7 ms·

German university life seen through American eyes, 1900-1901

138 points by Michelangelo11 4y ago

AlbertoGP 4y ago
I enjoyed reading this as someone that years ago had the experience of being a student in Germany from another Western country. One technical problem is that whatever web CMS was used for this page has trouble with anything non-ASCII and simply omits it, which affects not just the expected umlauts but also quotes and M-dashes and quotes. The result makes reading this piece more laborious than necessary, but then the linked article does link at the end to the original: http://cdi.uvm.edu/book/uvmcdi-21528#page/29/mode/1up http://cdi.uvm.edu/book/uvmcdi-21528#page/29/mode/1up
- Michelangelo11 4y ago
  I'm curious, how did your experience compare to this?
  - poulsbohemian 4y ago
    As an American student who was at a German uni in 1998, there was still a lot of this that felt very familiar. At minimum, it fell in line with everything I'd ever heard about traditional / historic life at German universities. It made me a bit sad, as I had a professor I was close to who passed away a few years ago and he would have found this article charming.
anyfoo 4y ago
Huh. At a first glance at the photo on top of the article, I thought: Is this Munich's University with a different yard layout and statues? (Would not be surprising with WW2 in between, you can still see some of the shrapnel damage on one of the walls.) But no, turns out, it's Berlin's Humboldt University. Unfortunately, I can absolutely cannot find a picture of LMU's building taken from a similar angle, but while it turns out some details are very different, the resemblance in the layout and the overall style is striking. Wonder whether that's on purpose. Munich University's main building is actually pretty young, having been erected in 1835, even though the university itself is over 500 years old.
- est31 4y ago
  The Humboldt University's palace was originally not meant as a university building but instead was built in 1748-1753 for one of Friedrich II's brothers prince Heinrich, who was as his brother, gay. In fact the building was designed to have separate rooms, entrances and staircases for Heinrich and his wife, so that they wouldn't have to see each other. The university moved into that building in 1809 upon its founding by the new king Friedrich Wilhelm III. This was 7 years after Heinrich's death. The LMU on the other hand is way older, but the building is younger than the one of the HU Berlin: it was built in 1835. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptgeb%C3%A4ude_der_Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit%C3%A4t_M%C3%BCnchen https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptgeb%C3%A4ude_der_Ludwig-M... https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_von_Preu%C3%9Fen_(1726%E2%80%931802)#Pers%C3%B6nlichkeit https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_von_Preu%C3%9Fen_(172... https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palais_des_Prinzen_Heinrich https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palais_des_Prinzen_Heinrich
  - anyfoo 4y ago
    Ah, thanks for the context to the Humboldt University. That makes it even more curious for me why the LMU building looks so similar, at least from the exterior. > The LMU on the other hand is way older, but the building is younger than the one of the HU Berlin: it was built in 1835. That's what I said, yeah. So given that, I'm wondering whether LMU's building was purposefully built to look similar to Humboldt's? Or maybe it's just coincidence, or was just common to shape buildings that way for a long time.
    - est31 4y ago
      Yeah both are U-shaped, at least from one side. I'm not sure why this commonality is the case, but it's not unseen to have U-shaped buildings. Even the Kanzleramt is U-shaped, the Russian embassy in Berlin, or the BND headquarters.
    - Archelaos 4y ago
      > Or maybe it's just coincidence, or was just common to shape buildings that way for a long time. They share an outline common to many palaces from the 18th to the mid 19th century. See for example also the palace of Mannheim that (in part) houses the University of Mannheim and was built roughly at the same time as Prinz-Heinrich-Palais: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schloss_Mannheim#/media/Datei:SchlossEhrenhof_2017.jpg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schloss_Mannheim#/media/Datei:... When you look closer, you can observe that the individual architectonic elements are quite distinct: Frederician Rococo[1] in Berlin vs Rundbogenstil (round-arch style)[2] with a later (1900s) large extension in Neoclassical[3] style in Munich. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rococo#Frederician_Rococo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rococo#Frederician_Rococo [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rundbogenstil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rundbogenstil [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassicism#Architecture_and_the_decorative_arts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassicism#Architecture_and...
Tarsul 4y ago
this is a little uncanny in that it reads a lot like it could be today as well (saying this as a German who studied in Germany in the 2000s/2010s). "the matriculant is now a full-fledged student, free to come and go at will. Absolutely no restrictions are placed upon him, he may attend all lectures or no lectures. He wears no academic dress, he lives in no dormitory." -------- This was true mostly all the way up until the bachelor reforms in the 2000s. Nowadays, there are quite a lot of classes that you have to sit in (depends a lot on the university and courses) " But every German class-hour has its “academisches viertel” or quarter-hour of grace." -------- We basically still "have" this in a way but it basically only means that many courses start at quarter past x (e.g. 8:15). "Then the professor enters in haste. Before he has even reached his desk, he begins, “Meine Herren und Damen!” (the order is signiﬁcant)" -------- Nowadays, it's the other way around ("Meine Damen und Herren"). "Occasionally scraping of feet, “Scharren,” a well-known signal, warns the lecturer that his words are not heard at the rear of the room, and he raises his voice, until the shufﬂing ceases." -------- This is not common anymore, as far as I know. A shame (well, we are allowed to raise our voices and tell the prof to talk louder, which works as well).
- westernpopular 4y ago
  I wonder if they already did the knocking on tables instead of clapping at the end of a lecture thing back then
  - kleiba 4y ago
    Most likely. Although the exact origins of this tradition are unclear, there's evidence that this practice reaches as far back as the 18th century.
  - WanderPanda 4y ago
    Brings back memories! Now in the US it feels weird just leaving the lecture hall without clapping or knocking
- ginko 4y ago
  >the matriculant is now a full-fledged student, free to come and go at will. Absolutely no restrictions are placed upon him, he may attend all lectures or no lectures. He wears no academic dress, he lives in no dormitory. That's just normal university life, though.
pavlov 4y ago
> “His clothes were shabby, his coat ill-ﬁtting and with an unnatural gloss, his linen or celluloid— I am not sure that his collars and cuffs were of linen— seldom above reproach, and his high hat was always brushed the wrong way.” A random aside… I enjoyed this description as a bit of a puzzle because it’s entirely based on fashion cues that happen to be obsolete. What kind of unnatural gloss? What does a celluloid shirt look like? Or a high hat brushed the wrong way? When reading a story, my mind needs to create little actors to place in scenery. Building up these mental characters is easy and automatic with fiction’s usual introduction formula (which is also used by long form journalism in the New Yorker style where the editor makes sure that a person’s shirt color and posture is described to satisfy readers like myself). But this German student broke my automatic actor-builder process and forced me to make conscious decisions about what his clothing looks like in my mind. Seems like this doesn’t happen very often, probably because usually there are enough cues to get a picture without fully processing everything.
- floren 4y ago
  His shirt wasn't made of celluloid, just his collars and cuffs. At one time, it was common for shirt collars and cuffs to be purchased separately and attached to your (collar-less, cuff-less) shirts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detachable_collar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detachable_collar As for the hat, remember that hats were made of felted beaver fur. To make a hat shiny, you'd brush it -- but if you brush it the wrong way, it'll look rough and weird.
F-W-M 4y ago
The Corps still exists. Less of them, with less members, and less fighting. But we still get fat from drinking too much beer.
- sophacles 4y ago
  I don't know what the 'The Corps' mean in this context. Do you mind explaining?
  - dewey 4y ago
    That's what we call some student organizations in Germany / Austria. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burschenschaft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burschenschaft
    - ginko 4y ago
      And they're almost all far-right.
      - pfannkuchen 4y ago
        Isn't any organization that has been around for a long time and hasn't sufficiently updated its moral positions considered to be such? This label could mean anything in a range all the way from "old boys club vibes" or "somewhat antifeminist" to "holds beliefs of objective racial superiority". It is a bit of a broad brush...
        adastra22 4y ago
        Generally true if he had said just “right” or “conservative.” But doesn’t far-right specifically mean fascist? (Like how far left is code for communist.)
        RalfWausE 4y ago
        I have a few friends who were in a corps and as far as i can tell the general political standing wouldn't be that much out of place in the Kaiserzeit. Definitive not fascist, but very much "classist" and racist in a way that want to believe that non-white people are not LESS capable, but that they (the white guys in the corps) are just MORE capable. I think the word "aristocratic" would describe their mindset best.
zwieback 4y ago
As someone who went to University in Germany but left for the US right after I found this very interesting. My daughters are going to (state) universities in the US and there are profound differences between the systems, some of them appear to have a very long history, judging by this account. My biggest complaints about the US system: sports and other non-academic activities as well as administration consumes way too much money. On the other hand, German universities are still much more selective so class hierarchies are reflected in the trade-school/vocational school/university hierarchy. Whether that's a good thing or not is a different question.
- codethief 4y ago
  > German universities are still much more selective …than US schools? https://giphy.com/gifs/nWn6ko2ygIeEU https://giphy.com/gifs/nWn6ko2ygIeEU What are you basing this on?
  - barry-cotter 4y ago
    Public universities in Germany will take anyone who they believe could pass the course if they worked hard enough. For practical purposes this means you got the school leaving certificate, the Abitur. If you went to a less academic school (Realschule) rather than a Gymnasium, a grammar school you need to take an extra year but you can still go to a university of applied sciences which offer Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees as well. The only complications to open admission are for high demand courses that are very expensive to teach, mostly medicine. But if you got an Abitur and didn’t get good enough grades to get in your can just wait. I met someone who did a physiotherapy apprenticeship[1] in the three years of waiting. [1] Yes, what in the rest of Europe is a Bachelor’s degree and in the US a “professional doctorate” is a three year apprenticeship in Germany.
  - zwieback 4y ago
    Sorry, poor wording. What I should have said is that the overall educational system ends up letting a smaller percentage of the population into universities, partially because sorting happens as early as age 10.
pjc50 4y ago
This is reminding me that I wanted to watch The Student Prince https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047537/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047537/ (1954 film based on 1901 novel, set in a before-then-but-unspecified historical period)

I enjoyed reading this as someone that years ago had the experience of being a student in Germany from another Western country. One technical problem is that whatever web CMS was used for this page has trouble with anything non-ASCII and simply omits it, which affects not just the expected umlauts but also quotes and M-dashes and quotes. The result makes reading this piece more laborious than necessary, but then the linked article does link at the end to the original: http://cdi.uvm.edu/book/uvmcdi-21528#page/29/mode/1up http://cdi.uvm.edu/book/uvmcdi-21528#page/29/mode/1up

Michelangelo11 4y ago
I'm curious, how did your experience compare to this?
- poulsbohemian 4y ago
  As an American student who was at a German uni in 1998, there was still a lot of this that felt very familiar. At minimum, it fell in line with everything I'd ever heard about traditional / historic life at German universities. It made me a bit sad, as I had a professor I was close to who passed away a few years ago and he would have found this article charming.

anyfoo 4y ago

Huh. At a first glance at the photo on top of the article, I thought: Is this Munich's University with a different yard layout and statues? (Would not be surprising with WW2 in between, you can still see some of the shrapnel damage on one of the walls.) But no, turns out, it's Berlin's Humboldt University. Unfortunately, I can absolutely cannot find a picture of LMU's building taken from a similar angle, but while it turns out some details are very different, the resemblance in the layout and the overall style is striking. Wonder whether that's on purpose. Munich University's main building is actually pretty young, having been erected in 1835, even though the university itself is over 500 years old.

est31 4y ago
The Humboldt University's palace was originally not meant as a university building but instead was built in 1748-1753 for one of Friedrich II's brothers prince Heinrich, who was as his brother, gay. In fact the building was designed to have separate rooms, entrances and staircases for Heinrich and his wife, so that they wouldn't have to see each other. The university moved into that building in 1809 upon its founding by the new king Friedrich Wilhelm III. This was 7 years after Heinrich's death. The LMU on the other hand is way older, but the building is younger than the one of the HU Berlin: it was built in 1835. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptgeb%C3%A4ude_der_Ludwig-Maximilians-Universit%C3%A4t_M%C3%BCnchen https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hauptgeb%C3%A4ude_der_Ludwig-M... https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_von_Preu%C3%9Fen_(1726%E2%80%931802)#Pers%C3%B6nlichkeit https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_von_Preu%C3%9Fen_(172... https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palais_des_Prinzen_Heinrich https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palais_des_Prinzen_Heinrich
- anyfoo 4y ago
  Ah, thanks for the context to the Humboldt University. That makes it even more curious for me why the LMU building looks so similar, at least from the exterior. > The LMU on the other hand is way older, but the building is younger than the one of the HU Berlin: it was built in 1835. That's what I said, yeah. So given that, I'm wondering whether LMU's building was purposefully built to look similar to Humboldt's? Or maybe it's just coincidence, or was just common to shape buildings that way for a long time.
  - est31 4y ago
    Yeah both are U-shaped, at least from one side. I'm not sure why this commonality is the case, but it's not unseen to have U-shaped buildings. Even the Kanzleramt is U-shaped, the Russian embassy in Berlin, or the BND headquarters.
  - Archelaos 4y ago
    > Or maybe it's just coincidence, or was just common to shape buildings that way for a long time. They share an outline common to many palaces from the 18th to the mid 19th century. See for example also the palace of Mannheim that (in part) houses the University of Mannheim and was built roughly at the same time as Prinz-Heinrich-Palais: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schloss_Mannheim#/media/Datei:SchlossEhrenhof_2017.jpg https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schloss_Mannheim#/media/Datei:... When you look closer, you can observe that the individual architectonic elements are quite distinct: Frederician Rococo[1] in Berlin vs Rundbogenstil (round-arch style)[2] with a later (1900s) large extension in Neoclassical[3] style in Munich. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rococo#Frederician_Rococo https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rococo#Frederician_Rococo [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rundbogenstil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rundbogenstil [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassicism#Architecture_and_the_decorative_arts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neoclassicism#Architecture_and...

Tarsul 4y ago

this is a little uncanny in that it reads a lot like it could be today as well (saying this as a German who studied in Germany in the 2000s/2010s). "the matriculant is now a full-fledged student, free to come and go at will. Absolutely no restrictions are placed upon him, he may attend all lectures or no lectures. He wears no academic dress, he lives in no dormitory." -------- This was true mostly all the way up until the bachelor reforms in the 2000s. Nowadays, there are quite a lot of classes that you have to sit in (depends a lot on the university and courses) " But every German class-hour has its “academisches viertel” or quarter-hour of grace." -------- We basically still "have" this in a way but it basically only means that many courses start at quarter past x (e.g. 8:15). "Then the professor enters in haste. Before he has even reached his desk, he begins, “Meine Herren und Damen!” (the order is signiﬁcant)" -------- Nowadays, it's the other way around ("Meine Damen und Herren"). "Occasionally scraping of feet, “Scharren,” a well-known signal, warns the lecturer that his words are not heard at the rear of the room, and he raises his voice, until the shufﬂing ceases." -------- This is not common anymore, as far as I know. A shame (well, we are allowed to raise our voices and tell the prof to talk louder, which works as well).

westernpopular 4y ago
I wonder if they already did the knocking on tables instead of clapping at the end of a lecture thing back then
- kleiba 4y ago
  Most likely. Although the exact origins of this tradition are unclear, there's evidence that this practice reaches as far back as the 18th century.
- WanderPanda 4y ago
  Brings back memories! Now in the US it feels weird just leaving the lecture hall without clapping or knocking
ginko 4y ago
>the matriculant is now a full-fledged student, free to come and go at will. Absolutely no restrictions are placed upon him, he may attend all lectures or no lectures. He wears no academic dress, he lives in no dormitory. That's just normal university life, though.

pavlov 4y ago

> “His clothes were shabby, his coat ill-ﬁtting and with an unnatural gloss, his linen or celluloid— I am not sure that his collars and cuffs were of linen— seldom above reproach, and his high hat was always brushed the wrong way.” A random aside… I enjoyed this description as a bit of a puzzle because it’s entirely based on fashion cues that happen to be obsolete. What kind of unnatural gloss? What does a celluloid shirt look like? Or a high hat brushed the wrong way? When reading a story, my mind needs to create little actors to place in scenery. Building up these mental characters is easy and automatic with fiction’s usual introduction formula (which is also used by long form journalism in the New Yorker style where the editor makes sure that a person’s shirt color and posture is described to satisfy readers like myself). But this German student broke my automatic actor-builder process and forced me to make conscious decisions about what his clothing looks like in my mind. Seems like this doesn’t happen very often, probably because usually there are enough cues to get a picture without fully processing everything.

floren 4y ago
His shirt wasn't made of celluloid, just his collars and cuffs. At one time, it was common for shirt collars and cuffs to be purchased separately and attached to your (collar-less, cuff-less) shirts: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detachable_collar https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detachable_collar As for the hat, remember that hats were made of felted beaver fur. To make a hat shiny, you'd brush it -- but if you brush it the wrong way, it'll look rough and weird.

F-W-M 4y ago

The Corps still exists. Less of them, with less members, and less fighting. But we still get fat from drinking too much beer.

sophacles 4y ago
I don't know what the 'The Corps' mean in this context. Do you mind explaining?
- dewey 4y ago
  That's what we call some student organizations in Germany / Austria. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burschenschaft https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burschenschaft
  - ginko 4y ago
    And they're almost all far-right.
    - pfannkuchen 4y ago
      Isn't any organization that has been around for a long time and hasn't sufficiently updated its moral positions considered to be such? This label could mean anything in a range all the way from "old boys club vibes" or "somewhat antifeminist" to "holds beliefs of objective racial superiority". It is a bit of a broad brush...
      - adastra22 4y ago
        Generally true if he had said just “right” or “conservative.” But doesn’t far-right specifically mean fascist? (Like how far left is code for communist.)
        RalfWausE 4y ago
        I have a few friends who were in a corps and as far as i can tell the general political standing wouldn't be that much out of place in the Kaiserzeit. Definitive not fascist, but very much "classist" and racist in a way that want to believe that non-white people are not LESS capable, but that they (the white guys in the corps) are just MORE capable. I think the word "aristocratic" would describe their mindset best.

zwieback 4y ago

As someone who went to University in Germany but left for the US right after I found this very interesting. My daughters are going to (state) universities in the US and there are profound differences between the systems, some of them appear to have a very long history, judging by this account. My biggest complaints about the US system: sports and other non-academic activities as well as administration consumes way too much money. On the other hand, German universities are still much more selective so class hierarchies are reflected in the trade-school/vocational school/university hierarchy. Whether that's a good thing or not is a different question.

codethief 4y ago
> German universities are still much more selective …than US schools? https://giphy.com/gifs/nWn6ko2ygIeEU https://giphy.com/gifs/nWn6ko2ygIeEU What are you basing this on?
- barry-cotter 4y ago
  Public universities in Germany will take anyone who they believe could pass the course if they worked hard enough. For practical purposes this means you got the school leaving certificate, the Abitur. If you went to a less academic school (Realschule) rather than a Gymnasium, a grammar school you need to take an extra year but you can still go to a university of applied sciences which offer Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees as well. The only complications to open admission are for high demand courses that are very expensive to teach, mostly medicine. But if you got an Abitur and didn’t get good enough grades to get in your can just wait. I met someone who did a physiotherapy apprenticeship[1] in the three years of waiting. [1] Yes, what in the rest of Europe is a Bachelor’s degree and in the US a “professional doctorate” is a three year apprenticeship in Germany.
- zwieback 4y ago
  Sorry, poor wording. What I should have said is that the overall educational system ends up letting a smaller percentage of the population into universities, partially because sorting happens as early as age 10.

pjc50 4y ago

This is reminding me that I wanted to watch The Student Prince https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047537/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047537/ (1954 film based on 1901 novel, set in a before-then-but-unspecified historical period)