45. 43. Poljakov, “Iz prošlogo russkoj srednej školy,” 34. 44. Anton Chekhov, “A Man of Ideas,ˮ in Anton Chekhov, Early Stories, trans. P. Miles and H. Pitcher (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 50–51. 45. RGIA F. 922. Op. 1. D. 232. [Fond V.G. Glazova.] Pis’ma (4) raznych lic V.G. Glazovu s vyraženiem protesta protiv izmenenija pravopisanija. 1904 g. Fol. 1. 46. RGIA F. 922. Op. 1. D. 232. [Fond V.G. Glazova.] Pis’ma (4) raznych lic V.G. Glazovu s vyraženiem protesta protiv izmenenija pravopisanija. 1904 g. Fol. 13. 47. Osterhammel, Die Verwandlung der Welt, 122. Osterhammel refers to the famous article by Edward P. Thompson, “Time, Work-discipline and Industrial Capitalism,ˮ Past & Present 38 (1967): 56–97. 48. Ordinance of the Ministry of National Education of 26 October 1912 cited in Aleksandr Laurson, Programmy i pravila ob ispytanijaсh dlja mužskich gimnazij i progimnazij vedomstva Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveščenija (Sankt-Peterburg: Tipografija V.D. Smirnova, 1913), 163. 49. Laurson, Programmy i pravila, 162. 50. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 76 Kultusministerium VI Sekt. VI z no. 4 Vol. VII. Die Abiturienten-Prüfungen und die Einsendung der desfallsigen Nachweisungen aus der Provinz Posen, vol. VII. Fol. 2ff., Fol. 10v, Fol. 29–45r, Fol. 75r, Fol. 204r. 51. Sic, with a t instead of th, against all rules! Underlined in pencil in the text and noted in the margin with an exclamation mark. 52. Poljakov, “Iz prošlogo russkoj srednej školy,” 32. 53. Evgenij Markov, “‘Živaja duša v škole’ (Mysli i vospominanija starogo pedagoga),ˮ in Evgenij Markov, Grechi i nuždy našej srednej školy (Sankt-Peterburg: Tipografija A.S. Suvorina, 1900), 4. 54. Steinhoff, “Das Seminar in Oldenburg,” 83. 55. “In comparison to other occupational groups, it should be noted that, although a teacher earned more than an average factory worker, the income of a low-level civil servant, to which the teaching profession aspired already prior to the 1848 revolution, was decidedly higher.” Hans-Georg Herrlitz, Wulf Hopf, Hartmut Titze and Ernst

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Cloer, Deutsche Schulgeschichte von 1800 bis zur Gegenwart. Eine Einführung. 4th edition, revised and updated (Weinheim; München: Juventa-Verlag, 2005), 54. 56. Herrlitz, Hopf, Titze and Cloer, Deutsche Schulgeschichte, 55. 57. Heinz-Elmar Tenorth, “Lehrerberuf und Lehrerbildung,ˮ in Handbuch der deutschen Bildungsgeschichte, ed. Christa Berg and Karl-Ernst Jeismann, vol. III: 1800–1870. Von der Neuordnung Deutschlands bis zur Gründung des Deutschen Reiches, ed. Karl-Ernst Jeismann and Peter Lundgreen (München: Beck, 1987), 258. 58. From the most humble memorandum of the Minister of National Education K. Lieven on the comments made in the plenary meeting of the State Council on the draft of the new statutes for educational institutions. Council of State on the draft of the new statutes for educational institutions: Refutation of the Remarks. 5 December 1828. Cited after: Nikol’ceva, Načal’noe i srednee obrazovanie v SanktPeterburge, 85. 59. Comparison based on [Anonymous], Sravnitel’nyj očerk služebnogo i material’nogo položenija učebno-administrativnogo personala srednich učebnych zavedenij Rossii, Germanii, Francii i Avstrii (Sankt-Peterburg: Senatskaja tipografija, 1902). 60. RGIA. Papka 2695. Pervyj s’ezd dejatelej po narodnomu obrazovaniju v Moskovskom Gorodskom Obščestvennom Upravlenii. no. 40: Doklad A. Dandurovoj “Kul’turnoe značenie ličnosti učaščich, ich pravovoe i ėkonomičeskoe položenie,” 4, 7. The diary of the gimnazija teacher Nikolaj Šubkin from the early twentieth century vividly shows how complicated and difficult the relationships between male teachers and adolescent female students could be: almost every pedagogical measure was at the same time a move in a power struggle and an act to be judged morally, which sometimes irritated the already nervous teacher to the extreme. See Nikolaj Šubkin, Povsednevnaja žizn’ staroj russkoj gimnazii. Iz dnevnika slovesnika N.F. Šubkina za 1911–1915 gody (Sankt-Peterburg: Izdatel’stvo Russkogo Christianskogo gumanitarnogo instituta, 1998). 61. Ivan Ivanov, “Mysli o suščestvennych voprosach škol’nogo vospitanija,ˮ Pedagogičeskij sbornik, no. 3, 5 and 6 (1896). 62. The psychological, psychoanalytical, and psychotherapeutic examination of error anxiety, based on the theoretical and empirical preliminary work done by Sigmund Freud, Anna Freud and Sándor Ferenczi, only began after the World War I and thus lies outside the period under investigation. Therefore, the neurotic aspects of the modern approach to spelling mistakes and the role of introjection mechanisms in its development will not be addressed here, especially since this approach would require a different source base than the one evaluated in the present study. 63. BBF DIPF OT 291 Manuskripte (masch., undatiert). Fol. 30–50. Schulreformprogramm. Fol. 38. 64. RGIA. Papka 2695. Pervyj s’ezd dejatelej po narodnomu obrazovaniju v Moskovskom Gorodskom Obščestvennom Upravlenii. no. 27: Doklad A.A. Bogoljubovoj. Na kakom materiale i kakimi priemami sleduet učit’ detej ustnoj i pis’mennoj peredače myslej, 9. 65. Sergej Poljakov, “Tradicionnye vzgljady i pedagogičeskie idei v škol’nom vospitanii,ˮ in Poljakov, K voprosu o reforme srednej školy, 75.

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66. Ernst Reuter, “Aufstiegsverhinderungsinstrument,ˮ Berliner Lehrerzeitung 32 (47), no. 2 (1978): 10. 67. Gerhard Nickel, Fehlerkunde. Beiträge zur Fehleranalyse, Fehlerbewertung und Fehlertherapie (Berlin: Cornelsen-Velhagen & Klasing, 1972); Hans Ramge, “Fehler und Korrektur im Spracherwerb,ˮ in Fehlerlinguistik. Beiträge zum Problem der sprachlichen Abweichung, ed. Dieter Cherubim (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1980), 1–22; Wolfgang Menzel, Rechtschreibunterricht: Praxis und Theorie “Aus Fehlern lernen” (Seelze: Friedrich, 1985). In Russia, new approaches have only recently been introduced in individual schools (e.g., no punishment for spelling mistakes at primary school level, etc.). 68. Die Gartenlaube, 16 (1873): 257. Link to the digitized image: https://commons​.wikimedia​.org​/wiki​/File​:Die​_Gartenlaube_(1873)​_b​_257​.jpg. 69. Die Gartenlaube. Heft 16 (1873): 268. 70. Die Gartenlaube, 6 (1876): 105. Link to the digitized image: https://commons​.wikimedia​.org​/wiki​/File​:Die​_Gartenlaube_(1876)​_b​_105​.jpg. 71. The picture hangs today in the local history museum of the small provincial town of Vol'sk near Saratov. However, it was available as a postcard at the time, which suggests a relatively high level of awareness and popularity, сf. http://www​ .gornitsa​.ru​/images​/products​/oser2​/al​_oldotkr12​_5929​.jpg. 72. There are two versions of this painting: Version A hangs in the Museum of Fine Arts in Kaluga (link to the digitized image: https://upload​.wikimedia​.org​/ wikipedia​/commons​/2​/2a/Корин_-_Опять_провалился​%2C​_1891​.jpg), Version B in the National Museum of the Republic of Komi in Salekhard (link to the digitized image: https://ru​.wikipedia​.org​/wiki/Файл:Корин_-_Опять_провалился,​_1891​.jpg#​ /media/Файл:Failed_Again_by_Aleksey_Korin_(1891).jpg). 73. The famous painting Opjat dvojka (Grade D, Again, 1952) by Fёdor Rešetnikov in the Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow treats the same motif. The original sketch showed a boy in front of the class under the reprimanding gaze of the teacher; the final version shows him at home in front of his despairing mother and indignant sister, who is ostensibly a model student. Another painting by Rešetnikov, Pereėkzamenovka (Re-examination, 1954), presents the unpleasant consequences of getting bad grades: it shows a schoolchild who, during the summer break, is learning for his autumn re-examination instead of playing with his friends. The emotional drama of failing in front of the class is conveyed by Viktor Cvetkov's painting Ne rešila! (Failed to solve the problem!, 1950s), and Vladimir Ievlev's U doski (At the Blackboard, 1970). 74. P. Hoche, “Schülernoten und Platzordnung in der Schule,ˮ Der Säemann. Monatsschrift für pädagogische Reform 4 (1908): 187. 75. Karl Küffner, Vom Fehlerkreuz an unseren Mittelschulen (Nürnberg: Sebald, 1911), 4. 76. Albert Eulenburg, “Schülerselbstmorde,ˮ Der Säemann. Monatsschrift für pädagogische Reform 5 (1909): 192. 77. Grigorij Chlopin, Samoubijstva, pokušenija na samoubijstva i nesčastnye slučai sredi učaščichsja russkich učebnych zavedenij: Sanitarno-statističeskoe issledovanie (Sankt-Peterburg: Senatskaja tipografija, 1906).

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78. Over 26% of all known reasons for suicide among Russian children and adolescents related to school in some way or another, according to the data collected by Chlopin. Another 30% had to do with lack of money, unemployment, and other socioeconomic causes. 79. Aleksandr Ljarskij, “Prostite, dorogie papa i mama.” Roditeli, deti i bor'ba s podrostkovymi samoubijstvami v Rossii (Sankt-Peterburg: Izdatel'stvo Kriga, 2017) argues that, in terms of its scope, the alleged ‘teenage suicide epidemic’ at the turn of the centuries was an illusion generated by improper collection and interpretation of statistical data, but does not confute the point that school problems and exams were among the most frequent reasons for schoolchildren and especially gimnazija students to try and kill themselves. 80. Grigorij Gordon, “Vospitanie i samoubijstvo detej,ˮ in Trudy I Vserossijskogo s’’ezda po semejnomu vospitaniju, Sankt- Peterburg 30 dekabria 1912—6 janvaria 1913 g., vol. 2 (Sankt-Peterburg: Tipolitografija Nyrkina, 1914), 450–453. Nikolaj Demert wrote in 1872, “In the last three to four years we have had two or three suicides every year in educational institutions of the Ministry of National Education, not counting higher and lower educational institutions and special schools. Now it's only July, and we already know of two suicides of gimnazija students (in Penza and in Odessa).” Nikolaj Demert, “Naši obščestvennye dela,ˮ Otečestvennye zapiski CCIII, no. 7, part II, (1872): 86–87. A study by Vladimir Bezgin, “Suicid v srede krest’janskoj molodeži (konec XIX—načalo XX veka),ˮ Genesis: istoričeskie issledovanija, no. 3 (2016): 198–204 shows that in the countryside, where many peasant children did not attend school at all, and those who made it to graduation did not worry about their subsequent careers because they had none in mind, grades and school anxiety hardly played a role as causes of suicide. 81. GStPK I. HA Rep. 76 Kultusministerium VI Sekt. I z no. 51 Vol.1. Betr das Censur-Wesen und Ausstellung von Zeugnissen bei den Gymnasien. 82. Minutes for the years 1864 to 1913 have been analysed. 83. In this section, I essentially draw on my essay Kirill Levinson, “Rechtschreibunterricht und Erziehung zum Gehorsam,ˮ Historische Anthropologie 15, no. 2 (2007): 195–220. 84. FS SA KBS-LK 1864–1875, Conference on May 31, 1865. Here and later, italicized words are underlined in the original. 85. Centralblatt für die gesammte Unterrichtsverwaltung in Preußen. 1863, 20, cit. after Strunk, Einheitliche und einfache deutsche Orthografie, 38–39. Wolfgang Kopke comments on the phrase “established by tradition” as evidence that “there had long been a largely uniform orthography at that time” (Kopke, Rechtschreibreform und Verfassungsrecht, 9). However, in view of the many divergent spellings that appear in the sources and about which teachers often complained, another interpretation seems more correct: whoever wrote this regulation obviously had no idea how often, due to fluctuations, uncertainties and divergent opinions held by different teachers, situations arose where the need to have a single correct spelling for every word could not be satisfied. 86. FS SA KBS-LK 1864–1875, 23 November 1865. The book in question was Karl Klaunig, Regeln und Wörterverzeichniß für deutsche Rechtschreibung, zunächst

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zum Gebrauch in der Realschule und den Bürgerschulen Leipzigs (Leipzig: Schlicke, 1865). 87. FS SA KBS-LK 1864–1875, 20 April 1866. 88. FS SA KBS-LK 1864–1875, 18 August 1866. 89. FS SA KBS-LK 1864–1875, 18 August 1866. 90. FS SA KBS-LK 1864–1875, 24 January 1867. 91. FS SA KBS-LK 1864–1875, 22 February 1867. 92. The reprimand was generally regarded as a tried and tested teaching method for all levels. The seminary director Ehrlich from Soest, who had been asked by the Oberpräsidium in Münster to write instructions for teachers on how to teach German in elementary schools, described on August 25, 1846, the routine to be imitated as follows: “The children read a piece from the reading book in chorus during the orthography lesson, after they have been admonished to pay close attention to the spelling. The teacher draws special attention to the spelling, but only for a few words, and gives quite understandable reasons. Then the pupils close the book and the teacher dictates to them, always following up and calling them out for the mistakes made.” LA NRW AW StaatsA Münster, Regierung Arnsberg, Schulabteilung, Generalia, no. 31718. Fol. 70 r. Whether the reasons given in each case seemed “quite understandable” to each child and whether each child reacted as expected to the teacher's reprimand—these questions were not addressed in such reports. 93. FS SA KBS-LK 1864–1875. 26 June 1869. 94. FS SA KBS-LK 1864–1875. 7 August 1869. 95. Felix Koehler, “Zum deutschen Unterricht in den mittleren Klassen,ˮ in Jahresbericht des Königlichen katholischen Gymnasiums zu Neisse für das Schuljahr 1894/95 (Neisse: F. Bär, 1895), 13–14. 96. FS SA KBSV-LK 1887–1892. 25 June 1887, 9 June 1888, 2 May 1891. 97. FS SA KBSV-LK 1887–1892. 25 June1887. 98. Low German “provincialisms,” for example, were corrected in Karl Strackerjan, Regeln für die deutsche Rechtschreibung, etymologisch-orthographisches Wörterverzeichniß mit Berücksichtigung landschaftlicher Eigenthümlichkeiten und falscher Gewöhnungen und kurze Interpunctionslehre (Oldenburg: Verlag von Gerhard Stalling, 1869). 99. Löffler, Dialektfehler, 94–103. Not necessarily much greater, but different are the problems of schoolchildren whose mother tongue is not German, as Günther Thomé, Rechtschreibfehler türkischer und deutscher Schüler (Heidelberg: Groos, 1987) has shown. 100. Sergi Danelija, O prepodavanii russkoj orfografii v srednich učebnych zavedenijach s inorodčeskim sostavom učašcǐ chsja (Tiflis: [no publisher], 1912), 3, 12–20, 38, 46–47. The author, who was just 24 years old, had studied at the University of Khar'kov and was later to become a founding father of the Chair of Russian Studies at the University of Tbilisi, outlined a concept of the Russian spelling instruction for native Georgian speakers in a good 60 pages. His further comments on linguistic interference also concerned pupils with German and other mother tongues (14–20). 101. An example from Austria: Karl Hehl, “Zur Methodik des deutschen Unterrichtes in der zweiten Gymnasialclasse,ˮ in Jahres-Bericht des K.k. Staats-Gymnasiums

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im VI. Bezirke von Wien für das Schuljahr 1894/95 (Wien: [Eigenverlag, 1895]), XIX, urged teachers as well as students to avoid “sloppy pronunciation . . . as well as pronunciation contrary to the language, which, for instance, . . . seeks to distinguish ei from ai, eu, äu . . . ,” whereas these diphthongs are in fact pronounced differently in standard High German. 102. Christoph Gottlieb Ludwig Hüser, “Wie wird der Unterricht im Deutschen eine Gymnastik des Geistes?” in Programm der Realschule im Waisenhause (Halle a.d.S.: Waisenhaus-Buchdruckerei, 1843), 12. 103. “Neue Vorschläge für die Praxis der schriftlichen Arbeiten in der Volksschule: (zur Preisbewerbung),” ADLZ, no. 44 (1886): 423. 104. FS SA KBS-LK 1864–1875, 3 December 1866. 105. Koehler, “Zum deutschen Unterricht in den mittleren Klassen,ˮ 14. 106. Küffner, Vom Fehlerkreuz an unseren Mittelschulen, 15–16. 107. Hugo Lerchenfeld-Koefering, Erinnerungen und Denkwürdigkeiten (Berlin: Mittler, 1935), 2; Heinrich Villard, Lebenserinnerungen von Heinrich Hilgard-Villard. Ein Bürger zweier Welten. 1835–1900 (Berlin: G. Reimer, 1906), 27; Paulsen, Aus meinem Leben, 82–83, 86; Wolfgang Noa, Leben in Preußen; sieben Porträts (Berlin; Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag, 1983), 163. 108. Eduard Bernstein, Von 1850 bis 1872: Kindheit und Jugendjahre (Berlin: Reiss, 1926), 88. 109. Eduard Bernstein tells the story of his fellow schoolboy who was given a written assignment in detention as a punishment for his misbehavior and pleaded with the teacher, “Oh, Miss, you'd better give me a thrashing!” Bernstein, Von 1850 bis 1872, 89. 110. Later, the principal once ordered spelling mistakes to be marked with a cross, see FS SA NKBS-LK 1892–1913. 9 March 1899, 191–192. 111. FS SA NKBS-LK 1892–1913. 1 March 1894, partially repeated on 21 November 1895. 112. “Sought to explain” is in place of the deleted “excused.” Apparently, in the principal's opinion, bad spelling could at best be explained, but not excused. 113. FS SA NKBS-LK 1892–1913. 14 June 1906. 114. FS SA NKBS-LK 1892–1913. 16 August 1906. 115. FS SA NKBS-LK 1892–1913. 8 May 1908. 116. That this method of combating errors was nevertheless regarded as efficient by many is evidenced by the success of a “collection of language mistakes” published by Ernst von Coelln, Fehlerbuch, eine Sammlung von Sprachfehlern (Graz: Kienreich, 1909), which went through seven printings by 1917 alone. The booklet was also reprinted in Prague and Leipzig. In 1952, its 14th edition, revised by Leonhard Slupski, was published in Frankfurt am Main. In this index, frequently misspelled words were put into a memorable alphabetical order. 117. FS SA NKBS-LK 1892–1913. 4 March 1909. 118. Ibid. 20 November 1906. 119. Ibid. 30 October 1906. 120. Ibid. 4 November 1909. 121. FS SA KBS-LK 1913–1925/26. 13 November 1913, 5 March 1914.

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122. Paul Richert, “Sprache und Schrift (Ein erkenntnistheoretischer Essay),ˮ in Wissenschaftliche Beilage zum Jahresbericht der Dritten städtischen Realschule zu Berlin. Ostern 1897 (Berlin: Gaertner, 1897), 12. 123. Richert, “Sprache und Schrift,” 28. 124. Bramann, DER WEG, 92–93. 125. FS SA KBS-LK 1864–1875. 23 November 1865. 126. Hans Nolte, “Die Beurteilung der deutschen Aufsätze,ˮ in Programm des vollberechtigten städtischen Realprogymnasiums zu Papenburg für das Schuljahr 1905–06. XXXII. Jahresbericht (Papenburg: Ems-Zeitung, 1906), 9. 127. [Anonymous], “Der Lehrplan der Anstalt für den deutschen Unterricht,ˮ in XXXII. Jahresbericht des Gymnasiums zu Seehausen i.d.A., Ostern 1895 (s.l. et a.), 43. 128. Deliberate non-compliance with current spelling norms was hardly ever observed in schoolchildren’s penmanship produced for school, but regularly among those teachers who belonged to the radical phonetic movement and demanded a reform that would bring spelling into complete conformity with pronunciation. In their writings (especially in the journal “Reform”), they made use of different orthographic systems. 129. Cited after Schadt-Krämer, Die pädagogische Bildung, 201. 130. Schadt-Krämer, Die pädagogische Bildung, 214–243. 131. Eduard Nitschke, “Drei Jahre in einem preußischen Lehrerseminar,ˮ Die Gartenlaube, no. 15 (1872): 244. 132. Verhandlungen der 48. Versammlung Deutscher Philologen und Schulmänner (Leipzig: Teubner, 1905), 733. 133. Incidentally, this was also the case in the language purification movement, which developed alongside the movement for the improvement of orthography and, despite the surprisingly few institutional and personal overlaps with it, in part exhibited very similar values and discourses. Members of the All-German Society, for example, set themselves the goal in the late 1850s of convincing the “leading literary figures” that they were “committing a sin by using foreign words.” Alan Kirkness, Zur Sprachreinigung im Deutschen 1789–1871: Eine historische Dokumentation, part II (Tübingen: TBL-Verlag Narr, 1975), 352. 134. Heinrich Erdmann, Zur orthographischen Frage (Hamburg: Meißner, 1874), 2. 135. Instances of this discourse can be found in Jacob Grimm and Wilhelm Grimm, Deutsches Wörterbuch, vol. 13 (Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel, 1893), 1364; Josef Süsser, Deutscher, sprich deutsch!: die Sprachsünden der Gegenwart, unter Gegenüberstellung des Falschen und Richtigen dargestellt an leichtfaßlichen Beispielen der Alltagssprache; nebst einem Anhange: Die Rechtschreibsünden der Gegenwart. Gesammelt und zu Nutz und Frommen unserer Muttersprache dargeboten von J[osef] Süsser (Leipzig; Prag; Wien: Schulwissenschaftlicher Verlag Haase, 1916). It is significant that apart from “language sin(s)” and “spelling sin(s),” there is no evidence of similar word coinages referring to other subjects such as algebra or geography. 136. Rudi Keller, “Zum Begriff des Fehlers im muttersprachlichen Unterricht,ˮ in Fehlerlinguistik. Beiträge zum Problem der sprachlichen Abweichung, ed. Dieter Cherubim (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1980), 24.

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137. Roman Mirotvorcev, “O neobchodimosti vzaimodejstvija meždu sem'ej i školoj: Reč', proiznesennaja 15 ijunja 1883 g. na publičnom akte Koročanskoj gimnazii direktorom onoj,ˮ Filologičeskie Zapiski, no. 1 (1884): 5 (5th pagination). 138. [Anonymous], Zamečanija na proekt ustava, 95. Italics are mine—K.L. 139. Mirotvorcev, O neobchodimosti vzaimodejstvija, 6. 140. [Anonymous], “Ueber die Nothwendigkeit einer gründlichen Vorbildung unserer Philologen für ihren Lehrer- und Erzieherberuf,ˮ ADLZ 28 (1876): 67. 141. StA Düsseldorf, Altes Archiv, Akten, 0–1–8 Akten der Schulverwaltung ab 1826 (alt: Bestand VIII), Protokollbuch des Städtischen Lehrerinnenseminars 1903–1913. Fol. 13r. As true as it is that school in the nineteenth century was mainly in the hands of men, this should not distort our view of the fact that school education by women was often decidedly repressive. The female teachers in Düsseldorf, for example, had to be “urgently” admonished “not to exceed the right of chastisement and above all to observe wise moderation and calm prudence” (10v). 142. A separate and very long chapter in the Provisional Telegraph Service Regulations (Vremennyj telegrafičeskij ustav), which was introduced in Russia as early as January 25, 1834, for Chappe's optical telegraphy, at that time used exclusively by the military and official agencies, was dedicated to the correction of unspecified “errors” (pogreshnosti). Incidentally, these regulations did not provide for penalties for mistakes of any kind in writing or telegraphing. It seems that military personnel in the armed forces were not expected to be orthographically correct beyond the pragmatic limits of comprehensibility, in contrast to examiners in the written examinations for one-year voluntary military service or for cadets, students of military colleges and officer candidates. 143. .“ . . Everyone corrects as they please, many not even without sinning against the most elementary, generally accepted rules; that is why there is no uniformity of spelling in the press as yet: not because of wackiness or an inveterate tendency towards neographism, but only because the proofreaders have no solid ground under their feet.” [Anonymous], Sistematičeskij svod zakonov russkogo pravopisanija ustanovlennyj po lučšim istočnikam. S priloženiem orfoėpičeskogo rukovodstva dlja pravil’nogo proiznošenija i načertanija inostrannych slov .  .  .  . (Sankt-Peterburg: Tipografija i chromo-litografija A. Tranšel', 1891), 4. 144. Rudolf Löhner, “Lehrerfahrungen. Beitrag zur Methodik und Didaktik des deutschen Unterrichts,ˮ in Fünfter Jahresbericht des k.k. Staats-Gymnasiums im XIII. Bezirke in Wien (Wien: Verlag des k. k. Staats-Gymnasiums im XIII. Bezirk, 1905), 5. 145. Ščerba, “Osnovnye principy orfografii i ich social’noe značenie,ˮ 49. 146. Since the medical discourse, supported primarily by doctors and later also by parents of affected children as well as by psychotherapists and educational therapists, developed mainly from the middle of the twentieth century onwards, it will only be outlined here in very general terms. 147. Oswald Berkhan, Ueber Störungen der Sprache und der Schriftsprache: für Aerzte und Lehrer dargestellt (Berlin: Hirschwald, 1889), cit. after Andreas Warnke, Legasthenie und Hirnfunktion: neuropsychologische Befunde zur visuellen Informationsverarbeitung (Bern; Stuttgart; Toronto: Huber, 1990), 4. 148. Pál Ranschburg, Die Lese- und Rechtschreibstörungen des Kindesalters, ihre Psychologie, Physiologie, Pathologie, heilpädagogische und medizinische Therapie (Halle a.d.S.: C. Marhold, 1928), 88.

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149. Hermann Weimer, Fehlerbehandlung und Fehlerbewertung. Mit einem Anhang: Geschichtliches und Grundsätzliches zur Fehlererforschung (Leipzig: Klinkhardt, 1926). 150. Arthur Kießling, Die Bedingungen der Fehlsamkeit (Leipzig: Klinkhardt, 1925). 151. Maria Linder, “Über Legasthenie (spezielle Leseschwäche),ˮ Zeitschrift für Kinderpsychiatrie, no. 18 (1951): 100. 152. Sabine Ruhfus, Legasthenie und Rechtschreibreform: Möglichkeiten und Grenzen einer Behebung legasthener Erscheinungsformen durch eine gezielte Reform der deutschen Rechtschreibung (Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1980). 153. International Classification of Deseases, 10th Revision, German Modification. https://www​.icd10data​.com​/ICD10CM​/Codes​/Z00​-Z99​/Z55​-Z65​/Z55-. 154. Cit. after Hartwig Peters, Die Reform der deutschen Schreibung. Vortrag, gehalten auf der 13. allgemeinen schleswig-holsteinischen Lehrerversammlung in Neumünster 1. August 1879 von H. Peters, Lehrer in Kiel (Kiel: Jenssen, 1879), 18. 155. “[In the students' work,] spellings which conform to the previously applicable rules but not to the new 'rules etc.' are not to be treated at face value as errors, but only to be marked as deviating from the latter.” LA NRW AW StaatsA Münster Regierung Arnsberg Schulabteilung Generalia no. 31733. No foliation. Minister der geistlichen, Unterrichts- u Medizinalangelegenheiten Studt an die Königlichen Provinzial-SchulKollegien und die Königlichen Regierungen. Berlin, den 16. Oktober 1902. 156. Dmitrij Ušakov, Russkoe pravopisanie. Očerk ego proischoženija, otnošenija ego k jazyku i voprosa o ego reforme, Pererab. iz letniсh lekcij 1911 g. pri Pedagogičeskich kursach Moskovskogo obščestva vospit[atel'nic] i učitel'nic (Moskva: V.S. Spiridonov, 1911), 29. 157. Aleksandr Tomson, K teorii pravopisanija i metodologii prepodavanija ego v svjazi s proektirovannym uproščeniem russkogo pravopisanija (Odessa: Ėkonomičeskaja Tipografija, 1903), XXXVI. 158. The latter may have been either Rudolf von Bitter, Sr., who held the office of Under-Secretary of State in the Ministry of the Interior, or the Crown Counsel Rudolf von Bitter, Jr. 159. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 151 Finanzministerium I B no. 317 Herstellung größerer Einheitlichkeit in der deutschen Rechtschreibung, vol. I 1876–1904. Not paginated. The quotations here are on subsequent sheets. 160. The letter to von Ende states “the hitherto officially existing.” 161. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 84a Justizministerium no. 2830/2 Betr. die Orthographie, 1902–1919. Fol. 211. 162. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 84a Justizministerium no. 2830/2 Betr. die Orthographie, 1902–1919. Fol. 213. 163. When a report to the ministry of finance stated that the authorities were repeatedly observed writing the name of the Lower Lusatian town of Calau with a K instead of a C, an unknown reader, possibly the minister himself, wrote on the margin, “Terrible!” The resolution, however, read, “Ad acta,” which seems to mean that the emotionally charged marginal note remained the ministry's only reaction to this spelling error. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 151 Finanzministerium I B no. 318 Herstellung größerer Einheitlichkeit in der deutschen Rechtschreibung, vol. II 1905–1921.

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164. This section is based on my article Kirill Levinson, “Diakritika i politika (ob odnom aspekte nemecko-pol’skiсh otnošenij na rubeže XIX-XX vv.),ˮ in Slavjane i Central’naja Evropa: jazyki, istorija, kul’tura: sbornik naučnych trudov, ed. Elena Kovtun, Sergej Skorvid, and Konstantin Cimbaev (Moskva: Polimedia M, 2015), 426–433. 165. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations here are from the documents in GStAPK. I. HA Rep. 151 Finanzministerium I B no. 317, vol. I 1876–1904 und no. 318. Not foliated throughout. 166. Biographical data on Dr. Maryan Rożański have been taken from the following web resources: http://uminski​.name​/osoby​/os11223​.html; http://uminski​.name​ /media​/12545​.pdf; http://www​.historia​-rybnik​.net​/kalendarium​.html; http://romaquil​.blog​.onet​.pl​/Artur​-Trunkhardt–1887–1965-wes,2,ID301669551,n[5][6]; http:// romaquil​.blog​.onet​.pl​/POWSTANIA​-I​-PLEBISCYT​-NA​-ZIEMI​,2​,ID440392090​ ,DA2011–11–28,n; http://madalinski​.info​/osoby​/b​.html. 167. Ministerialblatt für die gesamte innere Verwaltung in den Königlich Preußischen Staaten, no. 65 (1904): 58. 168. This was already prescribed by the Ministerial Decree of 27 July 1875 and by the decision of the Kammergericht of 11 June 1900,—Ernst Müser, Führung und Abänderung der Familien- und Vornamen in Preußen. Ein Nachschlagewerk für Behörden, Rechtsanwälte usw (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1913), 3. 169. See GStAPK. I. HA Rep. 151 Finanzministerium I B no. 317. Herstellung größerer Einheitlichkeit in der deutschen Rechtschreibung, vol. I 1876–1904. Not foliated. 170. Rolf, Imperiale Herrschaft im Weichselland, 138–139. 171. Rolf, Imperiale Herrschaft im Weichselland, 139. 172. Berthold Otto, Beiträge zur Psychologie des Unterrichts. Anregungen und Anleitungen zu einem Unterricht ohne Zwang und Strafen (Leipzig: Scheffer, 1903), 329–330. 173. On this school in general, see Ernest Howard Crosby, Tolstoy as a Schoolmaster (London: Fifield, 1904) and Ruth Meyer Guffee, The Yasnaya Polyana School 1859–1862: Its Place in Leo Tolstoys Development as Writer and Thinker (Yale University ProQuest Dissertations Publishing,  1980). 174. Lev Tolstoy was particularly critical of or even downright hostile toward what he called the “pedantic, dimwitted German concept of popular education.” He was familiar with this concept not only from books, but also from numerous observations he had made during his trip abroad. This negative attitude was further reinforced by observations Tolstoy made “with surprise and horror” in his homeland, where, due to the officially prescribed imitation of Prussian models, this school model, which he described as “harmful” and “prison-like,” “took root and confidently flourished.” Tolstoy's letter to A. Suvorin. http://tolstoy​-lit​.ru​/tolstoy​/bio​/gusev​-materialy–1870–1881/tolstoj-v–1873–1877​-godah​.h​tm. 175. Daniel Moulin-Stożek, “Five Principles of Tolstoy‘s Educational Thought,ˮ in Tolstoy and his Problems: Views from the Twenty-First Century, ed. Inessa Medzhibovskaya (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2019), 158–169. 176. Tolstoy’s Diaries, ed. and trans. by Reginald F. Christian (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1985), 257.

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177. Tolstoy on Education: Tolstoy’s Educational Writings 1861–62, edited and translated by Alan Pinch and Michael Armstrong (London: The Athlone Press, 1982). 178. Tolstoy wrote these two words in German (Gehorsam and Ruhe) as an allusion to the conditions he found in German educational institutions during his European trip. Elsewhere he describes this impression in an even more drastic way: “Any movement, any word, any question is forbidden. Hands pressed nicely together! Silence and obedience! (Die Hände fein zusammen! Ruhe und Gehorsam!)” Lev Tolstoj, “O metodach obučenija gramote,ˮ in Lev Tolstoj, Polnoe sobranie sočinenij, vol. 8: Pedagogičeskie stat’i 1860–1863 (Moskva: Chudožestvennaja literatura, 1936), 136, 139. 179. Lev Tolstoj, “O narodnom obrazovanii,ˮ in Lev Tolstoj, Polnoe sobranie sočinenij, vol. 8: Pedagogičeskie stat’i 1860–1863 (Moskva: Chudožestvennaja literatura, 1936), 11. 180. Nikolaj Gusev, Lev Nikolaevič Tolstoj. Materialy k biografii. S 1855 po 1869 god (Moskva: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1957), 425. 181. Jasnaja Poljana. Škola. Žurnal pedagogičeskij, izdavaemyj gr. L.N. Tolstym (Moskva: V tipografii Katkova i Ko, 1862). Twelve issues of the magazine appeared, the number of subscribers reached 400. 182. Although, as already indicated, adults also attended the school in isolated cases, the notes by Tolstoy and other teachers summarized here refer exclusively to children. 183. Leo Tolstoy, “Yasnaya Polyana School (November and December 1862),” in Leo Tolstoy, The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoï, trans. Nathan Haskell Dole (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., 1899), 185. 184. He dedicated a special essay to this subject: Leo Tolstoy, “Who Should Learn Writing of Whom; Peasant Children of Us, or We of Peasant Children?” in Leo Tolstoy, The Complete Works of Lyof N. Tolstoï, 301–334. 185. The “a and be” indicates the phonetic method Tolstoy used instead of the traditional spelling method, in which the students first spoke the names of the letters, that is, “az-buki,” and then proceeded to form syllables. See Lev Tolstoj, “O svobodnom vozniknovenii i razvitii škol v narode,ˮ in Tolstoj, Pedagogičeskie stat’i 1860–1863 (Moskva: Chudožestvennaja literatura, 1936), 172. 186. S. Protopopov, “‘Jasnaja Poljana’ za mart 1862 goda,ˮ Vospitanie, no. 8 (1862): 69–79. 187. Tolstoy, “Who Should Learn Writing of Whom,” 333. 188. Dušan Makovickij, “[Dnevnik] 1905,” in Dušan Makovickij, U Tolstogo, book 1, 121—482 (Moskva: Nauka, 1979), 353. 189. .” . . il m’arrive fort souvent de déchirer mes lettres après les avoir relues. Ce n’est pas par fausse honte que je le fais,—une faute d’orthographe, un pâté, une phrase mal tournée ne me gênent pas; mais c’est que je ne puis parvenir à savoir diriger ma plume et mes idées.” Cit. after the electronic edition http://tolstoy​-lit​.ru​/ tolstoy​/pisma​/1844–1855/letter​-49​.h​tm. 190. Like Goethe once did, Tolstoy left matters of orthography to the publisher. Lev Tolstoj, a letter to Nikolaj Strachov, 2 July 1872: .” . . resolve orthographic doubts as you wish.” Cit. after electronic edition: http://tolstoy​-lit​.ru​/tolstoy​/pisma​ /1863–1872/letter–289​.ht​m. 191. Lev Tolstoy, a letter to Michail Katkov, 8 December 1862: “The manuscript is not clean, it is teeming with footnotes and orthographic mistakes, but it is

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convenient to typeset.” Cit. after the electronic edition. http://tolstoy​-lit​.ru​/tolstoy​/ pisma​/1856–1862/letter–269​.ht​m. 192. Tolstoj, “O svobodnom vozniknovenii i razvitii škol v narode,ˮ 162–164. 193. Dušan Makovickij, U Tolstogo. 1904–1910. “Jasnopoljanskie zapiski” D.P. Makovickogo. Kniga vtoraja: 1906–1910 (Moskva: Nauka, 1979), 252. 194. Vladimir Moločnikov, “Svet i teni. Vospominanija o moem približenii k Tolstomu,” in Tolstoj i o Tolstom. Novye materialy. Collection 3, ed. Nikolaj Gusev (Moskva: Centrosojuz, 1927), 121. 195. Tolstoy, “Yasnaya Polyana School,” 219. 196. Tolstoy, “Yasnaya Polyana School,” 221. 197. Vladimir Vejkšan, L.N. Tolstoj—narodnyj učitel’ (Moskva: Učpergiz, 1959), 59. 198. Tolstoy, “Yasnaya Polyana School,” 181. In the English edition, this sentence contains two mistranslations. Tolstoy’s original Russian text really says, “The teacher is in trouble if a pupil has been trying hard and he, when reviewing [his exercises], has given him less than his deserts!” The fact that the fairness of marks was a legitimate subject of negotiation between a student and teacher made a significant difference between Tolstoy’s school and the state school model in which the child was normally at the mercy of the teacher's unrestricted judgment and could at most hope that his parents would intervene if the mark was evidently unfair. Furthermore, the German edition of “Yasnaya Polyana School” (Lev Tolstoj, “Die Schule von Jasnaja Poljana im November und Dezember des Jahres 1862,” in Lew Tolstoj, Sämtliche Werke. Von dem Verfasser genehmigte Ausgabe von Raphael Löwenfeld, 1st Series: Sozial-Ethische Schriften, vol. 9: Pädagogische Schriften, vol. 1, 1–180 (Leipzig: [Diederichs], 1907), 74–75) contains another translation error, which shows a lack of understanding. In the last sentence, it says Zensuren instead of Noten for marks. In German, this word means annual or quarterly marks which then influence promotion. This didn’t apply to Tolstoy’s school, because there were no achievement-based promotions. Tolstoy explicitly claimed in the text that his curriculum did not provide for any generally binding step-by-step annual objectives. 199. One exception was the mathematics teacher Vladimir Aleksandrovič (surname not handed down), a former soldier who often slapped the children for wrong answers. He was dismissed in 1861. 200. Lev Tolstoj, “Obščie zamečanija dlja učitelja,ˮ in Lev Tolstoj, Pedagogičeskie sočinenija, ed. Natal’ja Vejkšan (Kudrjavaja) (Moskva: Pedagogika, 1989), 338, 341. 201. Tolstoy, “Yasnaya Polyana School,” 229. 202. Tolstoy, “Yasnaya Polyana School,” 205. 203. Lev Tolstoy to P.V. Morozov, February (March) 1874. Cit. after electronic edition. http://tolstoy​-lit​.ru​/tolstoy​/pisma​/1873–1879/letter​-60​.​htm (Tolstoy's emphasis). 204. Dnevnik Jasno-poljanskoj školy. 26 February 1862. http://tolstoy- lit​.r​​u​/tol​​ stoy/​​chern​​oviki​​/dnev​​ni​k​-s​​hkoly​–1.ht​m. 205. Dnevnik Jasno-poljanskoj školy. 27. February 1862. http://tolstoy​ -lit​ .ru​ / tolstoy​/chernoviki​/dnevnik​-shkoly–1.htm; Ibid 9. März 1862. http://tolstoy- lit​.r​​u​/tol​​ stoy/​​chern​​oviki​​/dnev​​ni​k​-s​​hkoly​–2.ht​m.

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206. It is a sheet from the manuscript of Tolstoy’s article written for his magazine Jasnaja Poljana, reproduced at http://tolstoy​.ru​/online​/90​/08/. 207. Vejkšan, Tolstoj—narodnyj učitel, 86–101. 208. Vasilij Zolotov, “Issledovanie gramotnosti po derevnjam,ˮ Žurnal Ministerstva narodnogo prosveščenija 120, no. 3 (1863): 184–185. 209. Vasilij Morozov, Vospominanija o L.N. Tolstom učenika Jasnopoljanskoj školy Vasilija Stepanoviča Morozova (Moskva: Posrednik, 1917), 86. 210. It hardly needs to be emphasized that this is not intended to be a comprehensive and exhaustive account of Leo Tolstoy's pedagogy. Nor have I addressed any other important aspects of his worldview. 211. On the international pedagogical reception of Tolstoy in general, see, above all, Crosby, Tolstoy as a Schoolmaster, and Ulrich Klemm, Die libertäre Reformpädagogik Tolstois und ihre Rezeption in der deutschen Pädagogik (Reutlingen: Trotzdem, 1984). 212. See Verhandlungen der 48. Versammlung. 213. Lev Tolstoj, Gesammelte Werke. Von dem Verfasser genehmigte Ausgabe, ed. Raphael Löwenfeld, series 1, vols. 8 and 9: Pädagogische Schriften (Jena: [Diederichs], 1907). 214. Professor Paul R. Radoslavlevič (New York University) noted in 1928 that until then, there had been “no reliable translations” of Tolstoy's works at all: “Either they are defective or so abridged and adapted to the language into which they have been translated that one cannot get at Tolstoy the man.” Paul Radoslavlevič, “Der Geist der Tolstojschen Versuchsschule. Ein Beitrag zum 100. Geburtstag des großen russischen Pädagogen von Jasnaja Poljana 1828–1928,ˮ in Studien zur Pädagogik Tolstojs. Mit Beiträgen von Ulrich Klemm und einem “Brief über die Erziehung” von L. N. Tolstoj in neuer Übersetzung von Horst E. Wittig, ed. Horst E. Wittig and Ulrich Klemm (München: Minerva-Publ., 1988), 31–44. This is a German translation of Paul Radoslavlevič, “The Spirit of Tolstoy's Experimental School,ˮ School and Society. Educational Review XXIX, no. 737 (February 1929): 175–183; no. 738: 208–215 with footnotes provided by the German editors. Their note on the sentence quoted here (page 32) reads: “To this day [i.e.,1988—K.L.] there is no complete scholarly edition, translated and annotated, of Tolstoy's pedagogical writings in any of the world's languages.” 215. Walter Viёtor, Reformpädagogik und Deutschunterricht: eine gesellschaftlich-historische Analyse des Deutschunterrichts vom ausgehenden 19. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart (Leer: Sollermann, 1989), 97–100. 216. On reform pedagogy in general, see Hermann Röhrs, Reformpädagogik, Ursprung und Verlauf unter internationalen Aspekten, 6th edition (Weinheim: Beltz, 2001). 217. According to a study by Monika Wolting, about 500 schools with a reform pedagogical approach were established by 1933. Most of them were closed by the Nazis, but many reopened after 1945. Monika Wolting, “Reformpädagogik als eine Antwort auf die Modernisierungsprozesse am Anfang des 20. Jahrhunderts,ˮ Glottodidactica, no. XXXVII (2011): 28. 218. Ehrenhard Skiera, Reformpädagogik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: eine kritische Einführung (München: Oldenbourg, 2003), 10.

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219. The topic of the German language instruction in reform pedagogy has only been dealt with or even touched upon in a few studies, mostly from the latter half of the twentieth century, and focusing primarily on the content and expressive aspects of the German essays. See the bibliography in Viëtor, Reformpädagogik und Deutschunterricht. 220. Günter Sorgenfrei, Über den Volksschulaufsatz in der Zeit der Reformpädagogik bis zum Ende des Ersten Weltkrieges: ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Methodik des Deutschunterrichts (Halle a.d. Saale: Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, 1966), 30. The following comments and quotations are based on this work. 221. Jakob Stoffel, Der deutsche Sprachunterricht in der Volks- und Mittelschule: Ein Buch für Seminaristen und Lehrer, vol. 2: Mittel- und Oberstufe (Breslau: Hirt, 1891), 114. 222. Heinrich Scharrelmann, Im Rahmen des Alltags. 800 Aufsätze und Aufsatzthemen für das erste bis fünfte Schuljahr (Hamburg: Janssen, 1905), 15. 223. Fritz Gansberg, Der freie Aufsatz: seine Grundlagen und seine Möglichkeiten; ein fröhliches Lehr- und Lesebuch (Leipzig: Voigtländer, 1914), 139. 224. Gansberg, Der freie Aufsatz, 141. He even expressed the opinion that orthography did not deserve any special attention at all, since “the majority of words are written phonetically,” which was not at all true, as far as the German school orthography was concerned. See Fritz Gansberg, Das kann ich auch: eine Anleitung zum Bilderschreiben und Fibeldichten, 2nd ed. (Leipzig: Voigtländer, 1922), 30. 225. Adolf Jensen and Wilhelm Lamszus, Der Weg zum eigenen Stil: ein Aufsatzpraktikum für Lehrer und Laien (Hamburg; Berlin: Janssen, 1912), 171. 226. Otto Anthes, Der deutsche Aufsatz und die künstlerische Kultur (Heidelberg: [no publisher], 1904), 418. 227. Joachim Joe Scholz, “Haben wir die Jugend, so haben wir die Zukunft”: Die Obstbausiedlung Eden/Oranienburg als alternatives Gesellschafts- und Erziehungsmodel (1893–1936) (Berlin: Weidler, 2002), 41. 228. Contrary to Annette Kleer-Flaak's assertion that “evidence—such as teaching protocols or flow sketches [of Berthold Otto’s school—K.L.]—is missing” and, therefore, “conclusions about possible teaching practice can only be drawn on the basis of research literature” (Annette Kleer-Flaak, Die Realschule in der Zeit der reformpädagogischen Bewegung (1880–1933): reformpädagogische Strömungen im Unterricht der realistischen Lehranstalten Bayerns (Augsburg: Universität Augsburg, 2018), 9), Berthold Otto’s postum papers and the archive of his school are carefully preserved in the archive collection of the German Institute for International Education Research (DIPF) in Berlin. They are relatively well catalogued (see https://bbf​.dipf​.de​/de​/sammeln—entdecken/special-bestaende-collections/nachlass-berthold-otto) and for the period of interest to us here they are accessible without restriction, but barely studied. Among other things, they also contain detailed teaching protocols. 229. See Berthold Otto, “Zehn Jahre Hauslehrerbestrebungen,ˮ Der Hauslehrer. Wochenschrift für den geistigen Verkehr mit Kindern 8, no. 2 (January 18, 1908): 16–17. 230. Berthold Otto, Die Zukunftsschule: Lehrgang, Einrichtungen und Begründung (Leipzig: Scheffer, 1901). 231. BBF DIPF OT 30 Manuskripte. Fol.1–3. Hauslehrerschule.

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232. Berthold Otto, Der Lehrgang der Zukunftsschule. Formale Bildung ohne Fremdsprache, 2nd ed. (Berlin-Lichterfelde: Scheffer, 1912), 122–123. 233. Den Entwurf und die Einsendung von der Gymnasiallehrerin Julie Schilling aus Kiew, BBF DIPF OT 26 Berthold Otto Manuskripte 1903. Fol. 1–2. 234. Otto, Der Lehrgang der Zukunftsschule, 116. 235. Otto corresponded with Johann Spieser and exchanged reports. See preceding text on the Reform, with whose aims Otto sympathized. 236. Incidentally, Otto recommended this alphabet as “most appropriate everywhere where children of a younger age have to be taught to write,” but did not use it himself. See Otto, Der Lehrgang der Zukunftsschule, 116–117. 237. Otto, Der Lehrgang der Zukunftsschule, 117. 238. For this and for what follows, see Otto, Der Lehrgang der Zukunftsschule, 198. 239. With his own daughter Helga, Berthold Otto used an incentive to read that would hardly be used in school instruction. He gave the girl 4 pfennigs if she read two pages from the reader to him. See BBF DIPF Tagebuch 23. November 1914 bis 1. März 1915, Tagebuchkärtchen vom 28.2.1915, unpaginated. 240. Berthold Otto, Die Reformation der Schule (Gross-Lichterfelde: Verlag des Hauslehrers, 1912), 90–93. 241. For this and for what follows, see Otto, Beiträge zur Psychologie des Unterrichts, 331–334. 242. Otto, Der Lehrgang der Zukunftsschule, 23–24. 243. For personal accounts on being mocked, see Rüdiger Gans, “Erfahrungen mit dem Deutschunterricht. Eine Analyse autobiographischer Zeugnisse im Zusammenhang mit der Geschichte des Bildungsbürgertums im 19. Jh.,ˮ in Muttersprachlicher Unterricht im 19. Jh.: Untersuchungen zu seiner Genese und Institutionalisierung, ed. Hans Dieter Erlinger und Clemens Knobloch (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1991), 9–60. 244. Otto, Die Reformation der Schule, 143–144. 245. Otto, Die Reformation der Schule, 36. 246. “I can't bring myself to say orthography here!”—Otto, Die Reformation der Schule, 36. 247. Otto, Die Reformation der Schule, 155. 248. Otto, Die Reformation der Schule, 37. 249. Otto, Die Reformation der Schule, 37. 250. Otto, Die Reformation der Schule, 36. 251. Otto, Die Reformation der Schule, 156–157. 252. The money was thus expressly intended for Otto as a writer (as he was always referred to in the official letters addressed to him) and not for his school, which was funded by school fees (400 marks a year) and thus only affordable for the well-off. It was not until the Weimar period that the Prussian parliament decided on “continuous support” for the school, but in 1922, for example, only 50,000 marks were granted, which at the time of inflation was equivalent to 30 gold marks—a barely noticeable sum for the school budget. On the subsidy, see BBF DIPF OT 117 Schulbehörden 1900–1914. 4, 13, 24, 46, 61, 89, 104 and 72–73; on the school fees, BBF DIPF OT 206 Berthold-Otto-Schule Kopien von Briefen der Abt. Kirchen/Schulwesen der Kgl. Regierung usw., Fol. 10.

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253. BBF DIPF OT 117 Schulbehörden 1900–1914, Fol. 3. 254. BBF DIPF OT 291 Manuskripte (masch., undatiert). Die Hauslehrerschule. Fol. 1–3. 255. BBF DIPF OT 30 Manuskripte. Fol.1–3. Hauslehrerschule. 256. The Ministry of Education limited the number of pupils in Berthold Otto's “teaching circle” to 20 in 1907, then to 25 in 1908, then to 25 pupils. BBF DIPF OT 117 Schulbehörden 1900–1914. Fol. 20 and 28. 257. They even had a student court that drew up rules of conduct and—against Otto's wishes—a catalogue of punishments, of which it made use on a number of occasions. The teachers respected the court's judgments; otherwise, no means of punishment were used. 258. It seems significant to me that Otto, in his first ever lesson, introduced the conversation with the story of the construction of the Teltow Canal (сf. BBF DIPF OT 291 Manuskripte (typescript, undated). Fol. 30–50. Schulreformprogramm, 39). Such an enterprise in the industrial age embodied the same life experiences and guiding concepts of the time as have been described earlier in the examples of the railway, steam navigation, the telegraph, and so on as highly significant for the developments examined in this study, namely the victory of the scientifically, economically, and technically rational and exact over that which grew and developed naturally. 259. BBF DIPF OT 30 Manuskripte. Fol. 1–3. Hauslehrerschule. Fol. 2. 260. Kleer-Flaak, Die Realschule, 125–126. 261. BBF DIPF OT 198 Berthold-Otto-Schule. Unterrichtsprotokolle. Bl. 32v–36. Hauslehrerschule von Berthold Otto. Stundenplan vom 1. November 1911 bis auf weiteres. 262. Cf. notes in class minutes: BBF DIPF OT 194 Berthold-Otto-Schule: Unterrichtsprotokolle. Latein, Griechisch, Schreiben. Fol. 263, 267. 263. BBF DIPF OT 291 Manuskripte (typescript, undated). However, there were no reports from the Private Tutoring School of lying on the table, walking around, sleeping or shouting, which were the order of the day in Yasnaya Polyana. We don’t know if this was due to teachers disciplining their students or to the general upbringing in German urban middle-class families. 264. In the minutes from May 19, 1906, it was noted that “although interest was still sufficient, it had decreased considerably compared to the previous time, so we need to think about replacement [sc. a game introduced to practise orthographically difficult words, see below—K.L.].” Otto attached great importance to motivation: “If, contrary to expectations, it is not possible to interest the children . . . , then one should certainly beware of any coercion and leave the task alone for the time being. Interest will come later; and should it really not come at all—which would be a very bad sign for the teacher—I would still consider it better that the children should not bring the grammar to an outward conclusion than that they should have a forced knowledge thrust upon them instead of a knowledge voluntarily taken.” Otto, Der Lehrgang der Zukunftsschule, 121. 265. BBF DIPF OT 194 Berthold-Otto-Schule: Unterrichtsprotokolle. Latein, Griechisch, Schreiben. 261. 266. Corrected in ink from ‘againsttheclock’ (Nachderuhr. This insecurity is illustrative of the problems many Germans struggled with at the time. The complicated

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rules concerning separate vs. compound spelling were a permanent source of trouble for writers and a major issue in orthography reform discussions). Incidentally, this method was also used in Latin and Greek classes, where the endings were recited either “against the clock” or “without the clock,” depending on each child's preference. The teachers joined in and were not always the quickest. BBF DIPF OT 194 Berthold- Otto-Schule: Unterrichtsprotokolle. Latein. Griechisch. Schreiben. Fol. 59–118 and 119–176. 267. BBF DIPF OT 194 Berthold-Otto-Schule: Unterrichtsprotokolle. Latein, Griechisch, Schreiben. Fol. 263–264. 268. The dictation was a story in an age-appropriate language about writing a dictation and making mistakes: “Today for the first time we are writing a coherent text. The previous times we only wrote individual words. Every time we finished a word, everyone gave their piece of paper to the neighbour on the right. Then everyone had to check what mistakes the neighbour on the left had made. And it was all difficult words that we wrote. Nevertheless, some of us wrote them without mistakes.” BBF DIPF OT 194 Berthold-Otto-Schule: Unterrichtsprotokolle. Latein, Griechisch, Schreiben. Fol. 244–255. 269. BBF DIPF OT 194 Berthold-Otto-Schule: Unterrichtsprotokolle. Latein, Griechisch, Schreiben. Fol. 269. 270. BBF DIPF OT 591 Berthold-Otto-Schule Schüleraufsätze 1914–1922. Fol. 38–56. 271. Papers that can be attributed to older pupils based on the handwriting contain in some cases considerable violations of the “official spelling” (e.g., npaar instead of ein paar or einn instead of ein, etc.) but no corrections. BBF DIPF OT 211 Schüleraufsätze 1914–1932. 272. BBF DIPF OT 582 Berthold-Otto-Schule Zeitungsartikel über 1906–1933 Die Schule. Fol. 4. 273. Wolting, “Reformpädagogik als eine Antwort,” 27. 274. Incidentally, Otto had had the idea of introducing sport into the lessons long before that. “It should be taught without coercion, without appeal to a sense of duty, merely by using the children's natural theoretical and sporting interest,” he said in his first lecture on the school of the future. But then, talking about how “terribly difficult it is” to produce one’s own readings “in a psychologically correct way and how easy it is to make gross mistakes,” he recounted how he had once written a sentence for his little daughter: “Whoever is diligent learns to read quickly.” What Otto meant was that he had made a gross psychological error in not writing “He who is diligent…” However, he seems not to have noticed that, contrary to his stated principle, the maxim declared diligence instead of interest to be the prerequisite for learning success. This makes it clear what considerable habits of thought, conditioned by conventional upbringing and the whole cultural environment, and apparently not sufficiently reflected, this insight had to overcome to assert itself even in his own mind. Berthold Otto, “Die Schulreform im 20. Jahrhundert,ˮ in Die deutsche Reformpädagogik, ed. Wilhelm Flitner and Gerhard Kudritzki, vol. I: Die Pioniere der Pädagogischen Bewegung, 4th ed. (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984), 178 and 183–184, emphasis by the author. 275. From the draft of a letter to the Department for Ecclesiastical and School Affairs of the Royal Government on the occasion of the ordered closure of the school

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due to the lack of a permit, 31st August, 1907. BBF DIPF OT 206 Berthold-OttoSchule Kopien von Briefen der Abt. Kirchen/Schulwesen der Kgl. Regierung usw., 5. The analysis of these and other primary sources makes it clear that accounts of Otto's pedagogy that are based exclusively on his publications present a distorted picture, insofar as they are concerned with practice rather than with programmatic matters. For example, Jörg Hobusch claims that “Otto's reform pedagogical proposals ultimately amount to a decimation of the level of knowledge,” that “his ideas on popular education also want to impart knowledge of only a very general kind and low quality” and that in his concept “traditional real deficiencies of German language instruction in the elementary school system are ignored and thus fortified.” Jörg Hobusch, Der Deutschunterricht in den Anfängen der bürgerlichen Reformpädagogik (Frankfurt a.M. [et al.]: Lang, 1989), 231, 234. Obviously, such conclusions drawn from Otto's programmatic publications do not hold true for his schools actual performance as reflected in archival sources. 276. From the letter of the Minister of Religious, Educational and Medical Affairs von Trott zu Solz to Berthold Otto, July 1910: BBF DIPF OT 117 Schulbehörden 1900–1914. Fol. 67, 71. 277. Otto, Die Reformation der Schule, 6. 278. In the years 1909–1914 alone, over 1500 names from all continents were entered in the visitors' book. Russia was particularly well represented, more so than its immediate neighbours, but also Sweden, Bulgaria, Romania, Africa, South and North America, Japan, New Zealand and many more. However, it often happened that “gentlemen from Russia or other countries inquired about the school in Berlin and were astounded to learn that nothing was known about the existence of such a school.” BBF DIPF OT 291 Manuskripte (typescript, undated). Fol. 3. 279. BBF DIPF OT 291 Manuskripte (typed, undated). Fol. 10 and 26. Gesamtunterricht was also officially introduced in all schools in Greater Berlin for the first quarter of school attendance, but it did not correspond to what Otto understood by it, but “only a well-prepared passage through several subjects; certainly more interesting than the old subject cramming, but without the main feature of Gesamtunterricht: the adaptation to the natural cognitive instinct of the children.” BBF DIPF OT 291 Manuskripte (typescript, undated). Fol. 30–50: Schulreformprogramm, 43. 280. What has been said here about Berthold Otto's pedagogical concept in the context of German language instruction was not intended to be exhaustive or comprehensive. Among other things, I have not included Otto's worldview, which was a mixture of (Catholic) socialism, monarchism and nationalist Volksgeist ideas and was reflected in the chauvinist-militarist “civic education” at the Private Tutoring School and in the militant anti-Polish attitude of Otto the journalist (see Berthold Otto, Polen und Deutsche. Ein Mahnwort an die deutsche Jugend (Leipzig: Scheffer, 1902). However, it must be underscored that if today we see a blatant contradiction between Otto's ideology, which in retrospect seems rather authoritarian-statist, and the decidedly libertarian nature of his pedagogy, this is mainly due to the fact that we look at it through the prism of the politically predominantly left-wing, anti-authoritarian pedagogical ideas of the second half of the twentieth century, in whose logic such a combination appears paradoxical.

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281. Aleksandr Zelenko, “Bertol’d Otto i ego škola vzaimnogo obučenija,ˮ Svobodnoe vospitanie, no. 2 (1910–1911): 1–50. 282. Ulrich Klemm, “Anmerkungen zur internationalen pädagogischen TolstojRezeption,” in Studien zur Pädagogik Tolstojs. Mit Beiträgen von Ulrich Klemm und einem “Brief über die Erziehung” von L. N. Tolstoj in neuer Übersetzung von Horst E. Wittig, ed. Horst E. Wittig and Ulrich Klemm, 57–66 (München: Minerva-Publ., 1988), 67. 283. See, for example, Ėrnst Mejman, Lekcii po ėksperimental’noj pedagogike. Per. s nem. pod red. [i s predisl.] priv.-doc. N.D. Vinogradova (Moskva: Mir, 1909– 1910), 22; Fridrich Paul’sen, Pedagogika (translation of the 5th German edition) (Sankt-Peterburg: Izdanie gazety “Škola i žizn‘,” 1913), 121. 284. BBF DIPF OT 171 Berthold-Otto-Schule Hospitantenbriefe F. Fol. 28 285. –et: “Direktor Berthold Otto über die Zukunftsschule,ˮ St. Petersburger Zeitung 186, no. 268 (September 26 / October 9, 1912), 1st supplement page, 1–2. 286. Novye idei v pedagogike. Neperiodičeskoe izdanie, ed. Gustav Zorgenfrej, no. 4: Sovmestnoe obučenie (Sankt-Peterburg: Obrazovanije, 1914), 164. 287. One example is Grigorij Poljak, “Škola Bertol’da Otto v Liсhterfel’de,ˮ Vestnik prosveščenija, no. 11 (1926): 103–113. 288. Michail Boguslavskij, “Domašnjaja škola Bertol’da Otto: Realizacija principa prirodosoobraznosti,ˮ Pedagogičeskij kalejdoskop, no. 43 (1996): 7. 289. Robert Kenneth Schulz, The Portrayal of the German in Russian Novels: Gončarov, Turgenev, Dostoevskij, Tolstoj (Berlin: Peter Lang GmbH, 1969), 24–29. This image existed not only in literature. “Who is not aware of the formalism and pedantry prevailing in all spheres of family, social and political life in Germany? And the reason for this is, among other things, the German educational system itself,” wrote gimnazija teacher Ostašev from Smolensk, in agreement with most of his colleagues. Cited in Krumbholz Die Elementarbildung in Rußland, 121–122.

Chapter 3

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Germany and Russia being Christian cultures, the word cross (in the sense of ordeal) was widely used to describe the tormenting problems associated with orthography in some way or another. Some considered spelling mistakes of primary school and gymnasium students to be the “cross” schools had to bear, others insisted that the “arbitrary orthography,” that is, the lack of fixed norms, was the “cross,”1 and still others deemed the contradictory and unintuitive character of codified orthography to be the heaviest cross. In short, many were beginning to be unhappy with the situation, which had seemed normal early in the nineteenth century, and some even stated it was an “intolerable state of affairs.” In both German and Russian-speaking areas, demands and attempts to change the situation by means of comprehensive and systematic measures, in German often referred to as “reform,” increased especially in the second half of the century. In Russia, this term was not applied to the field of orthography until later; but since the same thing was meant, this word is also used here for the developments in the Russian Empire. In both countries, the reformers pursued two concurrent and closely intertwined objectives, both of which can retrospectively be classified as a drive for rationalization. On the one hand, reformers sought to replace conventional spellings that had hitherto been used in writing and a series of more or less authoritative privately produced sets of rules with a single official, universally applicable, codified normative orthography, more or less in the same manner as the systematic and complete collection of laws prepared in the Russian Empire at the time was meant to replace a chaotic multitude of old decrees. Among the German bourgeoisie, already striving for unity in intellectual (although not always practical) terms, there was also the desire to unify and standardize the various orthographies introduced in individual 177

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German-speaking countries, same as was done with customs tariffs, currency systems, and systems of weights and measures. Furthermore, historically evolved spelling norms were to be revised and improved at the same time or subsequently, in the same way as, for example, the course of rivers or the measurement of time were modified in order to adapt them to the new needs of the industrial age. In line with capitalist values, a better orthography was imagined as one that was as logically consistent as possible and easy to learn, although it should not differ too much from the old familiar one, because in the opinion of many (but not all) reformers, too great a change potentially jeopardized the reform’s acceptance. These reform plans, once made public, also prompted questions, objections, and alternative suggestions. Public discussion of the spelling question was not only tolerated but also expected in Germany as well as in Russia, and dissenting opinions were certainly taken into consideration. These debates will not be analyzed here in terms of individual spellings and rules, because this has already been done several times by other authors. What has not been done systematically so far and will therefore be attempted here is a threefold description of the decision-making processes typical of the German and Russian reform debates and decisions in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, namely: who were the social actors who drove the (re)construction of the two orthographies? What were their communication media and tactics? And how did the public react to them, especially when it came to the legitimacy of reformatory projects? These are the three main topics of this section.

EXPERTS AND STAKEHOLDERS IN CONGRESSES AND COMMISSIONS It need not be repeated here that since the sixteenth century at the latest (in the German-speaking world even since the late Middle Ages) authors of German and Russian grammars had sporadically or more or less systematically considered orthographic issues and formulated suggestions for the improvement of norms. However, these centuries of individually constructed and non-binding norm suggestions remain outside the scope of the study. In the nineteenth century, the tradition of formulating orthographic rules was continued by individuals in a changing manner. German orthographic works of the first half of the nineteenth century, which point the way to the future, were usually written on the initiative of their authors or at the suggestion of publishers. Some (like the one by Klaunig) met with approval and were in many places used privately and as a basis for local official and/or school standards; others remained rather isolated. In the second half of the century, on the other hand, as the establishment

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of orthography “from above” became a trend in German countries such as the Russian Empire, the authors increasingly acted as commissioned individual experts at the instigation of committees and officials who had set themselves the task of taking administrative measures to regulate orthography on the basis of these works written by scholars. A well-known example is the set of rules with a list of words written by the Germanist Karl Müllenhoff on behalf of the Prussian Minister of Religious, Educational and Medical Affairs, which, after having been discussed several times in the Ministry in 1866, was ultimately not introduced in Prussian schools. A less well-known example is the house orthography of the local Railway and Post Authority published in the Duchy of Brunswick-Lüneburg in 1855, which was written by Construction Councillor Hermann Scheffler on behalf of the authority.2 Scheffler was neither a philologist nor a teacher: his dealing with orthography was apparently part of a comprehensive description of the order of the world system to which this man devoted his life. His four treatises on linguistic topics were part of an extensive output that was characterized by impressive thematic versatility. He wrote books on the construction and financing of railroads, on taxes, algebra, arithmetic and geometry, theoretical and applied physics, physiological optics, demography and insurance, body and mind, the supply of cities with spring water and many other topics. In his mature years, he often dealt with philosophical topics such as the foundations of science, the ability to create, and the impossibility for man to originate from an animal (along with a critique of the works of Darwin and Haeckel), the nature of the spirit, the nature of spirits, the nature of God and His products, and so on. This is probably why he did not content himself with the drafting of a list of words, but provided a long account of orthography and the grammatical questions connected with it, in which, as a contemporary critic remarked, “in the absence of expertise, right and wrong often go through each other.”3 By contrast, behind the Russian grammars of the time, at least behind the ones that had a significant impact in the field of spelling, there was always a mandate from the Ministry of National Education or the Academy of Sciences, and the main purpose of their publication was practical use in teaching. This was the case with the two grammars of Aleksandr Vostokov4 as well as with the numerous versions of the grammar handbook of Nikolaj Greč5 and with the Russian Spelling (Russkoe pravopisanie) of Jakov Grot6 published in 1885. These three authors constructed the orthographic norm for Russian on their own, albeit partly in dialogue with their colleagues. In particular, the St. Petersburg linguist and Russian teacher of German descent Jakov Grot became a key figure in the history of Russian orthography after he wrote the “Russian Spelling” on the suggestion (but not, as was later claimed, on behalf) of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, which in part

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contained rules and individual spellings still valid today. The book was spontaneously regarded as “official” by various authorities and ordered to obey, but it also gave rise to violent, decades-long, in part scientifically serious, in part emotional (“Grotography!”) objections and debates. This should not be interpreted to mean that only commissioned grammarians made Russian orthography the subject of their optimization efforts. Again and again, unsolicited inventors came forward to publish their own projects. However, these designs were hardly noticed by the public if they were not directly linked to well-known and halfway accepted projects such as the phonetic spelling reform or shorthand.7 Vostokov, Greč, and Grot, although members of the Academy of Sciences, had only limited philological training. In the field of linguistics, all three were self-taught: Vostokov attended a cadet corps and then studied at the Academy of Arts; Greč was homeschooled, later attended the Imperial College of Law, and then took individual courses at the Pedagogical College; Grot graduated from the lyceum in Carskoe Selo, whose six-year course included a course in Russian linguistics. As native speakers of German, all three would theoretically have a relatively favorable starting position in the acquisition of German linguistic literature, but their acquaintance with it was not systematic. They did not have many reliable predecessors and equal discussion partners around them, and necessarily relied essentially on Western European models and opinions, which did not refer to Russian, but to Latin, German, or French. The famous literary critic Vissarion Belinskij, who in contrast to Greč had graduated from a gimnazija and studied philology (slovesnost’) at Moscow University and would thus actually be qualified as a critic, considered a critical analysis of his “Grammar” even impossible, since “fundamental, established concepts of Russian grammar,” on which one could “rely in such a discussion of someone’s grammatical works,” were missing. “My opinion, however, is no law for anyone,” the reviewer emphasized and was therefore content with the statement that Greč’s book showed “a great number of inaccuracies, contradictions, wonders, with one word, deficiencies, but also many advantages.” In general, he concluded, this book was “valuable as a stock of materials for Russian grammar, but at the same time a bitter reproach for us Russians, who are taught our mother tongue by foreigners.”8 Belinsky called the author a “foreigner” because of his German ancestry, but Greč, although son of German parents, was not a “German” as far as his scholarly views were concerned. As another reviewer later stated, he was completely under the influence of the “scholastic” French school and was not even familiar with Grimm’s most famous works.9 In addition to the construction of standards by individual experts, decentralized collective work was carried out with the same goal in mind, especially

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in Germany. Since, as was shown earlier, reflection on the handling of orthographic norms and their violations was concentrated above all in the school system and practiced by schoolmasters, it is reasonable to assume that the (re-)construction of the orthographic norm also took place primarily in institutions that served as forums for teachers. This assumption is confirmed by the opinion expressed in 1880 by Peter Reichensperger, member of the Reichstag, that the “whole movement” for a uniform, state-imposed orthography was “actually a specifically schoolmasterly one.”10 The teacher conferences already presented earlier using the example of Halle, in which teachers of a school were to agree on common orthographic norms, were such an institution, so to speak, on a small scale. There was also a much larger and freer (i.e., not controlled by a superior) teacher forum in Germany since the pre-1848 time: the Annual Meeting of German Philologists and Schoolmasters (Versammlung Deutscher Philologen und Schulmänner). It had, among other things, a Germanist and a pedagogical section, so it would be ideally suited for negotiations or at least for an exchange of ideas on the spelling question, which concerned interests at least of the teaching part of this professional community and required, as many thought, a scientific solution. However, this professional forum was not used at all for discussions about codification or perfecting German spelling during the first decades of its existence, and later only occasionally, not to mention the actual construction and decision-making. For the first time in 1867, Professor Julius Zacher’s lecture on “Facts and Principles for the Regulation of German Orthography”11 and the ensuing discussion on the setting of standards was discussed, without any practical steps being proposed by the assembly. Significantly, spelling was also a rather marginal field for the speaker himself, to whom he devoted only two public lectures and one small publication throughout his academic career, and only with a view to the forthcoming reform. Not that the participants attached too little importance to the standardization and regulation of spelling. On the contrary, they were so permeated by the idea of it that in 1872 they even discussed to have, as it were, retroactively “a spelling for Latin taught at Gymnasiums that was at least generally consequential, i.e. following a certain principle and a certain period of literature,”12 although everyone knew that “the Romans never had a uniform orthography.” The fact that for the assembled German Latin teachers such a unification, after (and nevertheless) the school Latin instruction had got along without it for more than two millennia, appeared just now as a “requirement,” obviously caused a ripple effect of the time-typical tendencies sketched earlier . In the discussion it was then proposed to regulate the spelling of the Latin language uniformly in the same convention procedure as it was prescribed at that time in Prussia for the German language, that is, first in the framework of the individual schools and then on the level of the school federations.

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Once again, German orthography was not discussed until the meeting on September 28, 1876 (about eight months after the First Orthographic Conference), when H. Lattmann from Clausthal, director of the Gymnasium, gave a detailed and “highly stimulating” lecture on the sentence “For the agreement in spelling to be established on a phonetic basis, it is particularly necessary to determine more completely and to compensate in an appropriate way for the differences in phonetics which had penetrated from the dialects into the educated High German of the individual parts of Germany.”13 However, a discussion on this could not take place due to the provision on the agenda: Instead, the debate on the forms of examination, which had been broken off the day before, was continued.14 Twenty-three years passed until Bremen the German spelling became for the fourth and last time the subject of a discussion in the Assembly of German Philologists and Schoolmen, in a thoroughly practical way: Gymnasium principal Dr. Schneider from Friedeberg in der Neumark applied for the general official application of school orthography. However, Prof. Theodor Siebs, on behalf of the German section, contradicted the motion by declaring, firstly, that the Assembly was not entitled to adopt such a resolution and, secondly, that the current school orthography was too inadequate to be introduced in general and that it had to be revised only on the basis of a jointly regulated discussion of German.15 More than that did not happen in Bremen in 1899, but the motion was noted by the Berlin Ministry of Religious, Educational and Medical Affairs. On January 19, 1900, Konrad von Studt, Prussia’s minister of religious, educational and medical affairs, wrote to the imperial chancellor: The question of a fixed regulation of German spelling has recently come to me from various sides. The rules and dictionaries introduced in the Prussian schools require a review and contemporary changes to the experiences made in previous use of the arrangements made by various authorities and especially the regulations issued by the High Authority for army and navy. On the other hand, the demand is becoming louder and louder that the spelling taught in the school also gains validity in public life beyond the school. It is always perceived by certain circles as an unbearable evil, that official spelling is not lacking in unity, not only among the various German states, but also in one and the same state, as is especially evident in the names of places which are not even within the same Document, eg of the Prussian state budget, evenly. I consider it necessary that this incoherence of spelling be put at least in the sphere of school education and official communication.16

The Assembly of German Philologists and Schoolmen did not play a decisive role in defining and perfecting German spelling. Without commenting on the individual statements, it should be added that the General German

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Teachers’ Meeting, the teacher associations of the individual cities and states as well as the educational press organs also played the role of the commenting and challenging choir and not of the acting protagonist of the spelling reform. In addition to regular meetings and one-off congresses in the Russian, as well as in the German-speaking area mainly printed matter such as professional periodicals and general daily and weekly newspapers and journals as well as brochures, reprints, much less books and other textual media served as discussion forums, in which, among others the question was discussed on how best to handle orthographic norms. A German example of this is the weekly published in Leipzig under the title Allgemeine Deutsche Lehrerzeitung, zugleich ein Organ des Allgemeinen Deutschen Rentenverbandes (General German Teacher Newspaper: at the Same Time the Outlet of the General German Teacher Meetings and the German Teachers’ Pension Association). It was founded in 1849, which is an indication that it should be “politically reliable.” On the other hand, she was considered more liberal and sat down next to professional interests of teachers for advanced educational methods: So were in this sheet, for example, Contributions were published, which called for the use of the stick as punishment in school to be limited as possible, and so on. In the field of German spelling, the newspaper even a while supported the radical phonetic movement and printed individual articles in the phonetics. A similar function was fulfilled in Russia by the journal Učitel. The consultation (soveščanie) of Russian teachers, which took place in the hall of the St. Petersburg Gimnazija No. 2 in 1862–1863, also took place in the virtual “meeting room” of the journal, which in addition to reports on the deliberations published the readers’ letters received, in which proposals for the simplification of Russian spelling and for the perfection of the Cyrillic alphabet were included.17 One of the most important Russian periodicals in the field of linguistics, literature and language teaching was the Filologičeskie zapiski (Philological Notes), a journal published in Voronež from 1860 to 1917. Its founder and longtime editor was the teacher, philologist and translator Aleksej Andreevič Chovanskij. This combination of professions was indicative of the circumstances of the time, since language research and literary studies were then mostly operated by men who taught them as subjects at high schools or universities, namely the development of philology in Russia in the early phase was largely on the Path of transfer: works by Western authors were translated into Russian, Russian authors were also often compositions written that were essentially more or less affirmative, but sometimes critical retelling of foreign publications. Prior to 1865, only four translated works by foreign (German, to be precise) philologists had been published in Russia. In Filologičeskie zapiski, however, dozens of translated and retold books and essays by

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German and French philologists were published, especially in the 1870s and early 1880s. Translations from the French were predominantly works on literary history and mythology. Linguistic works by German and Austrian authors included Wilhelm Freund’s How to Study Philology? (Translated from the 4th edition of Leipzig, 1880), Karl Wilhelm Ludwig Heyse’s System of Speech Sounds (1852), Berthold Gustav Gottlieb Delbruck’s Introduction into the Study of the Indo-European languages: A Contribution to the History and Methodology of Comparative Linguistic Research (1880), Friedrich Max Müller’s Lectures on the Science of Language (1861–1864) and On the Stratification of Language: Sir Robert Rede’s Lecture Delivered in the Senate House before the University of Cambridge on Friday, May 29, 1868, Friedrich Müller’s Outline of the Science of Language (Vienna, 1876), and Gregor Krek’s Introduction to Slavic Literary History (Graz, 1874). On a few occasions, works by English, Swedish, and Slavic authors were presented.18 The Filologičeskie zapiski were neither a translator’s project nor an ivory tower of science for the sake of science. Chovanskij taught Russian language and literature at the Cadet Corps in Voronez for a good 20 years (1845–1866) and saw the shortcomings of the grammar textbook used there. He decided to write a new textbook and found a philological journal to help teachers of Russian language and literature in their work and to ensure permanent contact between Russian teachers. For nearly 20 years, until the publication of Russkij filologičeskij vestnik in Warsaw and Izvestija otdelenija russkogo jazyka i slovesnosti Akademii nauk in St. Petersburg, Filologičeskie zapiski remained the only professional period for Russian language research and teaching. While many contributions were written by teachers who were hardly known beyond Voronež, Chovanskij went to great lengths to win over well-known experts from Russian university towns for cooperation, which he succeeded in doing. Leading philologists and pedagogues were among the authors of the Filologičeskie zapiski. When the Philological Society was founded in 1867 at the University of St. Petersburg, it made Filologičeskie zapiski its official organ. The journal enjoyed a high reputation throughout Russia and abroad: it was subscribed for by university libraries of Berlin, Jena, Leipzig, Strasbourg, Vienna, Prague, Zagreb, Paris, Uppsala, and so on. Chovanskij retired from his teaching duties in 1860 to devote himself to publishing the journal for the next 40 years. After his death in 1899, Filologičeskie zapiski was founded by his colleagues and associates, the teacher of Russian and pedagogy at the Voronezh St. Mary Gymnasium for Girls Sergei Nikanorovič Prjadkin and the head of the Voronezh Gymnasium No. 1 for Boys Bertram Oskarovič Gaaze (born in Dorpat as Bertram Haase), a graduate of the Russian Philological Institute Leipzig. The basic idea behind the project was still the need to take into account the latest

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achievements of linguistic research and practical pedagogy in Russian lessons, which should include grammar and spelling. Therefore, in addition to treatises on linguistic, literary and folklore history, mythology and morphology, the journal’s issues also contained reports and advice from the field of practice and teaching, and not just specifically related to language teaching: there were also instructions for young teachers creating and maintaining discipline in the classroom as well as complaints about overuse and fatigue of teachers. Orthographic norms and their violation were treated both by the scientific and the didactic side. Of the total of over 2,000 papers published in the journal between 1870 and 1914, only 46 were devoted to the topic of spelling:19 18 papers (published from 1874 onwards) dealt with the topic in general, just as many were concerned with spelling lessons; they were by two major episodes in the years 1888–1893 and 1900–1904, at about the same time (1898–1904), where two to three publications a year appeared in general for Russian lessons. Much of the articles on the methodology of spelling lessons came from the pen of Mikhail L’vov, teacher of Voronezh Non-humanistic Gymnasium. Ten publications, the first of them in 1883 and then a particularly dense series from 1899 to 1904, followed with draft reforms of Russian spelling, with most of their authors advocating the elimination of superfluous letters and/or approximation to phonetic spelling. But there were also opponents of the abolition of jat,’ in particular Dmitrij Fomin20 and the co-editor of the journal Sergej Prjadkin21, who argued that historical as well as phonetic spelling could not do without jat. The most active—three times in 1901 and twice in 1904—was Roman Brandt, who published his manifesto “On the Pseudoscientific Nature of Our Orthography.”22 In 1879 Prof. Mitrofan Kolosov founded the second Russian philological and pedagogical journal Russkij filologičeskij vestnik at the University of Warsaw, which he had to give up one year later due to illness; afterwards his colleague Aleksandr Smirnov took up his inheritance, who successfully ran the journal from 1880 to 1904. It was then taken over by Evfimij Karskij, who published it until its closure in 1917. All three editors had also gained experience as teachers in many different Gymnasiums, gymnasiums and other educational institutions in Russia and devoted much attention to pedagogical topics, including Russian lessons. The journal regularly featured practical reports and reviews of works by Russian and Western educators (including Kerschensteiner, Lay, Montessori, Diesterweg). About spelling mistakes Between 1881 and 1912 several authors expressed themselves on the subject of spelling, who delivered a total of about two dozen contributions, one more descriptive than Jan Ignacy Niecisław Baudouin de Courtenay with his series of essays on the orthographies of all Slavic languages23, the other more polemical like Roman Brandt, who in his contributions (seven in all between

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1881 and 1908) justified reformatory initiatives such as the demand for the abolition of jat and jer.24 The fact that both this journal and the Filologičeskie zapiski and Učitel’ were discussion forums for the experts can be said in two senses of the word, for on the one hand their authors published not only their own studies, overviews and theses, in which they occasionally referred explicitly or implicitly to other publications, but also contributions to the discussion, which were expressly understood as “answers” to the theses or points of criticism of certain authors, so that, albeit with a time lag, publicly conducted interrelated dialogues arose. On the other hand, although these discussions between experts were important for the articulation of scholarly opinions, they were not the decision-making process that led directly to the establishment, introduction or modification of binding norms. At best, they could influence this procedure indirectly, whereby, as one participant later noted with resignation, the influence of publications in specialist periodicals was less effective than that of the daily press. Thus the Russian court elite, whose attitude was decisive for the fate of the orthographic reform project of 1904, was influenced not only by the letter of a respected courtier (see later) but above all by antireform contributions in conservative newspapers like the Novoe Vremja.25 By the way, this was not only characteristic for Russia: the Württemberg government, for example, apparently also attached great importance to the opinions expressed in the press and carefully kept newspaper clippings with articles on spelling in the run-up to the planned reform of 1901.26 A similar collection of (conservative) press comments can also be found in the estate of Althoff, the ministerial director in the Prussian Ministry of Religious, Educational and Medical Affairs.27 Although educators had a considerable power over students in the everyday life at school and, at least as a group, had an outstanding intellectual capacity, making them potential authors of solutions, statesmen were more influential on a higher level of decision making. The stance taken by individual rulers might not have been able to move much, but it could have stopped a movement temporarily or at least made it much more complicated. Two particularly spectacular cases of obstruction are associated with the names of the German Reich chancellor and the German emperor. Surprisingly, Bismarck spoke out in the Reichstag against the Prussian school orthography introduced in 1880. He described it as an unnecessary “interference in the personal freedom of the individual” and concretely criticized the abolition of the silent h. The imperial chancellor also pointed out that the Prussian Ministry of Religious, Educational and Medical Affairs was not allowed to prescribe anything to other Prussian or other German ministries. Within the scope of his power of disposal as head of government, Bismarck

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prohibited the use of Prussian school orthography by the Imperial authorities (including the army, the German Imperial Railway and the German Imperial Mail): “Any arbitrary deviations from the spelling which has been customary in our official dealings and which has been learned unanimously by the current civil servants at schools are to be avoided in the interests of the service and, if necessary, prevented by increasing penalties.”28 But in Prussian schools the orthography introduced by Puttkamer was not reversed. Moreover, within a short time it was adopted by many ministries in Prussia and other German states. This resulted in a paradoxical situation: in a large part of the German elementary schools, Gymnasiums, and cadet corps, the state demanded that learners learn and observe certain spelling rules, the observance of which it later prohibited under penalty when, thanks to the meticulous observance of this spelling in their compositions or dictations, they passed the matriculation examinations and began a career with the Reich authorities. The differences between the old and the new spelling may seem small at first glance. The word stems and suffixes, the spelling of which was different (e.g., T(h)eil, Abt(h)eilung, Urt(h)eil, t(h)un, T(h)at, Eigent(h) um, nöt(h)ig), occurred, however, in numerous words used in public, so that every writer and reader had to meet them again and again. For tens of thousands of civil servants there were now not simply several orthographies coexisting (which they were accustomed to in the past, even though they might have considered it to be a state in need of improvement), but, which must have seemed more confusing, two official orthographies, both sanctified by the state authority and affirmed by different threats of punishment, but partly contradictory to each other. What was orthographically right or wrong depended on who wrote what, when, where and to whom. For 20 years a division of normative consciousness was thus officially brought about in Prussia. Sometimes one had to write one and the same document in two variants if it was to be sent to different offices. In the newspapers, different spellings for Prussian and imperial laws were used in the publication of laws. In Prussia, this situation lasted until the beginning of the twentieth century. In other German states, which found themselves in a similar situation, the governments found compromise solutions after a few years, either by repealing the rules introduced in 1880, or by more or less explicitly permitting the use of both the new and the old orthography within their areas of competence. The situation in Germany became even more complicated in these decades due to the stance taken by the supreme individual actor, namely the monarch. At first, the Prussian kings and German emperors did not claim the authority to prescribe or forbid anything to their subjects in the field of orthography. They stayed out of the norm construction process and no statements of Wilhelm I or Friedrich III on this subject seem to have been handed down. Wilhelm II, on the other hand, took a quite clearly negative position on the

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spelling reform, which was to take place by virtue of the Second Orthographic Conference of 1901. He indicated that the introduction of the new orthography for the official traffic of the authorities beyond the teaching area would not correspond to his desire. There was no legal reason to stop the reform. Wilhelm II, however, did not want the new spelling to apply at least for his immediate communication environment, preferring instead to retain the traditional spelling, that is, the one which at that time had given rise to the numerous lamentations about “the sad spectacle of absentmindedness,” “arbitrariness,” “rulelessness,” and so on, which led to the reform. To the minutes of the conference which were presented to him the monarch is said to have written the following comment to the margin: “The h in throne remains, my throne shall not be shaken!”29 Therefore the Immediatberichte, laws, decrees, orders, and so on to be submitted to the emperor were to be made using the old spelling, their certified copies however, which were intended for example, for the federal state parliament, for the law collection and so on, the new one. The title Rat (i.e., Councillor), for example, was supposed to be written with h in orders but without h in notification letters and so on.30 In addition, Minister von Studt assured the Emperor that the new rules would only be binding for fair copies and publications in the writing activities of the authorities. “Just as the individual official must not be denied the right to write as he sees fit, no pressure may be exerted on scholars or writers in this respect, but rather the possibility of a free further development of the written reproduction of the spoken word must be preserved.”31 Only nine years later Wilhelm II came to terms with the new spelling and announced on January 16, 1911: “I hereby determine that the new spelling shall henceforth be applied in the reports to be submitted to Me and in the decrees to be carried out by Me etc.”32 In spite of the striving for uniformity and uniqueness that animated large parts of the German bourgeoisie, the stubborn attitude of individuals in key positions could, conversely, lead to a multiplication of diverging norms. In individual cases, even the border between right and wrong, which tended to be drawn more and more sharply during the period under study, could be transformed into a new border zone at the instigation of heads of department. For example, a Prussian Minister of State issued an order on June 11, 1903: “2. The use of the double spellings added in brackets is not in itself inadmissible, but should be avoided as far as possible. (3) For the remaining double spellings, the choice of spelling is free until further notice.”33 The creation of this border zone, containing such spellings, which were to be regarded as neither completely correct nor completely wrong, only partially took into account the “zeitgeist” shaped by the many standardization trends described earlier, which expressed itself in the desire, especially of professional writers, typists and printers, for the most perfect unambiguity possible of orthographic norms. In spelling dictionaries of the late nineteenth

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century, however, a large number of words were found for which two or even three spellings were indicated as permissible. The possibility or necessity of deciding between them was no longer perceived by many as a welcome freedom, but as an imposition. Konrad Duden and other editors of the German spelling dictionaries met this demand by successively banning double spellings from rule books and lists of words. Double forms became fewer and fewer and disappeared completely in the industry-specific Book Printer’s Duden of 1903, but always remained in the “normal” dictionary, survived the age of maximum orthographic rigor and even increased after the last German spelling reform.34 In Russia, comparable phenomena such as the creation of several context-specific norms or grey areas could not be determined by the will of individual rulers. Otherwise, particularly influential individuals were able to take an effective stand against a (planned) spelling reform. Thus it was the attitude of a certain courtier that was decisive for the failure of the 1904 reform efforts, according to a contemporary witness report. General Aleksandr Kireev, at that time already over 70 years old, was a courtier, a publicist and secretary of the St. Petersburg branch of the Society of Friends of the Spiritual Enlightenment (Obščestvo ljubitelej duchovnogo prosveščenija). He was a kind of grey eminence who, while holding no relevant office, was close to one of the reform project’s key figures: after the death of Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevič (†1892), Kireev, his former aide-de-camp who had been friends with his entire family for decades, became aide-de-camp to the widowed Grand Duchess Alexandra Iosifovna and stayed with her and her son Konstantin Konstantinovič almost continuously at their residences in Pavlovsk and St. Petersburg, respectively. He enjoyed their trust and was therefore asked for advice by the patron of the Orthographic Commission despite a lack of professional training and competence. Kireev wrote several letters to the Grand Duke in which he denied both the reform authority of the Academy of Sciences and the commission appointed by it (see later) and the necessity of reform. These letters made a great impression on Grand Duke Konstantin because, as one of the reformers later remarked, Kireev used the specific writing style of the court writers and speakers and the specific rhetorical methods that worked particularly well for the courtly readership. Kireev did not base his theses on logical arguments, but on impressive aphorisms and purely rhetorical figures. He also wrote in the self-confident tone of a man who had to forbid and command power. To make matters worse, he sent the Grand Duke an excerpt from the newspaper Rus’ with the contribution already mentioned in the previous chapter, in which another extremely influential individual of the time, namely the “second tsar” of Russia Lev Tolstoy, vehemently spoke out against the proposed orthography reform.

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The reformers wrote a refutation in which, among other things, they tried to demonstrate Kireev’s and Tolstoy’s lack of linguistic competence and assert their own expert status: “Our opponents, with a few exceptions, do not even have elementary knowledge about the relation of spelling to language and about the nature and history of language,” they stressed, “For us, debating with an opponent who thinks ‘phonetics has nothing to do with science’ would be completely useless.”35 However, Kireev’s influence on the Grand Duke and his entourage was so strong that all attempts by the reformers to refute his arguments failed: the tsar’s court, the president of the Academy of Sciences, and the “high society” were re-tuned, especially since the conservative newspaper Novoe Vremja, which enjoys a high reputation at court, took a firm stand against the reform and several Gymnasium directors and ministry officials sent in negative reports. The failure of the reform project was thus sealed, for without the support of an influential representative of the monarchical leadership, the Commission’s decisions would have no legitimacy in the eyes of those who were to implement them.36 At least to a certain point (after which they often stalled), the norm construction or reconstruction processes progressed most successfully when mixed expert and stakeholder groups were commissioned by governments. Collective norm construction in the field of spelling was already practiced in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century. An early example is the eight-page brochure published almost anonymously (“by a teachers’ association”) in Erfurt in 1833, which appeared in two versions: “To be used for reference in doubtful cases by businessmen who haven’t studied at universities” and “For use in schools.”37 In the Kingdom of Hanover38, Friedrich Kohlrausch, the head of the Supreme School Board (Oberschulkollegium), later recalled that at the beginning of the 1850s the schools had “no firm ground under their feet” in spelling lessons.39 The word “more” seems puzzling at first glance: had there been a firm ground under one’s feet before? Why was it lost? The solution to the riddle results from the following explanations of Kohlrausch: according to my thesis—under the influence of the new experiences and constraints within the framework of the new context of life—one was confronted with the situation in the middle of the nineteenth century. I was aware of the “actually quite numerous inconsistencies” in the traditional orthography, which was “largely regulated after Adelung,” especially since “historical research” of the German language “brought these errors even more to consciousness” and, Kohlrausch apparently added in allusion to Grimm’s historical orthography, attempts were made “by deriving the correct spelling from earlier periods of our language and literature to produce a greater consistency.” This led to “confusion,” which the head of the Royal College of High Schools sought

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to remedy by seeking the opinion of the teaching staff on the matter and making it clear in the letter that his aim was to eliminate the uncertainties and fluctuations now perceived as heightened. However, the majority of the reviewers were in favor of maintaining the use of writing while cautiously adapting it to historical spellings. Kohlrausch then appointed “a commission of expert directors and teachers” as well as representatives of the Supreme School Board to “deal with the matter.” It met in Hanover on September 1 and 2, 1854, and decided on a spelling system that was valid for all schools in the country. In addition to a “greater uniformity,” the spelling system was characterized by an approximation to the historical spelling propagated by Grimm and Weinhold.40 In Leipzig, the “agreement between the teachers of the general civic and municipal gymnasium” took place as a result of the approximately two-year (1854–1856) work of a commission formed at the suggestion of the director of the municipal Gymnasium, which was composed of the teaching staffs of the two Leipzig citizen schools and this Gymnasium. The proposals for an agreement drawn up by this commission were prepared by Dr. Karl Klaunig, senior teacher at the Realschule, and published in 1857.41 A short (a 12 pages’ worth of rules and 29 pages’ worth of vocabulary) excerpt42 from this book, known as The Leipzig Book of Rules, became, with the support of the Allgemeine Deutsche Lehrerzeitung, one of the most influential and long-lived models for further rule books in Germany (Württemberg, Bavaria, Prussia, Saxony, Baden). The German orthographic conference that was probably the best known and best described in the research literature (and even in Wikipedia) took place in Berlin in 1876. It was attended by invited experts and interested parties who negotiated an orthography for the whole of Germany. The Prussian Minister of Religious, Educational and Medical Affairs Adalbert Falk, who on October 15, 1872 issued the General Provisions concerning Elementary Schools, Preparatory Schools and Seminaries and thus abolished the Stiehl’s Regulations valid since 1854, played a leading role at several school conferences which took place in Berlin and were essentially Reich School Conferences, although the constitution of the German Reich of April 16, 1871, referred the regulation of school matters to the competence of the individual states. As a result of Prussia’s hegemonic position in the Reich, the school policies of the federal states was—at least as far as the development of ‘common standpoints’ was concerned—under extremely strong Prussian influence.43 The first such conference, which took place in 1872, asked Falk to commission the Germanist Rudolf von Raumer with the development of a model for a uniform school orthography. This did not happen immediately: the commission was not given until the autumn of 1875. When the rules were ready, Falk convened a conference in Berlin “to establish greater unity in

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German spelling.” Fourteen participants with voting rights included teachers, Germanists, publishers, and representatives of the book trade, and seven other participants with observer status were predominantly government officials. The conference lasted 12 days from January 4 through 15, 1876. The participants tried to achieve two goals at once that were difficult to reconcile: to perfect German spelling and not to deviate too far from the prevailing usage in order not to jeopardize the chances of acceptance. The participants represented different, sometimes conflicting opinions on the vector of optimization as well as on the expected reactions of the language community to the individual innovations with varying degrees of perseverance and persuasiveness. Only speculations can be made about how things went in the conference hall. According to a report by Оtto Bertram from the bookstore and book printing shop of the orphanage in Halle, who was there as a representative of the book printing trade “just as well known as appreciated among colleagues,” all participants of the conference praised the minutes, which were taken by the high school teacher Johannes Imelmann, the minute-taker of the meeting, presented them the next day and in which “all essential points of the debate were sharply pointed and yet all those dubious expressions, which sometimes are used in excited debate, were happily eliminated .  .  . with a skillful hand.”44 Otto Bertram himself was very positive in his description of the atmosphere of the conference, emphasizing the friendly and amicable in the communication between the participants, so he did the same as Imelmann with his protocol corrections: both were apparently trying to give a more solid image to the extremely controversial and sometimes emotional negotiations. It is rather in relation to the results of the votes on the individual items of the draft that we can rely on the minutes that have been edited and published.45 What should henceforth be considered right or wrong was determined by, in part, very narrow majorities. The group of ‘moderate phoneticists’ around Rudolf von Raumer always outvoted the group of ‘traditionalists’ to which Daniel Sanders, Wilhelm Scherer and others belonged. Not being able to assert themselves against the majority in the conference hall, Sanders and Scherer joined in a press campaign against the decisions of the conference with sharp articles. Even before its end, the conference in Berlin generated a strong negative press response in which rather emotional judgments dominated. The second all-German orthographic conference was held in Berlin from June 17 to 19, 1901, with the actual negotiations already concluded already on June 18. Among its 26 personally invited participants were 2 university professors, 9 high-ranking civil servants, 2 representatives of the book trade, and 13 school and university teachers. This composition, which was very similar to that of 1876, clearly showed whom the Imperial Office of the Interior, which convened the conference, regarded as interested parties and

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experts.46 The conference did not have the task of discussing anything new, it only approved the abolition of th in words of German origin and eliminated several double spellings, reducing what was perceived as an intolerable ambiguity. We do not know who had prepared the draft.47 In any case, the new set of rules, which was adopted by majority vote without much discussion, essentially repeated that which had been introduced in Prussia in 1880. Now, after the Federal Council had recommended it to all ministries of education and cultural affairs and administrative bodies of the Reich, it became the basis for the first uniform official German spelling (i.e., obligatory for state institutions but not for private enterprises and individuals off duty), the introduction of which heralded the age of German orthographic unity, since Austria and Switzerland also largely supported it. In Russia, the first documented large teacher meeting to discuss and accept orthographic reform proposals took place in 1862–1863, that is, during the period of the “Great Reforms.” In contrast to the committees preparing these reforms, these “consultations on the question of the simplification of Russian spelling,” the history of which is still insufficiently researched,48 were not initiated by the state power. They were initiated by a relatively young (age 36) but already well-known progressive Russian teacher named Vladimir Jakovlevič Stojunin. Stojunin appeared at the Pedagogical Assembly49 on January 20, 1862, with the proposal to invite all Russian teachers in the capital to a consultation so that they could agree on common orthographic principles and simplify Russian spelling after eliminating controversial questions. The appeal “To Russian teachers in Saint Petersburg” was immediately published in the liberal Petersburg pedagogical journal Učitel’ [Teacher].50 No personal invitations were sent. Nevertheless, more than 100 people, mostly teachers, but also some editors of periodicals, turned up. Among the few participants known to us by name were the Russian teacher at the University of Engineering and the 1st Cadet Corps Vasilij Plaksin, Prof. Pёtr Perevlesskij of the Alexander-Lyceum, the literary scholar and Russian teacher Vladislav Kenevič, the Russian teaching inspector of the military educational institutions Vladimir Klassovskij and the two educationists and editors of the Učitel’ Iosif Paul’son and Nikolaj Vessel.’ Presumably, reporters from several other periodicals in St. Petersburg were also present. Speeches, summaries of the debates and relevant letters to the editor were published promptly in the Učitel.’ Other newspapers and journals like Severnaja počta, Russkoe slovo, Moskovskie Vedomosti, and Severnaja pčela brought (partly fictionalized) announcements about the meetings, abridged or full versions of the speeches, overviews of the discussions as well as own critical statements. The most sustained attention was paid to the deliberations by the daily newspaper Severnaja pčela, which was formerly close to the government and recently reoriented to social criticism, and the daily newspaper Severnaja počta, which

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was only launched in January 1862 as the official press organ of the Ministry of the Interior. The reports in the Učitel’ provide the following information on discussion patterns and decision-making processes in the deliberations: In accordance with the resolution of the Pedagogical Assembly, the first “Consultation on the simplification of Russian spelling” took place on March 10, the Second St. Petersburg Gimnazija. Further seven one-day sessions followed, some with large, some with very small intervals (March 24, 1862, March 31, 1862, April 13, 1862, April 28, 1862, May 12, 1862, December 8, 1862, and January 12, 1863). They started at 8 o’clock in the evening, which suggests an average duration of two, at most three hours. The first session was chaired by Perevlesskij, after which it was mostly Paul’son, once Vessel’ and once Plaksin who presided. No one seems to have cared about formal membership or decision-making mandates. According to Grot, among those present there were also “many prying persons from the public” and, at least in the first session, “also some ladies.”51 The circle of participants was not limited to those present: In the fourth session it was decided that anyone who cannot be present in person for any reason can send their presentation to the meeting. The President will open it and, depending on the content, read it out at the time when the Assembly goes to discuss the question that will be dealt with in the paper.52

Although these deliberations never constituted themselves as a standing body, they were given a variety of names by the contemporary press as well as by later research: sometimes they were called “Orthographic Commission,” sometimes “Orthographic Committee,” sometimes a “grammar congress,”53 and in 2004 the historian Tat’jana Grigor’eva even called them the “Orthography Congress of 1862,” whereas the participants themselves described the individual sessions with the term soveščanie (“consultation” or “conference”) and serial number. The whole thing therefore had the character of a series of events in which an agenda was successively worked through. In the meetings, Vladimir Stojunin and others gave their speeches, which triggered discussions on the respective issues on the agenda. The decisions were considered adopted “only with general agreement.” The published reports do not reveal whether votes took place or whether the consensus was established in any other way. There is only so much to be read in them that one or the other proposal “met with general approval,” “was unanimously approved by the meeting” or “met with nobody’s approval.” While individual points were decided upon “unanimously, without any dispute,” long debates, numerous discussions and arguments were quite common, which did not lead to a final result. Grot writes at one point, though, that the assembly “with majority of votes” had taken the side of radical changes54 and notes below that from the

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third session on, “contrary to the original decision of the assembly, questions were already decided by majority of votes and not with general agreement.”55 No final resolution was passed, but at the opening of the seventh session Stojunin took stock. He divided the orthographic questions discussed in six sessions into two categories: one concerned the exclusion of superfluous letters from the Russian alphabet and thus a fundamental transformation, the other concerned the discrepancies that appeared in the press and were seen as hindering the teaching and learning of writing. Stojunin declared the first category settled: the majority expressed the wish to exclude the superfluous letters by “relying on reasonable arguments which were not sufficiently refuted by anyone.”56 The articles published in newspapers and journals in favor of the “banned” letters evoked others that contained stronger and more convincing counterarguments. Stojunin believed that from then on the fate of the proposed changes depended no longer on the participants in the deliberations but on the press; he therefore did not consider it useful to return to the question on which “all opinions had already been sufficiently expressed.” The questions of the second kind, however, stemmed from the disagreement in the Russian press regarding many orthographic ambiguities. According to Stojunin, the participants of the consultations tried to solve these questions by letting themselves be guided by a certain principle, if possible, with the relief for learners in mind. Some of the suggestions uttered in letters to the editors of the Učitel’ and published in August in this journal showed that the aim of the consultations was not understood by many and that the main idea, namely the simplification of spelling in order to make things easier for pupils, was pushed into the background or even destroyed by the idea of transformation. So one would not have to reject all these proposals as the goal of our deliberations and ask all those interested to help the participants to stick to this goal. In the eighth session, it was decided that the discussion on a number of controversial issues should take place in a further, that is, ninth session, but this never happened. We do not yet know the reason for the suspension. Nor are we aware of whether the participants actually followed the new spelling rules they adopted in the classroom. After all, the editors of Učitel’ kept their promise to gradually apply the new rules adopted in each meeting to the reports of the meetings. As far as the effect of this first experience of civil society institutionalization of the reformers on later developments in this field is concerned, it must be noted that the next Russian spelling conference, namely that of 1904, followed a similar organizational pattern, although the question as to whether and to what extent this potential precedent, which dates back more than forty years, was consciously taken into account must remain open at the current state of research.

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The composition of the German orthographic conferences was basically determined by the ministry officials who initiated and prepared them. In some cases they knew exactly whom they wanted to invite, in others they only determined the institution whose representatives they would like to see among the participants, and left the appointment of the deputy to the institution itself. The circle of participants, however, included in principle only those persons and bodies who had already taken a stand on the orthographic reform.57 The situation was similar in Russia in 1904–1912, where the composition of the commission, chaired by Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovič, was discussed by him and Prof. Fortunatov, a number of experts were personally invited and certain institutions were advised to send their representatives.58 The Grand Duke could have learned about the work of the Main Committee on the Peasant Question and its editorial board (the minutes of which had not yet been published in 1904) directly from his father, Grand Duke Konstantin Nikolaevič, who had stood at the helm of this organ for a while. We don’t know, though, if Konstantin Konstantinovič actually took part in designing the procedure at conferences or Commission meetings where decisions on spelling reform proposals were taken and whether he favored taking the 1861 reform as a model. In general, this procedure was as follows: a draft prepared in advance was discussed point by point and then those present voted on individual points and/or whole sections and/or the whole set of rules, based on the ‘one man one vote’ principle. It was by a simple majority vote that they decided what was to be regarded as right and what as wrong. In the St. Petersburg Conference of 1904, for once, a seven-member subcommittee was formed to prepare a draft for the plenary session, rather than discussing a draft prepared in advance. The work of this sub-commission was not under a happy star: After four other persons, in addition to the seven members chosen in the plenary session, had been appointed as experts without the knowledge and consent of the large commission, Professor Aleksej Sobolevskij refused to take part in its activities and published in the press a biting criticism of this committee and its approach. The negotiations in the subcommittee, which according to Sobolevskij only included supporters of a phonetically oriented spelling reform (which was not confirmed by the members), were fruitful in themselves, but were accompanied in public by an increasingly fierce smear campaign in the conservative press and in the background by Kireev’s attacks on the other, as described earlier. In the end, the activity of the subcommittee became weaker as its leading members Fortunatov and Šachmatov became increasingly aware that Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovič Romanov, who was originally sympathetic to the project and institutionally promoted it as president of the Imperial Academy of Sciences, increasingly distanced himself from it and that after the publication of the preliminary proposals of

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the subcommittee, many academy members, ministry officials and Gymnasium teachers spoke out against the envisaged reform. Eight years later, the work of the subcommittee flickered again briefly, but a concluding plenary session and decision-making never took place.59 Now, constructing or reconstructing norms on paper was one thing, imposing them was another. The question of what individual or collective actors had or should have the authority and/or were capable of effectively prescribing orthographic rules to society was answered in many different ways in both Russia and Germany, especially since neither of the two empires had a written or even an unwritten law regulating this procedure. In what follows, some of the potential key actors will be presented whose entitlement and ability to impose the (re)constructed norms on society were widely discussed. Some suggested that an academy should be in charge of language regulation, as was the case in Italy, Spain, and France.60 Leibniz wrote in his day that the Germans would do well to follow the example of the French.61 In the late nineteenth century, the All-German Language Association also called for the establishment of an “academy of language.” However, such an academy was not formed at the time. The right of the Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg to reform Russian orthography was challenged in 1904, in a manner that was disastrous for the planned reform and deserves to be described in more detail. As indicated earlier, the President of the Academy Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovič, under whose auspices the reform commission operated, asked General Aleksandr Kireev for an expert opinion. Instead of a structured report, Kireev wrote several letters, which the Grand Duke forwarded to the commission,62 since these letters, although sent to him personally, were nevertheless addressed to the other reformers as well. The first letter in particular is of great interest for our topic, because the author does not so much comment on specific details of the reform project as on the fundamental question of by whom and why Russian orthography should (not) be reformed. Most of the letter’s remarks about stakeholders such as teachers, students, civil servants, publishers, scientists, and so on, are rather disparaging. Kireev did not think much of their opinions. Rather, he accorded authority to “experts,” and in matters of spelling he considered only certain literary figures to be an authority. This is the basis of his fundamental criticism of the way in which the reformers wanted to discuss the fate of the letters: “an important reform such as an abbreviation of the alphabet63 could be carried out somewhat differently: [one could], for example, ask our distinguished writers” for advice, such as Count Kutuzov or Leo Tolstoy, or “well-known connoisseurs of the Russian language.”64 Admittedly, the elderly Slavophile Kireev could only think of such language connoisseurs who had already died, namely Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow (†1867), or co-founder of the Slavophile

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movement, poet, publicist, theologian, and philosopher Alexej Chomjakov (†1860), a pedagogue named Leont’ev,65 the writer Ivan Turgenev (†1883), and the journalist Michail Katkov (†1887). However, the principle at stake was the one Kireev had set out in his memorandum Russia at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century a year earlier.66 In it, he welcomed the widest possible dissemination of the “advisory principle,” according to which “experts, knowledgeable persons”67 might be appointed in bodies which might only have an advisory vote. In doing so, “the government” (i.e., the autocrat) could and should prevent such “committees with an advisory voice from turning into others (i.e., in parliaments) with a decision-making voice.”68 The goal of the advisory procedure was not to restrict the will of the autocrat, but only to strengthen and sanctify it. This was not only “normal and in accordance with our Slavophile ideals,” emphasized Kireev, but the only correct principle altogether, because the “constitution of the West based on the rule of law” is a lie which degrades the ethical ideals of peoples and states in a fatal and inexorable way. Indeed, the rule of law is nothing other than legalized egoism sacrilegiously elevated to the status of an ethical principle; and to this principle we must oppose our Christian principle which we must steadfastly defend and unceasingly implement in our public life!69

The “Christian principle” that Kireev had in mind was embodied in the famous triad of “Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationality”: an authentically Christian constitution, he said, is one in which the people, with their many opinions, participate in deliberations, but the decisions are made solely by the monarch, whose power is not limited by any right or law. Kireev thus protested against important decisions being taken by vote, especially in commissions whose members represent corporate, official, business, or other interests (“egoism”!). For this would mean that the empire of the tsars would “fall into a constitution, into a legal order, and perish, no longer be the great and holy Russia.”70 Since in this reform project decisions were not to be discussed by “knowledgeable people” and ultimately made by the monarch, Kireev initially denied the commission members the status of experts and the eventual decisions of the commission any legitimacy. Instead of slipping into the role of “authorities” and wanting to do away with letters, he said, the scholars may and should only explain to people how, for example, the letter jat should be used correctly: “Show me (and explain) a rule for where I should put the jat and when! But instead, to alleviate my (supposed) headache, you abolish the jat, you deprive it of its civil rights. But does this letter belong to you? It belongs to the hundred million Russians and the ten million Slavs of the eastern branch.”71

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At the same time, Kireev was far from proposing a referendum in which the millions of “proprietors” of the jat would determine its fate. He also strongly advised the state power, whose authority to reform he was more willing to recognize, against the planned change of the alphabet: “The government should not take the lead in simplifying and facilitating attempts in the field of spelling.”72 For, firstly, the reform was not necessary, since the fatigue of schoolchildren was an imaginary illness, a temporary “fad.” And secondly: “They are not neurologists.”73 In his text, the general repeatedly switched from the third to the first person and back, speaking, as it were, in the name of the entire Russian people. By insisting that the Russian people were not so stupid that they would fail because of the existing Russian grammar,74 Kireev was obviously referring only to himself and not the great mass of people who write, and certainly not the school children and young people, whose struggles as pointed out by the teachers he was not aware of or ignored. This was possibly because he was childless and never had anything to do with teaching problems in his line of work. He made light of the problem, which educators called the “cross of the school,” and proposed an unconventional solution: all that was needed was to prohibit teachers to give grades lower than “satisfactory.” Society would be content and all children would write excellent Russian. There is every reason to believe that Kireev did not have the humanization of teaching in mind, but suggested (perhaps as a joke) that the grading system as a measuring device for the learning success of schoolchildren be manipulated so that it would always show good results. In this way, the whole problem could be solved by an order of the minister of public education, which would not at all encroach on the alphabet and the rules of orthography. However, this solution was apparently neither meant nor taken seriously. In the end, Kireev suddenly abandoned his own “advisory principle” and declared himself ready to give academics a leading or pioneering role in the spelling reform, but without really believing that they would be up to it. He suggested that the reformers be the first to use the new spelling and thus serve as an example for the others. Should they refuse to do so, they would be worthy of no further consideration. Should they do so, and should no one else (except “interested students”) follow them, then they would never again be allowed to come forward with their “insolent fantasies.” If, however, “the whole of writing Russia—you [i.e. Grand Duke Konstantin—K.L.], Leo Tolstoy, Count Kutuzov and whoever else is there”—were to follow them, then “their names would be honored.”75 This latter proposal described a course of action that was also suggested by Filipp Fortunatov76 and was not dissimilar to the erstwhile plan of Vladimir Stojunin and his comrades-in-arms. According to Stojunin, the resolutions of the 1862 consultations were merely intended to represent “reasonable wishes

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to simplify our orthography and make it easier.” The assumption was that the participants would subsequently adhere to their resolutions in practice and that possibly the press would soon adopt them as well. “Introducing these innovations into general use, into the media,” emphasized Stojunin, was “not within our power; therefore, they must not be introduced into pedagogical practice until they have gained a foothold in the media.”77 But the press did not pick up the proposed innovations. No official body saw them as a cause for action or even a public statement. This confirmed, according to Jakov Grot, “the truth that abrupt transformations of language made according to a theory never succeed, even if they have the authority of well-known experts on their side,”78 although it should be noted that no single “theory” can be discerned behind the decisions of the 1862/1863 deliberations. Tat’jana Grigor’eva argues that “the activity of the Orthographic Commission,” as she calls the consultations, had “no noticeable impact whatsoever” on the theory and practice of Russian orthography in the second half of the nineteenth century, but subsequently concedes, in a certain contradiction to what had just been said, that this work did encourage a “development of orthographic thought in a reformatory direction,” which subsequently led to a “broad orthographic movement for the simplification of orthography.”79 An approach that is similar in some (but not all) respects, that is, an attempt to set a good example and to encourage adult writers and printers to adopt an improved orthography by means of propaganda in the press, without wanting to introduce it from above, is discussed here in the presentation of a German radical phonetic alternative orthography. Otherwise, especially in an authoritarian state like Russia or the German Empire, many placed their hopes in actors who, in their eyes, embodied the state. For some, it was the monarch, so he should also see to the solution of the spelling question. In the Bavarian House of Representatives in 1880, for example, Deputy Beckh (Coburg) proposed a motion to petition the king of Bavaria to take measures for the uniform regulation of German orthography. The motion was passed almost unanimously.80 For others, it was Imperial Chancellor Bismarck who seemed up to this task, especially after he had already done so much unifying, regulating and rationalizing in and for Germany. According to a contemporary observer, the hope that “the mighty statesman who forced the divided Germany together should now also give it a universally applicable orthography” remained unfulfilled only because Bismarck “had no desire for orthographic laurels,” and that was “for his own benefit and that of the cause!” For, firstly, a solution other than that by force was probably not possible at the time, and secondly, this solution would have remained “a patchwork,” since, as Erdmann stated with a mixture of regret and hope for a better future, “for the time being we are not yet entitled to the power to compel our German brothers in Austria

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to the spelling we have adopted, not to mention the Swiss and Russian Germans.”81 And yet Erdmann considered the imperial government’s intervention in the matter not only desirable, but even “absolutely necessary, if an agreement is ever to be reached in our field.”82 Even under the Imperial Chancellor Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, who as a Catholic Liberal had neither assertiveness nor initiative comparable to Bismarck’s, the idea of the supreme executive power playing a key role in solving the spelling question had not been extinguished. The 45th Assembly of German Philologists and Educators in Bremen adopted the following resolution in its plenary session of September 29, 1899, at the request of Dr. Schneider, gymnasium director from Friedeberg in the Neumark: I. The introduction of the German school orthography—irrespective of its possible further development—into the official use of the imperial and state authorities is most urgently desired in view of the practical interest of the school, the needs of writing in general and not least in the interest of the officials themselves. II. The Assembly instructs its Board to send the above resolution to the Imperial Chancellor and the heads of governments of the German federal states with the request that they ensure the early application of school orthography in official correspondence.83 Incidentally, the assumption that there was “the” German school orthography is remarkable here. In 1899, a nationwide standard did not even exist, there were several school orthographies that differed from each other in some points. The Assembly of German Philologists and Educators as an institution did not participate in the construction of these norms in terms of content, but wanted the non-existent single norm to be introduced by the highest organs of the executive as one that was also generally valid in the administrative system. Still others were of the opinion that, commissions and discussions notwithstanding, the course is ultimately not set in parliaments or in any other bodies, but in the upper echelons of the executive. Therefore, they did not (or not only) share their thoughts and concerns with the public, or with assemblies of experts, but rather directly with the respective minister in whose hands, in their opinion, lay the fate of the reform. Thus, in the archives of both the Russian minister of public education and the Prussian minister of religious, educational and medical affairs and their staff we find petitions from individuals and groups, publications, and personal letters from private individuals (among whom, incidentally, in each case there is one lady84) on the subject of spelling and spelling reform. In most (but not all) cases, people who tried to influence the course of events in this way were alarmed representatives of the

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educated middle classes who saw a danger in the respective planned reform and asked the minister to slow it down or modify it. Incidentally, the fact that they placed their hopes in a representative of state power does not necessarily testify to their slavish subservience, for some of the letters are quite agitated and written in a tone that is not exactly submissive. The only celebrity among the senders, Rudolf Virchow, had published a series of arguments in his own periodical against a spelling reform that would do away with “dead” letters: the change in spelling would make it more difficult for readers, including and especially foreigners, to search in the alphabetical index to the 155 volumes of Virchow’s Archiv für pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie und für klinische Medicin [Virchow’s Archive for Pathological Anatomy and Physiology and for Clinical Medicine] published up to that time; the etymologically determined spellings of words of Greek origin have a historical justification, and so on. Apparently, the famous scientist, in addition to publishing his opinion in the journal, also made sure that the Prussian Ministry of Religious, Educational and Medical Affairs, which was effectively considered responsible for spelling issues in all of the German Empire, took note of it: a copy of Virchow’s article is found among the papers of Friedrich Schmitt-Ott, who at that time was still simply called Schmitt and was an employee (some years later successor) of the Ministerial Director in the Prussian Ministry of Religious, Educational and Medical Affairs Friedrich Althoff,85 while the Resolution, unanimously adopted by the General Meeting of the German Booksellers’ Association in Leipzig on 13 May, 1900 and the brochure by the gymnasium headmaster Karl Erbe The Impending Aggravation of the Spelling Distress in the German Empire86, sent in in June 1900, ended up in Althoff’s own archive.87 No comments by the ministers have been preserved. However great the similarity between the processes of standardizing orthographic norms and standardizing weights, measures and the like, there are no known instances of competences being attributed to a legislature with regard to the introduction of a single orthography in the German states and then in the united empire. The Reichstag did deal with the spelling question at least in one session in April 1880, but its members were rather reticent about regulating German orthography. The Reichstag did not pass any reformatory resolution. The opinions expressed in the session also did not necessarily testify to the deputies’ desire to make orthography a matter of state. Deputy Stefani, for example, declared that the officially decreed school orthographies were not at all necessary, since it would have been “exceedingly easy, without any interference in civic life, for teachers at schools to be forbidden . . . to deviate from the customs of educated life.”88 According to Stefani, the remaining duplicate forms in orthographic dictionaries did not cause the least offence in Germany, “because Germany wants individuality to develop freely, and

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has nothing against such diversity of individuality being expressed in the language and its spelling.” The Center Party Deputy Reichensperger, on the other hand, appealed to his colleagues: “Let us not go any further down the path of regulation and centralization than we have already gone in so many areas.” The historian and member of parliament Heinrich von Treitschke, who vehemently protested against the abolition of the silent h after the t in German words, said, moreover, that the Prussian minister of religious, educational and medical affairs had been “under a delusion, very forgivable for civil servants,” of believing that he had to abide by the opinion of teachers in matters of orthography. To adopt a school orthography “according to the opinion of the teachers alone,” however, was “the same as to draw up a customs tariff according to the opinion of the interested parties and tradesmen involved, which admittedly also happens sometimes,” said Treitschke. However, there was no such thing as the opinion of the teachers. Even within individual schools, teacher communities could not always agree on constructing an orthographic norm. In Halle an der Saale, as described in the previous chapter, in 1865 the teachers’ college of the boys’ school recognized the need for “an agreement on orthography to be reached first among the teachers.”89 This sentence contains a revealing correction. Originally it said “unity,” but was subsequently replaced with “agreement,” which means the decision was made to achieve unity through agreement rather than to decree it from above. Reaching an agreement of all teachers was a process that was considered necessary, but also very difficult. Individual educators were not yet ready to agree on common norms, even within the framework of a single school, by way of negotiation and concession. Discussion was repeatedly suspended or postponed for years, despite the ministerial decree. There were, of course, also educational institutions in which and between which such an agreement was reached. In 1872, gymnasium director Dr. Reisacker from Breslau (now Wrocław) told the assembled German philologists and educators how “in individual schools, individual teachers subject themselves to certain guidelines that they all must agree upon and that the individual, if he should disagree with one or another, must nevertheless obey. The emphasis is therefore placed on the authority of individual schools, and I believe that this authority must be among the most decisive.” In Silesia, according to Reisacker, they went even further, and in 1871 decided at the schoolmasters’ conference on orthography that “the various schools which belong together” should join a certain “convention,” which was to be prepared “by some” and then presented to the schools at the next conference, where differences of opinion could be made known, but after which “a final solution” had to be reached, which would be common to all these schools. At the time, such a decision had apparently not yet been reached; nevertheless, Dr. Reisacker was confident that once such a general norm, negotiated in

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two steps, had been established, “the publishers of textbooks would certainly for the most part join such agreements and norms. On the other hand, such authoritative norms would also find their modifications over time, depending on the development of scientific research.” This, Dr. Reisacker believed, was “a safer way of finally arriving at certain results,” but with a very important proviso: “but also through collaboration with a competent superior authority.”90 This is the crux of the matter. The decision-making authority, whether in the German Empire or in Russia before or after 1917, belonged neither to the legislature, nor the expert elite, nor the public, nor any professional community, but in fact to the executive. Without their support, even agreements that had been worked out collectively in lengthy negotiations and took into account as many different group interests as possible could fail, as was shown quite vividly by the examples of the failed attempts to introduce or reform spelling norms. In view of negative attitudes of the majority of the public in individual German federal states, their governments declared themselves unable to implement the reform decided upon without their participation at the First Orthographic Conference in Berlin. As a result, on 8 March 1876, Falk informed all governments by letter that the decisions of the conference were not to be implemented.91 The painstaking work of the First Orthographic Conference seemed to have been wasted. But only at first glance. For in 1877, the rules adopted at this conference along with the word list were published, and it turned out that the concept and its implementation were not as firmly and completely rejected as media reports might have made it seem. Among the teachers and school board officials, demand for a uniform and officially sanctioned orthography was in some cases so strong that individual federal state governments adopted official spelling rules for public schools and administrative bodies. In Bavaria, a ministerial decree in 1879 prescribed an orthography for use in schools based on Rudolf von Raumer’s book, which had served as a conference template, and the Berlin rulebook. Prussia followed suit in 1880. This time, the new Minister of Religious, Educational and Medical Affairs, Robert von Puttkamer, dispensed with conferences and prescribed a set of rules for school instruction that had been drawn up by an individual, philologist Wilhelm Wilmanns. It largely conformed to the Bavarian school orthography. From the proposals of the First Orthographic Conference, in which Wilmanns had participated, he borrowed the mostly phonetically oriented Germanization of foreign and loanword spellings (i.e., k or z instead of c) and the replacement of th with t in the middle and final sounds, but not at the beginning of the word. He did not adopt the Conference’s rule for vowel length marking aimed at avoiding “superfluous” letters.92 Since the author’s name did not appear anywhere in the brochure,93 the new Prussian school orthography was

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popularly called “the Puttkamer orthography.” It was the Prussian minister of religious, educational and medical affairs to whom the critic quoted earlier alluded when writing that in the field of orthography, the question of correctness would have been decided differently from one day to the next if a minister had the necessary power to dictate a new orthography to the people. Puttkamer called on heads of other ministries to adopt this orthography. Some refused, while others, however, responded to the appeal and, as has been shown earlier, got into trouble from other high-ranking officials. A very eloquent example of how great a role was attributed to agreement reached by self-organized interest groups, and of the crucial role played by the executive’s support in enforcing even a universally acceptable convention is the little-known story of an early twentieth-century attempt to perfect spelling standards in a limited lexical area. It concerned the scientific and technical vocabulary in German. Many technical terms originated in Greek, Latin, French, or English and, due to spontaneous or Duden-driven Germanization, sometimes had multiple variants, which was felt to be a nuisance, especially when looking up terms in alphabetically structured subject indices, directories, handbooks, and the like. One would be inclined to assume that scientists and engineers belonged to the communication communities with whom rational arguments could be used to justify even relatively large and comprehensive changes and, accordingly, those changes could be implemented smoothly with no external authority involved. However, this was not the case. Within individual professions, peculiar conventions had already become so entrenched by the time of the unification attempt that there were serious problems in the negotiations stemming from differences in basic educational values. The majority of engineers graduated from schools offering no Greek or Latin instruction and had a less “traditionalist” outlook. They did not attach great importance to the retention of orthographic signs of Greek or Latin origin of technical terms and, given their technically rational way of thinking, often advocated using Germanized spellings, whereas many academics were more tradition-conscious and rejected Germanized as well as phonetic spellings94 as being too vulgar,95 but above all loathed the coexistence of these with the supposedly etymologically “correct” variants, that is, those compliant with the neo-Latin spelling rules. Thus, in contrast to teachers, their dissatisfaction did not stem from the imperfection of the not yet fully consolidated spelling usage, but rather from certain consequences of the advanced new standard setting and from their desire to control it. The Jena professor Heinrich Ernst Ziegler, for example, drew attention in his 1903 essay to the fact that in the field of zoological terminology, “an uncertainty and arbitrariness” had only arisen after “about three years ago” (i.e., around the turn of the century, which is probably to be understood as an allusion to the decisions of the Second Orthographic Conference and

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the new Duden dictionary edition), when “the new orthographic order” had been introduced. Some publishers and “also some novelty-addicted authors,” Ziegler complained, believed that they had to extend the Germanizing tendency of the new orthography to zoological technical terms, which produced variant spellings (e.g., Kephalopoden, Zephalopoden, and Cephalopoden) and “can therefore become a nuisance in teaching and must cause frustration when using indices of zoological works and alphabetized library catalogues.”96 Note, by the way, Ziegler’s use of modal verbs “can” and “must” in this sentence: instead of reporting real cases in which difficulties actually arose, Ziegler seems to have imagined these annoyances and this trouble. The following sentences make it clear what was actually important to him: “Everyone now thinks they are allowed to make such changes according to their own taste. . . . It seems to me absolutely necessary that the spelling of technical terms should be spared any arbitrariness.”97 This indignation in the face of lively individual variety and this desire to regulate and standardize seem, at least in part, to have been caused not as much by the needs of scholarly practice as by the effect of the overall context described in the previous chapter. This even prevailed over the zoologist’s scientific views, for despite his belief in the applicability of Darwin’s theory of selection to societies and states,98 Ziegler apparently could not imagine that divergent spellings would “die out” by themselves if they were to be perceived as useless and disruptive by members of the communication community. Ziegler saw a collective decision by experts as the solution: the issue should be discussed at a “zoologists’ meeting” and a rule established and “recommended for compliance.” The intervention of the state, as happened with the introduction of spelling in 1901, seemed to him unacceptable: “Scientific terms are not subject to the spelling rules set by the state. The spelling of technical terms is an internal matter of science,99 in which no outsider may intervene.” The biological community followed the same pattern: on April 31, 1904, a “conference to discuss orthography in biological publications” was held in Göttingen, to which botanists, anatomists, physiologists and geologists were invited in addition to zoologists.100 About a year later, on June 14, 1905, a meeting of the Zoological Society was held in Göttingen.101 At these meetings, guidelines for the spelling of technical terms were drawn up and a dictionary prepared. Editors of the Berichte der Deutschen Chemischen Gesellschaft [Reports of the German Chemical Society], Prof. Dr. P. Jacobson, and of the Chemisches Centralblatt [Central Chemical Gazette], Dr. A. Hesse, also noted a “very unfortunate confusion”102 in spelling in specialist works and journals, which occurred after phonetic spellings and, in particular, Germanized foreign word spellings had been “officially” introduced through the Duden dictionary

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alongside the traditional Latin ones and even instead of them. Fully determined to “control the arbitrariness in spelling,” they turned to Dr. Huber Jansen, editor of the universal technical multilingual dictionary, the Technolexikon, which was being prepared by the Association of German Engineers, in view of the numerous overlaps in technical vocabulary, and proposed a joint course of action to agree on a uniform spelling of scientific and technical terms that could “count on recognition in the widest circles.”103 Engineers were probably no less numerous in Germany at the time, but less influential than teachers, for example, and enjoyed lesser sociocultural prestige than scientists.104 For this reason, despite the early (1856) founding of a large association, they did not see themselves in a position to articulate and promote their own orthographic concerns at the imperial level until relatively late, at the beginning of the twentieth century. This step seemed all the more viable to them in alliance with the much more powerful community of German natural scientists, because “involvement of a number of renowned experts” would “offer a greater guarantee of the soundness of the decisions to be taken.”105 Therefore, the board of the Association of German Engineers was “most obliging” in accepting the proposed task of jointly regulating scientific and technical orthography and called an orthographic conference of interested parties and experts in Berlin according to the scheme that had already been tested several times, with the mandate of regulating the relevant spellings as uniformly as possible. The conference, which met on October 21, 1904, and then on April 4, 1905, was attended not only by the editors of the Technolexikon, but also by two dozen delegates from public authorities, technical associations and scientific societies. Many of them were represented in person, others expressed their interest in the discussions in writing.106 There were, for example, representatives of the German Botanical Society, the German Bunsen Society, the German Chemical Society, the Association of German Chemists and the Association for the Protection of the Interests of German Chemical Industry, the German Geological Society, the German Physical Society, the German Pharmacist Association, the German Zoological Society, the Association of German Naturalists and Physicians, the Association for the Advancement of Horticulture in the Prussian States, and the Physical-Technical Imperial Institute in Charlottenburg. Compared to this broad front of scientists, the four representatives of actual engineering professions—the VDI, the Union of German Architect and Engineer Associations and the Association of German Electrical Engineers—formed a very small minority. The interests of publishing houses and the book trade were represented by delegates from the German Association of Book Printers, the Julius Springer publishing house, the Bibliographical Institute, and the German Publishers and Booksellers Association.

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Although the alleged difficulties in looking up words caused by the multiple spellings were one of the arguments in the fight for standardization, none of the editors of the encyclopedias took part in the conference apart from the editors of the Technolexikon. The editors of the Orthographisches Wörterbuch der deutschen Sprache (Orthographical Dictionary of the German Language) and the Rechtschreibung der Buchdruckereien deutscher Sprache (Orthography of the Printers of the German Language) (i.e., the so-called Buchdrucker Duden), on the other hand, were personally represented by Dr. Konrad Duden. Scientific periodicals were represented very unevenly. In addition to the Zeitschrift des Vereins Deutscher Ingenieure [Journal of the Association of German Engineers], there were also deputies from the Freie Vereinigung der Deutschen Medizinischen Fachpresse (Free Association of the German Medical Press), the Deutsche Medizinische Wochenschrift (German Medical Weekly), the editors of the Jahresbericht über Fortschritte der Chemie (Annual Report on Progress in Chemistry), the Journal für praktische Chemie (Journal of Practical Chemistry), the Zeitschrift für Physikalische Chemie (Journal of Physical Chemistry), the Zeitschrift für physiologische Chemie (Journal of Physiological Chemistry), the Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau (Natural Science Review), and the Prometheus. Besides these, the editor of the Chemikalienzeitung (Chemicals Newspaper), which represented an “extremely phonetic direction,” was invited to the second meeting at his request. There were also participants from the other two German-speaking countries: a member of the Austrian Society of Engineers and Architects came from Vienna, from Switzerland there were delegates from the All-Swiss Society for All Natural Sciences and from the Federal Ministry of the Interior in Bern (the latter, however, only ad audiendum et referendum). Interestingly, there were no geographers, astronomers, mathematicians,107 agronomists or representatives of any branches of biology, the military, universities or technical colleges. Not represented (or perhaps represented within the framework of larger umbrella organizations) were railway engineers, shipbuilders and other mechanical engineers. Of public authorities, only the Imperial Patent Office and the Prussian Royal Materials Testing Office were represented; a few other governmental bodies, such as the Imperial Ministry of the Interior, the Imperial Ministry of Public Health, the Royal Prussian Ministry of Religious, Educational and Medical Affairs and the Austrian Imperial and Royal Ministry of Cults and Education merely expressed their interest in the consultations in writing. Incidentally, this seems to have played a significant role in the fate of the resolutions of this conference. As with other orthographic conferences, resolutions were passed by vote. While most of the votes were quite clear, some even “unanimous,” opinions

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differed on one point. By 13 votes to 12, the resolution was adopted that it is necessary that “the vernacular (phonetic) spelling be extended, whereas the historical (etymological) spelling be restricted.”108 Here, then, we see the exact opposite of the contemporaneous trend in philology led by the Jacob Grimm, which was instrumental in triggering the process of spelling reform. A list of foreign terms, compiled by the editor of the Technolexikon, Dr. Hubert Jansen, was adopted as a template. Incidentally, Jansen was neither an engineer nor a scientist, nor a teacher: his fields of study included oriental languages and cultures as well as technical and scientific lexicography, and in the latter field he collaborated not with Konrad Duden but with his competitor Daniel Sanders and the Langenscheidt publishing house. The foreign word spellings were divided into three groups. The first included “scientific” or “scholarly” spellings, the second “vernacular” spellings. These two groups were to be governed by different rules, which provided for less Germanization for specialist literature and more for “general-interest literature (newspapers, fiction, etc.),” for example, in the substitution of the Latin c with z or k. The third, “neutral” group contained words, for which both a scholarly and a vernacular spelling were allowed to coexist, their use depending on the context. It was expressly acknowledged that universally applicable guiding principles could not be established for the delimitation of this neutral zone. For each “scientific foreign word that would have to be given a different form if it were written in the vernacular,” conference participants “considered,” whether “its occurrence in a non-scientific context is currently probable or not.” If such a probability was assumed, they allowed two spellings for the word, otherwise only one. In this way, the interests of scholars, who wanted to keep their specialist terms in “historical,” non-Germanized form, were accommodated, as well as the general trend toward Germanization, which was intensively promoted by the Duden spelling books. At the second session of the conference on April 4, 1905, a ten-member working committee was formed, which in October and December 1905 as well as in March 1906, for a total of 14 days, negotiated the standardization of the “vernacular” and “scholarly” spellings and, in particular, the question of whether “in specialist words of Greek origin, the spelling should follow the Greek origin or the Latin transcription,”109 an unmistakable testimony to the dominance of humanistically educated scholars over engineers, who may have been more concerned with the Germanization of English and Latin foreign words than with a return from Latin c to Greek k or, conversely, with a “general Latinization” as demanded by zoologists.110 The struggle between zoologists and the rest of the participants resulted in rules that were sometimes very complicated and difficult to follow and, on top of that, were not supposed to be “binding for the spelling of biological expressions” and were not supposed to “give any guidance for record-keeping.”111 The resignation in

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the face of the zoologists’ stance, which was “in direct opposition to the current usage in other natural sciences,” literally transpires from the published account of the conference: “The working committee has been well aware of these evils; but it saw itself unable to control them once the appointed representatives of zoology— unconcerned about the consequences for related subjects—had cast their vote.”112 In general, contrary to the hopes of many supporters of unification, the working committee “unfortunately” had to forego complete uniformity, since principles “still” in force in the individual disciplines could not be reconciled with each other.113 In 1907, Jansen presented the result of these “extremely laborious and time-consuming negotiations,” explicitly pointing out that “the greatest differences of opinion had been expressed” therein (not settled!). This is not surprising, given that in the course of several years of work on the dictionary of foreign words, thirteen other scholars and practitioners (one privy chief postmaster, who was probably responsible for the telegraph system, as well as a pharmacist and a factory owner) were asked for contributions, information and revisions. Thus, almost forty people were involved in this process of constructing the scientific and technical orthographic norms.114 In contrast to the Bookprinter’s Duden, which was extremely unambiguous with regard to double spellings, quickly sold out and was repeatedly reissued at the readers’ request, a second edition of this book was not published until 1959. Klaus-Wilhelm Bramann writes that the work was not able to establish itself in the long run and attributes this to the fact that authors did not adhere to the orthography it demanded and the problem of the spelling of foreign words thus fell back on the proofreaders of the printing houses, who were instructed by the chief proofreader of the Imperial Printing House in Berlin “to follow the spelling prescribed by the Bookprinter’s Duden in all cases where the writers did not expressly demand a different spelling.”115 The reform sought by engineers and scientists thus failed in a rather “social Darwinist” way: those standards that did not fit into independent writers’ perceived limits of reasonableness and were not supported by them proved to be non-viable. Since established scientists and engineers who wrote articles for scientific and technical periodicals were free insofar as they had no binding orthography and no longer had to fear red ink from teachers or bad grades, they often did not consider it necessary to obey these unwieldy orthographic norms. Thus, while negotiations and decision-making by assembled stakeholders and experts could easily be initiated at the grass-roots level, that is, without the involvement of the authorities, and could be carried out more or less successfully, the enforcement of the norms (re)constructed in this way

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failed not only because they did not find broad acceptance, as they were not handy enough, but also because of a lack of support from the government that could make these norms mandatory despite their unwieldiness. The lack of support was not because someone in the government questioned the ideal of uniformity. In the German executive system, there was simply no department responsible for orthographic standards in scientific publications. Ministries that were not directly responsible for this, however, showed little interest in this conference, as could be seen from the list of its participants, and did not support its decisions (at least those that deviated from the Duden standards). Despite the generally invoked ideal of uniformity, the authorities of the German Empire did not always present a united front, as the case with the Polish proper names showed. The individual offices sometimes acted more or less independently of each other, their opinions and interests sometimes even colliding. For example, the editorial commission of the Civil Code developed not only its own vocabulary, cleansed of numerous foreign words, but also its own orthography. Other offices and departments were by no means obliged to follow its lead. Only the Imperial Post Office introduced the orthography of the German Civil Code as obligatory for the postal sector. This met with little understanding and approval from heads of other imperial authorities. Sometimes the standards of individual authorities collided with each other. Therefore, the spelling reform in the early twentieth century, which was implemented through official channels, could initially only be applied to schools and civil service. It was only through mass schooling that, over time, more and more writers were trained to respect and apply the new standards contained in the officially endorsed Duden. In Russia, the spelling reform was carried out only through the intervention of the state,116 and in three steps. In the spring of 1917, it was decreed by the Provisional Government but hardly supported by the great mass of writers and printers. In December 1917, the Council of People’s Commissars (which, however, cannot really be called an executive body, since there was no separation of powers under the Bolshevik dictatorship) issued a decree that introduced the new orthography as if all over again, and in the spring of 1918 another decree, according to which it was made final and binding for all, that is, also for private publishers and printers. A contemporary later reported that in Petrograd, armed patrols visited all printing houses and summarily confiscated the types for the abolished letters jer, jat, fita, i, and ižica.117 Elsewhere, especially in the areas not (yet) brought under control by Soviet power, the old orthography persisted for a while. From the mid-1920s onwards, only a few publishers in exile continued to print according to the old rules.

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DISCOURSES USED IN REFORM DISCUSSIONS In discussions about whether and how to optimize the existing spelling(s), similar types of arguments were generally used in Russia and Germany. Their range was not particularly broad and overlapped to a considerable extent with that presented earlier in relation to the discussion about spelling mistakes. Common thematic lines along which both advocates and opponents of a reconstruction of orthographic norms formulated their arguments are presented here as “discourses.” The terms I have chosen to describe the discourses are intended above all to indicate their respective value references. The differences in content between the Russian and German variants of a discourse also appear to be revealing in that they vividly demonstrate characteristic features of each of these two imperial public spheres that go beyond orthography. My survey is by no means exhaustive. Preference is given to those discourses that are of interest from a social and cultural-historical perspective. Among other things, the “linguistic discourse,” that is, the purely linguistic argumentation, is omitted, especially since it has been presented in detail by competent experts in existing studies on the history of German and Russian orthography. It should only be noted that purely linguistic justifications for the (in)correctness of certain spellings have by no means always had a stronger impact than arguments of non-scientific nature, even in expert conferences, not to mention in journalism. The “National” Discourse One of the arguments used to demonstrate that codifying the established usage or even a more or less profound reform of one’s own orthography could be successfully implemented was that such enterprise had proved successful in other countries. “In Spain,” wrote Jacob Grimm, for example, “the Academy has changed the spelling in striking and crucial ways, and everyone has willingly complied with the arrangements made, so that the Spanish language now has an exemplary simple and easy spelling.”118 Grimm’s Letter to the Famous Weidmann’s Bookstore containing this passage was cited by Gustav Michaelis in one of his public talks, subsequently printed as a pamphlet. While Grimm called for what he believed to be a consistently historical orthography, Michaelis advocated an equally consistent phonetic one. What both had in common was their annoyance at the Germans’ unwillingness to follow the good example of the Spaniards and accept an optimizing radical reform of orthography. The frequent reference to other nations whose spelling was reformed more or less consistently according to the phonetic principle does not mean that

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they enjoyed a high prestige in the eyes of educated Germans that would make them worth imitating. More often, the opposite was true: especially after the founding of the German Empire, referencing foreign examples in the context of “national” discourse laid bare cultural chauvinism among many reform advocates in Germany. The two nations seen as Germany’s cultural and political peers, the English and the French, had orthographies that were even further away from the ideal of uniformity, rationality, and simplicity than German orthography, and there were no plans for reform in Great Britain or France. At least the French had their Dictionnaire de l’Académie as a generally accepted reference work for practical linguistic questions, including spelling; their orthography was thus at least codified and uniformly regulated throughout the country. Otherwise, these two languages could only be used as evidence that the nature of national orthography was actually irrelevant to the cultural and political greatness of the nation in question. The chauvinists among the supporters of a phonetic spelling reform therefore cited as examples those peoples to whom Germans felt superior (politically, or culturally, or both). They expressed this feeling of superiority clearly enough as they pointed out that a spelling reform had been successfully carried out “in feeble Spain” and “even in Sweden,”119 and “even the Serbs have reformed their script in the same [i.e., phonetic—K.L.] way, and the Dutch have almost done the same. What they could accomplish, should be impossible for Germans?” a teacher from Kiel exclaimed in 1879,120 implying that the feasibility of a spelling reform was not a matter of complexity. Proving unable to do something that allegedly inferior nations had successfully done would be just embarrassing. Within the framework of the German “national” discourse, the quality of spelling was regarded as something very important for the German people as a political nation: a prerequisite for, an integral element of, or an indicator of successful nation building and a matter of national pride. Optimizing this quality would include making it uniform, that is, the replacement of the many existing systems with a single one, because this would mean overcoming Germany’s historical fragmentation: For eight years now a single Germany has existed again; a single supreme commander has commanded the German army; we now have a single measure, a single weight unit, a single currency, a single law; postal and telegraph systems have become one throughout Germany; our united fatherland has in common a large and annually increasing number of important laws; after centuries of hairraising division and fragmentation, every man that cherishes sincere joy over the regained unity of Germany, every man that has a warm heart for German essence now finally desires the most intimate unification on both a large and small scale: should German spelling be excluded from this blessing?121

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Especially in the 1870s–1880s, the view was widespread that it would be a “patriotic German achievement” to introduce “a healthy unity also into matters of spelling.”122 Furthermore, within the framework of this discourse, it could be claimed that only an orthography corrected or improved according to certain (e.g., historical or phonetic) principles would be in the nation’s best interests. Since 1870, Germans could be “proud of their name as a Nazion [sic],” wrote Paul Eisen, had their language, the “most glorious in the world,” not lost two important qualities “through the misfortune of time,” namely lexical purity and orthographic correctness.123 This exaltation of Germanness increased to the extreme in the further course of the article and culminated in the rhetorical question: “Where in all the world is there a people that . . . is as incapable of writing so many of its most important words as the German people that is intellectually so far superior to all educated peoples and in possession of the most splendid of all languages?”124 A reform of German orthography, which would free it from historically accumulated “errors,” should thus be necessary for the same reason as the purification of the German vocabulary from foreign words. In the Russian reform discussion, however, in contrast to many other areas (see pedagogy mentioned earlier for one), references to foreign examples were rare, which is rather surprising given the high level of attention and respect paid to developments in Western European, especially German, scholarship. German orthographic conferences and reforms seem to have been hardly noticed in the Russian Empire. The famous lexicographer Dmitry Ušakov even denied them outright: no “profound” and “comprehensive” spelling reforms, Ušakov claimed in his overview of the history of orthography, had been carried out “either in France or in Germany or in England.” Attempts would only be made “by individuals and associations to reform the spelling in the sense of bringing it closer to the pronunciation,” and “individual insignificant changes . . . would be made from time to time everywhere.”125 This said, the phonetic spelling of Serbian created by Vuk Stefanović Karadžić in 1818 and introduced in 1864 was occasionally cited as an example of a successfully implemented phonetically oriented reform of a Cyrillic orthography.126 At the 1904 meeting of the Orthographic Commission, for example, philologist Fёdor Korš pointed out that “writing in primary schools is most correct among the Serbs” and “fairly correct among the Czechs, but this is justified by the simplicity of Serbian and Czech orthography and its conformity to the living language.”127 Otherwise, the reformers managed largely without references to foreign experience. At the second meeting on the simplification of Russian orthography (on March 24, 1862), Vladislav Kenevič gave a talk on the letters jer’ (soft sign) and jer (hard sign), in which he said in passing that the problems

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associated with the use or elimination of these letters would disappear of their own accord “if we adopted the system of diacritical marks as in Polish and Czech.”128 It cannot be seen from the published brief minutes of the subsequent discussion whether the audience ever returned to the example of these two West Slavic languages. However, in the letters to the editor published in the Učitel’ there are occasionally proposals to follow the example of Poles, Moldavians, Greeks, and so on.129 These suggestions, however, do not seem to have been seriously discussed in the meetings. Even those people in Russia who could have been aware of the state of affairs in the German reform discussion from personal experience did not refer to them. For example, the most radical phonetist among the members of the 1904 reform commission, Prof. Roman Brandt, informed the chairman of the same commission, Filipp Fortunatov, by letter of his thoughts on the relationship between the phonetic value of the English or German letter h and that of the Russian letter kh, saying that a consistent use of the latter for the transcription of the former was not feasible and that it would not do to want to change the customary spelling of Genrich Gejne (which is how Heinrich Heine’s name is traditionally written in Russian).130 However, Brandt made no mention anywhere of the Orthography Conference, which had recently taken place in Berlin and whose resolutions were being implemented at the time, or of the German phonetists, many of whose arguments he shared, although he would have been quite capable, at least linguistically, of familiarizing himself with relevant publications. It is therefore hardly possible to speak of the existence of an explicit ‘national’ discourse on spelling among the Russian reformers. Rather, one can point in this context to the discussion participants’ eloquent silence regarding the phonetic orthographies of other Eastern European languages that existed at the beginning of the twentieth century, such as Polish, Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian: they were neither mentioned as potential models for an envisaged phonetic Russian orthography nor as evidence for the possibility and expediency of a phonetically oriented reform in Russian. This is all the more surprising as Filipp Fortunatov, an expert in comparative linguistics, was well informed about Lithuanian orthography, among others, as he had spent years studying the dialects and folklore of the various Lithuanian “folk tribes” and collecting and editing Lithuanian folk songs and tales together with Vsevolod Miller, “paying close attention to the peculiarities of [each] dialect.”131 Since the use of the Latin script for Lithuanian had been forbidden in the Russian Empire since 1865, the editors of the Notices of Moscow University insisted that the texts of the songs he had written down with Latin characters be transliterated into Cyrillic ones for publication. Fortunatov probably also knew that several other variants of Cyrillic Lithuanian script were used in official, religious, and educational prints, some of

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which also followed the phonetic principle. They were taught in Lithuanian schools and, in contrast to the largely rejected Cyrillic Polish script,132 were even used by some Lithuanian writers in private correspondence. When Latin script was once again allowed at the beginning of the twentieth century, a new Latin Lithuanian alphabet, consciously distinguished from Polish, came to be used for Lithuanian and for a largely phonetic Lithuanian orthography, developed around 1901 by Jonas Jablonskis, personally known to and possibly even consulted by at least three members of the Russian orthographic reform commission of 1904–1912—Fortunatov, Korš, and Šachmatov.133 We can only speculate about the reasons that led them to avoid mentioning either the two Lithuanian spelling reforms or the Polish one. On the one hand, it seems logical to assume that a reference to the experience gained in Lithuania with phonetic orthography would hardly be of any use to the Russian reform movement, since everything that had happened in the Western gubernias since the 1863 uprising was, for the overwhelming majority of the Russian educated upper class, firmly associated with the stereotypes of “the treacherous Poles” and the “fanatical Roman Catholic clergy” and, therefore, unlikely to generate the enthusiasm and sympathy necessary for public support of spelling reform in Russia. Besides, the then relatively low prestige of Lithuanian may have played a role. The state of development and the cultural significance of Lithuanian dialects were probably not comparable with those of Russian in the eyes of the St. Petersburg philologists, since despite all the richness of Lithuanian folklore, there was still no significant modern Lithuanian literature. Therefore, Lithuanian orthography was probably not a suitable model for Russian as the language of governance and education in the Russian Empire, in which a considerable body of literature of the most diverse genres already existed. The same status inequality seems to have dominated the attitude toward the accumulated experience with phonetic orthographies of Ukrainian and Belorussian. It is true that the first variant of a phonetic Ukrainian writing system based on Cyrillic had been designed by Pantelejmon Kuliš as early as the mid-1850s and was used in his books as well as in the first Ukrainianlanguage literary and political-social journal Osnova, which appeared in Saint Petersburg in the early 1860s. Apart from Nikolaj Kostomarov, however, hardly any respected figures in the St. Petersburg academic world of the nineteenth century were prepared to acknowledge that the so-called malorossy (Little Russians) or južnorussy (Southern Russians) had a language of their own in the first place, let alone a one that could serve as a model for Russian. With some modifications, this Ukrainian orthography existed unofficially, ignored by the imperialist-minded Russian academics, for over twenty years until it was proscribed by Alexander II in 1876. In Austria-Hungary, a later variant was approved in 1893 for Galicia and Volhynia, but in Russia it too

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remained banned until 1905, as did the phonetic Belorussian script in its Latin version, which prevailed until the mid-nineteenth century and was also often used later. The Cyrillic variant existed until 1918 only unofficially (used, for example, for the magazine Naša Niva and poems by Janka Kupala) and, like the Belorussian language as a whole, was not regarded by the “Great Russian” philologists as an East Slavic linguistic and written culture, autonomous and equal to the Russian, that could be taken as a model.134 Likewise, most of the German philologists and educators who took part in the public debate on spelling reform were just as unwilling to accept the largely phonetic orthographies of the peoples that had a relatively low status in the German or Habsburg empires (Czech, Polish, Lithuanian, Hungarian, Croatian, etc.) as models for German. The use of diacritical marks typical of these languages (e.g., ī instead of ie, ih, ieh or š instead of sch, and č instead of tsch), despite the benefits they offered, occurred only very sporadically, in proposals that were hardly ever noticed. Even Friedrich Wilhelm Fricke, a resolute reformer and declared enemy of all stereotypes, who will be discussed here, used them only occasionally. Another interpretation is, however, also possible. This comes from Alexey Miller’s remarks on the subject and seems plausible. The two explanations I have proposed do not contradict it, though, but can be seen as complementary to it. According to Miller, the introduction of the Cyrillic alphabets for Lithuanian, Latvian, Polish, Belorussian and Ukrainian (for the latter, in fact, the Latin alphabet was otherwise often used) as part of the imperial Russification policy was primarily aimed at undermining Polish and German cultural influence on the population of the western periphery of the Russian Empire. With regard to the two East Slavic ethnic groups, this measure was an assimilation project: the switch to the Cyrillic script was accompanied by the suppression of the Ukrainian and partly the Belorussian languages in order to prevent the emancipation of these “Russian dialects.” In case of the Lithuanian and Latvian languages, only their use of the Latin script was targeted, while Cyrillic publications in these languages were not subject to any restrictions, as assimilation of Lithuanians and Latvians was not considered a priority task: the goal of imperial policy toward these ethnic groups was rather their acculturation and loyalty to the empire.135 It remains to be seen whether Miller is right that Cyrillic alphabets were imposed by the imperial government on all of the aforementioned peoples equally as part of a Russification campaign. From the perspective of the topic dealt with in the present study, one thing above all is important: whether designed by Lithuanian, Ukrainian, and Belorussian nationalist culture activists or by Russian researchers, or by imperial agents of assimilation and acculturation, whether intended for the cultural development of these peoples or for their connection to the Russian written culture, these written

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cultures had their own versions of phonetic orthographies. Neither etymological nor cultural-historical considerations, such as the need to preserve a visual link to the language of origin, played a role for these. Therefore, even Ukrainians and Belorussians who were to some extent Orthodox Christians or “reverted” to the Russian Orthodox Church, used alphabets with no Greek letters in words of Greek origin, without a final jer as a remnant of the Old Slavonic sound that had long since disappeared, and with a jat that had a phonetic value clearly different from that of an e. Numerous other traditional orthographic peculiarities of Russian, which often caused difficulties to many students and writers, were for whatever reason not adopted in the development of these new orthographies, which existed alongside the ones more Russian-dependent. In the discourse of the proponents of a Russian phonetic orthography, however, the question of how successful these projects were was not even raised. In the context of ‘national’ discourse, tables could also be turned: critics of the reform in Germany, for example, claimed that the reference to Spain was irrelevant. A radical switch to phonetically oriented spelling could be achieved there, because only a small part of the Spanish population could read and write at all, while the most educated people of all, Germans, had such a large number of readers and writers and such a large body of literature that a reform would be virtually impossible.136 Similarly, in Russia, the Serbian example could be used both to justify and to refute the necessity and feasibility of a reform. Thus, in 1904, the conservative professor of Russian and Church Slavonic philology Anton Budilovič pointed out that a change in the orthographic system only happens when “the people’s and the language’s life undergoes some deep upheaval or when a new period of rebirth begins after a period of decline and crisis,” which was the case “with the Serbs in the time of Vuk Karadžić,” while Russia is currently experiencing neither a shock nor a rebirth, which is why a spelling reform is scientifically impossible.137 Dmitry Ušakov pointed out that when opponents of spelling reform in Russia (whom he did not name) refer to the example of the English, who do not change their spelling despite its extreme difficulty, supporters [of a reform] offer a reasonable counterargument by saying that the example of England is instructive in the opposite sense: it shows the great discrepancy that can arise between writing and language if spelling is not corrected from time to time.138

The pronunciation of what was called the “Little Russian” dialects at the time was used to justify the necessity of jat, pointing out that this letter is neither “dead,” nor “superfluous,” but designates a sound that is pronounced as i in these dialects.139 This was emphasized, for example, by Kulakovskij, Budilovič and Sobolevskij in their polemic with the reformers in 1904.

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Referring to Kulakovskij’s remark that it was desirable to retain the jat, so that Poles and the so-called “Little Russians” could all the more easily adopt the Russian orthography, Professor Budde read out a note from the director of the Kazan seminary stating that more than 50% of the “eastern non-Russians” (vostočnye inorodcy) fail to pass the Russian spelling test due to its difficulty and, therefore, have no possibility of assimilating through school.140 Aleksej Sobolevskij admonished the participants of the 1904 public consultations: In spelling reform we must remember that we have one language—one for all Russians, no matter what dialect they speak, no matter whether they are Great Russians, White Russians or Little Russians. It is our duty not to invent innovations in the field of spelling that would make it difficult for any part of the Russian people to read Russian books.141

The danger of a spelling reform making it more difficult or even impossible for people to read the national classics of the past and thus endangering cultural continuity could thus also be interpreted as a danger of breaking the literary bond tying to the “Great Russian” culture ethnic groups that in the imperial worldview were regarded as parts of the Russian people. Thus the “national” discourse could pass into the “cultural-political” discourse. The “Cultural-Political” Discourse After the 1917 revolution, in Russia the “cultural-political” discourse took on communist ideological features instead of imperial ones. The new orthography, to which all Soviet and many exiled publishers switched, except for the implacably “white” ones, was henceforth firmly associated with Bolshevik power, both by its opponents and by supporters. In retrospective justification of the Russian spelling reform, the “economic” discourse receded into the background and the “cultural-political” discourse took on the new meaning. In 1926, Leo Trotsky declared in a public appearance before the reporters of the Rabočaja gazeta [Workers’ Newspaper]: “The letters jat, jer, fita, and ižica are our alphabet’s nobility that was dissolved by the October Revolution. These are unnecessary, superfluous, aristocratic, parasitic letters. They have been abolished. . . . All other letters, which are really necessary, are not noble and parasitic, but industrious, hardworking letters.”142 Within the framework of “cultural-political” discourse, arguments against the new Russian spelling could be formulated just as well. A few years after the Second World War the conservative-nationalist Russian philosopher and staunch opponent of the communist regime Ivan Il’in, who had been expelled from Soviet Russia in 1922 and lived in Zollikon, Switzerland, among other anti-Soviet works wrote the two essays O russkom pravopisanii (On the Russian Orthography) and O našich orfografičeskich ranach (On Our

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Orthographic Wounds) in which he cited numerous fabricated statements the meaning of which had allegedly been deliberately made unclear by the new spelling, and promised to continue the fight for the letter jat. Il’in attributed the introduction of the new spelling, which he called “revolutionary misspelling” (revoljucionnoe krivopisanie), to machinations of the “enemies of national Russia.” That is, the Freemasons: “They, precisely they and only they” could, according to Il’in, benefit from “all these distortions,” this “confusion in thought and linguistic creation,”143 because “for the world revolution, this is useful, necessary and important.”144 Even within Russia—in confidential conversations during the Soviet era and in anti-communist publications during and after the Perestroika—the spelling reform of 1917–1918 was often denounced as a cultural crime committed by the communists, who were said to have cut off the Russian people from their thousand-year-old Russian and Church Slavonic (hence, Orthodox Christian) linguistic cultural heritage and thereby hindered their spiritual and moral development.145 As a matter of fact, this reform project had been conceived decades before the revolution by people who were Orthodox Christians and Russian patriots as an improvement on the all too difficult orthography so that the common people could become literate and thus be led toward culture, but in the social construction of the new Russian orthography as a “creation of the revolution” this fact was partially ignored or forgotten by its supporters (concerning the identity of the original authors of the reform) and completely ignored or forgotten by its opponents (concerning both the reformers and their intentions). The “Moral” Discourse Some of the supporters of a radical phonetic reform in Germany decried the conventional German orthography taught in school as morally reprehensible among other things, for it did not promote understanding, but solely memorization, and was therefore non-educational and stultifying, harmful not only for the schoolchildren but also for adult society: Inconsistent teaching makes the pupil inconsistent, promotes his arbitrariness, his obstinacy. It damages the reputation of the teacher and the school, leads to a situation, in which the pupil in school and the man in life fear only violence, but do not respect the law; it is therefore immoral.146

The “moral” discourse was also present in the Russian journalistic discussion about spelling. Quite different things could be called a sin, for instance. Teachers or parents who wanted the school to be even more disciplinarian, strict, and demanding of the children, said that it was not bad spelling but rather connivance in school that was a sin, since it led to moral decay:

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Discipline and, consequently, decorum are hard to find among schoolgirls nowadays . . . The consequences of unruly humaneness are too obvious . . . The more willfulness everyone is permitted, the less respect they have for people, for their human environment. And the school is now guilty of a great sin by condoning this licentiousness and backing down before newspaper attacks that accuse it of despotism. . . . An honest, fair discipline teaches the schoolgirls—passively, for what it’s worth, and against their will—to be well-behaved and convenient for society.147

Although sin is a religious concept, there is nothing religious to this discourse: it never refers to any divine matters. Therefore, the term ‘moral’ seems more appropriate. This said, divergent interpretations of Christian morals do seem to have played an important role here. The conservative Russian Minister of Public Education Dmitrij Tolstoj held the opinion that the moral education of youth in schools should be carried out in the spirit of religion as the cornerstone of all future state order, which was interpreted by some part of teachers as a reference to the biblical maxim, “Everyone must submit himself to the governing authorities, for there is no authority except that which God has established” (Romans 13:1), which, interestingly, usually went hand in hand with a negative attitude toward simplifying orthographic reform plans. Another part of the teacher community and the interested public, however, were of the opinion that it was primarily the Christian commandments of loving one’s neighbor and showing compassion that should be applied in school as well as everywhere else, and that the school would be sinning against the children if it made life unnecessarily difficult for them. This interpretation found expression in the argumentation of the advocates of a spelling reform aimed first and foremost at simplifying spelling for the sake of young learners. The public lecture and the resulting brochure by an experienced Moscow teacher Vladimir Šeremetevskij can be viewed as a high point of this discourse: a humane consideration for the situation of the students would be a welcome phenomenon in view of the rigor and pedantry that made it particularly difficult for many of these little ones to fulfil the general spelling obligation, which was not easy in the first place.148

By repeatedly using the Church Slavonic biblical expression “these little ones” (malych sich), Šeremetevskij unmistakably alluded to Jesus’ words, “Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones” (Mt. 18:10). That elementary and secondary school unnecessarily and mercilessly tormented the children with cruel teaching methods and abstruse spelling rules was the tenor of many Russian media statements.149 Moral recriminations were levelled at each other by the supporters and opponents of the reform for polemical outbursts that had failed to meet the

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standards of academic conscientiousness. For example, Filipp Fortunatov wrote to the President of the Academy of Sciences that Leo Tolstoy had “committed a sin: knowing full well that all Russia listens to him, he nevertheless, influenced by some uneasiness, rashly condemned us before becoming thoroughly acquainted with our proposals and their justifications.”150 The “Pragmatic” Discourse In discussions about proposed reforms, it was repeatedly stressed that only projects that brought about as little change as possible would have a chance of acceptance, because radical changes would be rejected by the writing and reading public. The goal of perfecting the existing orthography as far as possible during codification was at odds with the goal of making the new orthography attractive, above all because while optimizing changes were largely intended to serve the interests of young learners, their enforcement depended above all on the reaction of adult readers and writers, who would be required to relearn. The fact that all those who no longer had to write or print superfluous letters would also benefit from the reform was often overlooked. Regardless of the practical advantages promised by one or another project to improve orthography, the social inertia that worked against its acceptance was, so to speak, directly proportional to its radicalism. Dr. Heinrich Erdmann, senior teacher at the educational facilities of the monastery of St. John wrote in the run-up to the first Orthographic Conference: The tiresome particularism, our subjectivism and individualism, the little bit of conservative obstinacy, or, if you will, obstinate conservatism, perhaps also German idealism—all help to explain the disconcerting phenomenon that something that is perceived as a general grievance has been lamented for centuries by all insightful and patriotic men and yet is handed down like an eternal disease.151

As some contemporaries both in Germany and in Russia pointed out, reforms that made the least change to the existing, however unsatisfactory, spelling rules had the greatest chance of success. The “Economic” Discourse A new orthography that would show a greater correspondence between the sounds and the letters and in which superfluous letters (i.e., ones that did not designate any sounds) would be eliminated, was, according to many proponents or advocates of reform drafts, supposed to bring palpable advantages to learners as well as to users of script. These benefits were quite in keeping with

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the capitalist spirit of the time: savings in learning and work time, money, paper, ink, printing black, and other resources. Many participants in the 1862 St. Petersburg consultations on the simplification of Russian orthography, as well as authors of newspaper articles and letters addressed to participants in these consultations, placed such economic considerations in the foreground. Vladimir Stojunin, while admitting that one should not disregard these issues, emphasized that, as the purpose of the consultations was a pedagogical one, issues that could steer the conversation away from that particular concern should not be taken up.152 In fact, even in purely pedagogical contexts, teachers often stressed that the orthography that existed in Russia and the way it was taught and assessed at school amounted to a tremendous waste of a valuable resource, namely time. If the rules could not be made simpler and easier to learn, they argued, it would at least be “desirable that the demands placed on spelling in the examinations should not be particularly high, otherwise a teacher might spend too much time on spelling to the detriment of other, more productive pursuits in the teaching of Russian.”153 Many German teachers, too, were of the opinion that in the current normative situation, the enormous amount of time devoted to spelling exercises (which were not very effective anyway) in elementary school and then in the first three years of Gymnasium, would be better spent on having the pupils read more good books and write more creative compositions. The pointless expenditures that “dead” or “superfluous” letters generated for the printing press were repeatedly cited as an argument in favor of a phonetic spelling reform. Vladislav Kenevič, Jakov Grot and others (mainly journalists) calculated the savings in resources that would result, for example, from the abolition of the final jer or from the consistent replacement of the Cyrillic letter и with the much narrower Latin i.154 In a popular-science presentation that was also used in school lessons, the Soviet linguist Lev Uspenskij underlined the enormous positive significance of the 1917–1918 reform by pointing out, among other things, that if one assumed the average production of all Russian publishing houses at the turn of the century to be about 1,000 titles of 250 pages each, the equivalent of about 8.5 million pages of these would have been printed only with the “useless” and “silly” letter jer. After the removal of the 115,000 “parasite letters” jer from Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the book became a good 70 pages shorter, which, with the six-figure print runs typical of the USSR, meant considerable savings in paper and as many as 3.5 days in typesetters’ work time. The jer was therefore declared the “most expensive letter in the world.” Money was not allowed to be used as an argument in communist propaganda, so it was emphasized that the resources freed up could be used to produce many beautiful and useful books.155 Whether and to what extent such economic calculations actually proved true after the implementation of the reform was never discussed in public. It

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would have been difficult to draw a precise balance due to the effect of many other factors. It was not only advocates of the reforms who used economic arguments. Skeptics and reform opponents pointed out that the changeover to new standards would deprive many entrepreneurs of their money because it would suddenly render many printed products “defective.” In contrast to state schools and public authorities, there was no binding spelling for publishing houses, editorial offices, companies and associations publishing in the private sector, nor was orthography compulsory for private communication. It was up to business owners, editors-in-chief, print shop managers and parents to introduce the “school” (or, as it was erroneously called in Russia, “academic”) orthography or to set their own standards and control their observance. However, it was important to bear in mind that books that deviated from the currently valid school orthography tended to be excluded from use in schools and were not readily bought by parents for their children. In particular, smaller publishing houses that printed textbooks and other books for children and young people were heavily dependent on fluctuations in the standards and their proprietors felt their very existence threatened by every spelling reform, because they assumed that, no matter what grace periods the state set, parents would only want to buy books for their children that could still be used years later, that is, only those printed according to the respective new spelling. Even with minor changes in spelling, large stocks of already printed books would have to be destroyed, printing plates would no longer be usable, manuscripts accepted for printing would have to be corrected again, possibly even re-set, which, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, caused losses and expenses that a smaller publisher could not always cope with. Therefore, every time a new reform was discussed or even rumors circulated that one was being planned, multiple deputations and letters were dispatched to tell the authorities what a ruinous effect a change in orthography would have on affected publishers and booksellers. The book trade also addressed this problem. In May 1900, that is, shortly before the Second Orthographic Conference in Germany, which decided on a reform, representatives of the Booksellers’ Association had an audience with Althoff, ministerial director in the Prussian Ministry of Religious, Educational and Medical Affairs, and expressed their concerns. Althoff assured them that he had no intention of changing the Puttkamer orthography and that their stocks would certainly be sold out.156 On January 17, 1901, 25 Reichstag deputies proposed that the imperial chancellor be asked to take measures as soon as possible to create a German orthography that should be as uniform as possible for the whole of German empire and, as far as possible, also for the German-speaking areas of Austria-Hungary and Switzerland. In the

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Reichstag session of January 31, 1901, Deputy Müller (Sagan) justified the motion by saying that the idea had arisen not only from an idealistic enthusiasm for the German written word, but also from the practical consideration that the German book trade is being severely tested by the fact that considerable changes continue to occur in the orthography of schools in individual German-speaking countries, which makes it impossible to use earlier editions of schoolbooks, and that the sale of books printed in one orthography is also made more difficult in those areas of the country where a different orthography is in use.157

The Minister of State, Secretary of the Interior, and Vice-Chancellor Count Arthur von Posadowsky-Wehner replied that the Prussian Ministry of Religious, Educational and Medical Affairs had examined the proposed reform and had “come to the conclusion that the necessary changes would only be so minor that the textbooks printed according to the old Puttkamer orthography could still be used and would not become unusable—an important issue financially.”158 A spelling reform also entailed expenses for customers who, after a reform, would have to buy new books at least for their school-aged children. Reichstag member Beckh of Coburg was particularly pleased that “in terms of finances, too, some attention will be paid to fathers of families in the German fatherland in particular, so that they don’t have to trash all their old textbooks and buy new ones for their children.”159 However, a spelling reform necessitates not only new textbooks for all subjects, along with new readers and dictionaries, but also new editions of literary works to be read in class, for which royalties have to be paid. Accordingly, member of the Reichstag Dr. Hasse stressed that the spelling issue also involved “the great material interests of the German literature.” Among the major material interests was the profit (which was not the subject of public discourse either in the run-up to the reforms or afterwards) derived from the codification of orthographic norms and the reforms by those companies that printed the new rules. The introduction of uniform and binding new orthographic rules created a great demand for them in printed form: every office, every educational institution, every family with school-age children needed one. In Germany, it was above all the Weidmannsche Buchhandlung and the Duden-Verlag that profited from this. (Why these two publishing houses became the leading producers of orthographic literature from the beginning has not yet been determined. Otherwise, reference should be made to Wolfgang Kopke’s highly interesting remarks on the “lending” of Duden from the point of view of constitutional law.160) The exact circulation figures and profits are difficult to determine, but an example from the early phase will suffice as an estimate. The book Regeln und Wörterverzeichnis für die deutsche

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Rechtschreibung zum Gebrauch in den preußischen Schulen (Rules and A Word List for German Spelling for Use in Prussian Schools), which became the only official version of the newly introduced orthography, was published by the Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, a traditional and respected publishing house. Unfortunately, the publisher’s archives were destroyed during World War II, so we do not know how many copies of the spelling rulebook were printed and sold, how high the production costs were and what net profit the publisher ultimately made from it, but we do get an idea of the order of magnitude from a 1903 invoice issued by the Prussian Ministry of Justice.161 The ministry purchased 15,000 copies, one copy for every two judicial officials, at a price of 14 pfennigs. Prussia at that time had 9 ministries, about 55,000 municipalities with their administrative authorities, about 40,000 primary and secondary schools, in addition to high schools, district and provincial authorities, hundreds of publishers and printers. All in all, without extrapolating, one arrives at no less than 750,000 copies, which, if sold at an average price of 14 pfennigs, means a gross profit of about 100,000 Marks in the first year alone. Unfortunately, we do not know whether and how often new copies were ordered by the authorities later. What is certain is that between 1880 and 1914 alone, the Weidmannsche Buchhandlung brought three editions of this set of rules (printed and reprinted in 1880, 1887, 1901, 1902, 1910, 1913, and 1914) onto the market at a retail price of 15 pfennigs (bulk price 14 pfennigs). In addition, they published a Kleines Wörterbuch für die deutsche Rechtschreibung (Little Dictionary of the German Orthography) by Gemß in 1880, three editions of Wilmanns’ two-volume Schulgrammatik nebst Regeln und Wörterverzeichnis für die deutsche Rechtschreibung für Gymnasien (School Grammar along with Rules and Dictionary of the German Orthography for Grammar Schools) from 1894 to 1908 at a price of 2 Marks, two editions of his commentary on the Prussian school orthography in 1800 and 1887, an extra dictionary for the new set of rules (without double spellings) commissioned by the Prussian government in 1903, of which the Prussian Ministry of Justice alone ordered 15,000 copies at 10 Pf. each.162 In Russia, more than 40 orthographic dictionaries, rulebooks, handbooks, and dictionaries appeared on the book market in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, published by many different large and small publishing houses. Most of them do not seem to have been particularly successful commercially, as they survived only one edition each. Bestsellers, whose reprints and revised editions each brought profits to the same publisher, included, before 1917, Jakov Grot’s Russkoe pravopisanie (Russian Orthohraphy) (22 editions between 1885 and 1916, all published by Tipografija Imperatorskoj Akademii Nauk in Saint Petersburg), Ivan Gan’s Polnyj slovar’ bukvy jat (A Complete List of All Russian Words to be Written with the Letter jat), nine editions of which were published in Vilna (now Vilnius, Lithuania) from 1885–1911, mostly with M.R. Romm,

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but also partly self-published; Fedor Abramenko’s Slovarik, zaključajuščij v sebe okolo desjati tysjač zatrudnitel’nych dlja pravopisanija slov (A Little Spelling Dictionary of about Ten Thousand Difficult Cases) with 14 editions in the years from 1905 to 1913 in Kiev at the publishing house Tipografija t-va I.N. Kušnerev i K° and then at Knižnyj magazin I.A. Rozova (tip. t-va I.N. Kušnerev i K° v Kieve) and then two more editions in 1913–1915 in Moscow at V.V. Dumnov, nasledn. br. Salaevych, and finally Vasilij Pokrovskij’s Spravočnyj orfografičeskij slovar’ (Orthographic Handbook for Learners), whose 12 editions were a great success for the Moscow publishing house Tipografija Ė. Lissnera i Ju. Romana (later Tipografija G. Lissnera i A. Gešel,’ then Tipografija G. Lissnera i D. Sovko) from 1897 to 1913. Sufficient data on prices and profits has yet to be secured, but the overall impression is that, apart from publishing primers, textbooks and readers for learners, printing orthography reference books was a reasonably high-profit industry branch that, at the turn of the twentieth century, was rapidly expanding with the growing number and size of educational institutions, publishing houses, mass media editor offices, government and administration bodies, chancelleries and clerk’s offices of all kinds. Even though private enterprises, unlike state institutions, were not obliged to keep to the official spelling rules, most of them preferred at least to have them at hand for reference. The demand for printed matters complying with and/or describing up-to-date spelling rules was so high that a whole number of publishers both in Germany and Russia depended on the sales of such products. Their businesses were now at risk. In order to minimize the threat to sales of books printed according to the old spelling, a grace period was discussed at the meeting in the German Imperial Chancellery on November 25, 1901, during which old books would still be tolerated in schools. If booksellers had had their way, this transitional period would have had to last several years. However, the Prussian minister decided otherwise: textbooks that had already been introduced “for basic German writing and reading instruction, as well as for instruction in German spelling” could continue to be used until the end of the school year 1903/4, “provided they could be aligned with the new rules in case of omissions or if insignificant changes to individual reading passages, sentences or word forms were to be made in class.” New textbooks and new editions of already introduced textbooks were only permitted if they corresponded to the new orthography. “A grace period of five years (until the end of the school year 1907/8) is to be granted for the editions of school textbooks currently in use, provided they do not belong to the category described above.”163 The state secretary considered a somewhat milder solution to be expedient: “One could also be lenient towards the books beyond the deadline. In particular, the deadline should not necessarily be met for textbooks, apart from readers and textbooks for spelling.”164

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Ultimately, one should bear in mind that the various discourses outlined in this study individually have been separated from each other for the sake of clarity only. In the discussions, moral, economic, national, and other lines of argumentation often formed a complex whole, as, for example, in the assertion by Vasilij Černyšev, member of the Russian spelling reform subcommittee formed in 1904, who said that its chairman Filipp Fortunatov had raised his authoritative voice in support of the half-forgotten interests of our mother tongue and its young learners, for whom our educators, not equipped with proper material and moral means, often work a lot less successfully than one might expect and wish for.165

We encounter these discourses mainly in explanations of why and exactly how existing orthography ought to be reformed. Another, no less controversial question was that of who could justifiably undertake and successfully enforce such a reform.

ALTERNATIVES: PHONETIC SPELLING AND SHORTHAND Apart from the moderate reform of existing spelling, have other solutions been proposed to remedy the flaws166 of the historically established German or Russian orthographies? Of course. In what follows, some of the radical alternatives shall be presented. The less radical of these alternative solutions was a complete rejection of historical, etymological, and morphological principles in favor of a consistently phonetic spelling. In Germany, part of the elementary and high school teachers, citing the difficulty of learning traditional spelling, advocated a reform that would aim at a more complete adaptation of the Latin alphabet and German spelling to the sounds of the German language. These reformers, called “phonetists” or, mockingly, “the fi party” (because of the phonetic spelling they proposed for the word Vieh [fi:]—cattle), proposed removing superfluous letters from the German alphabet and adding whatever was missing in order to achieve, if possible, a one-to-one correspondence between the sounds and the letters. On December 1, 1876, they founded the Allgemeiner ferein für fereinfaһte reһtsreibuŋ (All-German Association for Simplified Spelling). Its founder, Friedrich Wilhelm Fricke, published an Appeal for the procurement of a national orthography for the united Germany (Aufruf zur beschaffung einer nazionalen ortografi für das geeinigte deutschland).167 Within eight years up to 1884, more than 2,000 people, mainly teachers,

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joined the association.168 Thus, open supporters of this radical phonetic reform accounted for just under 4% of the total number of teachers in the country.169 Fricke pointed out that the Fehler (i.e., the faults and shortcomings) of the established German orthography went unrecognized only because people had “settled into the faulty spelling” through many years of daily practice;170 the force of habit, however, could “cover up the fault, but not make it go away.” Through examples of contradictory rules, exceptions and “unprincipled” spellings, he demonstrated that the existing German orthography inevitably led to a situation where the teacher could only tell students, “This is the way to write; comply and learn it by heart (instead of thinking).” Learning orthography was nothing but a burden on memory and an unjustifiable waste of time: according to Fricke’s calculations, every elementary school student had to sacrifice “to orthography about 1,000 hours of his school time, including homework, without ever being able to master the difficult art completely.”171 By introducing a “consistently phonetic spelling,” on the other hand, the teaching of spelling would “not take up any time worth mentioning.” This, Fricke argued, would relieve the elementary school teachers, who are primarily responsible for teaching orthography, “from a heavy burden”; the Gymnasium teachers would be spared “the hard work of correcting German compositions”; and an “even greater benefit would be done to the learning youth.” Such arguments, which invoked sympathy for the learners (especially in describing the existing evils) and moved in between moral and emotional discourses, were found many times in the writings and public lectures of many advocates of a radically phonetic reform of German orthography. They emphasized that “it is rare for a boy who has left school to be able to write his mother tongue correctly,” but that in view of the confusion prevailing in conventional orthography, the students who make mistakes should “not be accused of any sin in most cases.”172 Teachers, too, were not usually presented by them as hostile “error counters,”173 but rather as fellow sufferers (“How many most unpleasant lessons, how many corporal punishments, how much mind-numbing correcting . . . !”174) and as the best experts on the “needs of the people.”175 In Fricke’s own account of his optimization project, two lines of argumentation, which in the analytical scheme applied in this study belong to two different discourses, the economic and the moral, and would therefore have to be considered separately, flowed together in the ‘national’ discourse: “Economic benefit. Time and energy are assets. Every minute spent in vain is a sin, every minute spent in vain is an injustice. Therefore, the time and energy we spend on learning the unnecessary, useless difficulties of our old orthography may at the very least be called an injustice, and the regulation of the same—a national economic imperative and duty.”

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Fricke stressed that switching to a radically phonetic orthography could reduce the time required to learn spelling by 8 to 10 percent, which, he insisted, was significant from the point of view of national economy. After Germany’s industry had been “pushed back from the world market by the Thirty Years’ War,” it was now “progressing again with growing might, and every saving of time and energy is to be regarded and honored as an important factor in the final victory.”176 The savings in the case of a radical phonetic reform would not exactly be small, since, according to one estimate, printing letters that did not designate any sounds cost the German nation 150 million Thaler annually.177 Moreover, private individuals would also benefit from the elimination of superfluous letters, Fricke promised, because “telegrams could be sent faster and at reduced prices.”178 In assessing the results of the First German Orthographic Conference as moving in the right direction, but not radical enough, Fricke wrote, using his radically phonetist spelling: One should think that the strong Germany would not be fainthearted in the face of a work that the weak Spain had succeeded in doing. Since 1870, we have experienced and accomplished so many great things that even the greatest venture must seem small to us, and the fear of the difficulties of an orthographic reform is incomprehensible.179

Fricke also related, without giving the source of the information, that the emperor of Japan was planning to “replace the clumsy Japanese language with a more educated language,” and wondered what language that might be. Certainly not one that “speaks and writes differently,” for that would produce only “astonishment and laughter.” For this reason, neither English, French nor German “would appear desirable to an intelligent nation. But what is possible is a natural spelling,” Fricke emphasized. “Italy has shown this to us through constant harmonious development, and Spain through a bold, successful reform.”180 Here, then, the examples of other nations should appeal to the national pride and ambition of the Germans in three ways: they would have to be at least as “bold” as Spaniards, otherwise they would be not “strong” but “weak” like the latter—and not worthy of offering their language to the Japanese for adoption. The cultural-political discourse is also concisely represented in the phonetists’ writings. According to H. Peters’s conviction, a phonetic orthography would be particularly easy to learn for the illiterate (although he bypassed the question of pronunciation which tends to have more dialectal and sociolectal peculiarities among the illiterate). He hoped that this would lead to a future in which “everyone would be able to write correctly,” which would, however, cause the displeasure of those who “call the phonetic spelling an

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orthography for the plebs” and “now realize with horror that the new orthography is going to fill the great gap between them and the plebs.”181 Fricke tested his system by having his 11- and 12-year-old students write texts according to the spelling he had developed, and then reported in the media that it took them only five to ten minutes to learn it—in contrast to conventional spelling, which schoolchildren did not fully command with even after several years.182 However, it must be taken into account that this testing took place when Fricke was no longer teaching at school, but privately. Lessons taught at home presuppose entirely different learning conditions, different relationships between teachers and students (who by no means belong to the plebs), and between the students and the subject matter. We do not have any source-based statistics on how quickly conventional spelling was acquired on average in private lessons, but there is reason to believe that success was often achieved faster and was more sustainable than in school. Since the often raised argument against a radical spelling reform was that the young generation would be cut off from the cultural heritage of earlier periods by the difference in spelling, the Association ensured cultural continuity and published German classics in the reformed script.183 Its mouthpiece, however, was the monthly periodical Reform, printed first in Bremen, then in Norden by D. Soltau. It appeared for almost thirty years.184 After Fricke’s death, the Alsatian pastor Johann Spieser became the driving force behind the Association and the journal. He taught classes in Waldhambach, and with great success. At the Strasbourg Pentecost meeting of the Association for Scientific Pedagogy in 1909, the teaching method promoted by Spieser was recognized as that of the future. Prof. Rein from Jena built a bridge between this method and Johann Friedrich Herbart’s by stating that it fulfilled Herbart’s demands and claimed that this method would “actually awaken an interest in writing and reading” and that “the tedious teaching of forms” would be transformed into “a stimulating teaching of facts.”185 Spieser also used the new orthography in his own correspondence. For example, in September 1901 (i.e., after and despite the Second Orthographic Conference!) he sent the reform educator Berthold Otto a typed postcard that read: Association for simplified spelling. For every sound there should always be one corresponding letter. No sound—no sign. No c, q, v, x, y; ss, dt, th, ph, rh, ae, oe, ue; aa, ee, oo, ie, ah, eh, ih, ieh, and so on. Even for foreign words, only German letters. Monthly magazine Reform 2 mk. Business location: D. Soltau, Norden.

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On the other side of the postcard Spieser wrote the names and addresses of people in Alsace, in Hesse and in Bohemia who wished to subscribe to the Hauslehrer, and added: In case you do not want to give my name, I also recommend the address “teacher Wickersheimer, Waldhambach i. Elsas.” Would you include a reciprocal ad in the hauslehrer? The text could be copied. Perhaps with an addition of “An abolition of the worst school cross to date.” This addition would have to come right under the letter. So Association for the simplification of spelling. Abolition of the worst school cross to date. For every sound . . . With best wishes J. Spiser186

In fact, Spieser’s journal and teaching activities were mentioned several times with appreciation and approval in the Hauslehrer and in the lessons of the Berthold Otto School. Incidentally, in the interwar period, Berthold Otto himself also tried to develop a phonetic letter script in which, among other things, the vowel length was expressed by the size and/or position of the letters or by the length of the connecting strokes between them. His suggestions, he wrote, “are for the most part not new, but are all based on the observation of children who have observed and understood the formation of sounds before learning to read and write. They demand an unambiguous sign for each sound and consider it inexpedient to render different sounds with the same sign (like ch in ach and ich) or one sound with several signs (up to 4 for the voiceless sibilant we call the dental whiff: s, ß, ss, as in ‘es ist heißes Essen’).” But despite this flaw in conventional German orthography, Berthold Otto expected resistance to the introduction of a however more expedient new script, for extralinguistic reasons: Because of our traditional way of teaching most of us are not exactly incapable, but have become unenthusiastic about accepting new ideas, and we are even more reluctant to relearn. We have had to struggle so much to memorize our word images that we think we have all the reason we need to be angry at anyone who seeks to make our work worthless by introducing new word images.187

Otto believed that the introduction of this phonetic script would also promote the appropriate basis for the general enforcement of stage pronunciation. However, he seems never to have published this draft. Whether he ever used his phonetic script in the classroom will be the subject of future research. In his own notes, he always used either conventional writing in compliance with applicable spelling rules or shorthand. For the Curriculum of the Future

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School, on the other hand, published in numerous editions, Otto designed a “phonetic character script” of his own devising, in which special combinations of “sound character signs” (Lautartzeichen) and “sound place signs” (Lautortzeichen) were used instead of letters to indicate how to produce the sound reproduced by the sign. For this script, not only etymological, morphological, and historical considerations were irrelevant, but also the uniformity so dear to the hearts of the advocates of a uniform orthography: “Of course, without any regard for traditional orthography, one writes exactly as one speaks; thus a person from Schleswig Holstein will begin the word Stein with a voiceless sibilant, whereas the Central German with a post-alveolar one,” commented Otto, without seeing anything problematic in this discrepancy.188 For a while the Allgemeine Deutsche Lehrer-Zeitung (All-German Teacher Newspaper) also sympathized with the radical phonetic agenda and printed individual articles deliberately disregarding the school orthography, considered erroneous by fans of radical phonetic reform, and using the alternative spelling suggested by the respective authors instead.189 It was not a violation of the existing norm, but a break with it, without any firm other norm being immediately put in its place, for the reformers’ publications presented different spellings which were each put up for discussion. However, no consensus was ever reached on a final set of rules for phonetic spelling. Fricke soberly opined that unity in orthography could be achieved “if not by blood and iron, still only by force,” and that there should be no illusions about this. “Trusting in good will, enlightened insight, a genuinely German spirit, etc. proves to be a beautiful, ineffectual dream,” he noted with disillusionment, “because habit is stronger,” since mankind “is still on the low cultural level of allowing itself to be ruled by the moment, the most ruthless tyrant,” and because novelty “frightens people” by the effort it initially requires.190 The radical phonetic reform proposal, however, did not receive widespread support in Germany either from writers, students, and teachers, or from the ruling circles. Proponents of this approach were not even invited to conferences in Berlin, where spelling reforms were being decided upon, and their initiatives were not discussed. One of the possible reasons was apparently the radicalism of this initiative, which scared off the tradition-conscious part of the scholarly, teaching, and bureaucratic community. Another probable reason was that the ministers who determined the composition and agendas of the 1876 and 1901 conferences recognized that, on closer examination, a radically phonetic orthography could not solve the problem completely either, since the spelling simplified according to the phonetic principle should also become uniform and compulsory for all, and a uniform pronunciation to serve as the basis for this did not exist at the time. In the event of divergent pronunciation—which was the rule rather than the exception in the nineteenth, indeed even in the twentieth century—there would have to be spelling

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mistakes and disputes again, so that the “orthographic question” would, in fact, go unresolved. Although the most difficult problems, such as noun capitalization and the silent h, would go away, one would still have to ponder, before writing a word, how to pronounce it “correctly.” Only writers who spoke using the High German orthoepic norm would unquestionably benefit from such a reform, but this was a small minority, most of whom belonged to the educated class anyway and whose children were more successful at memorizing word images through relatively more reading from an early age and thus had fewer difficulties with spelling in general. In Russia there were also advocates of a radical phonetic spelling reform, but they were fewer in number, did not form an association and did not have a media outlet. In the Petersburg Russian teachers’ meetings of 1862–1863, some proposals were made in this direction, and they were also implemented in the reports published in the Učitel,’ so that readers could get an idea of what the new spelling would look like.191 But like any other resolutions of these meetings, they were not subsequently taken up again, not even by this same journal. Radical phonetic voices were also raised at the beginning of the twentieth century. Between 1904 and 1916, the Commission for the Simplification of Russian Orthography received a few dozen letters from all over Russia with variously radical proposals for reform, calling for pronunciation to be more accurately reflected in writing and in some cases proposing extra letters for this purpose.192 The dean of the Imperial Moscow University’s Faculty of History and Philology, Ord. Prof. Roman Brandt, spoke at the meeting of the commission on April 12, 1904, “theoretically in favor of the most perfect possible approximation of writing to literate pronunciation,” but “in practice” he was “prepared to make concessions to custom, although he would not fear the accusation of illiteracy that might be levelled at him for a purely phonetic spelling, which our literati equate with the spelling of housemaids and cooks.”193 In view of the “uncertainty of the dialectological and etymological data,” Brandt considered it possible to “allow for writing by ear or even for double spellings in individual cases.” Moreover, he did not demand “scientificity” from the orthography, but “would stand on practical ground and would be convinced that the planned reform was in accordance with the development of the literary Russian language from the written to the lively simplicity.”194 In Russian, alignment with the pronunciation has only become established to a limited extent (with the prefixes voz-/vos-, raz-/ras-, iz-/is-, etc.). In the closely related Belorussian, around 1900, it became the basis for a new orthography, which, however, cannot be discussed in detail here. Whether a radical phonetically oriented reform, called for several times but never attempted on a large scale, could have solved the problems of German

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or Russian orthography described earlier, but that is a moot point.195 What is certain is that in reality a different path was taken. In the last third of the nineteenth century, explicit calls for the standardization of German pronunciation and efforts to unify it, most notably on the basis of stage pronunciation, became more frequent: attempts were made to eliminate the discrepancy between the “write as you speak” principle, still maintained despite many modifications, and orthographic reality by prescriptively aligning pronunciation with the written language. These efforts culminated in the publication of Theodor Siebs’s German Stage Pronunciation discussed earlier. An even more radical alternative solution to the “spelling issue” envisaged a complete abolition of the old alphabetic system and a complete switch to shorthand across the board. This topic will be dealt with in more detail here, as it has received too little attention in research so far.196 Shorthand was invented and successfully used until the late twentieth century as an alternative to conventional writing for situations where notes had to be taken very quickly, for example when taking notes during speeches, lectures, negotiations, and other public appearances, as well as when taking dictation for business letters, reports, and so on. The higher writing speed was achieved by reproducing whole groups of sounds or letters, sometimes even entire words, by means of differently shaped, simple and quick single strokes. Shorthand also had more or less strict rules that varied in consistency and logic depending on the system. But at least in their deliberately simple and logical variants, the rules of shorthand tended to be less “tricky” than conventional orthography. Some other advantages over alphabetic writing shorthand was believed to offer will be discussed here. Because of these advantages, there was an idea for a while that shorthand, or a particular system of shorthand, would be increasingly favored by writers and thus at some point finally replace the less practical conventional longhand.197 Historically, this has not come even remotely close to happening, but for several decades the shorthand alternative was no less significant than any other, both in theory and in practical implementation attempts, and therefore deserves our attention. Despite isolated short-lived precursors in the antiquity, the Middle Ages and the eighteenth century, shorthand was a child of the modern era. Its rapid development and dissemination in the German-speaking world began in the years preceding the March 1848 revolutions, as meetings of legislative bodies and associations, specialist conferences and congresses, court proceedings, and so on, increasingly came to be recorded for the public to be able to follow them. Although after the defeat of the 1848 revolutions parliamentary and political activity in general dwindled in volume, the late nineteenth century saw a proliferation of other new fields of activity where stenography was a welcome tool to increase the pace of writing: modern business life, modern

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administrative apparatuses, modern educational and research institutions. With the development of the modern capitalist corporate culture, the amount of business writing increased, including not only accounting but also ever more extensive correspondence, both in-house and external, dictated by the bosses and written down by clerks (increasingly also female secretaries). Lectures had to be taken down at ever more numerous and larger educational institutions where specialists for modern jobs were trained, and so on. How great and general the desire was at the time to overcome the immanent disadvantages of the conventional German handwriting is made clear by the fact that several dozen (in some estimates even more than a hundred) shorthand systems were created in the German-speaking world, and their competition was very intense. Shorthand lovers usually formed hierarchically structured organizations that both disseminated shorthand through teaching and propaganda and carried out the so-called “system work,” that is, work on solving practical and theoretical issues. Shorthand systems, often referred to as “schools,” had a relatively low mass inertia, because they were “hand-made,” constructed to a large extent consistently according to certain principles and deliberately intended by their inventors to be gradually refined. Further development of a system was enshrined as a goal in the statutes of each association, and in the largest of them there were special committees that dealt with proposals for optimization. However, system work was also carried out locally by individuals as well as groups, and the results were continuously published for discussion in specialized periodicals. At more or less regular meetings—from regional stenographers’ conferences to all-German congresses—the results of such discussions were then put to the vote and the proposed changes and additions either incorporated into the rules or rejected. In contrast to conventional writing, improvement by reforming was thus an integral feature of German shorthand. Here, too, conferences and taking a vote constituted central mechanisms of norm (re)construction. Also in contrast to conventional writing, however, every shorthand system from the outset had a supreme authority—its creator, whose power to reform was never questioned. It was easiest to implement changes initiated by the author himself, for in every stenographic school there was a veritable cult of its inventor, who was called Master, Teacher, Father, or Leader (Führer), while the school’s adherents often referred to themselves as his disciples (Jünger, the same word was used for Christ’s apostles). After the inventor’s death, a new leader was elected, who might be somewhat less authoritative, but whose word always carried more weight than that of a philologist or state official speaking on the orthographic question. Of course, although customary usage did not become as entrenched in the field of shorthand as it had in the centuries-long history of conventional

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orthography, as a system aged and the number of its adherents increased, it became more and more difficult to introduce innovations. Nor did it always go smoothly. “System issues” were often the subject of fierce battles within stenographers’ associations, which turned into outright paper wars on the pages of specialist journals. Sometimes agreements on amendments were reached at congresses, but conflicts often arose when someone invented something new and met with a positive reaction from one part of the system users, but a negative reaction from another, and especially when the system originator would not accept an innovation proposed by someone else. Sometimes a vote was not enough, because individual associations voted for one or the other innovation at congresses, but then still actively campaigned against it in the media and in practice. Conversely, at times supporters of a rule rejected by the majority continued to adhere to it. All this led to divisions and factions, to the emergence of oppositions within the school, to savage mutual insults in the specialist press and finally to the departure of “sectarians,” who then formed their own organization. Later, however, there were often reconciliations, reunions, and the renaming of systems reformed on the basis of compromise. The two leading (and rivaling) shorthand systems were named after their inventors Gabelsberger and Stolze. Taken as a whole, system struggles and the authorities’ reluctance to give any school a preference over others contributed to the fact that in the German Empire—in contrast to Austro-Hungary, for example—no single school ever attained the monopoly that, due to a lack of competition, would make its further refinement unnecessary. Work on the (further) development of competing shorthand systems did not largely cease until the 1930s, when the National Socialists carried out a forced standardization of shorthand and the integration or dissolution of all associations. As damaging as the monopolistic position granted by a state privilege would have been for the development of a shorthand system, it was nevertheless the much-coveted goal of every school of thought. The numerous German stenographic schools engaged in a fierce competition for the favor of the public and the authorities (by no means only the potential clients!), which led an internal observer to state that “the mutually hostile schools” were “militant organizations by nature.”198 They essentially used three types of competitive tactics. From time to time, open competitions were initiated in order to “compare the systems,” but just as often they were criticized, for it was obviously a competition between persons and not between systems. Another kind of competition was mostly carried out in the trade press and at conferences, where advantages and disadvantages of different systems were compared with each other in participants’ speeches and debates. In this comparison, the criterion of “(un)scientificity” played a role, because in the

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nineteenth century Germany science conceived in positivist terms was held in extremely high esteem, especially in the eyes of the particularly prolific writing middle class, and Germany was also and above all regarded as the locus of modern scientific research and teaching, so for many discussion participants “unscientific” equaled “charlatanical.” The third competitive tactic was to advertise economic advantages of a system. These tactics and discussions about them will be analyzed here in relation to the “Stolze system” and its modified versions, the so-called “NeuStolze” system and the so-called “Unified Stolze-Schrey” system, which came into being in the 1880s. This system was not only widely used but also explicitly developed and presented by its inventor and its adherents as an alternative to conventional alphabet script. The inventor of this system, Heinrich August Wilhelm Stolze, lived and worked in Berlin. His system, first published in the 1840s after two decades of silent preparation and tirelessly developed ever since, was mainly used in Prussia and the countries conquered by Prussia, as well as in Switzerland, but was also adapted for Latin, English, French, Italian, and Spanish. Stolze’s system saw itself as “scientific” because it was based on “ironclad consistency,” whereas its rival, the South German system of Franz Xaver Gabelsberger, first published in 1834, was more of an “art,” complex and sometimes contradictory, which is why even after a long apprenticeship only a few Gabelsbergerians were able to write really quickly and correctly. Wilhelm Stolze, who had spent years studying shorthand systems of the past as well as an extensive literature on language history and who combined approaches by Grimm and Humboldt, brought to shorthand the spirit of accuracy, regularity, and completeness. He created a system in which neither terms, nor sounds were written, but letters or their clusters. Stolze’s dream was to make shorthand a general writing method that would surpass the traditional longhand in simplicity, economy and universality and therefore replace it completely. Accordingly, his system was intended for “everyone” as a target group, while Gabelsberger’s system was rather elitist, aimed at “all educated people.” Indeed, over time, in addition to representatives of the bourgeoisie, workers, and craftsmen increasingly started to attend the shorthand courses offered by the Stolzeans—as with all systems, free of charge or for a small arrangement fee.199 It is important to point out that shorthand classes offered by associations were mostly attended by adults rather than children, and teaching was largely limited to communicating practical skills without trying to make good Christians, good subjects and good persons out of the students. There were some classroom discipline requirements such as avoiding noise and other distractions, and some body disciplining in order to achieve the necessary writing pace and avoid chirospasm, but systematic disciplining aimed at instilling

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obedience in students was never a goal. Unlike primary and secondary schools, shorthand classes for adults did not pursue moral education goals and, therefore, although learners naturally made mistakes and these weren’t ignored by teachers, no moral quality was assigned to them and cases of leaners’ malperformance weren’t linked to their alleged personality flaws such as laziness, lack of attention, carelessness or proneness to sin in general. This made the whole learning experience different. Furthermore, in some systems, their founders and followers made a point of making shorthand ever easier to learn and use even for the uneducated. In an effort to simplify the Stolze system, for example, “philological correctness” was sacrificed to some extent by dispensing with individual rules and principles adopted from conventional German orthography, such as the division of words into a prefix, root, and suffix, or specific spellings for foreign and loanwords. This led to accusations of “unscientificity” not only from the competitors, but also from the more conservative wing within the Stolze school. In response, a renowned theoretician and reformer of the Stolze system, Dr. G. Steinbrink, gave a lecture in 1879 On the Concept of Scientificity in the Field of Stenography, which was later published in the stenographic press and as a standalone brochure. The speaker began his answer to the critics with the question: “What on earth does ‘scientific’ mean? . . . we [do] not yet possess any, much less a generally accepted method of scientific criticism in the field of shorthand.” Steinbrink formulated his own concept of scientificity as follows: Scientific . . . is the procedure when every change in the system is examined in every . . . direction . . . , when the various reasons, insofar as they conflict with each other, are carefully weighed against each other, and when the final decision leaves as little room as possible for indeterminate emotional assessments.200

In Steinbrink’s opinion, the statistical method of frequency analysis was best suited to this purpose. He could “not at all” concede “an independent significance” to linguistic aspects “alongside or even above” the statistical ones. Precisely for the sake of scientificity, “linguistic considerations” should not have equal status with others in the further development of a stenographic system, but should be subordinate to them, he argued. Wherever grammar and linguistics can help the solution of specifically stenographic optimization tasks, one would gladly make use of them. “An orthography that makes sense” could be “very useful in increasing the readability of stenographic word images; hence the connection of our shorthand with orthographic reform efforts.” Apart from that, however, “linguistic and grammatical rules .  .  . have no bearing at all on shorthand.” For stenography, according to Steinbrink, is not there to blindly obey and serve any science. Its purpose is to make writing faster and more convenient. Steinbrink illustrated this with a

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very significant couple of metaphors: etymologically determined spellings of foreign words (at which Gymnasium pupils often failed) were out of the question for shorthand, because a doctor who wants to “throw his findings onto the paper more quickly with the help of shorthand” while at the patient’s bedside should not be prompted by the rules of shorthand to “look up lexicons if he cannot make sense of the etymology of some Greek term!” Steinbrink then resorted to a leading metaphor of the time, discussed earlier, when he wrote: When I think of shorthand as a railway train that is supposed to take us smoothly and easily from there to here, [impositions of this kind] seem to me comparable to the jolting and bumping of a badly built carriage, which reminds us over and over again that we are being driven, while the quality of a means of transportation consists precisely in the fact that its being there becomes as imperceptible to us as possible.201

Steinbrink firmly rejected the idea that there was anything “much more important” than expediency and economy. As will be seen here, there was no shortage of scientists who just as resolutely took the opposite view. One of the most important thrusts in perfecting the Stolze system was to create symbols for the most frequently occurring sound combinations that could be learned and written as quickly and easily as possible. The frequency was initially estimated intuitively, but later became the subject of detailed research. It was only in connection with the criticism of the Stolze system that the importance of the frequency factor for a scientifically founded improvement of writing was adequately appreciated. Several counts were made on the basis of different text corpora. One particularly large count, for example, was based on the minutes of the German Customs Parliament meeting of 1869, which covered a total of 36 hours of debating. The total number of syllables uttered during this time was 436,000.202 Later, the scope of the counting work expanded. In the 1890s, a bank employee and stenography teacher named Friedrich Wilhelm Kaeding, assisted by 1320 volunteers from many Stolzean associations, calculated the frequency of words, syllables, and sounds of the German language on the basis of literary and journalistic texts. The data set comprised about 11 million words (over 250,000 different word forms). The “Kaeding count” remains the world’s largest linguistic statistical study to date, as all other comparable counts were based on much smaller amounts of data. The frequency profile of the German language calculated by laymen at the time was so precise that a new calculation, carried out in the Federal Republic of Germany in 1973 with the help of a computer system (using a data set half as large), produced a result that was only slightly different. Institutionally, the main sites where this scientific work was carried out were not academic institutions (although chairs of stenography existed at several German universities and trade schools), but stenographic societies

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and associations.203 The collection and primary processing of data was carried out by activists free of charge, but the publication of the results in the form of a frequency dictionary required funds that neither Kaeding himself, nor the stenographic association to which he belonged had. Convinced of the national importance of his work, the researcher wrote a petition to the emperor asking for a grant of 15,000 marks to cover printing costs. The Imperial Chancellery requested an expert opinion from Dr. Carl Ernst Konrad Burdach, a full professor at the University of Halle. Burdach attached a rather extensive justification to his negative evaluation, which, if I am not mistaken, has never been dealt with in the research literature. Burdach’s expert opinion shows quite vividly the relationship between the “stenographic science” and academic philology at the end of the nineteenth century, as well as the intellectual and value contexts, in which scientific work on the improvement of writing in Germany was conducted at that time. Burdach wrote with strong displeasure that Kaeding had attributed a great national and ideal significance and a high scientific value to his dictionary, while in reality his work served only “the carrying out of shorthand, possibly also the technique of casting type,” that is, a “lowly purpose in a narrowly limited sphere of certain technical needs,” and was carried out in a “purely factory-like” manner by “employees who are, like prisoners, forced to work as human counting machines.” This reminded Burdach of the “well-intentioned but basically laughable excesses” that were particularly widespread in the life of German public associations. Wherever a group of German men joins together in a common activity, be it to reform orthography, cultivate cycling, practice shorthand or play chess, there is never a lack of spirited speeches about the high national importance and the ideal value of the common task. . . . since, in the present day, genuine ideals have little effect on the great masses, hollow substitutes come forward in their place.

The expert admitted that he himself was not familiar with shorthand and could not judge whether the frequency calculation could really have such great significance for “the art of stenography or, to use the editor’s strangely unclear expression, ‘for stenographic science.’” However, he doubted very much that Kaeding’s linguistic-statistical survey would help end the dispute over the merits of Stolze’s, Gabelsberger’s, Arends,’ and so on, shorthand systems and “a uniform, generally recognized system would be brought into being, . . . since otherwise German particularism would first have to die out, as it reveals itself so obnoxiously in the orthographic movement, for example.” Burdach also doubted the possibility of “furthering” the question of the most expedient stenographic abbreviation formulas “simply by the mere crude presentation” of the dictionary. In general, he did not consider the spread of shorthand to be “an absolute progress or gain” in the interest of “true education,” for it would

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lead to a “reduction in the ability to really understand the words heard in context and to various other disadvantages.”204 Kaeding’s enterprise, Burdach thought, should be paid for by “interested parties.” However, he considered it sufficient to grant Kaeding only about 1,200 marks for the completion of the manuscript, which could then be displayed in a library for general inspection. The reviewer had no experience not only with shorthand, but also with lexicography. He studied German and classical philology, philosophy, and psychology, and in 1880 defended a dissertation on the poetry of Reinmar the Old and Walther von der Vogelweide, with a focus on stylistics and intellectual history. Afterwards he wrote a great deal about Goethe’s language. After his habilitation in Halle in 1884, he dealt with the philosophical origins of the Renaissance. It was not until 1902, that is, already after assessing Kaeding’s work, that Burdach set about researching the development of the written High German and published a series of works on the history of language. His interest was not in formal, but in semantic aspects of German writing. It is not clear from the documents in the relevant file in the Secret State Archives in Berlin-Dahlem why, despite all this, this man of all people was asked to assess Kaeding’s application, while there were a whole range of experts whose fields of interest lay much closer to relevant aspects of contemporary linguistic research and lexicography, such as Wilhelm Wilmanns, Hermann Paul, Konrad Duden and others. It was only natural that Burdach, as a representative of traditional German philology, saw nothing of value for science and for the German nation in the initiative of the non-academic Kaeding. This view resulted from his academic background and the mores of the German scholarly community of the time. Philologists at the time considered the content and the linguistic means of expression found primarily in outstanding literary works of the past to be worth exploring. The counting of words, syllables and phonemes did not seem to them to generate significant knowledge. Linguistics, especially quantitative linguistics, was still in its infancy at that time. Only later (but still during the lifetime of the generation to which Burdach and Kaeding belonged) would its most important theories be formulated and its establishment as a discipline in its own right be achieved. Just as typical of German science at the end of the nineteenth century was the idea that an uneducated person was not “called” to do serious scholarly research and could not communicate with academically educated scientists on an equal footing. Kaeding had neither a university degree, nor a schoolleaving certificate, as he had left the Gymnasium in second grade and then earned his living as an accountant. Of course, Burdach is unlikely to have been informed about the details of Kaeding’s biography. Kaeding’s study also had other features that left it no chance of a favorable review from a tradition-conscious academic expert. These, in Burdach’s

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view, included above all its “lowly,” far too utilitarian purpose and its data collection and processing procedure, which envisaged an inconspicuous computational activity using a large number of volunteers, rather than being the intellectual achievement of a single scholar. The disparaging comparisons with a factory and forced labor were not accidental: industrial capitalism and the brutality of modern state power were the opposite of Burdach’s ideal of pure and free scholarship. For both in the German academic world and in the public sphere, a clash of values was emerging in the late nineteenth century that had both deep roots and far-reaching consequences.205 One camp was formed by the proponents of “classical” ancient Greek and Latin literature, of “human beauty and greatness in all spheres,”206 of idealistic aspirations, including pure science for its own sake without any immediate practical purpose, not to mention saving of resources. In addition to numerous humanities scholars, this camp included also physiologists, such as Emil Heinrich du Bois-Reymond and Hermann Helmholtz, the philologist and archaeologist Ernst Curtius (whose brother, the linguist Georg Curtius, was incidentally one of the most prominent critics of the Young Grammarians), the physicist and chemist Gustav Magnus, and many others. Their ideal image of a scientist was the “Apollonian” type: a beautiful individual who does not bother with “a dozen jobs,” but works on beautiful scientific problems. He labors selflessly and devotedly for the sake of pure science, and, although surrounded by students, he does the really important work alone. This ideal was regarded as typically German by du Bois-Reymond, Helmholtz, and many other representatives of this camp.207 Its appeal was enormous, and the influence of this camp was correspondingly great, although it was not institutionalized in any way. The other camp was defined, as it were, ex negativo: it included those, whose research interests or methods did not correspond to the ideal image described earlier, but who (possibly implicitly) paid homage to values described as “materialism,” “Americanism,”208 and “mercantile spirit.” These scholars devoted their organizational activities and research to utilitarian, applied, practical goals, favoring research methods that minimized the impact of the researcher’s personality on the outcome of the investigation and readily resorting to industrial methods of scientific knowledge production. Steinbrink’s lecture cited earlier could probably serve as a prime example of this. Given the economic advantages of this latter kind of science, some supporters of the former tried to adapt it for their own purposes. For example, du Bois-Reymond wrote in the 1870s that scientific work required “huge numbers of workers” and “why shouldn’t science be organized like a factory,” that is, with a division of labor?209 However, when something like this was implemented in the new building of the Physiological Institute, the great master felt very uncomfortable in this science factory and withdrew to

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a separate laboratory, where he continued to work alone. In a letter to the zoologist Anton Dohrn in January 1882, he complained that he had a lot of beautiful and important research topics ready, but that the young scientists preferred to conduct some unbearably boring respiration studies instead and draw curves that were just as boring to look at as houses in the street. And then they looked over their shoulders at him disdainfully, as if he weren’t doing any real science.210 In his expert opinion, Konrad Burdach repeatedly and clearly stated that he himself belonged to the former camp and Friedrich Wilhelm Kaeding with his project to the latter. Thus everything—the applicant’s social profile, the subject and purpose of his project, as well as his working methods—worked against Kaeding. No wonder that the expert opinion and the decision based on it were negative. What is rather surprising is that the expert at least approved the granting of a not inconsiderable sum for the completion of the manuscript. Although the application for a grant was rejected, this was only a relative and temporary defeat, because firstly, Kaeding was soon able to self-publish the dictionary,211 and secondly, his concept was to loom large in terms of the development of linguistics. For along with many other representatives of the German “thinking class,” Konrad Burdach was to about to discover how modern trends in science as well as in society were gaining momentum and influence. Literary studies in particular very soon had to make room and share the philological field with linguistics, which was oriented toward values, objectives and working methods so odious to Burdach. The Häufigkeitswörterbuch der deutschen Sprache [Frequency Dictionary of the German Language], compiled under Kaeding’s direction, was not only appreciated by this new science, but formed one of its cornerstones, the basis of quantitative linguistics and modern statistics, for Zipf’s law was formulated in the 1930s on the basis of Kaeding’s count.212 The dictionary retained its importance for many decades and was even partially reissued in 1963.213 It was not until the middle of the twentieth century that it encountered competition: works based on other calculations appeared, and later also studies that differed from Kaeding’s approach by taking oral speech into account and strictly adhering to the principle of synchronicity.214 In the twentieth century, Kaeding’s work formed the basis for important studies in statistical linguistics, such as Helmut Meier’s Deutsche Sprachstatistik [German Language Statistics]215 or the series of computer-based studies conducted under Wolf Dieter Ortmann’s direction in the Goethe Institute’s Department of Academic Didactics.216 In addition, Kaeding’s count provided the basis for a large number of lexicographic and didactic works based on a concept of basic vocabulary, according to which textbooks and basic dictionaries should contain the most frequent (and not, for example, most “important” in terms of meaning) words of the respective language.

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The tremendous volunteer work done by the Stolzeans for the sake of perfecting their shorthand system led to progress, but these accomplishments could mostly only be noticed and appreciated by those who were already familiar with shorthand and knew its older versions. However, the associations set themselves the goal of continually recruiting new members. Instruction in the associations was free, so development and dissemination of stenographic techniques was not in and of itself a directly profit-oriented activity, but increasing membership numbers was important for competition with rival systems. The competition between the systems was not primarily about material profit, but rather about social capital. The creators and supporters of the individual shorthand systems used some of the same competitive tactics as providers of goods and services operating in a market economy, because they lived in a time, “in which the struggle for survival rages ever more furiously in all areas and the economically weaker party is easily defeated.”217 Here, scientificity played a subordinate role. Above all, the economic advantages of one’s own “commodity” over those of other providers were touted by pointing out how much more valuable resources one could save by resorting to this particular solution. Frugality was particularly effective in advertising because, on the one hand, it was one of the traditionally fundamental German bourgeois virtues and, on the other, it was a not insignificant factor in capitalist competition. Significantly, it involved savings on the same resources as alternative orthographies, namely time, energy, paper, and printing ink. In this respect, all shorthand systems had an advantage over ordinary writing. As stressed in advertising brochures for all systems, shorthand could be learned more quickly than “regular” German handwriting and spelling. Moreover, any piece of writing could be executed more quickly, and potentially in sync with speech. Shorthand also helped to save paper, as its advocates pointed out, because stenographic characters took up less space than letters;218 stenography, when commanded well, often required less physical effort than ordinary penmanship, because many stenographic systems did not use varied pressure when writing. Last but not least, shorthand could also be promoted on the grounds that many orthographic problems, especially the most difficult ones, such as capitalization or the choice between ß and ss, which often involved tedious thinking or looking up, were no longer necessary when using shorthand. In promotional materials for the individual stenographic systems, the reader was also shown exactly how much could be saved with the help of the respective system in comparison with both regular writing and other shorthand systems. This advertising and the commitment of shorthand enthusiasts, who taught shorthand in courses and associations free of charge, led to a rapid increase in the second half of the nineteenth century in the total number of people, mainly city dwellers, who could write and read shorthand characters more or

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less well. The Stolze system alone recorded 109 clubs with 6,050 members in 1866, and by 1891 there were already 495 Stolzean clubs with 12,448 members. By 1892, 57 editions of Stolze’s short manual, first published in 1845, had been printed in 20,750 copies.219 In all, there were several million people in the German-speaking world who had some command of a stenographic system—a clientele whose specific needs spawned a cottage industry of sorts: at the turn of the twentieth century, several publishing houses specializing in stenographic literature existed in the German Empire. In addition to textbooks and specialist periodicals in “regular” script, they printed entire books and journals in shorthand, such as volumes of prose and poetry, the New Testament, and so on.220 Schulzes Illustrierte Unterhaltungsblätter für Stenographen. System Stolze-Schrey (Schulze’s Illustrated Entertainment Pages for Stenographers. Stolze-Schrey System)221 appeared from 1902 through 1933, with 380 pages per year and with almost all of the text printed in shorthand, with the exception of titles and short editorial notes. The topics covered were typical of this media genre: poems, articles about African tribes, maritime accidents, exotic animals, archaeological finds, and so on, as well as riddles and prize giveaways. Novels and short stories appeared as supplements to this illustrated periodical; they were also printed with stenographic characters. It was distributed through bookshops (30 pf. per issue) and by subscription (3 marks per year). The print run is not known, but there is every reason to believe that it was rather small compared to conventional printing. Nevertheless, the business was apparently profitable enough for the publishers. Representatives of all systems took great pains to convince the authorities of the direct and indirect benefits of stenography for young learners: it possessed “essential educational elements,” they said in a petition from 1863, “which are either not at all present or not to the same extent in other areas of education,” and it was a means “to provide us with educational elements, which we would not be able to acquire without stenography.”222 This battle for the school had varying degrees of success: in Bavaria and Austria, governments ordered the introduction of shorthand as an elective subject in Gymnasiums as early as the first half of the nineteenth century, while in Prussia, for a long time it was only allowed to be taught on the premises of Gymnasiums as an extra-curricular elective class after the end of regular classes, without being listed as a subject in the report cards. This reluctance was due, on the one hand, to the fact that the benefits of shorthand for language education, emphasized by its supporters, were often not or not immediately recognized by teachers and civil servants.223 On the other hand, there was the concern that the parallel instruction in conventional orthography (which after primary school continued in the first classes of the Gymnasium) and shorthand, the rules of which were in part quite different, would confuse the children. Incidentally, teachers outside of Prussia had similar misgivings. The Nuremberg

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professor Karl Küffner, who was mentioned earlier, described the shorthand lessons that Gymnasium pupils received from the fourth grade onwards as one of the most important causes of mistakes: The students learned to write down what they heard without thinking about the fact that one and the same sound in different words was represented by different characters. Küffner did not call for the abolition of shorthand instruction in schools, but he did point out the need to “mitigate” its “harmful influence” through “strict handling of orthographic censorship.”224 The situation gradually changed, however, and at the beginning of the twentieth century, shorthand instruction was incorporated into the high school curricula as an optional subject in Prussia as well; in Bavaria, on the other hand, stenography was compulsory in many educational establishments. In addition to Gymnasiums, secondary schools and trade schools, shorthand was taught above all in military and trade academies. Moreover, in Munich, Berlin, Leipzig, Breslau, Königsberg, Kiel and some other German cities it even attained the status of an academic subject at the universities for a time.225 At the University of Berlin, a stenography lectureship was introduced in 1851 and a separate chair for stenography created in 1864 specifically for Gustav Michaelis, Stolze’s most zealous collaborator,226 who not only gave practical lessons, but also conducted his own studies that were relevant to the context we are interested in here. After studying mathematics and natural sciences in Göttingen, Michaelis moved to Berlin and taught these subjects for some time in various educational institutions in the Prussian capital. He learned shorthand there from Wilhelm Stolze himself and became increasingly interested in theoretical and practical aspects of writing. He developed simpler and more logical spelling rules for German and English, advocated the transition from Fraktur to Antiqua, suggested improvements for Stolze’s shorthand and applied them to other languages.227 From 1845 on, Michaelis put his mathematical and scholarly studies to rest and devoted himself entirely to the service of writing: he worked as a stenographer in the Prussian parliament, later also in the Reichstag, taught stenography, to which he attached both a linguistic and a pedagogical importance in addition to its pragmatic value, wrote several treatises on the history of orthography and in time became an advocate of a radically phonetic reform of German orthography. From 1854 onwards, he published reformatory proposals from the Stolzean perspective in a periodical that was initially called Zeitschrift für Stenographie (Journal of Stenography) and was in 1856 renamed Zeitschrift für Stenographie und Orthographie in wissenschaftlicher, pädagogischer und praktischer Beziehung (Journal of Stenography and Orthography in Scientific, Pedagogical and Practical Perspective).228 From 1853 to 1879, Gustav Michaelis served as its editor and principal contributor. In his articles he argued that the transfer of stenographic

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principles into conventional writing “in such cases where it concurs with the demands of historical grammar” would allow it to be radically improved. However, he was not successful in this field because, in the opinion of a contemporary, he took “almost no notice of existing usage.”229 Despite all the efforts by Michaelis and other advocates of a stenographically inspired radical phonetization of German orthography, this option was not even discussed at the two orthographic conferences in Berlin (1876 and 1901), let alone the general changeover to stenography. Michaelis was familiar with the minutes of the First Orthographic Conference.230 It became clear to him that linguists, teachers, publishers, and administrators who decided the fate of German orthography were far from radical reformist intentions. The radical reformist ideas he disseminated also met with only sporadic positive reactions from the general public. This seems to have led to resignation, for Michaelis stopped publishing his journal and pamphlets at the end of the 1870s. Library catalogues show no new publications and only a new edition of his paper Über die Physiologie und Orthographie der S-Laute (On the Physiology and Orthography of the S-Sound) in 1883. However, until 1889 he remained head of the Stenographic Office of the Prussian House of Lords and continued to teach stenography at the University of Berlin, where it can be proved that he was still offering a course in 1891, that is, at the age of about 78.231 He did not have a successor as professor. At other German universities, professorships in shorthand also only survived until the death of the respective chair holder. A permanent establishment of stenography as an academic discipline therefore did not take place. In other educational institutions, however, it was taught until the end of the twentieth century. The fact that even shorthand, so scientifically refined, was unable to replace conventional handwriting was not due to its technical deficits, but rather to the unequal conditions of competition: in elementary schools, where most German children received their first and only instruction in reading and writing, Fraktur and German cursive were taught first, then Antiqua and the humanistic cursive, but not shorthand. After completing the legally prescribed curriculum, however, most of the children left school and did not continue their education. Only a relatively small number went on to Gymnasium, where they then possibly had the opportunity, but rarely the requirement, to learn shorthand alongside the many other subjects, whereby it was explicitly assigned a secondary status. It hardly stood a chance against the many compulsory subjects (for which the use of longhand was prescribed). Due to didactic deficits (stenography instructors had even less pedagogical training than “regular” teachers who had at least attended a seminary or a university), learning shorthand through courses, associations, or independently was usually not so successful that the graduates were able to benefit practically from all the potential advantages of shorthand. In this respect,

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for the overwhelming majority, even of those who had some command of it, stenography remained at best a tool, whose practical importance and cultural significance could hardly be compared with those of conventional writing. Nevertheless, shorthand and the “stenographer lifestyle” associated with it was an important cultural phenomenon of the modern age, because for a while, stenographers’ associations and their forms of socializing played a role in Germany that went far beyond the purely pragmatic use of shorthand. Shorthand-related activities structured association members’ free time and offered opportunities to make and maintain social contacts. For many members, their entire worldview was linked to their “own” system, and the system struggle served as a substitute for the political-social activity that was only allowed in the German Empire to a limited extent. And ultimately, shorthand, which despite its rational use of resources, its modern social-communicative practices, and its novel scientific underpinnings was unable to overcome the mass resistance of the cultural mainstream, was a revealing phenomenon that once again makes clear how great the effect of precisely extra-linguistic factors was on the results of debates on scribal mistakes and ways to get rid of them. Let us now look how shorthand developed in Russia. Reading an overview of Russian shorthand by General Nikolaj Eršov from 1880, one might get the impression that stenography was about to challenge the monopoly of the (Cyrillic) alphabet in the Russian Empire as well. The author expressed confidence that “in the more or less distant future, conventional writing would be supplanted by stenographic writing.”232 Three decades later, this prophecy had not yet come true, although no less a person than Leo Tolstoy agreed with the author, thanking him in a 1909 letter233 for the book he had sent and welcoming the spread of shorthand. Two days earlier, Tolstoy is said to have declared to his relatives and guests that stenography was “very useful and would (in the future) replace writing.”234 But were there really valid reasons for this hope? In Russia, the development of stenography in the nineteenth century was different from that in Prussia in that the autocratic government played a much more significant—first restrictive, then supportive—role in it.235 As late as 1849, the St. Petersburg Censorship Committee considered that the Guide to Shorthand in the Russian Language presented by N. Mejer, containing “the rules of the stenographic art, which neither can nor may find a use in Russia, should not be approved for publication.” Nevertheless, work was already being done in Russia at that time on the development or modification of shorthand systems. In addition to modifications of German systems, especially the two largest by Gabelsberger and Stolze, original Russian versions were also created, such as that of the prospective officer Mikhail Ivanin. He designed and used it as early as 1832–1834, while studying at the Imperial

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Military Academy. In 1858 and 1866 he had it published,236 and as early as 1860 a public event (namely, a debate between two historians about the origin of Rus’) was successfully recorded in shorthand with the help of his system. How could “ordinary writing, which lags so far behind the spoken word, fully satisfy the activities and demands of our age?” Ivanin wondered in his book On Stenography, or the Art of Quick Writing as Applied to the Russian Language.237 One of the best-known Russian systems was that of Pavel Ol’chin, which became famous after it was used by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s stenographer and future wife Anna Snitkina to greatly facilitate the writer’s work and generate large profits. Ol’chin, son of a converted Jewish merchant from Curlandia and a Livonian woman of Swedish-German descent, had grown up multilingual. As a teenager in 1844, he read an anonymously published book on shorthand and for years thereafter engaged in comparative analysis of various shorthand systems. Finally, when he was in Nuremberg and had to write or translate numerous articles for the Russian journal Vokrug sveta (Around the World), he developed his own shorthand by applying the Gabelsberger system to the Russian language. The idea of generally using shorthand instead of conventional longhand seems never to have occurred to him either. He initially regarded his work as a tool for his own use and did not publish it until the 1860s.238 However, stenography quickly gained practical importance and further dissemination in the 1860s with the Great Reforms, which led to the emergence of novel institutions such as the zemstvo, the public trial, trial advocacy, and the jury court. The Russian economy, which was developing rapidly through capitalism, soon employed stenographers in large numbers. In view of the new needs, the government now sought to disseminate shorthand and set up free courses at the Military Topographic College in St. Petersburg, a secondary school in Moscow and elsewhere. Courses were set up especially for women, where Ol’chin was also active as a teacher. Voluntary stenography classes were introduced in many gimnazijas. Numerous stenographic systems emerged in Russia and, like in the German-speaking world, fought for the favor of the government and the public using both commercial advertising strategies and a serious comparative discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each system.239 In place of the existing variety, the government considered introducing a unified system. After a specially appointed commission had sought information from Dresden and a special commissioner named Bradke had been sent abroad to study and compare the European systems, the Russian government still could not make up its mind and took a different path from the one taken by Prussia by declaring a contest in 1864. A prize of 1,500 rubles—more than a year’s wage of a civil servant—was offered for the shorthand textbook that would

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be most suitable for the Russian language. Of the 28 designs submitted, none received the grand prize, the textbooks by Ol’chin and by Iosif Paul’son and Jakov Messer (a transcription of the Stolze system)240 were, however, praised as the most successful.241 A stenographers’ competition was held in 1866, but neither of the systems emerged as the clear winner. The war of systems continued. Specialized stenographic periodicals were also published in Russia, such as Stenografičeskij listok. Ježemesjačnoe izdanie, posvjaščennoe isključitel’no iskusstvu skoropisi (The Shorthand Gazette. A Monthly Dedicated Exclusively to the Art of Fast Writing), Učitel-stenograf (The Shorthand Teacher), Stenograf (The Stenographer), Stenograf-Praktik (The Shorthand Practitioner), Stenografičeskij vestnik (The Shorthand Courier). In Russia, there do not seem to have been any periodicals printed in shorthand, but individual readers, prose and poetry volumes did appear.242 During the period of reaction, however, the once bustling stenographic life in Russia flagged, as many of the institutions of public life brought about by the Great Reforms were again suppressed. Only in the business world did shorthand services continue to be in demand. It was not until the beginning of the twentieth century, when the political situation changed again, that there was a revival in the field of stenography:243 State Duma sessions and court hearings were recorded in shorthand, politicians and public figures dictated articles for the press, which had once again become freer, new textbooks of stenography appeared again and new systems were developed and promoted. Judging by the publications, hardly anyone in Russia seriously thought of totally abandoning the alphabetic script in favor of shorthand, except perhaps Ivan Cimmerman, a school teacher who on the eve of World War I promoted a shorthand system of his own device and appears to have believed that the ‘genuine popular literacy’ was based on purely phonetic spelling and therefore a purely phonetic shorthand system was to become the “new script.”244 His writings—mostly small pamphlets—had very little or no impact, though. Summing up, stenography did find its way into Russia in certain contexts and was successful (unlike Latinization efforts,245 which never progressed beyond little-noticed proposals). However, it was regarded as a faster and more economical way of writing but not as a potential solution specifically to the problems either of Russian orthography or its struggling learners and users. Nor were there more reasons for the assumption that shorthand would eventually replace alphabet script in Russia than in Germany, especially since the spread of stenography in Russia was much lower than in Germany at the same time. This was mainly because mass education in the Russian Empire began later and was limited to elementary literacy among the masses.246 For the great mass of people writing and learning to write, shorthand could never attain the status of an alternative option for all situations in life

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either in Germany or in Russia. However, it was practiced by thousands and even maybe tens of thousands of people as a functional and context-specific alternative to conventional penmanship. Its application was usually limited to transcribing oral speech as the first, subsidiary phase in the production of written texts. Most often, shorthand minutes were soon rendered into typewritten or handwritten texts in conventional Cyrillic, German, or Latin characters.247 Stenography helped to remedy just one disadvantage of conventional writing, namely the relative slowness of the text production process compared to speaking or thinking. Paper was hardly saved by its use, because it was expended both for the shorthand and for the clean copy. Shorthand did not necessarily free writers from orthographic problems either: although in some systems there was a relatively smaller number of problematic cases due to the omission of silent letters and unstressed vowels, as well as the identical designation of letters that sounded the same, each system had its fixed rules and these had to be adhered to, which not everyone always managed to do. When learning shorthand, dictations were also written and graded according to the number of errors. But there were important differences between instruction in conventional writing or the German language and lessons in stenography: in the majority of educational institutions, the latter was an elective and was usually not taught by teachers, but by enthusiastic members of stenographers’ associations or system designers; in many cases, stenography classes were attended not by children but by adults; and for the most part, these did not take place in the usual school setting, which meant learners who made mistakes did not have to bear the same psychological consequences, or at least not to the same extent, as schoolchildren who made mistakes in conventional lessons. In this respect, one can certainly claim that stenographic errors were constructed differently than those in conventional orthography. Summarizing this chapter as a whole, there were at least three reasons why many people in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were thinking about how to improve German and Russian spelling. First, the existence of a multitude of heterogeneous norms or normative systems and irregular spellings seemed incompatible with the capitalist-minded, rational, disciplined bourgeois spirit of modernity and—in the German-speaking world—with the national-political tendencies toward uniformity. Second, the possibility of relying on a single, codified and official standard promised teachers relief in teaching and control over results. Third, the shortcomings of existing German or Russian orthographies, their inherent lack of logic and consistency, the presence of “superfluous” letters (i.e., those that do not stand for sounds), the use of several letters to designate one sound, and so on, were perceived by many as a reason to want not only to codify and unify the spelling norms but also to reform them and replace them with more rational ones,—which

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in Russia, unlike Germany, was widely perceived as a “simplification” that would bring relief especially to learners. In both countries under consideration, similar collective and individual actors—teachers, linguists, lexicographers, government officials, businessmen, and journalists—constructed and reconstructed orthographic norms, whether on their own or through collective negotiation and voting at conferences of experts and stakeholders. But the development of new rules was not the end of the story. The construction of orthographic norms affected only their content and the sociocultural relevance attributed to them. But in order for new orthographic norms to be valid, they had to be followed by target groups. Powerful forces were working against that. The implementability of new norms often came up against institutional limits due to the limited scope of action of governmental and nongovernmental actors: a conference, a ministry, or an academy could not legitimately enact universally valid spelling norms, because there was a lack of consensus among the populations and in the state apparatuses as to who had such an authority in the first place. The overall unenthusiastic reaction of the general public also played a major role in the failure of several German and Russian reform initiatives. A passively negative or actively anti-reform position of key public opinion leaders, such as editors of influential media or celebrities, did the rest. In terms of enforcement, orthographic reforms were successful in the individual German states in the nineteenth century and then in the entire German Empire as well as in Russia after the revolution inasmuch as the state power resolutely backed them by way of self-empowerment. Arguments for and against a spelling reform formulated within the frameworks of the economic and “cultural-political” discourses were largely the same in both countries. According to the reform’s proponents, it was supposed to bring substantial savings in time, work and money or materials, such as metal, paper, printing ink (the “economic” discourse in Germany was flanked by its “moral” counterpart, which decried wastefulness as a “sin”), as well as make the learners’ path to mastering national cultural treasures through reading shorter and easier (the “cultural-political” discourse, in Russia propped up by the “moral” discourse underscoring the sinful unacceptability of the old standards for learners). According to the opponents of reform, visually divergent word images would make reading old books more difficult and thus separate the people from their cultural heritage, while etymological markers, no longer discernible due to phonetization of spelling, would render the correct understanding of many written sentences impossible (“culturalpolitical” discourse). The practicability of the new standards, in the sense of how easy they were to switch to, played a very important, albeit secondary, role in the

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discussions. This ease or difficulty was assessed in abstraction or introspectively by the reform opponents, and experientially tested in practical trials by the supporters of radical reform. Finally, the individual or collective character of the construction process does not seem to have played a significant role in the chances of reform proposals to succeed: no matter who and how conceptualized the new norms, their implementation depended above all on backing by the authorities.

NOTES 1. Franz Sauer, Orthographie-Willkür und Orthographie-Reform: ein Schulkreuz des 19., eine Volkshoffnung des 20. Jahrhunderts (Bonn: Hanstein, 1901). 2. Hermann Scheffler, Die officielle Orthographie der Herzoglich Braunschweig-Lüneburgischen Eisenbahn- und Postdirection (Braunschweig: Viewegg, 1855). 3. Ludwig Ruprecht, Die deutsche Rechtschreibung vom Standpunkte der historischen Grammatik beleuchtet von Ludwig Ruprecht, Collaborator am Gymnasium Andreanum zu Hildesheim. 2nd, revised ed. (Göttingen: Vandenhoek & Ruprecht, 1857), 7–8. 4. Aleksandr Vostokov, Sokraščennaja Russkaja grammatika dlja upotreblenija v nizšiсh učebnyсh zavedenijaсh (Sankt-Peterburg: V Tipografii Imperatorskoj Akademii Nauk, 1831); Aleksandr Vostokov, Russkaja grammatika po načertaniju sokraščennoj grammatiki, polnee izložennaja (Sankt-Peterburg: I. Glazunov, 1831). 5. Nikolaj Greč, Praktičeskaja russkaja grammatika (Sankt-Peterburg: V tipografii Imperatorskogo vospitatel’nogo doma, 1827); Nikolaj Greč, Načal’nye pravila russkoj grammatiki (Sankt-Peterburg: V tipografii Imperatorskogo vospitatel’nogo doma, 1828 (11 editions until 1858, various publishers, including in Karlsruhe)); Nikolaj Greč, Prostrannaja russkaja grammatika (Sankt-Peterburg: Tipografija izdatelja, 1827); Nikolaj Greč, Učebnaja russkaja grammatika (dlja učaščichsja) (Sankt-Peterburg: Tipografija N. Greča, 1851). 6. Research and discussion occupied a more important place in his earlier work: Jakov Grot, Spornye voprosy russkogo pravopisanija ot Petra Velikogo donyne (Sankt-Peterburg: Tipografija Imperatorskoj Akademii Nauk, 1873). 7. On the importance of stenography for Russia’s emergent public sphere, see Stephen Lovell, How Russia Learned to Talk: A History of Public Speaking in the Stenographic Age, 1860–1930 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2020), 14–16 and 26–30. 8. [Vissarion Belinskij], “Praktičeskaja russkaja grammatika, izdannaja Nikolaem Grečem. Vtoroe izdanie, ispravlennoe. Sankt-Peterburg, v tipografii izdatelja. 1834. (VIII) 526. (8),ˮ Molva X, no. 41 (1835): 232–233. Belinskij himself wrote a Russian grammar handbook which wasn’t a success—Vissarion Belinskij, Osnovanija russkoj grammatiki (Moskva: Stepanov, 1837).

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9. Fedor Buslaev, “O prepodavanii russkogo jazyka i slovesnosti (Zametki na stat’ju g. Greča v 7-m nomere ‘Morskogo sbornika’ za 1856 g.),ˮ Otečestvennye zapiski 109, part I (1856): 327–344. 10. Quoted after Kopke, Rechtschreibreform und Verfassungsrecht, 24–26. 11. Julius Zacher, “Tatsachen und Grundsätze für Regelung der deutschen Rechtschreibung,ˮ in Verhandlungen der 25. Versammlung Deutscher Philologen und Schulmänner (Leipzig: Teubner, 1868), 116–141. 12. Verhandlungen der achtundzwanzigsten Versammlung Deutscher Philologen und Schulmänner (Leipzig: Teubner, 1873), 117–129. 13. Julius Lattmann, “Über den Satz Für die auf phonetischer Grundlage herzustellende Einigung in der Rechtschreibung ist es insbesondere auch erforderlich die aus den Mundarten in das gebildete Hochdeutsch der einzelnen Teile Deutschlands eingedrungenen Verschiedenheiten der Phonetik vollständiger zu ermitteln und in angemessener Weise auszugleichen,ˮ in Verhandlungen der einunddreißigsten Versammlung Deutscher Philologen und Schulmänner (Leipzig: Teubner, 1877), 131–137. 14. Verhandlungen der einunddreißigsten Versammlung, 105. 15. [Anonymous], “Die deutsche Rechtschreibung und die Philologenversammlung in Bremen,ˮ Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Pädagogik 6 (1899): 474–475. 16. GStAPK VI. HA Rep. Nl Schmidt-Ott (M) B XXXIX Nachlass Schmidt-Ott, Deutsche Rechtschreibung. No foliation. 17. See these letters published in Učitel’ 2, no. 17 (1862): 885–92 and no. 18 (1862): 936–944. 18. Radišauskajte, Žurnal “Filologičeskie zapiski,” 282. 19. The calculations do not claim absolute accuracy and completeness. They are based on data presented in Radišauskajte, Žurnal “Filologičeskie zapiski.” 20. Dmitrij Fomin, “Nužna li bukva ‘Jat’?” Filologičeskie zapiski, no. 3 (1900): 1–11 (7th pagination). 21. Sergej Prjadkin, “Istoričeskoe i fonetičeskoe pravopisanie trebuet suščestvovanija v russkoj azbuke bukvy jat,ˮ Filologičeskie zapiski, no. 3 (1900): 12–20 (7th pagination). 22. Roman Brandt, “O lženaučnosti našego pravopisanija (Publičnaja lekcija),ˮ Filologičeskie zapiski, no. 1/2 (1901): 1–50 (7th pagination). 23. For example, Ivan Boduėn de-Kurtenė, “Russkaja grafika,ˮ Russkij filologičeskij vestnik 5, no. 1/2 (1881): 300–313. 24. For one example, see Roman Brandt, “Ob ustranenii jer,ˮ Russkij filologičeskij vestnik 14, no. 3/4 (1885): 347. 25. Vasilij Černyšev, “F.F. Fortunatov i A.A. Šachmatov—reformatory russkogo pravopisanija (Po materialam archiva Akademii Nauk SSSR i ličnym vospominanijam),ˮ in Trudy Komissii po istorii Akademii Nauk SSSR, ed. Sergej Vavilov, issue 3: A.A. Šachmatov. 1864–1920. Sbornik statej i materialov, ed. Sergej Obnorskij (Moskva; Leningrad: Izdatel’stvo Akademii Nauk SSSR, 1947), 182–187. 26. HSA Stuttgart, E 130b, Bu 1828. The folder contains newspaper clippings from Schwäbische Kronik, Neues Tagblatt, Allgemeine Zeitung, Kölnische Zeitung, Schwäbischer Merkur, National-Zeitung, Beobachter and other newspapers.

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27. GStAPK VI. HA Rep. Nachlass Althoff A II Nr.8. Folder “Deutsche Orthographieˮ contains newspaper clippings from the Neue Preußische (Kreuz-)Zeitung (1900). 28. Erlaß an die Chefs der Reichsämter. Quoted after: John Cornelius Booth, Persönliche Erinnerungen an den Fürsten Bismarck, ed. Heinrich von Poschinger (Hamburg: Verlaganstalt u. Druckerei A.-G., 1899), 17 (footnote). 29. Quoted after Jürgen Reichen, Rechtschreibung. Funktion und Didaktik (Bad Oldesloe: Eigenverlag, 1997), 9. 30. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 84a Justizministerium no. 2830/2 Betr. die Orthographie, 1902–1919. Fol. 225. 31. Staatsminister Studt an Se. Majt. Kaiser Wilhelm II. an den Kaiser vom 21. Juni 1902. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 89 Geh. Zivilkabinett, jüngere Periode no. 21381 Acta betr. die deutsche Rechtschreibung und die deutsche Schrift. 1880 bis 1918. Fol. 57ff. 32. GStA PK I. HA Rep. 151 Finanzministerium I B no. 318, not paginated. This decree, by the way, was “not intended for public disclosure.” 33. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 84a Justizministerium no. 2830/2 Betr. die Orthographie, 1902–1919. Fol. 302v. 34. Anna Maria Lasselsberger, Die Kodifizierung der Orthographie im Rechtschreibwörterbuch. Eine Untersuchung zur Rechtschreibung im “Duden” und im „Österreichischen Wörterbuch” (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2013). 35. Černyšev, F.F. Fortunatov i A.A. Šachmatov, 211–213. 36. Černyšev, F.F. Fortunatov i A.A. Šachmatov, 213. 37. Die Regeln der Rechtschreibung nebst einem Verzeichnisse der deutschen Stammwörter. Zum Nachschlagen in zweifelhaften Fällen für unstudirte Geschäftsmänner (Erfurt: Otto, 1833); A Teachers‘ Association, ed., Die Regeln der Rechtschreibung nebst einem Verzeichnisse der deutschen Stammwörter. Zum Gebrauche in Schulen, hg. von einem Lehrervereine (Erfurt: Otto, 1833). 38. This paragraph is based on Strunk, Einheitliche und einfache deutsche Orthografie, 35–37. 39. Friedrich Kohlrausch, Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben (Hannover: Hahn’sche Hofbuchhandlung, 1863), 366–367. 40. Regeln und Wörterverzeichnis für deutsche Rechtschreibung. Gedruckt auf Veranstaltung des Königlichen Ober-Schulcollegiums zu Hannover (Clausthal: Schweiger’sche Buchhandlung, 1855), 3; specially for lower grade students, Gustav Heinrich Seffer and Hermann Dieckmann, Anleitung zur deutschen Rechtschreibung. Ausgabe für Elementarclassen der höheren Schulen und für Mittel- und Volksschulen. Gedruckt auf Veranstaltung des Königlichen Ober-Schulcollegiums zu Hannover (Hannover: Carl Rümpler, 1857). 41. Karl Klaunig, Ueber deutsche Rechtschreibung vom wissenschaftlich praktischen Standpunkte, das Ergebnis der Einigung zwischen den Lehrern der allgemeinen Bürger- und städtischen Realschule zu Leipzig (Leipzig: Schlicke, 1857, 2nd ed. 1867). 42. Klaunig, Regeln und Wörterverzeichnis, the one that was suggested for discussion in the teachers’ meeting in the Orphanage School in Halle, mentioned in Chapter II.

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43. Klaus Goebel, “Friedrich Wilhelm Dörpfeld und die Konferenz zur Vorbereitung der Allgemeinen Bestimmungen im Juni 1872,ˮ in Wer die Schule hat, der hat die Zukunft. Gesammelte Aufsätze zur rheinisch-westfälischen Schulgeschichte, ed. Hans Kirchhoff (Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1995), 258. 44. GStPK I. HA Rep. 76 Kultusministerium VI Sekt. I x no. 2, Bd. 2 Die Verbesserung der deutschen Sprache. Fol. 193 Annalen der Typographie, der verwandten Künste und Gewerbe: Centralorgan für die technischen und materiellen Interessen der Presse, Leipzig, den 28. Januar 1876. no. 342. 45. [Anonymous], Verhandlungen der zur Herstellung größerer Einigung in der deutschen Rechtschreibung berufenen Konferenz. Berlin, den 4. bis 15. Januar 1876 (Halle a.d.S.: Waisenhaus, 1876). 46. [Anonymous], Beratungen über die Einheitlichkeit der deutschen Rechtschreibung (Im Reichsamt des Innern) (Berlin: [no publisher], 1901). 47. Wolfgang Mentrup and Christina Bankhardt, “Bemühungen um eine Reform der amtlichen Regelung der Orthographie,ˮ in Sprach-Perspektiven. Germanistische Linguistik und das Institut für Deutsche Sprache, ed. Heidrun Kämper and Ludwig M. Eichinger (Tübingen: Narr Francke Attempto Verlag, 2007), 195. 48. Some information, mostly concerning the changes suggested by participants, is to be found in: Grot, Filologičeskie razyskanija, vol. 1, 3rd, revised and enlarged ed. (Sankt-Peterburg: Tipografija Imperatorskoj Akademii Nauk, 1885), 272–275, and Grigor’eva, Tri veka, 48–53. 49. Since 1860, with the consent of the educational district curator, such assemblies took place twice a month in the aula of the Second St. Petersburg Gimnazija. 50. [Vladimir Stojunin], “Dlja učitelej russkogo jazyka, nachodjaščichsja v S.-Peterburge,ˮ Učitel’ 2, no. 3 (1862): 131–132. 51. Grot, Spornye voprosy, 675. 52. [Anonymous], “Tret’e i četvёrtoe soveščanija po voprosu ob uproščenii russkoj orfografii,ˮ Učitel’ 2, no. 8 (1862): 347. 53. Grot, Spornye voprosy, 675. 54. Grot, Spornye voprosy, 676. 55. Grot, Spornye voprosy, 677. 56. [Anonymous], “Sed’moe orfografičeskoe soveščanie,ˮ Učitel’ 3, no. 2 (1863): 95–96. 57. Schröer, “Die Zukunft der deutschen Rechtschreibung,” 306. 58. For invitation letters and responses specifying the names of persons appointed to attend the conference, see SPF ARAN F. 9. Op. 1. D. 842. Dela Komissii po voprosu ob uproščenii russkogo pravopisanija. 1904–1916. 59. For a detailed description and analysis of this conference, see Černyšev, F.F. Fortunatov i A.A. Šachmatov; Grigor’eva, Tri veka, 82–105. 60. As, for example, in Paul Eisen, Herr Professor von Raumer und die Deutsche Rechtschreibung. Ein Beitrag zur Herstellung einer orthographischen Einigung von Paul Eisen (Braunschweig: Wreden, 1880), 31. 61. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Unvorgreifliche Gedanken, betreffend die Ausübung und Verbesserung der deutschen Sprache [1697] (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1983), 17.

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62. SPF ARAN F. 9. Op. 1. D. 842. Dela Komissii po voprosu ob uproščenii russkogo pravopisanija. 1904–1916. Fol. 230r– 235v. 63. Meaning, the elimination of certain letters. Kireev did not address other changes proposed by the reform. 64. SPF ARAN. F. 9. Op. 1. D. 842. Dela Komissii po voprosu ob uproščenii russkogo pravopisanija. 1904–1916. Fol. 230r. 65. Since Kireev refers explicitly to a “pedagogue,” he presumably means the head of the Military Academy General Alexander Leont’ev (†1878) and not the Slavophile Konstantin Leont’ev (†1891). 66. Aleksandr Kireev, Rossija v načale XX stoletija (Sankt-Peterburg: Tipografija A.S. Suvorina, 1903). The memorandum was printed as a pamphlet in a very limited edition with the permission of the Ministry of Interior: the copies were intended only for the tsar, the members of the tsar’s family and some high-ranking officials and dignitaries. It was later reprinted in Aleksandr Kireev, Učenie slavjanofilov, ed. Sergej Lebedev and Tatiana Linickaja (Moskva: Institut russkoj civilizacii, 2012), 360–393, which I used for quotations. 67. Kireev, Rossija v načale XX stoletija, 387. 68. Kireev, Rossija v načale XX stoletija, 388. 69. Kireev, Rossija v načale XX stoletija, 393. Emphasis in the original. 70. Kireev, Rossija v načale XX stoletija, 393. 71. SPF ARAN. F. 9. Op. 1. D. 842. Dela Komissii po voprosu ob uproščenii russkogo pravopisanija. 1904–1916. Fol. 231r. 72. SPF ARAN. F. 9. Op. 1. D. 842. Dela Komissii po voprosu ob uproščenii russkogo pravopisanija. 1904–1916. Fol. 232r. 73. SPF ARAN. F. 9. Op. 1. D. 842. Dela Komissii po voprosu ob uproščenii russkogo pravopisanija. 1904–1916. Fol. 231r. 74. SPF ARAN. F. 9. Op. 1. D. 842. Dela Komissii po voprosu ob uproščenii russkogo pravopisanija. 1904–1916. Fol. 232r. 75. SPF ARAN. F. 9. Op. 1. D. 842. Dela Komissii po voprosu ob uproščenii russkogo pravopisanija. 1904–1916. Fol. 232v–233r. 76. SPF ARAN. F. 9. Op. 1. D. 842. Dela Komissii po voprosu ob uproščenii russkogo pravopisanija. 1904–1916. Fol. 55. 77. [Anonymous], “Pjatoe soveščanie po voprosu ob uproščenii orfografii,ˮ Učitel’ 2, no. 9 (1862): 401. 78. Grot, Filologičeskie razyskanija, 273. 79. Grigor’eva, Tri veka, 53. 80. This was reported in the 38th Reichstag session on 31 January 1901. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 84a Justizministerium no. 2830/1 Betr. die Orthographie, 1876–1919. Fol. 87r ff. 81. Erdmann, Zur orthographischen Frage, 1–2. 82. Erdmann, Zur orthographischen Frage, 4. 83. GStAPK VI. HA Rep. Nl Althoff A II Nr.8 Nachlass Althoff, Deutsche Orthographie. Fol. 63v–66v. 84. GStPK I. HA Rep. 76 Kultusministerium VI Sekt. I x no. 2 Vol. 2 Die Verbesserung der deutschen Sprache. Fol. 173–174. Brief von Ottilie Rohde aus Berlin

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an Adalbert Falk vom 12 January 1875. The author discusses the use of superfluous letters in the German spelling, the ways to signify vowel length, etc.; RGIA F. 922. Op. 1. D. 232 [Fond V.G. Glazova.] Pis’ma (4) raznych lic V.G. Glazovu s vyraženiem protesta protiv izmenenija pravopisanija. 1904 g. No foliation. Pis’mo Ekateriny Dolgorevoj. 85. GStAPK VI. HA Rep. Nl Schmidt-Ott (M) B XXXIX Nachlass Schmidt-Ott, Deutsche Rechtschreibung. Separatdruck aus [Virchow R.] “Die Orthographie und Interpunction im Archiv. Zur Verständigung für Leser und Mitarbeiter. Von dem Herausgeber,ˮ in Virchow’s Archiv für pathologische Anatomie und Physiologie und für klinische Medicin. 1899, vol. 155. Heft 1. 86. Karl Erbe, Die drohende Verschlimmerung des Rechtschreib-Elends im Deutschen Reiche. Ein Mahnwort von Gymnasialrektor [Karl] Erbe in Ludwigsburg (Stuttgart: Neues Tagblatt, 1898). 87. GStAPK VI. HA Rep. Nl Althoff A II Nr.8 Nachlass Althoff, Deutsche Orthographie. Fol. 75ff. 88. Information and quotations in this paragraph are based on Kopke, Rechtschreibreform und Verfassungsrecht, 23–26. 89. FS SA KBS-LK 1864–1875, 23. November 1865. 90. Verhandlungen der achtundzwanzigsten Versammlung, 128. 91. Adalbert Falk, “Schreiben des Königlich Preußischen Ministers der geistlichen etc. Angelegenheiten Dr. Falk an alle Bundesregierungen vom 8. März 1876,ˮ in Akten zur Geschichte der deutschen Einheitsschreibung 1870–1880, ed. Paul Grebe (Mannheim: Bibliographisches Institut, 1963), 14–17. 92. See Regeln und Wörterverzeichnis für die deutsche Rechtschreibung zum Gebrauch in den preußischen Schulen, herausgegeben im Auftrage des Königlichen Ministeriums der geistlichen, Unterrichts- und Medizinal-Angelegenheiten, ed. Hermann Bonitz (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1880). 93. In the same year, he published two entire books under his own name, each over 200 pages long: Wilhelm Wilmanns, Kommentar zur Preußischen Schulorthographie (Berlin: Weidmannsche Buchhandlung, 1880); Wilhelm Wilmanns, Deutsche Grammatik für die Unter- u. Mittelklassen höherer Lehranstalten: nebst Regeln und Wörterverzeichnis für die deutsche Orthographie nach der amtlichen Festsetzung (Berlin: Wiegandt, Hempel & Parey, 1880). A few years later (1887), a detailed commentary by him followed: Wilmanns, Die Orthographie in den Schulen Deutschlands, which came out in a second edition the same year. 94. Bramann, DER WEG, 326. 95. The ability to correctly write terms such as “cardiac tachyarrhythmia” has always been an unmistakable sign of belonging to the circle of educated people. In Russian, there have been orthographic elements performing the same shibboleth function. Anecdotally, Tsar Nicholas I asked the Minister of Public Education Sergej Uvarov (or, according to another version, Nikolaj Greč) what the letter jat was for and was told that jat was needed to distinguish the educated from the uneducated. 96. Heinrich Ernst Ziegler, “Über die Orthographie in der Zoologie,ˮ Zoologischer Anzeiger 27 (1903): 183–184. 97. Ziegler, “Über die Orthographie in der Zoologie,” 184.

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98. Cf. Heinrich Ernst Ziegler, Die Naturwissenschaft und die socialdemokratische Theorie. Ihr Verhältnis dargelegt auf Grund der Werke von Darwin und Bebel. Zugleich ein Beitrag zur wissenschaftlichen Kritik der Theorien der derzeitigen Socialdemokratie (Stuttgart: Enke, 1894); Heinrich Ernst Ziegler, ed., Natur und Staat. Beiträge zur naturwissenschaftlichen Gesellschaftslehre, 10 vols. (Jena: Fischer, 1903–1918). 99. Ziegler, “Über die Orthographie in der Zoologie,” 184. 100. See Johann Wilhelm Spengel, “Beschlüsse der Konferenz zur Beratung über die Orthographie in biologischen Publikationen, Göttingen am 31. Juli 1904,ˮ Zoologischer Anzeiger XXVIII, no. 11 (1904): 409–410. 101. See “Protokoll über die Sitzung der Zoologischen Gesellschaft vom 14. Juni 1905,ˮ Verhandlungen der Deutschen Zoologischen Gesellschaft 15 (1905): 43–46. 102. Hubert Jansen, ed., Rechtschreibung der naturwissenschaftlichen und technischen Fremdwörter. Unter Mitwirkung von Fachmännern herausgegeben vom Verein Deutscher Ingenieure (Berlin: Langenscheidt, 1907), VI. 103. Jansen, Rechtschreibung der naturwissenschaftlichen und technischen Fremdwörter, VI. 104. Tobias Sander, Die doppelte Defensive: Soziale Lage, Mentalitäten und Politik der Ingenieure in Deutschland 1890–1933, 2nd revised ed. (Wiesbaden: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2012). 105. Jansen, Rechtschreibung der naturwissenschaftlichen und technischen Fremdwörter, VII. 106. The following information on the composition of the conference is taken from: Jansen, Rechtschreibung der naturwissenschaftlichen und technischen Fremdwörter, XI–XIII. 107. The mathematical-physical classes of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences and the Royal Saxon Society of Sciences expressed their interest in the consultations in writing, but did not send any representatives. 108. Jansen, Rechtschreibung der naturwissenschaftlichen und technischen Fremdwörter, XIV. 109. Jansen, Rechtschreibung der naturwissenschaftlichen und technischen Fremdwörter, XV, XIV. 110. Apart from Jansen as chairman, only one engineer—Government Master Builder Diedrich Meyer—belonged to the working committee. The rest included chemists, botanists, physicians, and one philologist and teacher (Konrad Duden). 111. Jansen, Rechtschreibung der naturwissenschaftlichen und technischen Fremdwörter, XVIII, XIX. 112. Jansen, Rechtschreibung der naturwissenschaftlichen und technischen Fremdwörter, XX, XXI. 113. Jansen, Rechtschreibung der naturwissenschaftlichen und technischen Fremdwörter, XX. 114. Jansen, Rechtschreibung der naturwissenschaftlichen und technischen Fremdwörter, XV–XVI, quote XXIV. 115. Bramann, DER WEG, 326.

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116. This circumstance gave Daniel Bunčić a reason to state, “linguistic factors turn out to play a very minor role compared to extralinguistic factors. In fact, the most decisive factor seems to be timing.” Daniel Bunčić, “Factors Influencing the Success and Failure of Writing Reforms,ˮ Studi Slavistici XIV (2017): 46. 117. Lev Uspenskij, Slovo o slovach: očerki o jazyke (Leningrad: Detgiz, 1954), 134–135. 118. Jacob Grimm, Brief an die berühmte Weidmann’sche Buchhandlung [1849], cit. after Gustav Michaelis, Über Jakob Grimms Rechtschreibung (Berlin: F. Lobeck, 1868), 30. 119. Eisen, Herr Professor von Raumer, 31. 120. Peters, Die Reform der deutschen Schreibung, 19–20. 121. Eisen, Herr Professor von Raumer, 30. 122. Erdmann, Zur orthographischen Frage, I–2. 123. Eisen, Herr Professor von Raumer, 26. 124. Eisen, Herr Professor von Raumer, 31. 125. Ušakov, Russkoe pravopisanie, 28. 126. “A significant reform, which replaced historical with phonetic spelling, was actually carried out in Serbia in the first half of the nineteenth century,” stated Ušakov dryly, without drawing any conclusion about the significance of Serbia’s example for the Russian reform project (Ušakov, Russkoe pravopisanie, 28). 127. Quoted after Ušakov, Russkoe pravopisanie, 28. 128. [Anonymous], “Vtoroe soveščanie po voprosu ob uproščenii russkoj orfografii,ˮ Učitel’ 2, no. 7 (1862): 300–302. 129. The editors pointed out that numerous letters and essays had been sent in during the summer to be presented at the next public consultation in the autumn. However, as their number made it impossible to read them all out, the editors decided to print the “most remarkable” ones which “deserved general attention,” so that consultation participants might occasionally avail themselves of the suggestions they contained. [Anonymous], “Vtoroe soveščanie,” 885–887. 130. Postcard from R.F. Brandt to F.F. Fortunatov from January 14, 1911, in SPF ARAN F. 90. Op. 2. D. 1. Naučno-organizacionnaja perepiska po priglašniju členov v Komissiju po voprosu o russkom pravopisanii. 1903–1911. Fol. 35v. 131. Michail Peterson, “Akademik F.F. Fortunatov,ˮ in Filipp Fortunatov, Izbrannye trudy, ed. Michail Peterson, Petr Kuznecov, and Michail Robinson, vol. 1 (Moskva: Učpedgiz, 1956), 6; For the collection of Lithuanian folklore, see Vsevolod Miller and Filipp Fortunatov, Litovskie narodnye pesni, sobrannye Vsev. Millerom i F. Fortunatovym (Moskva, Izdatel’stvo Moskovskogo Universiteta, 1873). 132. This (failed) reform also provided for a phonetic orthography. Cf., from a linguistic perspective, Boris Uspenskij, “Nikolaj I i pol’skij jazyk (Jazykovaja politika Rossijskoj imperii v otnošenii Carstva pol’skogo: voprosy grafiki i orfografii),ˮ in Boris Uspenskij, Istoriko-filologičeskie očerki: sbornik statej, 123–175 (Moskva, Jazyki slavjanskoj kul’tury, 2004), with the source text in the appendix. On the Russification policy in Lithuania and Belarus, Darius Staliūnas, Making Russians. Meaning and Practices of Russification in Lithuania and Belarus after 1863 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2007).

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133. See an important article by Darius Staliūnas on these problems: Darius Staljunas, “Identifikacija, jazyk i alfavit litovcev v rossijskoj nacional’noj politike 1860-ch godov,ˮ Ab Imperio, no. 2 (2005): 225–254. 134. Incidentally, an arrogant attitude toward other Slavic languages, that is, also Polish, Czech, Slovenian, Ruthenian, and so on, was the rule rather than the exception even among Russian Panslavists and Slavophiles, as demonstrated by the 1867 Slavic Congress in Moscow and Saint Petersburg: the hosts attempted (unsuccessfully) to secure for Russian the status of the common literary language of all Slavic peoples. According to Friedrich Meyer von Waldeck, editor of the St. Petersburg Deutsche Zeitung, the congress participants were “unable to communicate with each other or with the Russians” and had to “resort to the language ... that they all hated the most, but handled best—German.” Friedrich Meyer von Waldeck, “Aus den Erinnerungen eines russischen Publicisten,ˮ Die Gartenlaube, no. 20 (1877): 332. 135. Aleksej Miller, Imperija Romanovych i nacionalizm: Ėsse po metodologii istorii (Moskva: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2006), 54. 136. E.g., Ruprecht, Die deutsche Rechtschreibung, 5; Erdmann, Zur orthographischen Frage, 4–5. 137. Černyšev, F.F. Fortunatov i A.A. Šachmatov, 18 138. Ušakov, Russkoe pravopisanie, 28. 139. SPF ARAN F. 9. Op. 1. D. 842. Dela Komissii po voprosu ob uproščenii russkogo pravopisanija. 1904–1916. Fol. 55. 140. SPF ARAN F. 9. Op. 1. D. 842. Dela Komissii po voprosu ob uproščenii russkogo pravopisanija. 1904–1916. Fol. 55. 141. Aleksej Sobolevskij, “Koe-čto o reforme orfografii (pis’mo v redakciju),ˮ Novoe vremja, no. 10.014 (April 20, 1904). 142. Lev Trockij, “Očerednye zadači rabkorov (Reč’ na vsesojuznom soveščanii rabkorov «Rabočej Gazety» 13 janvarja 1926 g.),ˮ Izvestija VCIK, no. 16 (January 20, 1926): 2. 143. Ivan Il’in, “O našich orfografičeskich ranach,ˮ in Ivan Il’in. Naši zadači. Stat’i 1948–1956 g. vol. II (Pariž: Izdanie Russkogo Obšče-Voinskogo Sojuza), 443. 144. Ivan Il’in, “O russkom pravopisanii,ˮ in Ivan Il’in. Naši zadači. Stat’i 1948– 1956 g. vol. II (Pariž: Izdanie Russkogo Obšče-Voinskogo Sojuza, 1956), 438. 145. On political aspects of the perception of the new orthography, see Valerija Kaverina and Elena Leščenko, “Bukva «jat» kak ideologema rossijskogo diskursa na rubeže XIX-XX vv.,ˮ Voprosy kognitivnoj lingvistiki, no. 3 (2008): 117–124; Konstantin Vasil’ev, “Russkaja orfografija kak povod dlja političeskogo ožestočenija, kak tolčok k obščestvennomu vozbuždeniju i sposob proverki na vernopoddannost,’ˮ Vox. Filosofskij žurnal 22, vol. 12 (2017): 180–194. 146. [Moritz Kleinert], Die Reform der deutschen Schreibung. Vortrag, auf der 22. Allgemeinen deutschen Lehrerversammlung in Fürth am 23. Mai 1877 gehalten von Moritz Kleinert, Lehrer an der 1. Bürgerschule und Redakteur der Allgemeinen deutschen Lehrerzeitung in Dresden. Zugleich ein Wort der Verständigung an das deutsche Volk über die Bestrebungen des «Allgemeinen Vereins zur Einführung einer einfachen deutschen Orthographie» (Vorort Wiesbaden, Schriftführer Dr. F. W. Fricke, Organ Reform {Bremen, Kühtmann}) (Leipzig: Julius Klinkhardt, 1877), 12.

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147. RGIA F. 922. Op. 1. D. 232 [Fond V.G. Glazova.] Pis’ma (4) raznyсh liс V.G. Glazovu s vyraženiem protesta protiv izmenenija pravopisanija. 1904 g. L.1–2 [E. Dolgoreva’s letter], quote Fol. 2. 148. Šeremetevskij, K voprosu o “edinoobrazii” v orfografii, 84. 149. As representative of many, here are two examples, separated by about 40 years: “.  .  . elementary education is conducted in such a way that only rarely does an hour pass for the child without tears, without punishments . . . . While reading or writing, . . . the child does not think about what he is reading, writing, or answering, but about how he will be shouted at, punished or even beaten if he makes a mistake; consequently he is distracted . . .. After several rounds the school finds that [this child] is extremely inattentive and begins to persecute and punish him—and here begins for the child a series of protracted and unbearable torments: he is showered with bad marks for lack of performance, with bad marks in conduct—and already the child is lost!,” as we read in an essay, the title of which has an unmistakable moral coloring: “Is it fair to blame the pupils themselves even in the slightest way for their lack of success in learning?”—Michail Nikolenko, “Spravedlivo li obvinjat’ chot’ skol’konibud’ samich učenikov v ich neuspechach v naukach? Okončanie,ˮ Učitel’ 3, no. 20 (Oktober 1863): 939–943. And: “Just think how many poor little children cry every year because of the by no means necessary letters jat and jer, not to mention the sinister fita and the notorious ižica . . . Let [the jat] be cursed as often as children have cried because of it!”—[Anonymous], “Ešče o gramotnosti,ˮ Tverskaja gazeta, no. 279 (1904). 150. Černyšev, F.F. Fortunatov i A.A. Šachmatov, 219. 151. Erdmann, Zur orthographischen Frage, 4. 152. [Anonymous], “Sed’moe orfografičeskoe soveščanie,ˮ Učitel’ 3, no. 2 (1863): 96. 153. RGIA F. 25. Op. 5 D. 493. L. 53. Prepodavatel’ russkogo jazyka N. Cvetkov. Doklad o merach k vozmožno lučšej postanovke prepodavanija russkogo jazyka i, v častnosti, vedenija pis’mennych upražnenij po ėtomu predmetu, v kommerčeskich učiliščach. 25.09.1917. 154. Grot, Spornye voprosy, 680–681. 155. Uspenskij, Slovo o slovach, 103–104. 156. GStAPK VI. HA Rep. Nl Althoff A II Nr.8 Nachlass Althoff, Deutsche Orthographie. Fol. 123; Börsenblatt für den Deutschen Buchhandel und die verwandten Geschäftszweige, no. 175 (31.05.1900), 5667–5668. 157. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 84a Justizministerium no. 2830/1 Betr. die Orthographie, 1876–1919. Fol. 86v. 158. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 84a Justizministerium no. 2830/1 Betr. die Orthographie, 1876–1919. Fol. 87r–88v. Reichstag—38. Sitzung. Donnerstag den 31 Januar 1901. 159. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 84a Justizministerium no. 2830/1 Betr. die Orthographie, 1876–1919. Fol. 88r. 160. Kopke, Rechtschreibreform und Verfassungsrecht, 50–65. 161. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 84a Justizministerium no. 2830/2 Betr. die Orthographie, 1902–1919. Fol. 215–225.

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162. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 84a Justizministerium no. 2830/2 Betr. die Orthographie, 1902–1919. Fol. 341v, 328r. 163. LA NRW AW StaatsA Münster, Regierung Arnsberg, Schulabteilung, Generalia, no. 31733. No foliation. Rundschreiben des Ministers der geistlichen, Unterrichts- und Medzinalangelegenheiten Studt an Provinzialschulkollegien und -regierungen. 164. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 84a Justizministerium no. 2830/1 Betr. die Orthographie, 1876–1919. Fol. 146ff. Sitzung im Staatsministerium am 25. November 1901. 165. Vasilij Černyšev, Pis’ma o staroj i novoj russkoj orfografii (Sankt-Peterburg: Tipografija Imperatorskoj Akademii Nauk, 1904), 5. 166. The use of the word flaw here alludes to a pedagogical concept that can be found, for example, in Philipp Burkhard’s book titled The Flaws of Children: An Introduction to the Study of Educational Pathology with Special Reference to the Doctrine of Psychopathic Inferiorities (Die Fehler der Kinder: eine Einführung in das Studium der pädagogischen Pathologie mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Lehre von den psychopathischen Minderwertigkeiten (Karlsruhe: Nemnich, 1898)). What was meant here were not the mistakes that one makes, but rather the flaws that one has, that is, bad qualities. The flaws of children include, according to Burkhard, absentmindedness, shyness, surliness, chattiness, and other character traits that made them less convenient for adults. The characteristics of the German or Russian spelling norms that made them less user-friendly could thus also be called “flaws.” 167. Friedrich Wilhelm Frikke [Fricke], Aufruf zur Beshaffung einer nazionalen Ortografi für das geeinigte Deutshland (Bremen: J. Kühtmann’s Buchhandlung, 1876). 168. Bramann, DER WEG, 92–93. 169. Wehler, Deutsche Gesellschaftsgeschichte, 404. 170. Friedrich Wilhelm Fricke, Abriss der vereinfachten Volksorthographie (Leipzig: Robolsky, 1885), [1]. 171. Fricke, Abriss der vereinfachten Volksorthographie, 5–6. 172. Peters, Die Reform der deutschen Schreibung, 5. 173. This was more typical of reform educators’ discourse in the later decades— сf. Quosego, “Lehrer oder Fehlerzähler?.” 174. Peters, Die Reform der deutschen Schreibung, 5. 175. Peters, Die Reform der deutschen Schreibung, 17. 176. Peters, Die Reform der deutschen Schreibung, 6. Incidentally, the apparent paradox of this thought is quite remarkable when one considers that England and France, the two powers that could have been Germany’s opponents in a battle for “final victory” at the time, were able to gain their leading positions on the world market despite the fact that their orthographies were anything but phonetic. 177. Peters, Die Reform der deutschen Schreibung, 17. 178. Fricke, Abriss der vereinfachten Volksorthographie, 7. 179. Friedrich Wilhelm Frikke [Fricke], “Die ortografische Reform in wissenschaftlicher, pädagogischer unt praktischer Beziung,ˮ ADLZ 28, no. 14 (1876): 111– 113. The article was designed “as an example of the natural Ortografi” and featured simplified spelling.

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180. Frikke, Die ortografische Reform, 111. 181. Peters, Die Reform der deutschen Schreibung, 16. 182. Friedrich Wilhelm Frikke [Fricke], “Zukunfts- unt Übergangsortografi,ˮ ADLZ 28, no. 45 (1876): 386–387. 183. Deutše klassiker. Herausgegeben fon dem ferein für fereinfahte deutše rehtšreibung. Mit erklärendem fōrvort fon dr. F. V. Frikke (Bremen: Ferlag fon J. Kühtmann’s buhhandlung, 1882). 184. Michael Schlaefer, Grundzüge der deutschen Orthographiegeschichte vom Jahre 1800 bis zum Jahre 1870 (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1980), 291. 185. BBF DIPF OT 375 Korrespondenz «Hauslehrer». Leserzuschriften. Fol. 23. 186. “Ferein für fereinfachte rechtʃchreibung. Jedem laut ʃtets das eine īm zukommende zeichen. Wo kein laut, da kein zeichen. Keine c, q, v, x, y; ss, dt, th, ph, rh, ae, oe, ue; aa, ee, oo, ie, ah, eh, ih, ieh, usw. Auch bei fremdwörtern nur deutʃche lautbezeichnung. Monatsʃchrift ’Reform‘ 2 mk. Geʃchäftsʃtelle: D. Soltau, Norden.” “Für den fal das Si meinen namen nicht nennen wollen, empfele ich auch di adresse ‘lerer Wickersheimer, Waldhambach i. Elsas.’ Würden Si eine tauʃchanzeige aufnemen in den hauslerer? Di fassung könnte umʃteender fordruk sein. Filleicht mit dem zusaz ‘Abʃchaffung des ʃchlimsten bisherigen Schulkreuzes.’ Diser zusaz hätte gleich unter di überʃchrift zu kommen. Also ‘Ferein f. f. rechtʃchreibung. Abʃchaffung des ärgsten bisherigen schulkreuzes. Jedem laut...’ Besten grus. J.Spiser” BBF DIPF OT 24. Manuskripte 1901. Fol. 44. 187. “durch unʃere herkömlihce Unterihctswaise ʃint di maisten fon uns nihct grade unfähihc, aber durhcaus unlustihc geworden, noie Gedaŋken auftsunemen unt noch mer ʃctroiben wir uns gegŋ das Umlernen. Wir habm uns ʃo ʃer kwäln müsn, um unʃere Wortbilder aintsudriln, das wir aln Grunt tsu habm glaubm, dem tsu tsürǹ, der durhc Ainfüruŋk noier Wortbilder diʃn Beʃits wertlos, diʃe Arbait alʃo fergeplihc tsu machŋ ʃucht.” BBF DIPF OT 227 Notizzettel. Fol. 5–27, Zitate Fol. 7v und 7r. (Unfortunately, the width of the letters could not be reproduced by means of the typeface used here.) 188. On the contrary, Berthold Otto emphatically pointed out that “in reality, the written language is a transformation and definition, made for specific purposes, of a spoken language that is in itself always alive and therefore constantly capable of change.” the draft in BBF DIPF OT 28 Berthold Otto Manuskripte 1904. Fol. 26–37, here fol. 30v.; BBF DIPF OT 291 Manuskripte (masch., undat.). Fol. 40. 189. See Eduard Lomeier, “Der erenname ‚fi-Partei,’ˮ ADLZ 35 (1883): 99. 190. Quoted after Peters, Die Reform der deutschen Schreibung, 19–20. 191. [Anonymous], “Tret’je i četvertoe soveščanija po voprosu ob uproščenii russkoj orfografii,ˮ Učitel’ 2, no. 8 (1862): 344–347. A footnote on p. 344 says, “From now on, when printing reports, we will apply the spelling adopted at the present meeting and will take into account any changes that are made in the future. In this way it will be clear to what extent the aim of simplification is being achieved. We must note, however, that we have had to leave the letters jer and i kratkoe, excluded from the alphabet by general agreement, because the printers have no types for the respective new characters.” 192. SPF ARAN F. 9. Op. 1. D. 842. Dela Komissii po voprosu ob uproščenii russkogo pravopisanija. 1904–1916. Fol. 9–19.

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193. The subordinate clause is omitted from the published version of the minutes. 194. SPF ARAN F. 9. Op. 1. D. 842. Dela Komissii po voprosu ob uproščenii russkogo pravopisanija. 1904–1916. Fol. 54. 195. It should be borne in mind that the phonetists only wanted to adapt the spelling to High German pronunciation, which would only bring partial relief to the majority of students who were dialect speakers. 196. The history of stenography has so far been written almost exclusively by stenographers and not historians and barely treated from the angle of interest here. For a few exceptions, cf. Kerstin Stüssel, In Vertretung. Literarische Mitschriften von Bürokratie zwischen früher Neuzeit und Gegenwart (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2004), 206, concerning Russia, Lovell, How Russia Learned to Talk. On the history of shorthand in general, see Walter Kaden, Neue Geschichte der Stenographie. Von der Entstehung der Schrift bis zur Stenographie der Gegenwart (Dresden: W. Kaden, 1999). 197. Stüssel, In Vertretung, 207. 198. “[Untitled editorial],” Merkesiana. Fachblatt zur Förderung des Merkes’schen Stenographie-Systems (June, 1901): 74. 199. On the one hand, Stolzeans credited themselves for this, but on the other hand admitted that the “increased influx from the lower strata of society” deterred potential participants from the middle class. This statement by a leading representative of the Stolze-Schrey system was quoted with glee by the competition. “[Untitled editorial],” Merkesiana (June, 1901): 78. 200. Gustav Steinbrink, Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftlichkeit auf dem Gebiete der Stenographie. Mit besonderer Beziehung auf das vereinfachte Stolzesche System. Vortrag, gehalten am 4. November 1878 im stenographischen Verein zu Berlin von Dr. G. Steinbrink. Separatabdruck aus dem «Archiv für Stenographie» no. 361 und 362 (Berlin: Expedition des ‘Archivs,’ 1879), 9, 20. 201. Steinbrink, Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftlichkeit, 25 202. Steinbrink, Über den Begriff der Wissenschaftlichkeit, 8 203. The Royal Saxon Stenographic Institute in Dresden specialized in the Gabelsberger system at that time. Unfortunately, the archival holdings of the institute were not accessible to me at the time of writing, so it was not possible to determine how research was conducted there. However, this may be disregarded here insofar as this institute did not set itself the goal of achieving the general replacement of conventional writing with shorthand. 204. GStAPK I HA Rep. 89 Geh. Zivilkabinett, jüngere Periode. no. 21380, unpaginated. 205. In the following remarks I rely on Sven Dierig, “Apollo’s Tragedy: Laboratory Science between Classicism and Industrial Modernism,ˮ in Science as Cultural Practice, vol. I: Cultures and Politics of Research from the Early Modern Period to the Age of Extremes, ed. Moritz Epple and Claus Zittel (Berlin: Akademie, 2010), 103–120. 206. Dierig, Apollo’s Tragedy, 117. 207. Dierig, Apollo’s Tragedy, 118–119. 208. Dierig, Apollo’s Tragedy, 116–117.

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209. Dierig, Apollo’s Tragedy, 114. 210. Dierig, Apollo’s Tragedy, 115. 211. Friedrich Wilhelm Kaeding, ed., Häufigkeitswörterbuch der deutschen Sprache. Festgestellt durch einen Arbeitsausschuß der deutschen StenographieSysteme (Steglitz bei Berlin: Selbstverlag, 1897/98); Kaeding later described his work in Friedrich Wilhelm Kaeding, “Das Häufigkeitswörterbuch und die Geläufigkeitsuntersuchungen,ˮ Magazin für Stenographie XX (1899): 83–87, 90–94, 115–119, 129–133, 153–158. 212. For the history of modern statistics and its changing role in scholarship and politics, see Theodore M. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking: 1820–1900 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). 213. Friedrich Wilhelm Kaeding, ed., “Häufigkeitswörterbuch der deutschen Sprache, Teil 1 u. 2, Teilnachdruck,ˮ Grundlagenstudien aus Kybernetik und Geisteswissenschaft 4 (1963), Supplement. 214. For example, [Anonymous], “Vocabularium voor het vreemde-talenonderwijs in het eerste leerjaar,ˮ Levende Talen (1958): 84–101. 215. Helmut Meier processed Kaeding’s raw data in his spare time over the course of 40 years. He published his findings in a book—Helmut Meier, Deutsche Sprachstatistik (Hildesheim: Olms, 1964)—which was so successful and in such demand that a new edition was published in 1967 and a second, revised and supplemented edition in 1978. 216. Wolf Dieter Ortmann, ed., Hochfrequente deutsche Wortformen. 7995 Wortformen der Kaeding-Zählung, rechnersortiert in alphabetischer und rückläufiger Folge, nach Häufigkeit und Hauptwortarten (München: Goethe-Institut, 1975). 217. Heinrich Jaekel, Roller oder Stolze? Eine Beleuchtung der Jacobsohnschen Kritik des Rollerschen Systems (Rixdorf: W. Hecht’s Hofbuchdruckerei, 1892), 3. 218. Edmund Parish,”Vergleich der Rollerschen und der Neu-Stolzeschen Stenographie in Bezug auf ihre Leistungsfähigkeit,ˮ in Jaekel, Roller oder Stolze, 27. 219. E. Alberti, “Stolze, Heinrich August Wilhelm,ˮ in Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, ed. Historische Kommission bei der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, vol. 36 (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1893), 425–428. 220. Examples include the Correspondenzblatt des königlich-Sächsischen Stenographischen Instituts; Deutsche Stenographenzeitung; Das Neue Testament unseres Herrn und Heilandes Jesu Christi, übersetzt von D. Martin Luther. Erste deutsche stenographische Ausgabe. Übertragen und autographirt von Heinrich Krieg, Professor am königl. stenographischen Institut zu Dresden (Dresden: G. Dietze, 1870); for more, see Karl Keil, Verzeichniss der stenographischen Literatur (Druckwerke und Kunstgegenstände) Deutschlands und der wichtigsten gleichartigen Erscheinungen des Auslandes, sowie einer Auswahl verwandter Werke über Schriftkunde, Pasigraphie und die Tachygraphie der Alten: nach dem System geordnet (Leipzig: Verlag von J.H. Robolsky, 1880). 221. Schulzes Illustrierte Unterhaltungsblätter für Stenographen. System StolzeSchrey (Berlin: Schulze, 1902–1933). 222. Quoted in Julius Tietz, “Ein Urteil über die Verhandlung, welche auf der 15. Versammlung der Directoren der Westphälischen Gymnasien und Realschulen

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zu Soest, am 13. bis 17. October 1863, über den Unterricht in der Stenographie an den höheren Lehranstalten stattgefunden hat,ˮ in Neue Jahrbücher für Philologie und Pädagogik. Begründet von Johann Christian Jahn. Gegenwärtig herausgegeben von Alfred Fleckeisen, Professor in Dresden, und Hermann Masius, Professor in Leipzig. 35th year. Vol. 92. Part 2: Gymnasialpädagogik und die übrigen Lehrfächer mit Ausschlusz der classischen Philologie, ed. Hermann Masius. 11th year, 291–305 (Leipzig: Teubner, 1865), 291–92. 223. In his essay, Tietz demonstrated that the negative opinions of all the headmasters of Prussia’s higher educational institutions, who had been asked for their opinion on the necessity of shorthand instruction at their institutions, were based on their lack of familiarity with shorthand. Tietz, Ein Urteil über die Verhandlung, 293–296. 224. Küffner, Vom Fehlerkreuz an unseren Mittelschulen, 15–16. 225. Timetables of shorthand classes can be found in Historische Vorlesungsverzeichnisse der Universität Leipzig (Leipzig: Universität Leipzig, 2009); Chronik der Königlichen Universität zu Breslau für das Jahr vom 1. April 1902 bis 31. März 1903. 17th year (Breslau: [no publisher], 1903); Handbuch der Industrie- und Handelskammer Breslau (Breslau: [no publisher], 1927); “Findbuch des Bestandes Abt. 47: Christian-Albrechts-Universität Kiel, part 1: 1665–1945,ˮ in Veröffentlichungen des Landesarchivs Schleswig-Holstein, vol. 90 (Hamburg: Hamburg University Press, 2007), 21. 226. Arthur Mentz, Geschichte der Stenographie. 2nd revised ed. (Berlin; Leipzig: Vereinigung wissenschaftlicher Verleger, 1920), 92. 227. For nearly three decades in the second half of the nineteenth century, Gustav Michaelis published very extensively on topics related to writing and orthography. Listing his relevant works here would be impossible due to space constraints. 228. Without waiting for a general reform, Michaelis went about improving German spelling in his periodicals and had the journal printed in Antiqua, omitting the vowel-length h and at times using the lower case for nouns. 229. Ruprecht, Die deutsche Rechtschreibung, 7–8. 230. He set out his thoughts on this in his pamphlet Gustav Michaelis, Die Ergebnisse der zu Berlin vom 4. bis 15. Januar 1876 abgehaltenen orthographischen Konferenz (Berlin: Barthol, 1876). 231. In the Central Index of Antiquarian Books there is a handwritten letter card with signature (“Prof. Michaelis & Frau”) and a handwritten lecture announcement with the place and time of his lectures on German shorthand “along with practical exercises” from autumn 1891. (The card can be found on the website www​.zvab​.com via the search function). 232. Nikolaj Eršov, Obzor russkich stenografičeskich sistem. Istorija, kritika i literatura russkoj stenografii (Sankt-Peterburg: Redakcija žurnala “Pedagogičeskij muzej,” 1880), 4. 233. See [Lev Tolstoj]: “Pis’mo T[olstogo] k N.A. Eršovu ot 3 ijunja s blagodarnost’ju za ego kn. ‘Obzor russkich stenografičeskich sistem,’ˮ in Lev Tolstoj, Polnoe sobranie sočinenij v 90 tomach, vol. 79 (Moskva: Chudožestvennaja literatura, 1957), 215.

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234. Makovickij, Jasnopoljanskie zapiski, vol. 3, 429. Leo Tolstoy did not learn shorthand himself, but his secretary Nikolaj Gusev and later his daughter Aleksandra L’vovna Tolstaya used it to transcribe his conversations and letters. 235. Cf. Lovell, How Russia Learned to Talk, 26–29. 236. Michail Ivanin, O stenografii ili iskusstve skoropisi i primenenii eё k russkomu jazyku (Sankt-Peterburg: Tipografija Imperatorskoj Akademii Nauk, 1858); Michail Ivanin, Russkaja stenografija ili skoropis’ dlja glasnogo sudoproizvodstva i učebnych zavedenij (Sankt-Peterburg: Tipografija tovariščestva “Obščestvennaja pol’za,” 1866). 237. Ivanin, O stenografii, 20. 238. Pavel Ol’chin, Rukovodstvo k russkoj stenografii po načalam Gabel’sbergera (Sankt-Peterburg: Tipografija doktora M. Chana, 1866). 239. See V.I. Sokolov, “Rejman. Materialy dlja buduščej stenografii,ˮ Učitel’ 3б no. 4–6, 8, 9, 11–16, 22–24 (1863). Accounts of the system competition see in Michail Stasjulevič, “Novejšie uspechi stenografii,ˮ Golos, no. 154 (June 19, 1863): 601–602; Eršov, Obzor russkich stenografičeskich sistem, 138–143. 240. Iosif Paul’son and Jakov Messer, Russkaja kratkopis,’ ili stenografija po načalam Štol’ce (Sankt-Peterburg: Paul’son, 1864). 241. Solomon Rejser, Russkaja paleografija novogo vremeni: neografija: Učebnoe posobie dlja vuzov (Moskva: Vysšaja škola, 1982), 51. 242. For example, Pavel Ol’chin, Dva rasskaza. Upražnenie v čtenii dlja izučajuščich bystropis’ na kursah Pavla Ol’china (Sankt-Petersburg: [no publisher] 1866); Michail Lermontov, Maksim Maksimyč; Fatalist i nekotorye stichotvorenija. Stenografičeskij perevod Stanislava Dlusskogo (Kiev: Izdatel’stvo Južno-russkogo knižnogo magazina, 1887). 243. The invention of new stenographic systems also continued. Eršov published his own work—Nikolaj Eršov, “Novaja skoropis’” (stenografija) (Sankt-Peterburg: Tipografija M. Merkuševa, 1912). 244. Ivan Cimmerman, Stenografija—novaja pis’mennost.’ Lekcii-korrespondencii dlja samoobučenija (Sankt-Peterburg: Stenograf, 1913); Ivan Cimmerman, Zvukovaja stenografija (dlja russkogo jazyka) po načalam M.A. Ternė. Pod red. i v obrabotke d-ra I.L. Cimmerman. Polnoe rukovodstvo, sostavlennoe po planu učebnika stenografii Dr. J. Zimmerman “Transcription phonétique universelle sténographie,” issues 1–6. (Sankt-Peterburg: Tovariščestvo “Stenograf,” 1913–1914); Ivan Cimmerman, Podlinno zvukovoe sluchovoe pis’mo—narodnaja gramotnost.’ Mysli ob orfografii i našej škole (Sankt-Peterburg: Tovariščestvo “Stenograf,” 1913); Ivan Cimmerman, Russko-narodnaja gramotnost.’ Očerk, posviaščennyj russkomu pravopisaniju (Sankt-Peterburg: Tovariščestvo “Stenograf,” 1913); Ivan Cimmerman, Škola i stenografija. Kartinki sovremennoj školy (Sankt-Peterburg: Stenograf, 1914). 245. See [Anonymous], Novye usoveršenstvovannye litery dlja russkogo alfavita, ili udobnejšee sredstvo učit’sja čteniju i pis’mu russkomu, daže i inostrancam, prisposoblennoe vmeste k izučeniju vseсh evropejskiсh alfavitov, s priloženiem nekotoryсh istoričeskiсh zamečanij o upotreblenii bukv u drevniсh i novyсh narodov (Moskva: Tipografija Avgusta Semena, 1833); Kirill Kadinskij, Uproščenie russkoj

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grammatiki. Uproscenie ruskoi grammatiki, napečatannoe dvojakim šriftom russkim i vnov’ predlagaemym latinskim (Sankt-Peterburg: Tipografija Štaba voenno-učebnych zavedenij, 1842). 246. Jeffrey Brooks, When Russia Learned to Read: Literacy and Popular Literature, 1861–1917 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985); Lovell, How Russia Learned to Talk. 247. Texts written by stenographers for their own use and therefore not transcribed, such as the diaries of Dostoevsky’s wife, were an insignificant exception in quantitative terms.

Conclusion The History of Orthography as a History of Society

Let us summarize the results of our study. When viewed against the backdrop of broader historical contexts, the construction of modern orthographic conventions in the countries under examination appears to have resulted from lifeworld changes and transfer actions during the European age of modernization. The counterintuitive fact that the modern construction of the spelling mistake preceded the modern construction of the orthographic norm is explained by the course of social history and, above all, of school history in German countries, primarily in Prussia, and in the Russian Empire. In the nineteenth century, profound changes were underway in all areas of life in German countries and (partly at the same time, but mostly decades later) in Russia. Their interaction was of crucial importance for the establishment of a new way of dealing with orthographic problems, among other things. The following were identified as decisive factors here: (1) German unification under the hegemony of Prussia. Especially the populations of those territories that became Prussian under constitutional law were taught values that were particularly important for the issues this study addresses: discipline, obedience, order, uniformity, and accuracy. However, at the imperial level, tendencies toward uniformity marked by Prussification were for a long time thwarted by administrative particularism and the cultural sovereignty of individual German federal states. While this was a specifically German problem that had no immediate relevance for Russia, the two countries had another factor in common that hindered orthography optimization efforts. (2) Diverging interests and attitudes of different ministries with regard to spelling and the absence of a central body responsible for regulating and/ or mediating spelling. This also led to the question of authority being raised when discussing reform projects. 271

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(3) Modernization and its impact on the worldview. Many among the increasingly empowered bourgeoisie longed for modernization effects such as economic rationality and (for Germany) national unity. Projected onto the written word, this meant the demand for the most comprehensive uniformity possible and an orthography that saved as many resources as possible in learning and writing. Above all, the way modern technology was interpreted in German mass media raised the appeal of dispensing with the homegrown, the traditional, the imprecise and the arbitrary. The Russian media, which presented modern technology just as enthusiastically, did not emphasize precision and regulation, but rather cost and performance. However, through their uniformly timed mode of operation and their strict, non-negotiable rules, modern means of transportation contributed also in a more direct way to disciplining their German and Russian users. These direct and indirect effects of technical innovations, which increasingly shaped the people's imagination and lifeworld, encouraged new patterns of behavior and ways of thinking, including a broader acceptance of new orthographic requirements with their tendency toward uniformity and intolerance of anything discretionary, individual, and flawed. At the same time, however, they also led to a growing desire for streamlining the existing norms. Last but not least, the emergence of new, technocratic, rationally thinking professional groups also played a role. (4) The linguistic mingling of the population that went hand in hand with industrial capitalist development of German countries and Russia, and the mass migration resulting therefrom, became particularly noticeable at school in a way that is important for our agenda. The old principle, “Write the way you speak!” was finally proven to be dysfunctional, since too many people spoke too differently. This was one of the reasons why school teachers felt that the introduction of a differently substantiated uniform standard was a necessity. Related to this is also the next factor. (5) The expansion of the school systems, the spread of the modern Prussian school system with its dual (teaching and moral education) mission, including its transfer to Russia. Political reaction led to a drastic disciplining of prospective teachers and a concomitant deterioration of their pedagogical training. These processes had several important consequences, but above all the mistake-centered formalization of marking and grading, and the increasing dissatisfaction of teachers, students, and their parents, who were ever more often confronted with divergent and illogical spellings in textbooks and readers. Unable to successfully teach complicated orthography, many teachers developed, on the one hand, a penchant for teaching methods that increased the fear of making an error while others, on the other hand, developed a particularly strong desire to improve orthographic standards. This desire, however, only became apparent to governments when, in the course

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of the teaching community becoming more professional, the organizations and the media representing their interests gained strength, and also when the number of those in the public who expressed sympathy for this desire reached a critical mass. Therefore, spelling reforms leading to the creation of modern sets of rules were only initiated when the construction of the spelling error had already been largely completed. In both countries, educational institutions that functioned according to the Prussian model had probably the most rigorous and repressive approach to violations of rules in general and spelling rules in particular, as well as to students guilty of such violations. Due to the qualification system in force in both countries, the path to higher education and, accordingly, into the “educated” professional and social groups led via secondary schools (Gymnasium, gimnazija, or Realschule, real’noe učilišče), admission to which meant passing a number of exams in which errors played a great role. Therefore, those who made mistakes in school and Gymnasium subjects were stigmatized as poorly educated, incompetent, intellectually inferior by representatives of the educated circles who had successfully passed the examination filters with great mental and psychological effort. The secondary socialization mandate of the school meant that spelling mistakes fell under the heading of morally reprehensible misbehavior along with other faults. Mistakes that children made when writing were interpreted as symptoms of disobedience, laziness, absent-mindedness, willfulness, and so on, and were taken as the occasion for disciplining measures that included positive reinforcement as well as traumatizing punishments of various types and severity. This approach was part of an overarching repressive school culture in which mistakes were generally forbidden and punished. The key actors who served as bearers of this school culture and its corresponding attitude toward mistakes were thus teachers. At the core of their respective professional interests was the most successful and efficient fulfilment of the officially controlled aspects of their teaching and educational mandate. The media they used for the (partly indirect or implicit) construction of the spelling mistake were, in addition to specialist periodicals and brochures, primarily consultations at various levels from individual school staff meetings to international conferences. The predominant consensus toward which they tended during the second half of the nineteenth century was, so far as mistakes were concerned, as follows. Mistakes were insufferable and subject to punishment; they were not only an important grading criterion but also had a negative moral connotation; their main causes were, according to some, insufficient effort and other shortcomings on the part of the learner, according to others, difficult working conditions on the part of the teacher, and, according to still others inadequate orthography standards that made it difficult to teach and learn.

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As the school system expanded over time, more and more Germans and Russians whose secondary socialization took place within the framework of the Prussian school model espoused the repressive school culture’s values as parents at home and as employers in their public lives. However, not everyone was satisfied with or agreed with this school model and with its concept of error. The schools of Leo Tolstoy and Berthold Otto practiced an alternative style of communication and teaching that was more child- and error-friendly. Here, too, dealing with spelling mistakes was an organic part of an overarching school culture, but one that was distinguished by a higher level of behavioral freedom, tolerance, respect for children and their needs, and a fundamental renunciation of subjugation. The renunciation of a compulsory curriculum and examinations as well as the extensive freedom from official supervision also played an important role. Tolstoy and Otto constructed mistakes, including orthographic ones, as par for the course and neither indicative of the student’s character flaws nor deserving punishment. Founders of alternative schools hoped that their concepts, by virtue of their success, would serve as an informal model and be widely emulated. They were counting on the spread of their non-repressive school model, which, among the many other pedagogical issues that the conventional model was unable to solve or even created in the first place, was also supposed to solve the problem with the acquisition of spelling. However, their school models were able to gain only limited terrain and were, at the end of the day, far from being a widely accepted alternative to the now prevailing pattern. Otto's private tutoring school was more successful and long-lived of the two because it received more recognition and support from the authorities, while Tolstoy's schools fell victim to the state's repressive apparatus fighting political “revolutionaries.” Many educators, however, were of the opinion that it was collective work on improving orthographic norms that would solve the problem. In both Germany and Russia, the second half of the nineteenth century and the years leading up to World War I were a period of numerous attempts to perfect existing orthographies. Some of them were spontaneous and isolated, others were coordinated and supported by governments or other authoritative bodies. As could be seen in the course of this research, there was a great similarity between the attempts at reform in the two countries, both in terms of the content of the proposed reforms that was debated and the way in which these debates were conducted. At that, no evidence of deliberate imitation in this matter has so far been detected; rather, on the Russian side, despite the great German influence, evidence can sometimes be observed of an emphatic disassociation from Germany as a model. The arguments put forward in debates on the reform can analytically be divided into four discourses. In the “economic” discourse, the need to abolish

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superfluous letters (the silent h in German; jer, jat, i with a dot, fita, and ižica in Russian) and to introduce some easier-to-learn spelling rules was justified by arguments of economizing time and effort. Under the influence of the lifeworld context, which made accuracy, uniformity, and technical and economic rationality common values, demands for standardization were voiced, since the “unwarranted variety” and “intolerable irregularity” prevailing in orthography at the time seemed untenable. Difficulties in teaching and learning caused by the complexity of traditional orthographies, cited by the leading supporters of a reform of German and Russian spelling in both countries, were addressed in a particularly interesting way within the framework of the “moral” discourse. Whereas opponents of reform in both countries often attributed the learning difficulties and spelling mistakes to children's allegedly sinful, morally imperfect nature (laziness, inattentiveness, disobedience, carelessness, etc.), what German Lutheran reformers described as sinful was the waste of precious time expended on the tedious learning of conventional orthography, whereas in Russia some reform advocates among the educators thought that it was a sin to torment the poor young learners with the much too difficult spelling and with poor marks for spelling mistakes. This difference in values explains why almost identical reforms in Germany were predominantly described as “creating greater unity” and “standardization,” while in Russia they were mainly referred to as a “simplification” of spelling. Opponents of any reforms and advocates of such reform projects that were as conservative as possible preferred to use “pragmatic” discourse, pointing to the impracticability of innovations that went “too far” and to the need to preclude an eventuality that future generations, taught according to whatever new rules, would find themselves unable to read already existing books, as this would either ruin the publishers and booksellers or lead to the reform being rejected by the educated public. Educators (from ordinary school teachers to ministers of education) were the main actors of the orthographic mistake construction. Educators (primarily philological faculty graduates who worked in secondary and, less often, urban primary schools) were also the main actors of the spelling reform movement in both countries. Individual linguists played an important role as drafters of reform projects and as experts; although administrative officials, parents of school children, literary figures and other stakeholders did participate in the discussions, mostly through publications or letters, their influence is often difficult to assess. Both in Germany and in Russia, a person of high standing (imperial chancellor, emperor, president of the Academy of Sciences or an influential courtier) had a powerful say at crucial moments and influenced the course of events decisively and lastingly, even setting the boundaries between right and wrong at times.

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In Russia as in Germany, the most significant and effective efforts to find a practical solution to the spelling issue were made within institutionally or geographically limited professional educator communities. Other professional associations (those of philologists, journalists, publishers, book printers) issued only a few approving resolutions, and even that only in Germany. The authorities in Berlin and the Academy of Sciences in St. Petersburg reacted to submitted proposals and launched preparations for reforms with varying degrees of delay. As in many other areas at that time, conferences were the most important, if not the only medium of reform work. This study analyzed several Russian and German conferences taking place at various levels. In addition to significant differences (especially the above-mentioned difference in the intended goals of reforms), numerous similarities between these public consultations were found: • A working group of experts and interested parties was formed to prepare the draft for an optimizing solution of the spelling question on the basis of a concept penned by an individual or a small group. • Teachers of the German and Russian languages were the most numerous and active among the experts and interested parties involved. Further actors included linguists, journalists, representatives of the book printing industry and the book trade, as well as administration.1 • The objective was twofold: the new spelling should be uniform and better than the old one, but not too different. • The mandate of the conference provided for a purely advisory function. Legislation and implementation were not part of that mandate.2 • Learners constituted the most important target group, although experienced readers and writers’ interests were taken into consideration.3 • Representatives of the target groups had a say only indirectly, by way of unsystematic second-hand reports.4 • The individual provisions of the draft were discussed and adopted, modified, or rejected by vote. • The phonetic principle was usually given priority over the etymological principle in the conference resolutions but less so in the eventually adopted reforms. • Proposals considered too radical were rejected or not considered at all. The latter point hit at a core problem of reformatory activity: some claimed that only moderate solutions had a good chance of being widely accepted, while others countered that only radical solutions could remedy the “spelling distress.” While the moderates always gained the upper hand, from the point of view of our problem definition, it is necessary to also give a place in the picture to the radicals who were pushed away from participating in the construction of the new norm.

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Two such alternative solutions were presented in this study: a radically “phonetic” alphabet script largely adapted to oral speech as proposed by Fricke, Spieser, Brandt et al., and shorthand that was visually completely detached from the conventional alphabet script—the stenographic system of Stolze or Stolze-Schrey being one example. Both of these alternative solutions were promoted at the time with the same arguments that we know from the discourses of moderate reformers: they were said to help save the resources so highly valued in the modern world, such as time, energy, money, paper, and printer's ink; wasting these resources was described as a sin; Stolze's shorthand also claimed to have the advantage of being more “scientific” than other shorthand systems, not to mention conventional German orthography. The fact that it became widespread but could by no means replace conventional penmanship, and that radical phonetic alphabetic writing remained but a marginal phenomenon in both Germany and the Russian Empire, can probably best be explained with the help of Max Weber's distinction between instrumental and value-rational social actions. Although people were aware of certain instrumental advantages of the new inventions, the majority of them stuck to the far-from-perfect but familiar solutions sanctified by tradition out of value-rational considerations, as long as state power did not force them to switch to the new. This also shows the limits of the influence on behavior that the new lifeworld context described at the beginning could exert. Finally, the importance of comparing two cases for a epistemologically productive application of the social constructionist approach should be highlighted. For what is important is not only that something was constructed, but also by whom, how, and not least under what conditions, and how these conditions affected the construction process. The specific conditions of the politically, socially and culturally highly complex unification process in Germany and the comparatively late start of modernization, urbanization and mass schooling (or first introduction to literacy) in the centralized Russian Empire, but also the different reform agendas and the largely similar phenomena of political reaction, the different religiously colored moral value systems and the cultural and geographical orientations in the two countries—all these factors, which could only be compared here in rudimentary form as worlds of imagination and lifeworld contexts, left their mark on the respective construction processes. Their influence, furthermore, was partly eclipsed by an extremely strong influence of intense transfer in the fields of scholarship and secondary education, so that in two countries as different as Germany and Russia, such strikingly similar manifestations can be observed in the way orthographic norms and errors were and mostly still are dealt with.

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NOTES 1. Exceptions: St. Petersburg 1862, where only teachers and journalists were present, and St. Petersburg 1904, where professional writers were also present as members of the large commission. 2. Exception: Halle, where the participants were also expected to carry out the resolutions. 3. This target group should either be reached directly through the introduction of new orthography in the classroom (as in Berlin in 1876 and 1901), or indirectly via the media as an approval authority (as in Petersburg 1862–1863 and 1904–1912). 4. The Saint Petersburg Commission of 1904–1912 also took into account votes (including those submitted in the form of letters) of journalists and professional writers.

Archival Collections

GStAPK—Geheimes Staatsarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz—Secret State Archives Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation (Berlin): 1. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 76 Kultusministerium VI Sekt. VI z Nr. 4 Vol. VII. Die Abiturienten-Prüfungen und die Einsendung der desfallsigen Nachweisungen aus der Provinz Posen, Vol. VII. 2. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 84a Justizministerium Nr. 2830/1 Betr. die Orthographie, 1876–1919. 3. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 84a Justizministerium Nr. 2830/2 Betr. die Orthographie, 1902–1919. 4. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 89 Geh. Zivilkabinett, jüngere Periode Nr. 21381 Acta betr. die deutsche Rechtschreibung und die deutsche Schrift. 1880 bis 1918. 5. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 151 Finanzministerium I B Nr. 317 Herstellung größerer Einheitlichkeit in der deutschen Rechtschreibung, Vol. I 1876–1904. 6. GStAPK I. HA Rep. 151 Finanzministerium I B Nr. 318 Herstellung größerer Einheitlichkeit in der deutschen Rechtschreibung, Vol. II 1905–1921. 7. GStAPK VI. HA Rep. Nl Althoff A II Nr. 8 Nachlass Althoff, Deutsche Orthographie. 8. GStAPK VI. HA Rep. Nl Schmidt-Ott (M) B XXXIX Nachlass Schmidt-Ott, Deutsche Rechtschreibung. RGIA—Rossijskij gosudarstvennyj istoričeskij archiv—Russian State Historical Archives (Saint Petersburg):

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1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

RGIA F. 25. Op. 5 D. 493. RGIA F. 107. Op. 1. D. 10. RGIA F. 734. Op. 3. D. 2. RGIA F. 734. Op. 3. D. 5. RGIA F. 922. Op. 1. D. 232. RGIA. Papka 2695. Pervyj s’ezd dejatelej po narodnomu obrazovaniju v Moskovskom Gorodskom Obščestvennom Upravlenii. 7. RGIA Papka 2209 Pečatnye zapiski. Ministerstvo vnutrenniсh del. Glavnoe upravlenie počt i telegrafov. Otdelenie IX. Stol 2. 8. RGIA Papka 2210 Ministerstvo počt i telegrafov. Telegrafnoe upravlenie. Kontrol’noe otdelenie. Stol 5. V S-Peterburge. BBF DIPF—Bibliothek für Bildungsgeschichtliche Forschung des Leibniz-Instituts für Bildungsforschung und Bildungsinformation—History of Education Research Library, Leibniz Institute for Education Studies and Information (Berlin): Nachlass Berthold Otto (OT)—Berthold Otto’s Papers (OT): 1. BBF DIPF OT 24. Manuskripte 1901. 2. BBF DIPF OT 26 Berthold Otto Manuskripte 1903. 3. BBF DIPF OT 28 Berthold Otto Manuskripte 1904. 4. BBF DIPF OT 30 Manuskripte. 5. BBF DIPF OT 117 Schulbehörden 1900–1914. 6. BBF DIPF OT 171 Berthold-Otto-Schule Hospitantenbriefe F. 7. BBF DIPF OT 194 Berthold-Otto-Schule: Unterrichtsprotokolle. Latein, Griechisch, Schreiben. 8. BBF DIPF OT 198 Berthold-Otto-Schule. Unterrichtsprotokolle. 9. BBF DIPF OT 206 Berthold-Otto-Schule Kopien von Briefen der Abt. Kirchen/Schulwesen der Kgl. Regierung usw.. 10. BBF DIPF OT 211 Schüleraufsätze 1914–1932. 11. BBF DIPF OT 227 Notizzettel. 12. BBF DIPF OT 291 Manuskripte (masch., undatiert). 13. BBF DIPF OT 375 Korrespondenz «Hauslehrer». Leserzuschriften. 14. BBF DIPF OT 582 Berthold-Otto-Schule Zeitungsartikel über 1906– 1933 Die Schule. 15. BBF DIPF OT 591 Berthold-Otto-Schule Schüleraufsätze 1914–1922. SPF ARAN—Sankt-Peterburgskij filial Archiva Rossijskoj akademii nauk— Saint Petersburg Branch of the Archives of the Russisian Akademy of Sciences (St Petersburg):

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1. SPF ARAN F. 9. Op. 1. D. 842. Dela Komissii po voprosu ob uproščenii russkogo pravopisanija. 1904–1916. 2. SPF ARAN F. 90 Op. 2. D. 1. Naučno-organizacionnaja perepiska po priglašniju členov v Komissiju po voprosu o russkom pravopisanii. 1903–1911. FS SA—Franckesche Stiftungen, Schularchiv—Francke Foundation, School Archives (Halle an der Saale): 1. FS SA Knabenbürgerschule, 9.2.2. Konferenzprotokolle A IV 7 Protocoll-Buch für die Lehrer-Conferenzen an der Knaben-BürgerSchule von 13/4 1864 bis 10/4 1875 (shortened note: FS SA KBS-LK 1864-1875). 2. FS SA Knabenbürgerschule, 9.2.2. Konferenzprotokolle A IV 19 Protokolle der Lehrerkonferenzen 1913–1925/26 (shortened note: FS SA KBS-LK 1913–1925/26). 3. FS SA Knabenbürgerschule, 9.2.2. Konferenzprotokolle A IV 21 Conferenz-Buch der A., Neuen Knab[en]-Bürger-Schule Ostern 1890—Ostern 1892 und B., Knab[en]-B[ürger]sch[ule]: Ostern 1892—[1913] (shortened note: NKBS-LK 1890-1892 bzw. NKBSLK 1892-1913). 4. FS SA A IV 16, Protokolle der Lehrer-Conferenzen der KnabenBürgerschule und der Vorschule in den Franckeschen Stiftungen. Seit 18/2 1887—Ostern 1892 (shortened note: FS SA KBSV-LK 1887-1892). StA Düsseldorf—Stadtarchiv Düsseldorf—Düsseldorf City Archives: 1. Stadtarchiv Düsseldorf, Altes Archiv, Akten, 0-1-8 Akten der Schulverwaltung ab 1826 (alt: Bestand VIII). StA Kiel—Stadtarchiv Kiel—Kiel City Archives: 1. Stadtarchiv Kiel. 33482. StaatsA München—Staatsarchiv München—Munich State Archives: 1. Staatsarchiv München. Wilhelmsgymnasium 663. LA NRW AW StaatsA Münster—Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, Abteilung Westfalen, Staatsarchiv Münster—State Archives of North RhineWestphalia, Department of Westphalia, Münster State Archives:

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1. Landesarchiv Nordrhein-Westfalen, Abteilung Westfalen, Staatsarchiv Münster, Regierung Arnsberg, Schulabteilung, Generalia HSA Stuttgart—Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart—Stuttgart Main State Archives: 1. Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart, E 130b, Bu 1828.

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Index

Aachen, 71n144 academies, 197, 253; French Academy, 12; Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences, 17; Russian Imperial Academy of Arts, 180; Russian Academy of Sciences, 6; Russian Imperial Academy of Sciences, 14, 15, 179, 180, 189, 190, 196, 197, 212, 222, 275; Russian Imperial Military Academy, 250 accuracy, 5, 12, 18, 26, 27, 30–33, 35– 39, 41, 46, 48, 50, 52, 55, 64, 67, 78, 80, 88, 113, 114, 123, 131, 172n258, 180, 234, 238, 240, 255n19, 271, 272, 275 Adelung, Johann Christoph, 12, 190 advertisement, 153, 238, 245, 250 Africa, 174n278, 246 Alexander II, emperor of Russia, 14, 83 Alexander III, emperor of Russia, 48 Allgemeine Deutsche Lehrerzeitung (newspaper), 4, 183, 191 alphabets, 43, 55, 108, 110, 171, 183, 195, 197, 199, 202, 216–19, 228, 235, 238, 249, 251, 265, 277 Alsace-Lorraine, 45 America, the United States of, 2, 174n278, 243 Antiqua, 110, 247, 248, 268n228

anxiety, 93, 94, 99, 158, 160 aristocrats. See nobility army, 14, 25–27, 29–30, 32–33, 36, 37, 42–43, 46–47, 51–53, 64n53, 65n65, 67n84, 76, 77, 91, 92, 125, 164n142, 182, 187, 193, 208, 213, 247, 258n65. See also soldiers; officers assemblies, 14, 33, 35, 201, 210; Assembly of German Philologists and Educators (or Schoolmen), 20– 22, 138, 181, 182, 201, 203; Federal Assembly (Frankfurt am Main), 18; General Assembly of German Stage Association, 20; General German Teachers’ Assembly, 20; Pedagogical Assembly (St Petersburg), 193, 194, 257n49; teachers’, 109. See also conferences; congresses; Consultations on the Simplification of Russian Orthography (St. Petersburg, 1862/1863) associations, 15, 33, 183, 190, 207, 214, 224, 234, 235, 276; AllGerman Association for Simplified Spelling, 228–29, 231–32; AllGerman Language Association, 197; All-Swiss Society for All Natural Sciences, 208; Association for Dyslexia and Dyscalculia, 309

310

Index

116; Association for Scientific Pedagogy, 231; Association for the Advancement of Horticulture in the Prussian States, 207; Association for the Protection of the Interests of German Chemical Industry, 207; Association of German Chemists, 207; Association of German Electrical Engineers, 207; Association of German Engineers, 207; Association of German Naturalists and Physicians, 207; Association of German Railway Administrations, 45; Austrian Society of Engineers and Architects, 208; Berlin Association of Humanistic and Non-Humanistic Gymnasium Teachers, 28; Free Association of the German Medical Press, 208; German Association of Book Printers, 207; German Booksellers’ Association, 202, 224; German Botanical Society, 207; German Bunsen Society, 207; German Chemical Society, 207; German Geological Society, 207; German Pharmacist Association, 207; German Physical Society, 207; German Stage Association, 20–22; German Teachers’ Pension Association, 183; German Zoological Society, 207; Moscow Educational Society, 118; Moscow Educational Society, 118; Schleswig-Holstein Association of Towns and Cities, 36; stenographers’ organizations, 236– 38, 240, 241, 245, 246, 248, 249, 252; Union of German Architect and Engineer Associations, 207 Austria, 9, 17, 18, 22, 26, 30, 46, 64n52–53, 65n61, 71n138, 92, 114, 161, 184, 193, 200, 208, 216, 224, 246 Austrian Imperial and Royal Ministry of Cults and Education, 208

Baden, 38–39, 44, 61n16, 64n48, 191 banks, 36, 240 Bartsch, Robert von, 43 Baudouin de Courtenay, Jan Ignacy Niecisław, 185 Bavaria, 16–18, 26, 27, 39, 61n16, 64n48, 118, 191, 200, 204, 246, 247 beating. See punishment, corporal Belarussians (ethnic group), 217–19 Belinskij, Vissarion, 180, 254n8 Belorussian (language), 215–17, 234 Belorussian script, 217 Berger, Peter L., 7 Berkhan, Oswald, 115 Berlin, 6, 20–22, 29, 41, 45, 46, 52, 54, 56, 58, 71n144, 79, 93, 103, 109, 129, 141, 142, 147, 170, 174n278, 184, 191, 192, 204, 207, 210, 215, 233, 238, 242, 247, 248, 276, 278n3 Berlin Observatory, 52 Berlin, Rudolf, 115 Bethmann-Hollweg, Moritz August von, 82 Bingen, 39 Bismarck, Otto von, 119, 121, 142, 186, 200, 201 Bolsheviks, 15, 61n15, 211, 219 bourgeoisie, 24, 25, 26, 32, 44, 47, 49, 58, 76, 86, 91, 95, 97, 99, 101, 149, 153, 172n263, 177, 188, 202, 238, 245, 252, 266n199, 272 Brandenburg, 12 Brandt, Roman, 185, 215, 234, 277 Bremen, 6, 21, 118, 182, 201, 231, 262n146 Breslau (now Wrocław), 20, 203, 247 Brockhaus Conversations Lexicon, 67n84 Brockhaus Publishing House, 142 Budde, Evgenij, 219 Budde, Hermann von, 43 Budilovič, Anton, 218 Bulgaria, 174n278 Bunčić, Daniel, 261n116 Bundesrat, 17, 29, 193

Index

Burdach, Carl Ernst Konrad, 241–44 Bürgertum. See bourgeoisie career, 1, 26, 27, 75, 76, 84, 97–100, 115, 135, 142, 160n80, 181, 187 Carlsruhe (Karlsruhe), 34, 35, 130, 254n5 Caucasus, 156n32 Černyšev, Vasilij, 228 chancellor, 182, 186, 200, 201, 224, 275 Chekhov, Anton, 9, 49, 87, 88 Chlopin, Grigorij, 100, 160n78 Chovanskij, Aleksej, 183–84 churches, 19, 26, 33, 75, 81, 83–85, 122, 123, 154n1–2, 218 Church Slavonic (language), 131, 218, 220, 221 civil servants, 23, 27, 36, 51, 78, 90–92, 119, 121, 123, 124, 157n55, 187, 192, 197, 203, 246, 250 classes (lessons), 51, 82, 83, 94, 106, 130, 143, 149, 151, 185, 195, 232, 238, 278n3 classrooms, 100, 107 clocks, 45, 51, 52, 88, 149, 173 clubs. See associations Commission (Committee) for the Simplification of Russian Orthography, 5, 6, 234 compositions, 2, 5, 57, 62, 66n79, 77, 89–90, 94, 98, 102, 107–9, 111, 133, 134, 136–37, 139–41, 146–48, 150–51, 154n7, 170n219, 183, 187, 223, 229 conferences, 4, 5, 33–35, 54, 152, 191, 195, 196, 204, 206, 233, 235, 253, 273, 276; Catholic Female Teachers’ Conference (1878), 114; Conference on the Simplification of Russian orthography (St. Petersburg, 1904), 196; Consultations on the simplification of Russian spelling (alias Orthographic Commission, Orthographic Committee, Grammar Congress, or Orthography Congress,

311

St. Petersburg, 1862–63), 5, 14, 183, 193–95, 199, 200, 223, 261n129, 276; for the establishment of greater unity of German pronunciation (Berlin, 1908), 22; German Conference of Ministers of Education and Cultural Affairs, 117; at Halle Orphanage School, 181; Orthographic Conference by Technolexikon (Berlin, 1904/1905), 207–14; Orthographic Conference, First (Berlin, 1876), 5, 22, 28, 29, 182, 191–92, 196, 204, 214, 222, 230, 233, 248; Orthographic Conference, Second (Berlin, 1901), 5, 22, 28, 29, 121, 188, 192–93, 196, 205, 214, 215, 224, 231, 233, 248; Rome Telegraph Tariff Conference, 54; St. Petersburg Telegraph Tariff Conference, 54; stenographers’, 236, 237; teachers’, 5, 6, 76, 81, 87, 114, 203; Washington Meridian Conference, 45. See also assemblies; congresses congresses, 4–6, 33–35, 93, 100, 118, 178, 183, 194, 235–37, 262n134; First All-Russian Congress on Family Education, 100. See also assemblies; conferences; consultations Cousin, Victor, 25 curricula, 5, 27, 29, 58, 76, 78, 79, 82, 84, 85, 88, 94, 111, 119, 142–45, 147, 149, 168n198, 232, 247, 248, 274; hidden curriculum, 82, 149 Customs Union, 16–17, 28 Cvetkov, Viktor, 159n73 Danelija, Sergi, 104, 161n100 Danube, 40 Demert, Nikolaj, 160n80 detention. See punishment dialects, 12, 19, 20, 23, 24, 42, 56, 59, 62n30–31, 62n34, 63n44, 104, 105, 129, 182, 215–19, 230, 234, 266n195

312

Index

dictations, 5, 20, 57, 66n79, 94, 104, 106–8, 110–11, 115, 148, 150–51, 173n268, 187, 235, 252 dictionaries, 4, 12, 28, 58, 67n84, 182, 188–89, 202, 206–8, 210, 225–27, 241, 244 Diesterweg, Adolph, 78, 127–29, 185 discipline, 25–27, 29, 30, 32, 33, 35, 51, 55, 64n53, 75, 80, 82, 85, 91, 104, 106, 107, 112, 130–31, 150, 153, 172n263, 185, 210, 220, 221, 238, 242, 252, 271–73 discourses, 3, 7, 8, 11, 13, 27, 37, 38, 40, 42, 55, 101, 114, 119, 121, 123, 127, 163n133, 212, 228–29, 274, 277; bureaucratic, 124–125; culturalpolitical, 219, 230, 253; economic, 222, 225, 229, 253, 274; emotional, 229; legal, 123, 124; linguistic, 212; medical, 115, 164n146; moral, 106, 111–15, 163n135, 220–22, 229, 253, 275; national, 105, 212–19, 229; political, 123–24, 126; pragmatic, 118, 222, 275 Dnipro, 40 Dnjestr, 40 Dorpat (Tartu), 79, 156n32, 184 Dresden, 16, 21, 56, 250 Dresden Coinage Convention, 16 Duden (dictionary), 12, 118, 189, 205–11, 225 Duden, Konrad, 189, 209, 242 Duma, 15, 251 dyslexia, 115–18 Eckhardt, Christian Leonhard Philipp, 18 emperors, 43, 120, 121, 186–88, 230, 241, 275. See also Alexander II, Alexander III, Wilhelm II empress, 30 Ende, August von, 120 England, 32, 155, 184, 213 English (language), 12, 77, 78, 168, 205, 209, 215, 230, 238, 247 Englishmen, 31, 218

Erfurt, 190 Eršov, Nikolaj, 249, 269n243 essays. See compositions exactitude. See accuracy exams, 5, 26–30, 36, 66n79, 77, 79, 82, 85, 89, 90, 95, 98–100, 102, 103, 117, 135, 146–48, 154n8, 159n73, 160n79, 164n142, 182, 187, 223, 273, 274 factories, 19, 31, 32, 88, 136, 157n55, 210, 241, 243 Falk, Adalbert, 191, 204 Falk, Paul, 27 families, 19, 24, 27, 48, 49, 86, 91, 94–100, 105, 132, 135, 147–49, 151, 172n263, 175, 189, 225, 258n66 fathers, 25, 80, 82, 95, 96–99, 196, 225, 236. See also mothers; parents fear, 39, 48, 50, 80–89, 91–94, 96– 100, 126, 128–29, 135, 137, 140, 141, 148, 150, 210, 220, 230, 234, 272 Federal Council. See Bundesrat Filologičeskie zapiski (journal), 4, 183–84, 186 fi party, 228 First International Telegraph Congress, 33 fita, 55, 211, 219, 263, 275 flogging. See punishment, corporal Fomin, Dmitrij, 185 Fortunatov, Filipp, 196, 199, 215, 222, 228 Fraktur, 110, 247, 248 France, 16, 29, 30, 39, 47, 49, 128, 155n14, 180, 197, 213, 214, 264n176 Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), 29, 46 Frederick IV, King of Prussia, 81 Frederick Wiliam III, King of Prussia, 50 freedom, 12, 15, 25, 26, 50, 62, 71, 80, 85, 92, 109, 128–32, 137, 139–41,

Index

145, 148–53, 186, 188, 189, 210, 243, 252, 274 French (ethnic group), 25, 30, 42, 46, 63, 184 French (language), 77, 78, 90, 205, 230, 238 Fricke, Friedrich Wilhelm, 217, 228–31, 233, 277 functionaries. See civil servants Gaaze (Haase), Bertram, 184 Gabelsberger, Franz Xaver, 237, 238. See also Gabelsberger shorthand system Gabelsberger shorthand system, 237–41, 249–50, 266n203 Gartenlaube (magazine), 4, 32, 40, 53, 95, 96 German Civil Code, 211 Germanization of loanword spelling, 204, 205, 209 Germanization, policy of, 122, 125 Glazov, Vladimir, 88 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 12, 104, 167n190, 242 Golovnin, Aleksandr, 86 Goncharov, Ivan, 49, 70n127 Gordon, Grigorij, 100 Göttingen, 6, 58, 79, 206, 247 grading, 2, 4, 19, 57, 76, 77, 86, 89–90, 93–100, 102, 103, 106, 107, 109, 111, 117, 118, 134, 135, 140, 141, 145, 146, 150, 159n73, 160n80, 168n198, 199, 210, 252, 263n149, 272, 273, 275 Greč, Nikolaj, 67, 179, 180, 259n95 Greek (language), 58, 76, 173, 202, 205, 209, 218, 240, 243 Greifswald, 20, 79 Grigor’eva, Tatjana, 10, 194, 200 Grimm, Jacob, 57–58, 72n155, 180, 190, 191, 209, 212, 238 Grimm, Wilhelm, 57–58 Grot, Jakov, 3, 53, 59, 179, 180, 194, 200, 223, 226

313

Hamburg Stock Exchange, 51 Hamm, 64n67 Hannover, 28 Hauslehrer (journal), 142, 143, 147, 153, 232 hegemony, 25, 29, 191, 271 Heidelberg, 79 Heine, Heinrich, 7, 46, 54, 215 Hesse, 17, 18, 39, 232 Hesse-Nassau, 61n16, 120 highways, 37, 66n82, 67n84 Hippeau, Célestin, 29 historical spelling, 57, 101, 185, 190, 191, 209, 212, 214, 228, 261n126 Hohenlohe-Schillingsfürst, Chlodwig zu, 201 Honsell, Max, 39 Hubert, Michel, 56 Ievlev, Vladimir, 159n73 Il’in, Ivan, 219–20 Imperial Chancellor (German Empire), 182, 186, 200, 201, 224, 275 Imperial College of Law (St. Petersburg), 180 Imperial Interior Authority (German Empire), 126, 192, 208 Imperial Patent Office (Germany), 208 Imperial Physical-Technical Institute (Charlottenburg), 207 industrialization, 30, 32, 37, 59, 139 Industrial Revolution. See industrialization intelligence, 96, 116, 230 intelligentsia, 90–91 International Committee for the Weights and Measurements, 33 Italian (language), 238 Italy, 128, 155n14, 197, 230 Ivanin, Mikhail, 249–50 ižica, 55, 211, 219, 263n149, 275 Jansen, Hubert, 209 Japan, 47, 53, 174n278, 230 Japanese (language), 230

314

Index

Jasnaja Poljana (journal), 129, 133, 137, 168n198, 169n206 jat, 23, 87, 88, 136, 185, 186, 198, 199, 211, 218–20, 226, 259n95, 263n149, 275 Jena, 128, 130, 139, 184, 205, 231 jer, 53, 55, 59, 186, 211, 214, 218, 219, 223, 263n149, 265n191, 275 Jews, 24, 58, 132, 250 Kaeding, Friedrich Wilhelm, 240–42, 244, 267n211, 267n215 Kaehler, Gustav, 130 Kaluga, 97, 159n72 Kapterev, Pёtr, 79 Karadžić, Vuk Stefanović, 214, 218 Karakozov, Dmitrij, 83, 84, 86 Karcevskij, Sergej, 61n15 Karskij, Evfimij, 185 Kavkaz i Merkurij (steamship company), 41 Kazan, 142, 219 Kekulé, Friedrich August, 34 Kenevič, Vladislav, 193, 214, 223 Kerschensteiner, Georg, 185 Kiel, 6, 36, 142, 213, 247 Kiesewetter, Hubert, 16 Kiev (now Kyiv), 40, 56, 143, 227 Kireev, Aleksandr, 6, 189–90, 196–99, 258n63, 258n65–66 Klaunig, Karl, 93, 102–3, 178, 191 Kleer-Flaak, Annette, 170n228 Kohlrausch, Friedrich, 190–91 Kolosov, Mitrofan, 185 Königgrätz, battle of, 26 Königsberg, 247 Konstantin Konstantinovič, Grand Duke of Russia, 14, 15, 189, 196, 197 Kopp, Friedrich, 64n47 Korin, Aleksej, 97–98 Küffner, Karl, 106, 247 Kulakovskij, Julian, 218–19 L’vov, Mikhail, 185 Latin (language), 58, 76, 123, 148, 154n1, 173n266, 180, 181, 205,

207, 209, 238, 243; Latin alphabet, 215–17, 223, 228, 251, 252 Lay, Wilhelm August, 185 Lemonius, Vil’gel’m (Wilhelm), 79 Lenin, Vladimir, 42 lifeworld, 8, 10n8, 11, 30, 32, 36, 37, 41, 271, 272, 275, 277 Linder, Maria, 116 literacy, 32, 53, 71, 75, 78, 88, 117–19, 129, 131, 132, 136, 234, 251, 277 Lithuania, 216, 226 Lithuanian (language), 215–17 “Little Russian” (dialect). See Ukrainian (language) “Little Russians” (ethnic group). See Ukrainians (ethnic group) Ljarskij, Aleksandr, 160n79 Lochtin, Vladimir, 40 locomotives. See railways Löhner, Rudolf, 114 Loškarev, Sergej, 78 Löwenfeld, Raphael, 139 Luckmann, Thomas, 7 Ludwig, Grand Duke of Hesse, 18 Lüneburg, 51, 179 Lutherans, 58, 275 Lyceum (in Carskoe Selo), 180, 193 Magdeburg, 43, 152 Main Committee on the Peasant Question (Russia), 15, 196 Mainz, 6, 39 Mark (German currency), 16, 147, 171n252, 226, 241, 242, 246 marks. See grades medicalization, 115–18 Mendeleev, Dmitry, 34 Meyer, Diedrich, 260n110 Meyer von Waldeck, Friedrich, 262n134 Michaelis, Gustav, 212, 247–48, 268n227–31 middle class. See bourgeoisie migration, 56, 272 Military Topographic College (in St. Petersburg), 250 Miller, Alexey, 217

Index

Miller, Vsevolod, 215 ministers of religious, educational and medical affairs (Prussia), 43, 82, 120, 174n276, 179, 182, 191, 201, 203–5 ministers of the interior (Prussia), 122, 125 Ministry of National Education (Russia), 15, 78, 83, 84, 113, 118 Ministry of Religious, Educational and Medical Affairs (Prussia), 100, 147, 152, 182, 186, 202, 208, 224, 225 Ministry of the Interior (Prussia), 17 Ministry of the Interior (Russia), 194 Ministry of the Interior (Switzerland), 208 modernization, 11, 14, 30, 32, 88, 139, 271, 272, 277 Moltke, Helmut von, 46 money, 16, 35, 44, 46, 50, 51, 53, 55, 91, 160n78, 171n252, 223, 224, 253, 277 Montessori, Maria, 185 moral education, 75, 80, 112–14, 129, 132, 140, 152, 154n2, 172, 173, 221, 239, 272 Morse code, 55 Moscow, 6, 23, 24, 44, 45, 52, 79, 93, 132, 136, 159n73, 180, 221, 227, 250, 262 Moskovskie Vedomosti (newspaper), 193 mothers, 19, 95–98, 159n73. See also fathers; parents mother tongue, 24, 105, 112, 161n99– 100, 180, 228, 229 Munich, 6, 20, 26, 247 Nasmyth, James H., 32 National Socialism, 115, 169n217, 237 Nazis. See National Socialism Neckar, 39 Neman, 40 Netherlands, 39 newspapers, 3, 18, 37, 41, 100, 133, 183, 186, 187, 189, 190, 193,

315

195, 208, 209, 219, 221, 223, 233, 255n26, 256n27 New Zealand, 174n278 Niva (magazine), 4, 32, 47, 48, 53 Nizhniy Novgorod, 40 nobility, 14, 44, 50, 58, 70n127, 85, 128, 132, 142, 219 noblemen. See nobility Norden, 231 North German Confederation, 17, 28 Nuremberg, 41, 106, 246, 250 obedience, 25–27, 29, 51, 80, 82, 107, 111, 112, 114, 129–30, 140–41, 153, 167n177, 239, 271, 273 Oder, 40 Odessa, 56, 68n96, 93, 118, 160n80 officers, military, 25–27, 43, 65, 91, 92, 125, 164n142, 249. See also army officials. See civil servants one-year voluntary military service, 27, 77, 164n142 Otto, Berthold, 6, 93, 141–53, 170n228, 171n235–36, 171n239, 171n252, 172n256–58, 172n264, 173n274, 174n275, 174n279–80, 231–33, 265n188, 274 pamphlets, 3, 18, 39, 106, 212, 248, 251, 258n66 parents, 19, 27, 75–76, 84, 92, 95–100, 116, 129, 131, 135, 141, 142, 151, 152, 164n146, 168n198, 180, 220, 224, 272, 274, 275. See also fathers; mothers Paris, 33, 47, 184 parliaments, 15, 171n252, 188, 198, 201, 203, 235, 240, 247. See also Duma; Reichstag particularism, 23, 28, 222, 241, 271 parties, political, 23, 203 Paul’son, Iosif, 193, 194, 251 peasants, 15, 39, 42, 48, 49, 78, 79, 84, 85, 128, 129, 131–33, 136, 137, 156n35, 160n80, 196 Perevlesskij, Pёtr, 193, 194

316

Index

Peschel, Oskar (Oscar), 26, 64n52 Peter and Paul Fortress (in St. Petersburg), 45 petitions, 88, 100, 122, 200, 201, 241, 246 philologists, 15, 20–22, 59, 179, 183, 184, 204, 214, 216, 217, 236, 242, 243, 260n110, 276 phonetic spelling, 101, 180, 185, 205, 206, 213–18, 223, 228–30, 233–34, 251, 261n132 Pirogov, Nikolaj, 127 Plaksin, Vasilij, 193, 194 Poland, 4, 24, 47, 58, 126 Poles (ethnic group), 47, 125–27, 174n280, 215–16, 219 Polish (language), 24, 122–27, 156n32, 262n134 Polish spelling, 122–27, 211, 215–17 Polytechnikum (in Jena), 130 population, 25, 39, 41, 56–58, 71n146, 84, 104, 123, 126, 217, 218, 253, 271 port cities, 41, 44 ports. See port cities Posadowsky-Wehner, Arthur von, 126, 225 Posen (now Poznań), 89, 90, 125 Postel’s, Fёdor (Postels, Friedrich von), 79 Potsdam, 41 Prague, 45, 162n16, 184 precision. See accuracy primers, 24, 134, 227 Pripyat, 40 Private Tutoring School (Hauslehrerschule), 6, 141–52, 172n263, 174n280, 274 Prjadkin, Sergej, 184–85 professors, 20–22, 26, 29, 65n64, 100, 106, 109, 114, 118, 138, 169n214, 181, 182, 185, 192, 193, 196, 205, 206, 215, 218, 219, 231, 234, 241, 247, 248, 268n231 proofreaders, 12, 114, 147, 164n143, 210

Provisional Government (in Russia, 1917), 211 Prussian Royal Materials Testing Office, 208 publishers. See publishing houses publishing houses, 9, 12, 15, 114, 133, 142, 167n190, 178, 192, 197, 204, 206, 207, 209, 211, 219, 223–27, 246, 248, 275, 276 punishment, 19, 31, 32, 49, 62n28, 84, 86, 89, 93–100, 106, 107, 111, 112, 114, 117, 118, 135, 136, 145, 149, 159n67, 162n109, 172n257, 187, 263n149, 273, 274; corporal, 80, 86, 87, 97, 100, 106, 107, 128, 131, 145, 162n109, 183, 229, 263n149 Puttkamer orthography, 119, 205, 224, 225 Puttkamer, Robert Viktor von, 119, 187, 204, 205 qualification to one-year voluntary military service, 27, 76, 273 railroads. See railways railway gauge. See railways railways, 17, 39, 41–52, 69n101, 70n120, 71n138, 172n258, 179, 187, 240; personnel of, 43, 45, 72n153, 208; railway time, 45; railway track gauge, 43, 44, 46; stations incl. their names, 19, 43, 70n127; timetables of, 41, 51; trains, 32, 42, 44–51, 70n127, 240 Ranschburg, Paul (Pál), 115–16 rationality, 33, 35, 38, 39, 42, 46, 50– 53, 55, 142, 172n158, 177, 200, 205, 213, 249, 252, 272, 275, 277 Raumer, Rudolf von, 191, 192, 204 readers (books), 29, 132, 225, 227, 272 real’noe učilišče, 153, 273 Realschule, 78, 90, 191, 273 Reform (journal), 231, 163n128 Reichensperger, August, 23, 181, 203 Reichstag, 17, 23, 54, 125–26, 181, 186, 202, 224, 225, 247

Index

Reiff, Paul, 109 revolutions, 25, 30, 42, 50, 55, 58, 81, 82, 85, 88, 132, 274; French (1789), 14; German (1848–1849), 15, 81, 157n55, 235; German (1918), 15; Russian (1905–1907), 15, 100, 133; Russian (October, 1917), 15, 61n15, 219–20, 253 Richert, Paul, 109–10 Riga, 56 rivers, 38–41; regulation, correction, or straightening of, 38–41, 46, 50, 178 Romania, 174n278 ROPiT (steamship company), 41, 68n96 Royal Prussian Statistical Office, 51–52 Royal Saxon Stenographic Institute (Dresden), 266n203 Rożański, Maryan, 122, 123, 127 Ruhr region, 39, 56 Russian Philological Institute (Leipzig), 184 Russians (ethnic group or nation), 1, 30, 48, 50, 180, 198, 219, 262n134, 274 Russian-Turkish War of 1877–1878, 47 Russkij filologičeskij vestnik (journal), 4, 184, 185 Russkoe slovo, 193 Saarland, 118 Šachmatov, Aleksej, 196, 216 Saint Petersburg, 4–6, 14, 42, 44, 45, 47, 52, 54, 56, 68n96, 78, 79, 84, 93, 100, 104, 126, 153, 179, 183, 184, 189, 193, 194, 196, 197, 216, 223, 226, 234, 249, 250, 257n49, 262n134, 276, 278 salaries, 26, 92 Salekhard, 159n71 Sanders, Daniel, 192, 209 Saratov, 40, 159n71 Saxon dialect, 20 Saxony, 12, 20, 61n16, 84, 191 schedules. See timetables Scherer, Wilhelm, 192 Schleswig-Holstein, 36, 117, 118, 233

317

school boards, 23, 27, 76, 77, 79, 82, 190, 191, 204 schoolbooks. See textbooks school culture, 15, 81, 89, 91, 94, 127, 153, 273, 274 seminaries, 76, 78, 81–85, 91–93, 112, 128, 129, 137, 152, 154n3, 156n32, 161n92, 219, 248 Serbian orthography, 214, 218, 261n126 Severnaja pčela (magazine), 193 shorthand. See stenography Siebs, Theodor, 20–22, 42, 62n34, 182, 235 Silesia, 105, 122, 203 simplification, 5, 6, 14, 15, 53, 110, 115, 124, 183, 193–95, 199, 200, 214, 221, 223, 228, 231–34, 239, 253, 264n179, 265, 275 sin, 111–15, 134, 163n133, 220, 221, 229, 239, 275 Smirnov, Aleksandr, 185 Sobolevskij, Aleksej, 196, 218–19 social action, value-rational vs. instrumental, 277 social construction, 7–9, 13–15, 22, 77, 178, 236, 252, 254, 271, 275, 277; of mistake, 59, 94, 95, 98, 107, 111, 130, 135, 138, 139, 271, 273–75; of orthographic norm, 5, 15, 18, 33–35, 59, 178, 179, 181, 187, 190, 197, 201, 210, 212, 220, 236, 253, 271, 275, 276 societies. See associations soldiers, 25–27, 46, 129, 168n199. See also army Soviet Russia, 219. See also Soviet Union Soviet Union, 9n2, 98, 153, 223 Spain, 29, 65n65, 197, 212, 213, 218, 230 Spanish (language), 212, 218, 238 Spieser, Johann, 144, 171n235, 231–32, 277 St. Petersburg Censorship Committee, 249

318

Index

St. Petersburg Literacy Committee, 78 standardization, 30–32, 44, 45, 55, 188, 206, 237, 275; in industries, 31, 43, 44, 46, 202; of measures, weights etc., 16, 61n16, 202; of pronunciation, 19, 20, 235; of spelling, 17, 43, 57, 177, 181, 208, 209, 275 steamboats, 32, 39, 41, 50, 51; steamboat line timetables, 50–51; steamship companies, 41, 50–51, 68n96 Steinbrink, Gustav, 239–40, 243 Steinheil, Carl von, 18 Steinmann, Georg von, 120 Štejnman, Ivan (Steinmann, Johannes), 78, 79 Stenographic Office of the Prussian House of Lords, 248 stenography, 33, 51, 53, 148, 180, 228, 232, 235–42, 245–52, 266n203, 268n223, 268n231, 269n234, 277 Stettin (now Szczecin), 4, 45 Stojunin, Vladimir, 155n21, 193–95, 199, 200, 223 Stolze, Heinrich August Wilhelm, 237, 238, 247. See also Stolze shorthand system; Stolze-Schrey shorthand system Stolze-Schrey shorthand system, 238, 246, 266n199, 277 Stolze shorthand system, 237–41, 245– 47, 249, 251, 277 Strasbourg, 184, 231 Studt, Konrad von, 182, 188 suicide, 2, 99–100, 160n78–80 Supreme School Board (in the Kingdom of Hannover), 190 Sweden, 174n278, 213 Switzerland, 78, 84, 116, 155n14, 193, 201, 208, 219, 224, 238 telegram. See telegraph telegraph, 26, 33, 52–55, 71n138, 164n142, 172n258, 210, 213;

telegrams, 52–55, 230; telegraphers, 45, 53, 54 textbooks, 12, 24, 29, 58, 59, 103, 104, 106, 108, 128, 132, 184, 204, 224, 225, 227, 244, 246, 250, 251, 272 therapy, educational, 116–18, 158n62, 164n146 Thiersch, Friedrich, 62n32 Thuringia, 118 Tiflis (now Tbilisi), 56, 87, 161n100 timetables, 41, 43–45, 50, 51 tolerance, 1, 19, 31, 37, 46, 109, 118, 121, 133, 145, 177, 178, 193, 227, 272, 274, 275 Tolstoj, Dmitrij, 85, 86, 221 Tolstoy, Leo (Tolstoj, Lev), 6, 7, 9, 40, 45, 48, 49, 128–42, 148–49, 152–53, 166n174, 167n178, 167n182, 167n185, 167n190–91, 168n198, 169n206, 169n214, 189, 190, 197, 199, 222, 223, 249, 269n234, 274 Tomson, Aleksandr, 118–19 trains. See railways transfer, 1, 9, 30, 31, 77–79, 113, 146, 152, 183, 247, 271, 272, 277 Treitschke, Heinrich von, 203 Tretyakov Gallery (in Moscow), 159n73 Trotsky, Leo, 219 Tübingen, 6 Tulla, Johann Gottfried, 38–40 Turgenev, Ivan, 49, 198 Turkish (language), 123 Učitel’ (journal), 4, 183, 186, 193–95, 215, 234 Ukraine, 23, 48, 56 Ukrainian (language), 23, 56, 63, 215–18 Ukrainians (ethnic group), 217–19 unification, 28, 45, 54, 181, 205, 238, 250; of German pronunciation, 20–23, 42; of German spelling, 9, 28, 115, 210, 213; of Germany, 9n1, 11, 16–18, 23, 36, 37, 44, 45, 105, 213, 271, 277

Index

uniforms, 29, 46, 97 universities, 6, 30, 57, 58, 76, 77, 79, 86, 87, 183–85, 190, 208, 240, 242, 248; of Berlin, 58, 247, 248; of Breslau, 20, 247; of Engineering (Moscow), 193; of Göttingen, 58; of Greifswald, 20; of Halle, 241; of Jena, 130; of Kazan, 142; of Khar’kov, 161n278; of Kiel, 142, 247; of Königsberg, 247; of Leipzig, 247; of Moscow, 180, 215, 234; of Munich, 247; of Odessa, 118; of St. Petersburg, 184; professors of, 22, 67n84, 142, 192; students of, 85, 90, 99, 130, 132; of Tbilisi, 161n278; of Warsaw, 185 upbringing. See moral education Upper Saxony, 12 Uppsala, 184 urbanization, 91, 139, 277 Ušakov, Dmitrij, 118, 214, 218, 261n126 Ušinskij, Konstantin, 127, 128, 155n14 USSR. See Soviet Union Vessel’, Nikolaj, 79, 193, 194 vice-chancellor, 126, 225 Vienna, 6, 35, 40, 44, 93, 114, 184, 208 Vistula, 40, 126 Vladivostok, 45, 47 Vol’sk, 159n71 Volga, 40, 51, 68n96 Volga Steamship Company, 50–51 Voronež (Voronezh), 183–85 Vostokov, Aleksandr, 59, 179, 180 wagons. See railways Waldhambach im Elsass, 231, 232

319

Warsaw, 44, 47, 56, 126, 156n32, 184, 185 Washington, 45 Weber, Max, 277 Weidmannsche Buchhandlung (Weidmann’s Bookstore, publisher), 212, 225–26 Weimar, 12, 62, 128–30, 139 Weimer, Hermann, 115–16 Weinhold, Karl, 12, 58, 191 Welzin, Karl, 34 Western Schleswig, 19 Westphalia, 12; the Peace Treaty of, 33 “White Russians.” See Belorussians Wickersheimer, teacher in Waldhambach i.E., 232 Wilhelm II, King of Prussia and emperor of the German Empire, 187, 188. See also emperors Wilmanns, Wilhelm, 3, 60n13, 204, 226, 242 workers, 31, 55, 72, 82, 88, 238, 243 Württemberg, 61n16, 64, 186, 191 Würz, Karl Adolf, 34 Yasnaya Polyana school, 128–38, 149, 168n198 Yiddish, 56 Zagreb, 184 Zeddeler, Loggin (Seddeler, Ludwig von), 67n84 Ziegler, Heinrich Ernst, 205–6 Zollikon, 219 Žukov, Dmitrij, 97–98 Žurnal Ministerstva Narodnogo Prosveščenija (journal), 78

About the Author

Kirill Levinson was born in Moscow in 1971. After graduating from the Faculty of History at Lomonosov Moscow State University, where he specialized in the history of the Middle Ages and early modern times, he worked at the Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences, then at the Higher School of Economics and at the German Historical Institute in Moscow. Since 2022, he has been living and working in Vilnius. His areas of interest are German history, in particular the history of science and education, the history of textbooks, and the social history of writing. His first dissertation was on urban officials in early modern German cities, his second focused on the social construction of orthography in Germany and Russia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to his research work, Kirill Levinson teaches history and languages at schools and universities, and translates literature in the humanities and social sciences.

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