On 19 June 1811 Friedrich Ludwig Jahn began public gymnastics in Berlin. This counts as the birth of the German gymnastics movement, Turnen. Jahn introduced many pieces of apparatus, among them the horizontal bar and the parallel bars. In 1816 he published, with Ernst Eiselen, Die deutsche Turnkunst, zur Einrichtung der Turnplätze dargestellt, German gymnastics, set out for the establishment of gymnastics grounds. According to German Wikipedia, the book came from practice for practice. It contains a model description of a gymnastics ground and its apparatus, the exercises, and the order and laws of gymnastics, down to the conduct and dress of gymnasts and teachers.
The Press Code
German journalism has a written code of good practice, the Pressekodex of the German Press Council. It was handed to Federal President Gustav Heinemann on 12 December 1973. By tradition, every later change is also handed to the sitting Federal President. One of its most debated rules concerns whether to mention the ethnic or national group of a suspect. In 2016 several editors called for this guideline to be deleted. The Council did not delete it. On 22 March 2017 it rewrote guideline 12.1. It now says that membership of a group soll in der Regel nicht erwähnt werden, es sei denn, es besteht ein begründetes öffentliches Interesse, should as a rule not be mentioned unless there is a justified public interest.
A Handbook That Grew to 2,550 Pages
In 1995 the German federal office for information security, the BSI, published its first IT-Grundschutzhandbuch, a handbook of standard security measures for computer systems. It began with 18 modules and 200 measures. At the end it had 58 modules and 720 measures, and it had grown from 150 to 2,550 pages. In 2006 it was split up into standards and catalogues, and in October 2017 the catalogues were replaced by a new compendium. Organizations can be certified on the basis of these written measures.
Rules for the Vegan Schnitzel
The German Food Code, the Deutsches Lebensmittelbuch, describes how foods are made and what they may be called. Many vegan and vegetarian products looked like meat products and carried similar names. Without common rules, products appeared that did not match what consumers expected. On 21 August 2018 the German Food Code Commission unanimously adopted guidelines for these products. Names such as Schnitzel, Gulasch or Frikadellen may be borrowed. Names of specific sausages, such as Bierschinken, are usually not used for meat substitutes.
Recipes Tested, Then Printed
The Dr. Oetker Schulkochbuch, the school cookbook, was written in 1910 by Emilie Henneking, a home economics teacher in Bielefeld. It first appeared in 1911. Her aim was to pass knowledge on to the next generations. By 1927 it was already the standard work in millions of households and in cooking schools. The edition of 2018 contains 455 recipes. They were developed in the Dr. Oetker test kitchen and tested under different household conditions. More than 19 million copies have been sold.
Not Whether, but When
In 1814 the jurist Anton Friedrich Justus Thibaut published an essay on the necessity of a general civil law for Germany. He called for one simple and understandable civil code for all German lands. In the same year Friedrich Carl von Savigny replied with Vom Beruf unserer Zeit für Gesetzgebung und Rechtswissenschaft, on the vocation of our age for legislation and legal science. For Savigny, law grows organically, and legal scholarship should first take up the customary law of the people. Erst am Ende dieser Entwicklung sah Savigny eine Kodifikation als möglich an. (Only at the end of this development did Savigny consider a codification possible.) The German Civil Code was passed in 1896, after 23 years of work. It came into force on 1 January 1900.
Making the Reformation Last
Cities and territories that adopted the Reformation gave themselves a Kirchenordnung, a church order, often adopting one written elsewhere. According to German Wikipedia, these orders marked the beginning of a phase of consolidation. In northern Germany the leading author was Johannes Bugenhagen. Braunschweig adopted his order in 1528, Hamburg in 1529 and Lübeck in 1531. With the Braunschweig order Bugenhagen laid the foundations of the school system and regulated care for the poor. In 1528 Martin Luther saw on his visits to parishes that ordinary believers knew the faith only in fragments. In 1529 he wrote the Small Catechism, which explains the faith in questions and answers. It was meant as a basis for the heads of households to teach their families. It is still often used today in confirmation classes.
How a Business Letter Is Laid Out
Every German who learns to write a business letter meets DIN 5008. The standard sets rules for writing and layout. It deliberately does not regulate content or spelling. It goes back to rules for business mail and typing that an office association published around 1930. In April 1949 the German standards committee took these rules over as DIN 5008. Until 1996 the standard dealt only with the typewriter. From 1996 it also covered word processing on a computer. The 2020 edition describes electronic correspondence in more detail. It no longer mentions the typewriter at all.