Stephan Ludwig Roth

Who was Stephan Ludwig Roth?

Stephan Ludwig Roth was a Transylvanian Saxon intellectual, pedagogue and Lutheran pastor.

After studying in Mediaș, Sibiu, and at the University of Tübingen, in 1818 Roth pursued his interest in the science of teaching by travelling to Switzerland, in order to gather experience from Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi's projects in Yverdon-les-Bains. He became a collaborator of Pestalozzi, publishing Der Sprachunterricht and finished a doctorate in philosophy at Tübingen.

Returning to Transylvania, Roth followed in the footsteps of his father as head of the Mediaș Gymnasium and became a pastor in 1837.

In the debates raised by the Transylvanian Diet in 1841, he argued that Romanian be the official language in the region, pointing out its ascendent over all others in the ethnical composition of the country. He stood by this principle during the 1848-1849 Revolution, proposing that official material be published simultaneously in Romanian, Hungarian and German. While he was against cultural assimilation of Romanians, Roth had always argued that the Saxon element in Transylvania could be strengthened by encouraging new German colonists to move in.