Abstract: This article focuses on paper modeling as a theoretical subject and material practice at the center of nineteenth-century pedagogical reform debates in Germany and beyond. Tracing a brief history of paper-based craft instruction after 1800—from Heinrich Blasche to Friedrich Fröbel—it shows how the plastic and haptic capabilities of paper and pasteboard modeling are understood as the basis for new, often radical educational models. Such models implicitly short-circuit the principle of alphabetical learning to propose instead the possibility of fundamental relations between “making” and “thinking.”

Keywords: history of paper, paper modeling, Heinrich Blasche, Friedrich Fröbel, history of education, nineteenth-century crafts

A BOOK-REVIEW PRINTED IN 1820 in the Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung under the heading “Pedagogy” announces the publication of a new manual on paper modeling: Bernhard Heinrich Blasche's Der Papierformer, oder Anleitung allerley Gegenstände der Kunstwelt aus Papier nachzubilden (The Paper Modeler, or How to Reproduce All Manners of Artistic Objects from Paper, 1819). Both the volume and its presence in the journal are part of a larger trend. As one of the many crafts involving techniques of paper manipulation2 (such as scrapbooking and silhouette art), paper modeling, defined here as the construction of three-dimensional models from paper and pasteboard, gains increasing attention among early nineteenth-century educators, practitioners, and readers. But the 1820 review seems vehemently critical toward Blasche's manual: “Es ist durchaus nicht zu billigen, wenn man das Mechanische zum Wissenschaftlichen hinaufziehen will” (237; The attempt to raise the mechanical to the level of science can under no circumstance be sanctioned). The book's treatment of paper modeling as “more” than just a “mechanische Fertigkeit” (235; mechanical skill) and its elevation from an activity dedicated to “der Erholung und dem Zeitvertreibe” (relaxation and passing the time) to a “wahrhaft bildend und mathematisch” (236; truly educational and mathematical) practice are plainly dismissed. In the same negative vein, the article also comments on Blasche's suggestion that, qua manual craft, paper modeling can ultimately be exercised as a “freye Thätigkeit” (236; free activity)—a formulation that signals the potential for intellectual and creative autonomy. From the reviewer's perspective, any affinity between manual craft and intellectual pursuit is rejected from the start.