Frankfurt Declaration on the Spelling Reform
The Frankfurt Declaration is a resolution critical of the spelling reform that was signed on October 6, 1996 by prominent writers , German scholars , publishers , historians and other well-known personalities at the Frankfurt Book Fair .
The initiator was Friedrich Denk , who as a German teacher at the Weilheim grammar school since 1980 together with colleagues 45 readings by numerous authors - a. a. Walter Kempowski , Martin Walser , Siegfried Lenz , Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Günter Grass - had organized. In order to protect the German language and literature from encroachment, he distributed a leaflet at the Frankfurt Book Fair in which he called for the spelling reform to be stopped and collected signatures.
On October 11, 1996, 42 members of the German Academy for Language and Poetry joined the Frankfurt Declaration on Spelling Reform and called for a boycott of the reform. The declaration was published on October 19, 1996 together with a list of 400 first-time signatories in a full-page advertisement in the FAZ .
In the declaration, the signatories called on the responsible politicians in Germany , Austria and Switzerland to immediately stop the controversial spelling reform, "the introduction of which wastes millions of hours of work, causes decades of confusion, and damages the reputation of the German language and literature at home and abroad and would cost several billion DM. "
The signatories included Ilse Aichinger , Wolfgang Balk , Dieter Borchmeyer , Vicco von Bülow , Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau , Wolfgang Frühwald , Günter Grass , Peter Härtling , Thomas Hürlimann , Ernst Jandl , Elfriede Jelinek , Joachim Kaiser , Walter Kempowski , Wulf Kirsten , Günter Kunert , Siegfried Lenz , Otfried Preußler , Gerhard Ruiss , Albert von Schirnding , Edgar Selge , Kurt Sontheimer , Patrick Süskind , Siegfried Unseld , Franziska Walser , Martin Walser and Roger Willemsen .
On November 9, 1996, the "Weilheimer Initiative for Spelling Reform" reported in a further advertisement in the FAZ about the signature campaign, during which 37,442 people had written to stop the spelling reform.
On the occasion of the Frankfurt Book Fair 2004, a large number of prominent representatives of the literary scene signed the Frankfurt Appeal on the basis of the “Frankfurt Declaration” . Finally, for the 2016 Book Fair, an anthology “Twenty Years of Spelling Reform” was published with 30 contributions to the “Frankfurter Orthographie-Preis” and a “Frankfurt Declaration after 20 Years of Spelling Reform”.
Web links
Individual evidence
- Jump up ↑ botch with mayonnaise . In: Spiegel Online . tape 42 , October 14, 1996 ( spiegel.de [accessed July 22, 2019]).
- ^ FAZ: 2nd Frankfurt Declaration on the Spelling Reform. FAZ, November 9, 1996, accessed on July 22, 2019 .
- ↑ The anthology. Retrieved July 22, 2019 (American English).
