Nineteenth-Century German-American Reading Societies: An Alternative Educating Institution

Within the last two decades historians of American education have cited the inclination of educational theorists and practitioners to focus so exclusively on the schools as vehicles of learning that they ignore the possibilities of other educating forms. Failure to consider education in its widest possible context only contributes to a parochial account of the learning process. One such alternative institution, conspicuously neglected in the history of American education, is the reading society. Not only has this organization remained unexamined as an educating forum, but its very existence in the American scene has also gone largely unnoticed. Although most treatments of the variety of American educating institutions mention museums, libraries, offices, factories, and farms, no notice is given the reading society.² Nevertheless, research presently being conducted abroad, particularly among German scholars, indicates that the reading society or Lesegesellschaft represented a vital education institution in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. A survey of selected German-American archives and historical societies proves that such reading societies existed in America and that they in part mirror their European predecessors in form and function. A study which examines German-American reading societies, indicating their structure, organization, and function, contributes to a better understanding of American education.

The educating function of German reading societies is apparent in their age of greatest prosperity-the last third of the eighteenth century through the first quarter of the nineteenth century. Irene Jentsch, in Zur Geschichte des Zeitungslesens in Deutschland am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts,³ suggests a dual basis for the establishment of reading societies: the strong desire of the middle class to read (often called Lesewut) combined with the high cost of book purchase by individuals. Barney Milstein, in Eight eighteenth-century reading societies: A sociological contribution to the history of German literature, reacts to Jentsch when he states that "the desire to read does not lend itself to analysis as financial restriction, yet it is worthy of closer examination."⁴ Milstein's treatment of the late eighteenth-century Lesewut highlights, in part, an educational matrix which relates the emergence of reading societies to the influence of the Enlightenment:

It is very likely that the Reading Societies represent in part a manifestation of the Enlightenment which had at its roots the increasing significance of the extra-familial relationships. With the growth of consciousness of the middle classes in Germany the need for education became clear. As individuals of the period began to seek social contacts outside the family, some functions of this group, notably education, also took on an extra-familial cast.⁵

The Enlightenment's call for Erziehung in the most comprehensive sense and its strong affirmation of self-education through reading, writing, and discussion guided the middle-class German as he now sought education in groups other than the family. One of the earliest manifestations of this movement occurred of course in the form of Deutsche Geseflschaften modeled after the one founded in Leipzig in 1727 by Gottsched. Their goal was unequivocally to educate and to improve the use of the German language. It was but a short step to the establishment of Lesegesellschaften, whose major purpose was to provide a well-articulated structure for the increased circulation of reading materials among groups of predominantly middle-class citizens.

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