Tobias Gottfried Schröer’s Concept of Nation

Tobias Gottfried Schröer (1791–1850), a professor at the Lutheran Lyceum in Bratislava, left behind a voluminous and varied, but today less considered oeuvre. His works written in Latin and German were created in the spirit of the neohumanist ideal of education. This study reconstructs the scholar’s concept of nation on the basis of Schröer’s writings on education, especially his pamphlet Über Erziehung und Unterricht in Ungarn (1833) addressed to István Széchenyi. According to the basic thesis, Schröer’s program aimed at the integration of different social and ethnic groups living in the territory of the Kingdom of Hungary, regardless of order or ethnicity. He envisioned the image of an organic cultural nation, which was divided into suborganisms in order and ethnicity, but through the mutual communication of the parts—as a means of which he intended the Hungarian language—it formed a dynamic unit. The concept of nation, based on the communication practice of pietism and the neohumanist image of man, did not attract the necessary understanding in the debates of the Reformation era, but without taking it into account, our knowledge of the history of ideas would be incomplete.