Grimm's Germanisten Congresses (1846-47) to be placed online
CORE AdminSPIN will place a digitized version online of the proceedings of Jacob Grimm's congresses of Germanisten in Frankfurt (1846) and Lübeck (1847).
This initiative has been undertaken in association with the University Library of the University of Amsterdam, and with support from the Duitsland-Instituut Amsterdam and from Amsterdam University Press.
These congresses brought together the cream of Germany's philologists, historians and legal scholars, three specialisms united in what Grimm called Germanistik. The congresses consolidated the study of German culture and mentality into a new, authoritative discipline and also signalled the readiness of Germanisten to place this new discipline at the service of a new, increasingly assertive German nationalism. The delegates at these conferences not only represent some of the leading intellects of their generation (Arndt, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, Dahlmann, Droysen, Gervinus, Ranke, Uhland, etc.), many of them also were elected representative in the Frankfurt Parliament of 1848. In the discussions at these congresses, not only important philological agendas were outlined (such as the project of a comprehensive dictionary of the German lnguage, ultimately to become the benchmark Grimm Wörterbuch), but also matters of political import, such as the German claims on the contested territory of Schleswig-Holstein.
The proceedings of the Germanisten-congresses as a conduit from cultural to political nationalism are well-known, but the texts themselves have not been readily available. SPIN hopes to meet this desideratum. The texts will be placed online in two parallel forms: as PDFs of the original printed pages and in searchable transcript, with a search interface and accompanying background information.