3 - Teaching Schiller: Philological Discourse and Educational Practice at Schools of Higher Education in the German Kaiserreich—The Example of Wallenstein

Summary

Abstract

The essay analyses how German Classics were taught in German secondary schools during the nineteenth century. Using the example of Friedrich Schiller's drama Wallenstein, this will be discussed from a discourse analytical perspective. The first section explains the underlying concept of ‘dispositive’ as both a theoretical approach to a more grounded history of subject teaching and an analysis grid for evaluating school-specific media sources. The second section presents some results and conclusions of a three-step analysis of the underlying source corpus on Wallenstein. After all, the results of this article may contribute to valorizing a more practice-oriented history of the German class.

Keywords: Friedrich Schiller; German classics; canon; German class; didactics; drama; discourse analysis; dispositive analysis; Curriculum Studies; history of German Studies

Teaching Modern Languages in the Nineteenth Century: A Discourse Analytical Approach

In the context of a volume focusing on the history of foreign language teaching, it is interesting to recall that German—at least as a literary language— has only been firmly anchored in the curricula of secondary schools and institutions of higher education in the German states since the second half of the nineteenth century. Up to the end of the German Kaiserreich, the teaching of German remained a minor subject along with the modern foreign languages that were gradually introduced over the same period. Until well into the Weimar Republic, literature lessons, calculated in weekly hours, consisted mainly of reading the Greek and Latin classics. The subordinate role of modern languages and literatures was the reason why teachers of German, French, and English long acted as a joint interest group, which shared similar questions, conceptual approaches, and methodical solutions for imparting literary knowledge in class. Although—or rather precisely because—these teachers were usually classical philologists from their university education, an extensive practice-oriented discourse developed from the middle of the century. This discourse found its most prominent institutionalization in the journal Archiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen und Literaturen that was founded in 1846 as an interdisciplinary journal for the didactics of language teaching and still exists today as one of the leading journals of comparative literature.