For anyone who knew Schleyer superficially, it was hard, when approaching him, not to be startled by the ebullience of his person- ality. It was not difficult to notice that one was not dealing with an ordinary man, and that a different yardstick from that used for measuring most mortals was needed to address his genius and excitable nervous system [that blended] geniality with naive childishness. Schleyer was in many ways, and even in his old age, a child. It was his childishness that made him speak so often and in
such a self-congratulatory manner about himself, boasting about his work, his titles, and reputation. Or was it perhaps that he made this child the center of his small world? He was not aware of being pretentious. He never looked down on other people. On the con- trary, he always extended his hand to other people. And was not he also grateful, like children are? Anyone who visited him in his studio could read in his face how happy your visit made him, and no one could leave without carrying in his hands a small parcel of literary samples of the inventor of the world language. Happy like a child!6
But there is a second, more powerful explanation, unrelated to Schleyer's personality, which has to do with his membership in the Catholic Church and his past experiences in the Kulturkampf. They imprinted the distinctive authoritarian ethos on his movement and framed his strategies when he found himself confronted by reformists.
Schleyer invented his Volapŭk when he was serving in the small town of Litzelstetten. By then, he was no longer a subject of the Grand Duchy of Baden, but a citizen of the new and more secularized German empire. With the uni- fication of Germany in 1871, its first chancellor, Otto von Bismarck, faced im- portant new challenges. A particularly pressing one was the Catholic Church, most prominent in the southern states. To offset the influence of Rome, and to win the unconditional loyalty of German Catholics to the new state, Bis- marck embarked on a political campaign against the pope that soon esca- lated into what contemporaries dubbed the Kulturkampf, or culture war.
The Kulturkampf was a reaction to Pope Pius IX's ultramontane stance, designed to counter the doctrines he so vigorously propounded, such as the condemnation of liberalism, free thought, modern science, secular education, civil marriage, the right of Protestants to worship in Catholic countries, and any interference by the state in Church matters, which were set forth in the 1864 Syllabus, and cemented by the dogma of papal infallibility in 1870.7 To match that of the pope, Bismarck's position was no less radical, and it found expression in the expulsion of the Jesuit, Franciscan, and Dominican orders, the assertion of the right to appoint and dismiss Catholic clergy, the seizure of Church property, the expulsion of ultraconservative priests, the limitation of freedom of speech for Catholic priests (the "pulpit paragraph"), and an end to school supervision by the Church. Thanks to Bismarck's anti-Catholic laws—which Pope Pius declared null and void8—all Prussian bishops had been imprisoned or exiled by 1876. By the time the Kulturkampf ended, some 1,800
Catholic priests throughout Germany had been fined or sentenced to prison.9 One of them was Schleyer.
The Kulturkampf erupted in southern Baden, in the region of Messkirch, where Schleyer was serving. More important, Messkirch was also the center of the Old Catholics movement, a schismatic group of liberal-leaning Cath- olics who allied with Bismarck and opposed the pontificate of Pius IX.10 While liberal Catholics sought a more conciliatory position that would spare them from having to choose between Church and state,11 the Old Catholics were vehement in their animosity toward the pope. They defiantly rejected not only his teachings, but his very position at the top of the Catholic hierarchy. The Old Catholics wanted to replace the centralized and hierarchical struc- ture of the Catholic Church with a different organizational model based on the old diocesan episcopate, which was believed to be more in keeping with the traditions of the first four centuries of Christianity, when the bishop of Rome had no primacy over his peers. Although not strong in numbers, their earnest Catholic beliefs and Bismarck's support placed the Old Catho- lics at the forefront of the Kulturkampf, and local authorities usually chose them to replace Catholic priests as inspectors of schools.12 Their open coop- eration with state authorities earned them very harsh penalties from Rome.
As a young priest in Messkirch, Schleyer took an active part in the Kul- turkampf by implementing the repressive measures the pope decreed against the Old Catholics. When he refused to give a proper burial to an Old Catho- lic in his parish, he was sentenced to four months in prison, after which his superiors commissioned him to serve in the small and more peaceful town of Litzelstetten. During the Kulturkampf, Schleyer positioned himself among the most loyal Church members, in sharp contrast to the position taken by Kerckhoffs, his most outspoken rival in the Volapuk movement, and also a Catholic. As a doctoral student at the University of Bonn, he had supported the Old Catholic movement (although Schleyer appears not to have been aware of this).13
In his confrontation with Kerckhoffs, Schleyer did not bother to devise a new strategy, but instead envisioned this confrontation as a new battle in the war between the revealed truth and its enemies. First, he wielded an organi- zation that closely resembled the Church itself.14 Rigid and hierarchical, it even included a Senate, analogous to the Roman prelature (to which he would be promoted in his final years), whose members were selected on the basis of personal loyalty rather than merit. Second, he pursued the same strategies he used during the Kulturkampf. Like Pius IX, he asserted his own infalli- bility in all matters relating to the language, and when reformists challenged his authority, he ex-communicated them by striking their names off the of- ficial journal. Like the pope, Schleyer demanded unswerving loyalty. Voice was out of the question, and exit was the sole path open to those who wanted to contribute their ideas to the movement. Volapuk, Schleyer hinted, had come to him as a sort of revelation, and in the same way that the pope was the Vicar of Christ, he saw himself as the ultimate guardian of Volapuk.
Although he spent his entire life in monolingual Baden, Schleyer was a polyglot. He had learned many languages, but he had done so in the same way he had learned Latin, the lingua franca of the international organization in which he worked: by studying grammars and dictionaries. Unexposed to the evolving and adaptive character of living languages in multilingual set- tings, he thought that, very much like Latin, a language is a closed system materialized in a grammar and dictionary. If this is the nature of a language, then it is possible to create a language, contrary to the opinion of German linguists. One only needs to write the necessary textbooks and dictionaries. The idea that a language can be satisfactorily contained in a handbook and a dictionary naturally leads to the conclusion that, for that language to expand, disputes about words or rules should be suppressed. Thus, Schleyer's concep- tion of language as a self-contained system fit very closely with his authori- tarian strategy. Theoretically, he admitted, Volapuk could be reformed, but not in a manner that could undermine the hierarchical principles inherent in this conception, and embodied in the printed word.
The language was Volapuk, but the meta-language was authority. And au- thority he learned from his decades of service to the Catholic Church.
As he explained in his anonymously published 100 Grunde warum ich katolische bleibe (100 reasons why I remain a Catholic), the Catholic Church is superior to other churches not only because of its doctrine but, more im- portant, because it has "the highest and most sacred regard for unity and una- nimity, [as well as] a visible leader . . . who has never made a mistake . . . and has a powerful central office in Rome."15