Infotainment in the Age of Enlightenment

Imagine the world of rural peasants in the 18th century. Life in the little village is shaped by daily chores. Ploughing, sowing, harvesting and the winter rest, with various church festivals – Catholic or Protestant, depending on the area – in between. And that’s it. Only a relatively small proportion of the village population can read. Nobody can afford newspapers and visitors from the wider world are few and far between.

In this society, the ‘Volkskalender’ (a ‘people’s calendar’), as dubbed by modern researchers, was very successful. It was indeed a calendar, but it also had many other functions.

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Saints, Moon Phases, Bloodletting

Let’s imagine a world without the daily news, without daily weather reports, even though back then, people were far more dependent on the weather than we are today. In this world, the calendar was of critical importance. People consulted it regularly. That’s why, in Switzerland, it often hung on the wall in the parlour, the best room of the house, in a frame made especially for it. The worn pages show just how often these calendars were used.

These calendars not only told farmers today’s date and whether it was a church day or a work day. It also told them which tasks that day was particularly well suited for. Was it a good day to till the soil, chop wood or cut hair? Was it a good day for bloodletting or not? When, nowadays, some gardeners insist that they achieve especially good results in their garden by consulting the lunar calendar, they are drawing on a method that the peasant communities of the 18th century used to aid them, because they didn’t have anything else.

For those who couldn’t afford an expensive, personalised horoscope, the Volkskalender contained the star sign with the ascendant of the day at a special rate. It also contained farmers’ ‘weather lore’ instead of weather reports and listed the most important markets for that month. 

An Insight Into the World – But in Plain Language, Please

This was the basic version, which pedlars sold door-to-door for 2 1/2 kreuzer. For 5 kreuzer, you could get the large calendar, which contained everything you’d expect to find in a modern tabloid – only once a year instead of once a day. In a world where even a washerwoman earned 12 1/2 kreuzer, a tailor 30 kreuzer a day, 5 kreuzer wasn’t very much money. That’s why publications like the Appenzell calendar were so widespread.

Just like any good modern newspaper, the news came from both the local area and the rest of the world. So, let’s take a look at what the two calendars in the MoneyMuseum have to offer. The local news includes an obituary for the late Abbot of St. Gallen, the names of everyone who had died over the age of 90, as well as statistics detailing births, deaths and marriages.

The news stories from around the world are organised according to political geography. The old rule applies: the closer the story, the more detailed the report. 

Of course, it’s very exciting to stumble across events in these calendars that we remember from our own history lessons: for instance, the Appenzell calendar from 1797 shows a portrait of the young Napoleon Bonaparte, who was just causing a stir in Italy. The 1793 calendar mentions the spectacular assassination of the Swedish King Gustav III, but gives this story considerably less space than the death of Leopold II, Holy Roman Emperor. The neighbouring Habsburgs were simply closer to the people of Appenzell than the Swedes in the far north.

All of the texts are written in plain language. They are intended to educate, but without condescension. They address topics that even a peasant would have heard something about, for example the East India Company, which supplied all of Europe with new colonial goods. These goods were sold at fairs for a great deal of money and even a peasant, though he may not have been able to afford them, would at least have seen them.

Helping Out a Peasant Population

Volkskalenders like the Appenzell calendar understand their clientèle and serve their needs. After all, who else could you turn to when your rich neighbour, from whom you borrowed some money for a week, started charging you interest? The Appenzell made it easy for the interest recipient to check whether the proposed contract adhered to the interest rate of 5% set by the Catholic Church, which was considered an appropriate rate. The multiplication tables were also extremely useful. They enabled people to master this difficult arithmetic without a pocket calculator or any advanced school education.  It also provided a little general education. It’s no wonder the Volkskalender was used as a textbook in the primary schools that were just starting to emerge at the time.

Entertainment, Too

In addition to educational and useful information, the Volkskalender also provided entertaining content all year round. There were the calendar stories, which a certain Johann Peter Hebel turned into an art form. Even more popular were all the strange, spectacular and mysterious stories, the likes of which still prompt modern readers of daily newspapers to start on the ‘Miscellaneous’ page.

A Good Business

The Appenzell calendar was probably the most widely used Volkskalender in German-speaking Switzerland, and so to this day, you can still buy it very cheaply in lots of antique shops and well-stocked ‘Brockenstuben’ (Swiss second-hand shops) – as we did. This is because up to 60,000 copies were printed every year. The business was founded by Johannes Tobler in 1722, but Ulrich Sturzenegger had taken over in the second half of the 18th century. He came from a peasant background and didn’t have any advanced level of education whatsoever; he taught himself all the mathematical and astronomical knowledge required to put one of these calendars together. His son Mathias Sturzenegger, together with his brother, was responsible for the both the calendars we have here, which were produced in the company’s own printing works in Trogen.

By that time, by the way, the Appenzell calendar had some competition. In 1790, the zealous, St. Gallen-born Enlightenment philosopher Johannes Zollikofer had launched the ‘Christliche Jahrbuch ohne Aberglauben’ (‘Christian annual without superstitions’). His calendar didn’t include any horoscopes and didn’t hold back on the lectures. It didn’t stand a chance against the Appenzell calendar – and not just because it cost 6 kreuzer instead of 5. 

Other Things You Might Be Interested in:

You can view digitized versions of all Appenzell calendars since 1722 via Digishelf, courtesy of the Bodensee Bibliotheken. 

This article is not about calendars, not about horoscopes but about comics of the Enlightenment. 

Similarly useful as the Appenzell calendar was this book by Samuel Tissot on the most widespread ailments of his time and how to prevent them by eating more healthily.