Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Wander


Karl Friedrich Wilhelm Wander was a German pedagogue and Germanist. He published the largest existing collection of German-language proverbs.

Life

Wander was born on 27 December 1803 in Fischbach near Hirschberg in Silesia, as the eldest son of the village tailor of Fischbach. From 1810 he attended the local school there. In 1818 he started a carpentry apprenticeship in Warmbrunn, which he dropped after half a year in order to take up his desired profession to become a teacher. He was first trained by the village pastor, then from 1822 to 1824 at the Bunzlau teacher's seminary. He later became an auxiliary teacher in Gießmannsdorf and, in 1827, he moved to the Evangelical Municipal School in Hirschberg. There he practised Pestalozzi's educational approach in his mother tongue. In addition, he advocated teacher emancipation. His liberal attitude, sometimes referred to as communist, often led to quarrels with his superiors. This led in 1845 to a house search and his removal from office. In 1847, he was reinstated after being acquitted. However, after the March Revolution of 1848 he finally had to give up teaching in 1849. He was sacked as "instigator and seducer of riots and rebellion". He emigrated to the United States in 1850, but returned to Germany the following year.
In 1852 he became independent, running a spice shop in Hermsdorf. In 1874, he moved to Quirl, a village between Hirschberg and Schmiedeberg, where he died on 4 June 1879. In the GDR, he was considered a pathfinder from liberalism to socialism. The Pädagogische Hochschule in Dresden and high schools in Magdeburg and Leipzig bear his name.
His linguistic life's work was the proverb research. As a teacher he had already started collecting proverbs and used them for teaching purposes. He published various collections of proverbs, initially for children. From 1862 onwards his Deutsches Sprichwörter-Lexikon was created which, with over 250,000 entries, is the largest collection of proverbs to date. For numerous German proverbs, Wander gives their equivalents in many foreign languages.

Works

Educational works

Monographs