GERMAN writers seldom have a good word to say about one another and there are few issues capable of uniting them. But more than 300 intellectuals, including most of the country's most well known writers, have found common cause in a campaign to block a spelling reform aimed at simplifying the German language.
Gunter Grass, Patrick Suskind, Ernst Junger and Botho Strauss are among the famous names who have signed a petition organised by Mr Friedrich Denk (53), a Bavarian schoolteacher.
The governments of Germany, Austria and Switzerland agreed in July to introduce the changes, which involve separating some of the many composite words in the German language, relaxing the rules about inserting commas and replacing the letter "sz" (which is written like the Greek beta) with "ss" in some words.
The protesters argue that the changes will be expensive and time consuming and that the only people to benefit will be publishers of dictionaries and grammar books. A book outlining the main changes is already top of the bestseller list but a straw poll in a Hamburg newspaper found that 87 per cent of those who responded oppose the reform.
The poet and essayist, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, has called for a boycott of the new spelling and the weekly news magazine, Der Spiegel, announced that it would ignore the changes.
"A clique of so called experts want to make themselves important, two big publishers are snapping at the monopoly profits and politicians are, as usual, practising the trick of switching labels. I would advise every teacher in the republic to silently ignore the nonsense of the `new official rules'. The schools have better things to do," said Mr Enzensberger.
The spelling reform has been 15 years in the making, occupying dozens of linguists and teachers at the Institute for the German Language in Mannheim.
Civil servants, teachers and school children are the only people obliged to follow the new rules, leaving writers free to spell any way they like.
The campaign against the reforms would never have happened if the schoolteacher, Mr Denk's 20 year old son had not read George Orwell's 1984 while on holiday last month.
Horrified at the prospect that Germany would adopt its own newspeak", the young engineering student urged his father to take action.
Mr Denk formulated 10 arguments against the new spelling and printed them on 5,000 fliers which he distributed at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
Mr Denk wants the reforms to be withdrawn immediately, warning that they will "waste millions of working hours, create confusion for decades, damage the image of the German language at home and abroad and cost billions of marks".
The novelist, Martin Walser, signed Mr Denk's petition but he admits that there is something absurd about writers arguing over rules they all ignore anyway.
"Everybody ought to write at his own risk any way he wants. If he wants to be understood he should try it in his own way. The spelling argument could produce something good: an awareness that these rules are of little importance," he said.
Bismarck failed to stop a spelling reform almost 100 years ago but Thomas Mann helped to block the last major attempt to tinker with the language in 1954.
The critic, Marcel Reich Ranicki, is predicting that the latest reforms will slowly win acceptance among younger Germans.
"Many of those who signed the declaration are over 60, if not over 70. That applies to me: I am 76 and I will stick to the existing rules for the rest of my lite. But once every 100 years, one ought to stand up against the inevitable resistance of the older generation and reform spelling," he said.
