G: Correspondence
The priest from Lützelflüh as well as the author Jeremias Gotthelf engaged in a lively correspondence exchange. Bridging varying contexts, he reached out to a fair number of colleagues. This body of correspondence complements the clerical, narrative and journalistic texts within the Edition, and this permits a multifaceted insight into the political period of the turbulent renewal, as well as into the activities of Gotthelf/Bitzius, and finally into the literary and pedagogic network he was part of.
Gotthelf used to maintain letter exchanges with publishers, friends and relatives. These correspondences reveal these various writers’ opinions about political events, which in turn permits us to deduce on how certain literary works of his were partly arrived at precisely through such exchanges with other parties. The example of Albert Bizius’ correspondence with various authorities enables us furthermore to gauge the abundance of official activities a Bernese rural priest in the 19th century was expected to perform: The letters elucidate, for example, the organisation of the school system, they shed light on his concerns with regards to managing the parish, or again yield conclusive evidence of his engaged activities within the aid association of popular Christian education in the office of Trachselwald or the local association for the poor.
Part of the Research Center’s aim is to edit the entire accessible correspondence to and from Albert Bitzius and integrate it within the digital Edition, dHKG. Previous efforts merely comprised of the compilation of a limited number of letters, thus the current project extends way beyond the existent body of editions. The typical limitation was done by excluding the letters addressed at Bizius – and that applies particularly to official correspondence –, and these exclusions precluded to properly and conclusively comprehend the context in which his oeuvre had been formed, as well as the scope within which the priest of Lützelflüh was acting. Within the dHKG, all correspondence will be merged into a single portal. The entire collection of correspondence comprises of some 3,000 documents; out of which some 1,760 were already known when the project started, and up to date more than 1,400 have been edited. The two initial years of the project alone yielded the discovery of more than 650 fresh and as yet unedited documents, this can be accounted to the very systematic research work done by the staff. In particular the Bernese state archives proved to be a treasure trove of new findings.
A significant ’discovery’ was made in 2018 at the Burgerbibliothek Bern, consisting of an untapped stock of letters. This collection testifies the network within which Bitzius engaged with pedagogues and key personnel of educational institutions (BurgerbibliothekBern, ?gap? Nachlass Jeremias Gotthelf 45). Included are three letters by one Karl Mager, covering the years 1843 – 1846. He was the editor-in-chief of the Pädagogische Revue, the very periodical that featured Bitzius’ offensive article Zur Geschichte des Primarschulwesens im regenerirten Canton Bern (Concerning the history of primary school-education in the regenerated Canton of Bern). Furthermore, a letter of the teacher at the school for the poor, Johann Konrad Zellweger, dated 30 November 1844 and addressing Bitzius, confirms that the latter had contributed a text toward Die schweizerischen Armenschulen nach Fellenberg’schen Grundsätzen. Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des schweizerischen Armenwesens (Trogen1845). (Swiss schools for the poor according to the principles of Fellenberg. A contribution to the history of Swiss poverty relief) Bitzius’ text focused on the education system of the poor in Trachselwald, but unfortunately said text was lost to a fire.