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Papierdenken: Blasche, Fröbel, and the Lessons of Nineteenth-Century Paper Modeling
- Edited by Patricia Anne Simpson, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Birgit Tautz, Bowdoin College, Maine, Sean Franzel, University of Missouri, Columbia
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 28
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 15 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 15 June 2021, pp 209-224
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Summary
Abstract: This article focuses on paper modeling as a theoretical subject and material practice at the center of nineteenth-century pedagogical reform debates in Germany and beyond. Tracing a brief history of paper-based craft instruction after 1800—from Heinrich Blasche to Friedrich Fröbel—it shows how the plastic and haptic capabilities of paper and pasteboard modeling are understood as the basis for new, often radical educational models. Such models implicitly short-circuit the principle of alphabetical learning to propose instead the possibility of fundamental relations between “making” and “thinking.”
Keywords: history of paper, paper modeling, Heinrich Blasche, Friedrich Fröbel, history of education, nineteenth-century crafts
A BOOK-REVIEW PRINTED IN 1820 in the Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung under the heading “Pedagogy” announces the publication of a new manual on paper modeling: Bernhard Heinrich Blasche's Der Papierformer, oder Anleitung allerley Gegenstände der Kunstwelt aus Papier nachzubilden (The Paper Modeler, or How to Reproduce All Manners of Artistic Objects from Paper, 1819). Both the volume and its presence in the journal are part of a larger trend. As one of the many crafts involving techniques of paper manipulation2 (such as scrapbooking and silhouette art), paper modeling, defined here as the construction of three-dimensional models from paper and pasteboard, gains increasing attention among early nineteenth-century educators, practitioners, and readers. But the 1820 review seems vehemently critical toward Blasche's manual: “Es ist durchaus nicht zu billigen, wenn man das Mechanische zum Wissenschaftlichen hinaufziehen will” (237; The attempt to raise the mechanical to the level of science can under no circumstance be sanctioned). The book's treatment of paper modeling as “more” than just a “mechanische Fertigkeit” (235; mechanical skill) and its elevation from an activity dedicated to “der Erholung und dem Zeitvertreibe” (relaxation and passing the time) to a “wahrhaft bildend und mathematisch” (236; truly educational and mathematical) practice are plainly dismissed. In the same negative vein, the article also comments on Blasche's suggestion that, qua manual craft, paper modeling can ultimately be exercised as a “freye Thätigkeit” (236; free activity)—a formulation that signals the potential for intellectual and creative autonomy. From the reviewer's perspective, any affinity between manual craft and intellectual pursuit is rejected from the start.
Media Inventories of the Nineteenth Century: A Report from Two Workshops
- Edited by Patricia Anne Simpson, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Birgit Tautz, Bowdoin College, Maine, Sean Franzel, University of Missouri, Columbia
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- Book:
- Goethe Yearbook 28
- Published by:
- Boydell & Brewer
- Published online:
- 15 June 2023
- Print publication:
- 15 June 2021, pp 285-296
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Summary
THE FIRST SELF-PROCLAIMED General Bibliography of Printed Inventories (Bibliographie générale des inventaires imprimés) (1892–1895), arduously compiled by Fernand de Mély and Edmund Bishop, starts with an immediate disclaimer: “If the fear of incompleteness had deterred its two authors, th[is] publication … would have never seen the light of day.” “We have only included inventories properly speaking,” the preface states, leaving aside “manuscript and library” catalogues, “mere lists of relics,” and “testaments and literary descriptions,” which “would have carried us too far.” De Mély and Bishop's pointed reference to “proper” inventories (as distinct from other types of itemized written records) calls for further examination. While the volume does not offer any definitions for the terms it invokes, the commentary here can be considered against the background of nineteenth-century dictionary entries. In Larousse's Great Universal Dictionary, for example, the term “inventory” is primarily understood as a “catalogue, a record that inscribes and describes, article by article, all the objects, immovable and movable property, goods, titles, papers, belonging to a person, or found in a house or residence.” But during the nineteenth century, a growing interest in inventories of artifacts associated with historical sites or collections (such as those announced in the Bibliographie générale) gives rise to the need for more diverse and, at the same time, more systematic approaches. In the process, categorical limits are continuously tested and reexamined. By their own admission, de Mély and Bishop are “compelled to admit some exceptions,” challenging their own self-imposed criteria and thus returning to the impossible task of not going “too far.” Inventories, as de Mély and Bishop’s efforts suggest, promise an overview and a systematic organization of accumulations of discrete objects, yet are based in a sense of incompleteness visà- vis the excess of practices of storing, listing, ordering, and recording with which they are confronted.
De Mély and Bishop's multivolume undertaking thus serves as an apt starting point for a discussion around the slippery margins of inventorying categories, their nineteenth-century histories, media practices, and techniques. What cultural premises mark the increased awareness of the importance of inventorying that gives rise to metaprojects such as the Bibliographie générale des inventaires imprimés?