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Innocents Abroad: American Students in German Universities, 1810–1870

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Carl Diehl
Carl Diehl*
Affiliation:
Yale University
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Extract

Very few of the American students who studied in Germany up to 1870 claimed perfection for German institutions and values. Virtually every one of them realized that American institutions had to grow out of American values. Thus, any historical account that explains the development of American universities purely in terms of German “influence” must be highly suspect. The American universities were not constructed from simple blueprints shipped over on the Hamburg Line. And American scholars were anything but imitations of their German teachers.

Type
Article III
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , Fall 1976 , pp. 321 - 341
Copyright
Copyright © 1976 by New York University 

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References

Notes

1. Wayland, Francis, in his Thoughts on the Present System of Collegiate Study in the United States (Boston, 1842), was careful to promote a certain diffidence of tone and critical approach toward all foreign systems of education. Not only was there considerable resistance to educational reform in America, but there was even more suspicion of reform which appeared based only on foreign models no matter how perfect.Google Scholar

2. See Veysey, Lawrence, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago, 1965), p. 126. The other major work on German influence on American scholarship, Herbst, Jurgen, The German Historical School in American Scholarship (Ithaca, 1969), also concentrates on these later students. There are any number of studies on the first four students. Long, Orie, Literary Pioneers, The American Exploration of European Culture (Cambridge, 1935), is the standard published account based on extensive research in the manuscript sources. Brown, Cynthia Stokes, “The American Discovery of the German University: Four Students in Göttingen 1815–1822', (Johns Hopkins, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, 1966), is a more recent study based on the manuscript sources. Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, “Göttingen and Harvard Eighty Years Ago,” Harvard Graudates Magazine, VI (1897), pp. 6–18, was one of the first to focus attention on these four and quotes some of their correspondence. See also Pochmann, Henry, German Culture in America (Madison, 1957), pp. 66–67.Google Scholar

3. Another obvious, though perhaps less serious bias, however, is not the result of lack of information but the reverse. Through the zealous efforts of a latter-day graduate of Göttingen we have a record of nearly all of the names of American students who attended there. Although fewer than half of these names could be traced and appear in the sample, naturally the proportion of Göttingen students is somewhat inflated. This also skews some other information, notably on the dates of study in Germany (since Göttingen was more popular in some periods than in others), and on the subjects which the Americans studied. A certain amount of common-sense “dead-reckoning” may be all that is possible to navigate more surely and counter this bias of the data. Even with these biases, however, the sample may be of some use in obtaining a rudimentary knowledge of the whole group of Americans who studied in German universities before 1870. See Shumway, Daniel B., “Göttingen's American Students,” German Historical Review, III (June, 1907).Google Scholar

4. See Thwing, Charles F., The American and the German University: One Hundred Years of History (New York, 1928), pp. 40–42 and Richard Barnes, “German Influence on American Historical Studies, 1884–1914,” (unpublished Yale Ph.D. dissertation, 1953).Google Scholar

5. “Notes on the History of Foreign Influence upon Education in the United States,”, U.S. Commissioner of Education Report, I (1897–98), pp. 591–632.Google Scholar

6. Hart, James Morgan, German Universities: A Narrative of Personal Experience (New York, 1874) was the first reliable firsthand account of study at a German university. It was not, however, the first actual account of German universities. Popular guide books from at least the beginning of the nineteenth century carried descriptions and fabulous accounts of student life in some of the universities. Henry Dwight's Travels in the North of Germany (New York, 1829), offered a great deal of substantial information to the prospective student, along with some criticism of American education that was bitterly resented at home. By the eighteen-forties the literature on the German universities was already extensive. Books which concentrated on the exotic customs of the German fraternities were common. Howitt's, William The Student Life of Germany (Philadelphia, 1842), is typical. It advertised itself as containing forty of “the most famous student songs.” By the 1850's more serious accounts of the German university system like Schaff's, Philip Germany: Its Universities, Theology, and Religion (Philadelphia, 1857), had become available.Google Scholar

7. Shumway's list of American Göttingen graduates, including auditors and non-matriculates, lists a total of two hundred and sixty-one names up to 1870. He compiled his list primarily from the university records, supplemented by the record of the Colony Book, kept by the American students themselves. Given the obligation of aliens to report to the local police and furnish an official reason for an extended stay, it seems unlikely that these records would fail to record many Americans, since the university was perhaps the only reason to stay for any length of time in Göttingen. For the same reason, the Göttingen names are probably not inflated (as the Berlin records might be) with Americans who stayed in the town for other reasons, but registered at the university only to be able to claim that they had attended.Google Scholar

8. Much more work remains to be done with the published registration records of Heidelberg University, Die Matrikel der Universität Heidelberg, 6 volumes (Heidelberg, 1884–1916).Google Scholar

9. After that date, however, the university gained favor rather rapidly. Justin Winsor's letters from Harvard indicate that he knew three or four other Americans during the time that he was there in 1853. By the middle of the eighteen-sixties, James Morgan Hart records seeing eighteen or twenty of his countrymen idling the afternoon away in a streetside cafe. He thought that this might have represented about half of the Americans there. But the records do not indicate anything like that number actually registered. Moreover, Hart's observations apply only to the summertime, and he specifically mentions that most of the Americans spent their winters in other universities, so the net registration is particularly difficult to calculate. See Hart, James M., German Universities, A Narrative of Personal Experience (New York, 1874), pp. 158–59.Google Scholar

10. “Notes on the History of Foreign Influence upon Education in the United States.” U.S. Commissioner of Education Report, I (1897–98), pp. 591–632.Google Scholar

11. This figure of six hundred and forty (plus or minus at least fifteen per cent) contrasts sharply with the figure of fifteen hundred which Charles Thwing gives and the extrapolations of those figures offered by Richard Barnes. The latter's total of twenty-two hundred is not credible. Thwing's calculations, though less obviously unfounded, appear only slightly less implausible. Even if his numbers for registrations can be accepted, his totals must be reduced by thirty per cent to make allowance for multiple registrations which he does not. But even with that calculation Thwing's estimates imply that there were hundreds of American students at one time studying at Berlin by the end of the sixties; a situation which is quite improbable for that time, and which no observer indicates until the eighties. Neither James Morgan Hart nor Hall, G. Stanley, Life and Confessions of a Psychologist (New York, 1923), mention any large number of American students in Berlin in the 1860's.Google Scholar

12. Herbst, , The German Historical School, p. 6.Google Scholar

13. See Conrad, J., Das Universitätsstudium in Deutschland (Jena, 1884), for figures on the relative decline in enrollment at Halle (p. 25) and the relative decline in enrollment in Theology all over Germany. See also Paulsen, Friedrich, Die deutschen Universitäten und das Universitätsstudium (Berlin, 1902).Google Scholar

14. In 1837, the first centennial of the university's founding, the opposition of seven of the most distinguished professors (including the brothers Grimm) to unconstitutional decrees of the new King, led to their dismissal and a landmark battle of academic freedom. It was not for a decade and a half that registrations there reached the level of the late twenties again. Perhaps the effects were prolonged for half a decade for American students.Google Scholar

15. There are only a few Pennsylvania Dutch names in the sample.Google Scholar

16. Hall recounts the story of Henry Ward Beecher ordering Henry Sage, a wealthy philanthropist, to lend Hall one thousand dollars in Life and Confessions of a Psychologist, pp. 182–83.Google Scholar

17. Torrey, Henry, Longfellow, H. W., Bancroft, George, Everett, Edward, Lowell, James Russell, and Ticknor, George are some of the people whom Harvard paid to study in Germany.Google Scholar

18. Edward Everett's Ph.D. was honorary, confirmed because of his position as a professor in a post-secondary institution of education.Google Scholar

19. The founders and first editors of The Atlantic Monthly and Scribner's had studied in Germany. For extensive accounts of this kind of German “influence,” see Pochmann, , German Culture in America. Google Scholar