И время и место: Историко-филологический сборник к шестидесятилетию Александра Львовича Осповата

When Fet was brought to Werro as a teenager, he happened upon a kind of serendipitous Golden Age in local education. The head of his school, Heinrich Kr"ummer (i796-1873), had come to the Russian Baltic region in 1825 for the purpose of establishing a boys’ school there, but he originally intended to carry out his plan in Dorpat.⁷ For various reasons, including not only the demographics of Werro but also the government’s new suspicions about Kr"ummer’s foreign religious sponsorship,⁸ the government decided not to allow him to work in Dorpat, but did permit him to open a new school in Werro, which stood in need of one. The Werro school was finally established in 1832. Although not the first German-language school for boys in the town, Kr"ummer’s school immediately became the best, and for about a decade it was a virtual machine for preparing boys from the Baltic German upper classes to enter the university at Dorpat and then embark on successful careers, often in the service of the Russian government. Once Werro had got a reputation as a strong educational center, other schools also competed, and in 1840 there were 29 schoolteachers (of whom six were women) working at seven schools in Werro. Between 1830 and 1840, the number of schools more than doubled, while the number of pupils rose from 48 to 245. While the growth in schooling to some extent corresponds simply to population growth, it was also specific to the cultural context in Werro. When that context changed, Kr"ummer’s school declined, and its founder retired from it in 1849; the number of pupils in Werro schools was smaller in 1850 than it had been a decade before. According to H. Eisenschmidt [Eisenschmidt: 74–78], the decline was precipitated by russifying government policies, demanding Russian language preparation at a higher level than corresponded to the availability of good teachers, but a number of other factors also contributed.⁹ The growth of the town meant that demand for land and services rose, and with them – prices. Locals blamed Kr"ummer for bringing in “outsiders,” while Kr"ummer himself, in an effort to cope financially, tried various undertakings to bring in more money, but they all took time and energy, and they all failed [Eisenschmidt: 74–78]. He found himself at odds with the local powers and even with some of his own senior teaching staff, and by 1847 Kr"ummer, in unpublished correspondence (Herrnhut Archive R19 G aa 24 a 15), talks about Werro as a kind of hell populated by a narrow-minded and short-sighted citizenry.

In spite of these petty and ultimately exhausting conflicts, Kr"ummer’s legacy shows him to have been at least somewhat adaptable to his situation as a German pedagogue in the Russian Baltic provinces: in 1830,before he succeeded in founding his school, he published a German-language arithmetic textbook, afterwards revised and often reprinted, providing exemplification suited to the needs of local pupils, including Estonian ones who happened to be attending German-language schools.¹⁰ Moreover, one part of his own school in Werro – a part unmentioned by Fet – was, although German in language of instruction, an elementary school that taught Estonian pupils. By means of both the textbook and his education of Estonian children, Kr"ummer was participating in the enterprise that had drawn him to the region in the first place: the work of German Moravian missionary-educators in the Russian Baltic provinces, where they had been influential since the eighteenth century but where they were unwelcome after the death of Alexander I. Kr"ummer seems to have separated his program from any explicit missionary goal (there was at least one other local Moravian school, more pious and academically less successful), but to have retained his sense of himself as an educator bringing enlightenment to both a ruling class in need of moral discipline and a population only recently freed from serfdom. Kr"ummer thus was a late representative of the tradition of Estophilic Germans, notably pastors, active in the region for generations. When the school began to lose its ability to attract wealthy German families, this was of course not only a problem for the school itself but also an intellectual loss for the town and a grave disappointment to Kr"ummer; nonetheless, the change can be viewed not only as deterioration (which it was) but also as a kind of assimilation to local needs and part of a shift away from German cultural dependency to a new situation that engendered a more dynamic, if not invariably more pleasing, set of social relationships.