Given its pedantic protagonists, this social constructionist history of the spelling mistake in Germany and Russia is surprisingly enticing. Levinson presents the creation of orthographic norms as a facet of modernization, charting the economic, political, and social determinants that forged the often-brutal imaginative worlds of orthographers, schoolteachers, and parents. Focused on the later decades of the nineteenth century, the study is solidly archival with forays into graded student work, specialist conferences, and childrearing pamphlets. Levinson draws most heavily from German case studies and documents the transfer of German expectations to the Russian Empire, while also exploring the latter's national particularities. The results are convincing, though a taste of how normative ideas about spelling impacted language would have enriched the study. In the end, Levinson detaches the development of cultural norms from the transformation of language itself, leaving unclear the magnitude or content of the changes.
The opening chapter on the “lifeworld context” (11) that sparked “norm-consciousness” (11) about writing in Germany and Russia excavates the values associated with technological advance. Under the conditions of capitalism, Levinson argues, the ideals of precision, optimization, rationalization, and standardization replaced acceptance of the arbitrary, habitual, and approximate in language. A powerful economy required not only on the rationalization of transportation and financial systems but the ability to produce clear, uniform texts. While the state imposed uniform weights and measures, the variety of German dialects made artificial phonetic homogenization difficult to achieve after unification. Distinct patterns of linguistic usage had produced diverse regional German orthographies such that dialects perpetuated spelling inconsistencies. As the expansion of railways demanded standardization in communication, however, philologists and educators began regulating stage pronunciation to encourage uniform pronunciation in schools. Russia lacked equivalent dialectal variation; for many schoolchildren Russian lessons, in fact, entailed foreign language instruction, and only in the 1920s did the radio and record players, not the theater, encourage exemplary pronunciation. But the building of telegraph lines prompted reflection on eliminating superfluous letters from the alphabet. In both empires, mass migration to urban areas created such linguistically unwieldy classrooms that teachers longed for spelling consistency.
Against this backdrop, Levinson charts the rise to hegemony of a Prussian model of education and child-rearing. This is not a value-neutral trajectory; Levinson, in fact, all but indicts the spread of an “overarching repressive school culture” (273) that forbid and punished mistakes, exposing dialect speakers to “cognitive dissonance” (105). As the second chapter details, school boards, teachers, and parents chose to construct the idea of the spelling mistake, inflated its detrimental consequences, and disciplined students who violated orthographic rules. In an era of political reaction, in which autocratic monarchs blamed revolutionary impulses on the miseducation of their subjects, schools were expected to instill loyalty, demand obedience, and discourage critical thinking, while shunning individual expression as dangerously liberal. The result was a system of distrust, fear, control, and humiliation that prioritized and carefully scrutinized orthography in dictations and compositions. Parents perpetuated the shame and despair associated with poor spelling, inflicting “double misery” (100) on students with bad marks. Levinson ventures that inadequate performance in school contributed to a stunning number of student suicides in Prussia, when between 1883 and 1905, one child a week attempted or committed suicide; in Russia, he notes, the suicide rate among university and gymnasium students spiked as German models spread east.
The secondary role of schools as a vector of socialization magnified the social and cultural ramification of mistaken spelling. Levinson reconstructs three discourses that amplified the significance of orthographic errors. In Germany, poor spelling constituted a moral failing or sin, proof of deficient enough character to justify physical punishment. The secularized moral discourse of Russian schools, by contrast, emphasized respect for fellow human beings as justification for orthographic correctness. A concurrent medical discourse perceived bad spelling as a form of mental impairment and a health issue, especially after a Stuttgart ophthalmologist named the disorder of dyslexia in 1887. Once administrative officials in the German government began regulating spelling mistakes, errors verged on treason and inflamed conflicts over German and Polish nationality, especially in the spelling of last names.
To emphasize the contingency of this educational culture, Levinson sketches several interesting alternatives to the Prussian model, including the experimental schools of Leo Tolstoy and Berthold Otto. Their healthier, non-repressive psychological climate took a constructive attitude towards mistakes and accorded greater freedom to children. Without state support, however, an error- and child-friendly school culture could not advance to the mainstream. Levinson's more diffuse third chapter on the state's subsequent sanction of orthographic norms offers fewer surprises, though the initial reluctance of Otto von Bismarck and the German kaisers to prescribe orthography is one of them. (Wilhelm II reputedly declared “The h in throne remains, my throne shall not be shaken!” (188)) Orthographic organizations and industry interest groups, in publishing for example, not the legislature, pressured the executive to enforce standardization. The advantages of orthographic norms for nation building and nationalism eventually prevailed over the linguistic particularism and cultural sovereignty of the federal German states. In Russia after 1917, new orthographic standards reinforced Bolshevik power and communist ideology. Both empires rejected alternatives to mainstream orthographic norms, precluding official adoption of purely phonetic spelling or stenographic shorthand.
The reduction of the state to a secondary actor in Levinson's analysis not only reflects his socio-cultural approach to linguistic change. Levinson explicitly attributes the problematic process of orthographic normalization to the “capitalist-minded, rationalist, disciplined bourgeois spirit of modernity” and, in Germany, to “national-political tendencies toward uniformity” (252). These conclusions are credible, although other facets of this transition perhaps deserve scrutiny, such as the role of gender. Were girls equally subject to orthographic discipline, and did distinct discourses govern expectations for their writing? Finally, the emphasis on transfer between the states leaves open the question of whether the standardization of orthographies in other European regions, such as the Italy or Austria-Hungary, followed the same trajectory. This is unlikely, as Levinson establishes that historical contingencies, not language itself, shaped the modernization of orthography.
