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I am trying to understand part of a sentence on a Prussian passport issued in 1851. Some of the words are printed in Fraktur script, and others are written into the passport form in Fraktur longhand. The portion of the sentence with which I am having difficulty reads as follows:

und werden alle Civil- und Militair-Behoerden Diensten gebenst ansucht denselben mit angefuehrter Begleitung frei und ungehindert reisen

Most of these words are printed on the form and are therefore easy to read. But I am having trouble with the three words that are written in longhand. As best I can make them out, those are the three words that I have written as

Diensten gebenst ansucht

I thought a native speaker of German might be able to make sense of this sentence, even though I may not be transcribing the longhand correctly since it is very difficult to decipher the letters of these words. My tentative translation of this sentence segment is as follows:

and the Civil and Military authorities shall, upon request, assist said person, with his retinue, to travel freely and unhindered

However, I realize the verb forms are not really correct to support this translation.

Hubert Schölnast
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Bill Hoffman
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1 Answers1

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Based on your obviously imperfect transcript

und werden alle Civil- und Militair-Behoerden Diensten gebenst ansucht denselben mit angefuehrter Begleitung frei und ungehindert reisen

it is close to the mind to suppose that the orignal would rather be

... und werden alle Civil- und Militair-Behörden dienstergebenst ersucht, denselben mit angeführter Begleitung frei und ungehindert reisen [zu lassen]

which would translate to "... and are all civil and military authorities respectfully requested to let pass him and his aforementioned companianship unobstacled." (Sorry for the doubtlessly amateurish English.)

Of course, having a faksimile of the original would be good. But the reading seems pretty clear anyway.

Christian Geiselmann
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    I don't think it makes any sense to speculate about something you can't see. – tofro Aug 17 '18 at 22:25
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    @tofro The transcript by Bill Hoffmann is pretty clear. Given a) the context and b) the rules and traditions of German language I do not see much to debate here. The only thing where doubt is possible without seeing the original is the proper wording of the xxxxx section. And somebody more familiar with 19th century clerical style would probably guess even this correctly without any problem. Documents of this type use a very standardized language. – Christian Geiselmann Aug 17 '18 at 23:14
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    @ChristianGeiselmann Google search "werden alle Civil- und Militair-Behoerden" shows a result containing "werden alle Civil- und Militair-Behörden hiermit diensterebenft ersucht". So I think you can just change to "dienstergebenst ersucht" and we have the correct wording. – Javatasse Aug 18 '18 at 00:55
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    @Javatasse - Thank you for this hint. Yes, the wording is obviously "*dienstergebenst". - Whereas "diensterebenst" - without the letter g* - is clearly a spelling error, probably not by the original, rather by some OCR software reading it. The word is correctly "dienstergebenst", i.e. "respectfully at your service" or "respectfully in service"; it is just a clerical formula of politeness). – Christian Geiselmann Aug 18 '18 at 12:13
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    https://books.google.at/books?id=SFwZAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA1&lpg=PA1&dq=%22werden+alle+Civil-+und+Militär-Behörden%22&source=bl&ots=K5E5DtHVHi&sig=1K0crDGV3RsxpUFfCuOJSbs6BEU&hl=de&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjYzdm5jPfcAhWjFZoKHUT1DucQ6AEwA3oECAMQAQ#v=onepage&q=%22werden%20alle%20Civil-%20und%20Militär-Behörden%22&f=false – Hubert Schölnast Aug 18 '18 at 17:13
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    @HubertSchölnast ... which shows, by the example of "... so werden alle Civil- und Miltär-Behörden dienstergebenst ersucht, auf die genannten Individuen ein sorgsames Auge zu haben." that this formula was standard in that type of correspondence. Whoever said in the previous comments that due to the formalism of the genre it should be possible to correctly guess the original text even without seing a faksimile may have been right. – Christian Geiselmann Aug 18 '18 at 20:25
  • @ChristianGeiselmann Yes, the "f" instead of the "s" in the end dienstergebenft also immediately made me think of OCR software. – Javatasse Aug 19 '18 at 12:06