Abstract
Among the chief assets Germany possessed by the time it had begun to industrialize was an uncommonly literate labor force. By 1850 Prussia’s literacy rate—not unrepresentative of that of the rest of the German states—had reached eighty-five percent. This Prussian rate, which assumes a standard of literacy consisting of both reading and writing skills, compares with a mid-century rate of sixty-one percent for France (reading only) and fifty-two percent for England (reading and writing).1 Although historians have assumed that high literacy rates played an important role in the rapidity of German industrialization in the nineteenth century,2 they have failed to give a satisfactory explanation for this early achievement of mass literacy.3 One reason for this failure is their unwillingness to view the literacy drives of the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries as having exerted a sufficiently powerful impact on society to account for the unusually high literacy rates of nineteenth-century Germany.
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Notes
Kenneth Barkin, “Social Control and the Volksschule in Vormärz Prussia,” Central European History 16 (March 1983), p. 50.
For a quantitative analysis of school enrollment in nineteenth-century Prussia, see Peter Lundgreen, “Educational Expansion and Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Germany: A Quantitative Study,” in Schooling and Society: Studies in the History of Education, ed. Lawrence Stone (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), pp. 20–66.
David S. Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industnal Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1969), pp. 340–48.
Gerhard Oestreich, “Strukturprobleme des europäischen Absolutismus,” Vierteljahr schuft für Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 50 (1968), p. 338.
An English translation of this article is included in Gerhard Oestreich, Neostoicum and the Modern State, trans. David McLintock (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1982), p. 265.
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982), pp. 10–15, 174-75.
Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word (New York: Methuen, 1982), pp. 115–16, 178-79.
Peter Kriedte, Peasants, Landlords and Merchant Capitalists: Europe and the World Economy, 1500-1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), pp. 32, 35-39.
Gerald Strauss, Law, Resistance, and the State in Sixteenth-Century Germany (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986).
Rolf Engelsing, Analphabetentum und Lektüre: Zur Sozialgeschichte des Lesens in Deutschland (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1973), p. 35.
For a sophisticated assessment of the impact of the Lutheran agitation on the popular mind, see R. W. Scribner, For the Sake of Simple Folk: Popular Propaganda for the German Reformation (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981).
Richard Gawthrop and Gerald Strauss, “Protestantism and Literacy in Early Modern Germany,” Past & Present no. 104 (August 1984), pp. 33–35, 42.
Ernst Christian Helmreich, Religious Education in German Schools: A Historical Approach (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 15. See also Gawthrop and Strauss, pp. 35-36.
Helmreich, p. 15. See also Eugen Schmid, Geschichte des Volksschulwesens in Altwürttemberg (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1927), pp. 14–16.
Gerald Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning: Indoctrination of the Young in the German Reformation, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), p. 21.
The sixteenth-century Lutheran school ordinances have been collected and published in Reinhold Vormbaum, ed., Evangelische Schulordnungen, 1 (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1858).
Peter Lundgreen, Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Schule im Überblick, Teil 1: 1770-1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1980), p. 17. See also Schmid, p. 4.
Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning, pp. 201-02; Schmid, p. 7. See also Christopher R. Friedrichs, “Whose House of Learning? Some Thoughts on German Schools in Post-Reformation Germany,” History of Education Quarterly 22 (1982), pp. 371–78.
For the best account of the system used to finance primary schooling in Germany from the late sixteenth to the early nineteenth century, see Mary Jo Maynes, “The Virtues of Archaism: The Political Economy of Schooling in Europe, 1750-1850,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 21 (1979), pp. 613–25.
Strauss, Luther’s House of Learning, pp. 302-08. See also David Sabean, Power in the Blood: Popular Culture and Village Discourse in Early Modern Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Miriam U. Chrisman, Lay Culture, Learned Culture: Books and Social Change in Strasbourg, 1480-1599 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 153–55.
Rolf Engelsing, Analphabetentum und Lektüre: Zur Sozialialgeschichte des Lesens in Deutschland (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1973), pp. 31, 42-43.
Rolf Engelsing, Der Bürger ah Leser: Lesergeschichte in Deutschland, 1500-1800 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1974), p. 340.
The atmosphere of crisis in the seventeenth century led to a temporary lack of interest in primary education among state administrators. According to Veit Ludwig von Seckendorff, a bureaucrat and early cameralist, such an interest was regarded as “indecent” among the bureaucratic elite. Seckendorff, Deutscher Fürstenstaat, Neudruck der Ausgabe Jena 1737 (Aalen: Scientia, 1972), p. 335.
John G. Gagliardo, From Pariah to Patriot: The Changing Image of the German Peasant, 1770-1840 (Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1969), pp. 85–86.
Hermann Conrad, “Staat und Kirche im aufgeklärten Absolutismus,” Der Staat 12 (1973), p. 62.
Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 171–72.
Marc Raeff, The Well-Ordered Police State: Social and Institutional Change through Law in the Germanies and Russia, 1600-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 177–78.
Ibid., pp. 199-212; for the text of Francke’s regulations, see August Hermann Francke, Schriften über Erziehung und Unterricht, ed. Karl Richter (Leipzig: Max Hesse, 1880), pp. 393–460.
For the texts of these ordinances, see Reinhold Vormbaum, ed., Evangelische Schulordnungen, III (Gütersloh: Bertelsmann, 1864).
Max J. Okenfuss, “Education and Empire: School Reform in Enlightened Russia,” Jahrbücher für die Geschichte Osteuropas 27 (1979), pp. 44–46.
Fritz Neukamm, Wirtschaft und Schule in Württemberg von 1700 bis 1836 (Heidelberg: Quelle & Mayer, 1956), pp. 55–60.
Joachim Whaley, “The Protestant Enlightenment in Germany,” in The Enlightenment in National Context, ed. Roy Porter and Mikulas Teich (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 111.
The same relationship between the Enlightenment and society was true in the Catholic states as well. See T. C. W. Blanning, “The Enlightenment in Catholic Germany,” in The Enlightenment in National Context, pp. 122, 125.
Fritz Terveen, Gesamtstaat und Retablissement: Der Wiederaufbau des nördlichen Ostpreussens unter Friedrich Wilhelm I, 1714-1740 (Güttingen: Musterschmidt, 1954), p. 115.
Helmreich, p. 35. For the role that night schools played in a rural Swiss district, see Rudolf Braun, Industrialisierung und Volksleben: Die Veränderungen der Lebensformen in einem ländlichen Industriegebiet vor 1800 (Erlenbach-Zürich and Stuttgart: Eugen Rentsch, 1960), pp. 139–46.
Gawthrop and Strauss, p. 52. For the Swedish system of clerical monitoring, see Egil Johansson, “The History of Literacy in Sweden,” in Literacy and Social Development in the West: A Reader, ed. Harvey J. Graff (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 159.
This relationship between the “morality of literacy” and sought-for improvements in classroom instruction is discussed in Harvey J. Graff, The Literacy Myth: Literacy and Social Structure in the Nineteenth-Century City (New York: Academic Press, 1979), pp. 22–48, 272-92.
J. G. Justi, Grundfeste zu der Macht und Glückseligkeit der Staaten, Neudruck der Ausgabe Königsberg 1761 (Aalen: Scientia, 1965), II, pp. 116–17. See also Engelsing, Analphabetentum und Lektüre, p. 69.
Lundgreen, Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Schule, p. 37; Maynes, p. 613; Engelsing, Analphabetentum, p. 62; Peter Lundgreen, “Industrialization and the Educational Formation of Manpower in Germany,” Journal of Social History 9 (1975-76), p. 67.
Helmut Möller, Die kleinbürgerliche Famillie im achtzehnten Jahrhundert (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1969), p. 248; Engelsing, Der Bürger als Leser, p. 340; Braun, pp. 136-37.
Rudolf Jentzsch, Der deutsch-lateinische Büchermarkt nach den Leipziger Ostermesskatalogen von 1740, 1770 und 1800 in seiner Gliederung und Wandlung (Leipzig: Voigtländer, 1912), Tafel III.
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Gawthrop, R.L. (1987). Literacy Drives in Preindustrial Germany. In: Arnove, R.F., Graff, H.J. (eds) National Literacy Campaigns. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-0505-5_2
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