Our Friend "The Enemy": Elite Education in Britain and Germany before World War I 9781503626874

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Our Friend ccThe Enemy))

Our Friend "The Enemy" Elite Education in Britain and Germany before World War I

Thomas Weber

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS STANFORD, CALIFORNIA 2008

Stanford University Press Stanford, California © 2008 by the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system without the prior written permission of Stanford University Press.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weber, Thomas Our friend "the enemy" : elite education in Britain and Germany before World War I I Thomas Weber. p.cm. Based on the author's thesis (doctoral)-University of Oxford. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-o-8047-ooq-6 (cloth : alk. paper) r. University of Oxford-Students. 2. Universitat Heidelberg-Students. 3· Elite (Social sciences)-Great Britain-Education. 4· Elite (Social sciences)-Germany-Education. 5· Europe-Social conditions. I. Title. LF529·W43 2007 378.42'57-dc22 2007013862 Typeset by Thompson Type in 10/!2 Sabon LT

For my parents) Barbara and Gunter Weber

Contents

Acknowledgments, xi Introduction: Setting the Stage, r r. Oxford and Heidelberg in Their National Contexts, IJ 2. Transnational Nationalists: Anglo-German Life at Oxford and Heidelberg, 48

3· Of Oars and Rapiers: Militarism and Nationalism, 99 4· Student Sexuality at Oxford and Heidelberg, r36 5· No Long History, No Proud Tradition?

Women at the Two Universities, r63 6. Anti-Semitism and Attitudes Toward Foreigners, r83 Conclusion,

223

Abbreviations, 24r Notes, 243 Bibliography, 297 Index, 327

Tables, Figures, and Photographs

TABLES

r.

Region of origin of Heidelberg students, summer semester 1913, 27

2.

Education of the members of Arthur Balfour's Cabinet (1902-1905) and of Herbert Asquith's Cabinet (1908-1915), 28

3·

Ranking of German universities according to the number of senior government ministers (chancellor and Staatssekretare) who attended them, 1871-1914, 29

4·

Matriculation numbers of Germans at the University of Oxford, 68

5·

Residence of fathers of matriculated German students at Oxford I899II900-I9I3!I4 on their date of matriculation, 69

6.

Profession of the fathers of the matriculated German students at Oxford 1899lr9o0-1913/I4, 70

7·

Places of residence of fathers and/or mothers of matriculated British students at Heidelberg University, winter semester 1899-1900 to summer semester 1914, 87

8.

Profession of fathers of matriculated British students at Heidelberg University, winter semester 1899-1900 to summer semester 1914, 88

9·

Enrollment in the Oxford University Officers Training Corps, rr8

10. Enrollment in the First "Oxford University" V. B. Oxfordshire Light Infantry, 126

X

Tables, Figures, and Photographs

rr. Nationality of matriculated foreign students at Heidelberg University, 214

FIGURES

r.

Development of the student body of British matriculated students at Heidelberg University, summer semester r89I-1914, 86

2.

Ratio of British students among matriculated foreign students at Heidelberg University, r893-1914, 2r6

PHOTOGRAPHS

r.

Oxford: A British National Symbol, r6

2.

Heidelberg: A German National Symbol, 17

3·

Heidelberg: The Cult of Drink, 45

4·

Oxford: The Cult of Drink, 46

5·

Cosmopolitan Nationalists: Oxford's Anglo-German Club, 1913, 78 Heidelberg Blades: The Image of Different Cults of SportDueling, 109

6.

7·

Oxford Blades: The Image of Different Cults of SportRowing, rro

8.

Oxford Militarism: The OUOTC in Training-Rifle Practice, 121

9·

Oxford Militarism: The OUOTC in Training-Mounted Troop, 122

ro. Heidelberg Student Life: The Image of Easy Romantic Love, 144 rr. Oxford Student Life: Women-free for All but One Week a YearNew College Commemoration Ball, 1899, 147 r2. Walking the Fine Line Between Racism and Humor:

"The Balliol Tom-Toms,"

220

Acknowledgments

It is my great pleasure to thank those without whom this book (and the DPhil thesis upon which this book is based) never would have been written. I am especially grateful to my doctoral supervisor Professor Niall Ferguson who has been a role model of support, inspiration, and encouragement. I can never thank Niall enough for all he has done for me over the years. Very special thanks are also due to my co-supervisor Professor Gerhard Hirschfeld and to Dr. Simon Price, my college advisor at Lady Margaret Hall, for their continuous support throughout the process, and to Professor Hartmut Pogge von Strandmann, my Master's supervisor, who first set me on course on Anglo-German history and has continued to provide good advice ever since. The book also owes more than words can express to my wife, soul mate, and best friend, Sarah Yael Cooper Weber. My thanks also go to Professor James Albisetti, Sandra and Lauren Bialystok, Dorothee Birke, Professor Rudiger vom Bruch, Carsten Fischer, Hendrik Kafsack, Dr. Klaus Kempter, Professor Lothar Kettenacker, Dr. Frances Lannon, Dr. Muireann O'Cinneide, Professor Steven Piaff, Dr. Karsten Ploger, Professor Peter Pulzer, Professor William Rubinstein, Professor Richard Sheppard, Mishka Sinha, Dr. William Whyte, Professor Jiirgen von Ungern-Sternberg, and many others for providing feedback and advice. Moreover, I have greatly benefited from the incisive and generous reader reports of Professor Paul Deslandes and Stanford's other reader, my DPhil viva with Professor Hew Strachan and Dr. Chris Clark, and my transfer of status and confirmation of status examinations with Professor Robert Evans and Dr. Adrian Gregory. Karl Schabas, my father, and my wife did stellar work in reading and commenting on the entire book manuscript and thus helping to turn it into an intelligible book. I am also extremely grateful to Dr. Norris Pope for giving my book a home at Stanford University Press, as well as Emily Berk, EmilyJane Cohen, Rob Ehle, John Feneron, Kathy Garcia, Margaret Pinette,

Xll

Acknowledgments

Randy Stevens, and the rest of the team at SUP for so ably seeing my book through the publication process. I have also incurred debts to audiences who listened patiently to me and generously offered constructive criticism at seminars and conferences at Oxford University, the University of Birmingham, the German Historical Institute London, the National Archives at Kew, the Institute of Historical Research and the Institute of Germanic Studies at London, Trinity College Dublin, the University of Washington in Seattle, the German Historical Institute Washington, the University of Chicago, SUNY Buffalo, Gottingen University, the Humboldt Universitat Berlin, and at Wittenberg as well as at a conference of the Victorian Society and the Prince Albert Society. Many thanks also go to the staff of the Bodleian Library, the Archive and Library of Lady Margaret Hall, the Taylor Institution Library (and especially to Jill Hughes), the Oxford Union, the Oxford University Archive, Christ Church archive, St. John's College archive (and especially to Michael Riordan), and University College archive at Oxford; the National Archives at Kew; the Department of Documents at the Imperial War Museum and the German Historical Institute at London; the Universitatsarchiv, Stadtarchiv, the archives of Heidelberg College and of the Burschenschaft Franconia, and the Universitatsbibliothek at Heidelberg; the Badisches Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe; the Bibliothek fur Zeitgeschichte and the Wiirttembergische Landesbibliothek at Stuttgart; the Geheimes Staatsarchiv PreuBischer Kulturbesitz at Berlin; Robarts Library at the University of Toronto; the University Library at the University of Glasgow; the libraries of the University of Freiburg im Breisgau; the Bayerische Staatsbilbiothek at Munich; Yale University Library; Regenstein Library at the University of Chicago; and van Pelt Library at Penn. Since leaving Oxford, I have been fortunate enough to have been given a home first at the University of Glasgow, then at the University of Chicago, and now at the University of Pennsylvania. I have received nothing but kindness at these three amazing places. It is due to many people, but to none more so than Dr. Thomas Munck, Professor Bernard Wasserstein, and Professor Jonathan Steinberg, that these last years have been such a smooth and enjoyable voyage. The intellectual stimulus my colleagues, students, and friends have provided has allowed me to refine, develop, and reshape the ideas I had expressed in my DPhil thesis into this book. Finally, had it not been for the amazing treasures of Penn's libraries and the other Ivy League libraries that were so easily available at one mouse click, this book would have been much more difficult and painful to write.

Acknowledgments

Xlll

I am grateful to the editors of the English Historical Review and Oxford University Press for granting me permission to reproduce in Chapter 6 a revised version of "Anti-Semitism and Philo-Semitism among the British and German Elites: Oxford and Heidelberg before the First World War," EHR, cxviii, no. 475 (February 2003), 86-II9, © 2003 by Oxford University Press. I would like to thank the German Historical Institute London, the British Chamber of Commerce in Germany, Lady Margaret Hall Oxford, the Graduate Studies Committee of Oxford University, Oxford's Faculty of History, and the German History Society for providing scholarships and grants to me. My final and biggest thank you goes to my parents. This book would not exist without their continuous and loving pecuniary and nonpecuniary support. It is dedicated to them.

Our Friend ccThe Enemy))

Introduction Setting the Stage

On the first day of October 1946 an Old Boy of New College, Oxford and a Heidelberg graduate faced each other for the last time in the court room of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg. The former, Geoffrey Lawrence, the presiding judge, had found the latter guilty of having planned, initiated, and waged wars of aggression and other crimes against peace; of having committed war crimes; and of having participated in crimes against humanity. Lawrence told him: "Defendant Wilhelm Frick, on the counts of the Indictment on which you have been convicted, the International Military Tribunal sentences you to death by hanging." Sixteen days later Hitler's former minister of the interior was dead. Before Wilhelm Frick was hooded on his way to the gallows, he had shouted "Long live eternal Germany," showing no remorse for his deeds. What has astounded observers ever since Hitler came to power in 1933 is that the country that had prided itself as being the most educated country in the world and whose universities had been the envy of the world had unleashed war and genocide on an unprecedented level. Despite Hitler's own lack of higher education, an astonishing number of Nazi leaders were products of the German higher education system. In total, fifteen of the twenty-four defendants at Nuremberg had attended university or teacher's college, and at least three were sons of teachers. Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, like Frick, held a law doctorate from Heidelberg University. Furthermore, a huge fencing scar, dating from his days in a dueling student corporation in Graz, ran across the face of Ernst Kaltenbrunner, the highest SS official still alive and like Frick and Krupp a doctor of law. The other British judge at Nuremberg, Norman Birkett, meanwhile, had been president of the Cambridge Union at pre-1914 Cambridge, while the British prosecutor, David Maxwell Fyfe, had been at Balliol, Oxford from 1917. Another member of the

2

Introduction

prosecuting team was G. D. "Khaki" Roberts. Rather than slashing his face in a student duel in the style of some of the Nazi war criminals, "Khaki" Roberts had earned his fame as an undergraduate at St. John's, Oxford between 1905 and 1908 in a team sport. He had played Rugby for both Oxford and England. 1 The biographies of the British legal team and of the majority of the defendants at Nuremberg thus make it tempting to imagine that Europe's civil war with its conflict between Nazism and Western democracy had been coming for a long time and that British and German universities had produced many of the prime protagonists in this conflict. Yet the contention of this book is that at least the pre-r9r4 differences between the two countries-at a time when most of the protagonists of the Second World War attended either school or university-can neither sufficiently or even prominently explain the differences between Germany and Britain after 1933 nor why Europe collapsed in I9I4· This book, which uses the cases of two elite universities-Oxford and Heidelberg-takes aim at both the paradigms of British and German exceptionalisms. Yet readers tired of arguments about the Sonderweg-the idea that, as it modernized, Germany had taken a distinctly different path from the West, ultimately leading to Auschwitz-or Whiggish interpretations of British history need not put the book aside at this point, as Our Friend "The Enemy" does not try to refight historiographical battles of the past. First, this book raises the question of what the implications of the contention that Britain and Germany were much more similar than they were different are for our understanding of the pre-r9r4 world. It does not give too much away to acknowledge that while Oxford and Heidelberg had many dark and troubling sides, this book ultimately proposes that there was little at the two places to suggest that European society at the end of the long nineteenth century was fatally flawed and a cataclysmic reorganization was imminent. The question here is how stable or unstable life at Oxford and Heidelberg was before the First World War and how stasis and change interacted. Second, the approach of this book is both comparative and transnational. The book examines how national and transnational identities overlapped among British and German elites in the era before I9I4 and produced a sense of European identity that was very different from the Europeanization of the post-1945 period and yet provided Europe with a fragile stability. This book asks if the approach we have commonly used to study pre-1914 history has prevented us from recognizing that cosmopolitan nationalists were a more common species than hitherto believed. We will see that, two weeks before the outbreak of war in 1914, the British students at Heidelberg could think of no other struggle with German students than that in a forthcoming rowing regatta.

Introduction

3

"We guarantee," they would write, "to give our friend 'the enemy' a hard row for his money." 2 Third, this book is as much about the way we study history as it is about Oxford and Heidelberg. The argument here is that the lenses we have tended to use to look at the pre-1914 world have distorted our view and knowledge of the past, amplifying conflict, tension, and differences, thus largely ignoring opposing development. In other words, the contention is that far too many historical studies have taken the Second World War and the Third Reich as the starting point to explain pre-1914 history and have thus distorted history. 3 This trend has been amplified by an earlier attempt to explain the pre-1914 era, when the First World War was taken as the starting point to make sense of the decades before August 1914. Hence, we have all too often seen a teleological reduction of pre-1914 history. Finally, this is, at the very least, a book about two of the world's greatest and most fascinating universities. It brings back the pre-1914 life in Heidelberg's and Oxford's cobblestone lanes, colleges, corporations, and lecture halls of a generation whose lives were shattered in the era of the two world wars. In its approach, the book cuts across the political, cultural, social, intellectual, national, transnational, and international history divide. It does not rely on one approach but transcends the heavily fortified and labeled borders of the profession for two reasons: first, because it examines the methods that have been applied to British and German history and, second, because of the interwoven reality of life, it is more interested in combining different approaches than in applying one approach at the expense of another.

What has been the history of the views of British and German exceptionalisms? Debates about British history have not been channeled quite as prominently through one single question as is the case, as we shall see, of the German Sonderweg. Yet most debates ultimately fall on either side of two arguments: one over British decline in the twentieth century4 and the other about British exceptionalism. The original version of the latter argument was the Whiggish interpretation of history. It had as its theme the constant unfolding of reform, liberalism, and gradual improvement first in England and then in Britain. Its name referred to the political party of aristocratic reform in post-civil war England, but it had its heyday between the times of Thomas Macaulay in the first half of the nineteenth century and the days of his great nephew G. M. Trevelyan

4

Introduction

a century later. In its original form, Whig history was the history of the evolution of the constitution of England and the United Kingdom and its institutions. 5 It has mutated considerably over time, and in its more recent incarnation it may be more fitting to speak of British exceptionalism. The term Whiggish interpretation has, at any rate, always been used more by its critics than its practitioners. This book uses the term British exceptionalism as an undogmatic short key for interpretations that believe in liberal and positive peculiarities that set the course of British history apart from the European continent. The next generation of historians after the demise of the original Whiggish interpretation was dominated by Ludwik Bernstein Niemirowski and Gottfried Rudolph Ehrenberg. The two adored England the way probably only immigrants and emigres could. As Lewis Namier and G. R. Elton, they sought to explain why their new country provided a haven from the left-wing and right-wing extremism that had gained currency on the European continent. However, Whiggish interpretations were increasingly challenged. The most famous salvo against the interpretation had already been fired in 1931 by Herbert Butterfield who had criticized the tendency of historians of Britain "to write on the side of Protestants and Whigs, to praise revolutions provided they have been successful, to emphasize certain principles of progress in the past and to produce a story which is the ratification if not the glorification of the present." 6 Butterfield criticized the historical professions for using the lenses of the present to look at the past, for selecting and rejecting facts from the past to fit their argument, in other words to teleologically reduce the past. Whole generations of historians started to critically study the British past ranging from Anglo-Marxists such as Eric Hobsbawm, Christopher Hill, or E. P. Thompson to the cultural and gender historians of today. Along the way, a number of young British left-wing and liberal historians critical of Britain's past, including Geoff Eley, David Blackbourn, and Richard Evans, were drawn toward studying German history when they realized that the German Sonderweg historians of the 1970s used as their point of reference an idealized version of British history in which few historians of Britain still believed. Furthermore, since the winds of change had blown the British Empire away, postcolonial historians have also been less than congratulatory toward British history. Finally, the rise of Scottish and Welsh nationalism has given rise to a movement that has portrayed the history of Britain as the history of English imperialism and oppression. Yet as recent debates about the British Empire show/ arguments about British exceptionalism have never died. Many historians, 8 but in particular the disciples of J. H. Plumb, who himself had been a student

Introduction

5

of Trevelyan, have resurrected a less damning view of British history and sometimes also a belief in British exceptionalism, arguing that, in comparison to existing alternatives, Britain had moved more often than not in the right direction. 9 In that sense, they are the heirs of the Whig historians. However, in their approach-namely, to judge the past by the standards of the past and also to face the darker sides of Britain's past-they stand more in the tradition of Butterfield. The view of German exceptionalism has been, if anything, even more resilient. The history of the Sonderweg over the last three decades is perhaps best summarized under the motto "The Sonderweg is dead, long live the Sonderweg." Every time it is pronounced dead, the idea that the German peculiarities of the long nineteenth century are pivotal in explaining the rise of Nazism is immediately reaffirmed by someone in a slightly mutated form. What changes in new incarnations of the Sonderweg is primarily the explanatory model behind the general idea of a divergence of Germany and the West. The original Sonderweg interpretation goes back to nationalist historians in the last third of the nineteenth century and, in a slightly modified form, to apologist German historians of the interwar period. The latter argued that German history had taken a superior path but had been knocked off the track by the imagined double assault of Germany's foreign enemies during the First World War and of left-wing and democratic "traitors" who had supposedly stabbed Germany in the back at the end of the war. The Sonderweg in its modern negative incarnation was developed by social historians in the 1970s who used modernization theory to explain why Germany had been different from the West. The core of the argument was that, unlike the West, Germany had indus-

trialized but not modernized. This was purportedly evident in the fact that the German middle classes (the Biirgertum) had been marginalized and feudalized. The discussion of the Sonderweg had thus necessarily always been-at least implicitly-comparative, and in its modern form has generally focused on Britain. As a response to this interpretation that became the new orthodoxy, David Blackbourn (another of Plumb's disciples), Geoff Eley, and many others criticized that proponents of the Sonderweg interpretation had applied an asymmetrical perspective toward German and British history, scrutinizing the German development and contrasting it relatively uncritically with an idealized counterfactual version of the West, and in particular of Britain. The critics of the Sonderweg also argued that the middle classes had, in fact, modernized and achieved a silent revolution. 10 By the second half of the 1990s even many of the protagonists of the original 1970's Sonderweg at the Bielefeld School of History had come

6

Introduction

to acknowledge that the German bourgeoisie indeed had not been as weak and as premodern as had been argued previously. 11 Proponents and critics of the original interpretation alike now proclaimed the death of the Sonderweg. 12 However, what they meant was really something rather different. While the latter meant that Germany was no more (and no less) special than any other country until 1914, the former simply implied that the explanation of the different path of German history had relied too heavily on modernization theory. For them the idea that the differences between Germany and the West in the long nineteenth century made the two world wars likely is still alive and well, though in a slightly different reincarnated form. In a 1998 article, discussing what is left of the Sonderweg, Jiirgen Kocka identified the weakness of liberal parties, the existence of an illiberal political culture and of a strong authoritarian state, the strong role of militarism in state and society, a blocked process of parliamentarization, and the role of elites as some of the elements that had caused a fundamental German divergence from the West in which Kocka continues to believe. 13 In the two latest installments of his multivolume history of modern Germany, Hans-Ulrich Wehler equally reaffirmed the notion of a divergence of German history and pointed to the continuities between Germany before and after the First World War; the inability of Imperial Germany to reform; and imperialism, extremism, anti-Semitism, and illiberalism particularly among university studentsY Similarly, the first volume of Heinrich August Winkler's semiofficiaP 5 Der Lange Weg nach Westen (The Long Road West), published in German in 2ooo and in English in 2006, 16 illustrates that the view of an essential difference between Germany and the West in the pre-1914 period had indeed not diedY In recent years the conceptualization of the Sonderweg has taken a cultural turn. The emphasis now lies on the social construction of a German identity that was purportedly more extreme than any other European counterpart in its construction of internal and external enemies, its rigidity of gender boundaries, and its worship of war, thus giving rise to Nazism and triggering two world wars. 18 Another potential reincarnation of the Sonderweg is the view, which has gained currency lately, that a German way of waging war had evolved since the r87os. This view is said to be visible in instances of colonial violence and the treatment of noncombatants in the First World War which supposedly set Germany apart from other European countries and constituted a conditio sine qua non for the evolution of the German war of annihilation against Jews and Slavs in the Second World War. 19 Volker Berghahn recently remarked that the controversy over the German Sonderweg "is

Introduction

7

still rumbling on, and given its enormous implications I wonder if it will ever be resolved ... it may well be that no historian of modern Germany will ever escape being slotted on one side of the divide or the other." 20 II Every work of history that asserts national exceptionalisms is necessarily, at least implicitly, comparative in character. As a wave of works over the past decade or two has realized, 21 the best way to test what is (and what is not) specific about different national histories is thus by means of comparative history. Yet comparative history did not take off as much as enthusiastic supporters of comparative approaches had once hoped. Not too much has changed since the American historian Raymond Grew remarked in 1980 that "for many professional historians comparative history study evokes the ambivalence of a good bourgeois toward the best wines: to appreciate them is a sign of good taste, but indulgence seems a little loose and wasteful." 22 The first book in English about the methodology of comparative history only appeared in 2004. 23 Even the Bielefeld historians, the world's most enthusiastic supporters of comparative history, concluded in 2000 that in practice even in their own school they had not found as many converts to comparative history as they had once envisaged. 24 Where comparative history exists, it still often limits itself to "cosmopolitan gestures" 25 and an uncritical contrasting of the results of research on two different countries (or phenomena) without contrasting the way those results have been arrived at. Often studies fail to see that apparent differences between historical phenomena really result from differences in the conceptualization and research of those phenomena. 26 The worst examples of this kind of (asymmetrical) comparative history can be found in conclusions of monographs or concluding paragraphs of chapters within monographs on any one country. Jiirgen Kocka has pointed out that an asymmetrical comparative perspective is certainly not as fruitful as an outright systematic comparison. Nevertheless, he has argued that it is difficult to escape asymmetrical comparisons and that a perspective of that kind is better than no comparison at all. 27 However, as this book demonstrates, asymmetrical comparisons have often been carried out with a lack of caution. While the application of an asymmetrical comparative perspective gives the impression of a comparative approach, it, in fact, tends to reproduce and seemingly confirm existing stereotypes. By contrast, Our Friend "The Enemy" carries out comparative history in a double sense. It poses

8

Introduction

general questions and then applies the approach which has been used by the historiography for one country to the historiography of the other. 28 It tries, in the words of John Breuilly, to "show that apparently different events can be related to similar conditions, which means that those conditions cannot be related to differences of events." 29 After demonstrating how the British and German national historiographies have produced differing national images for the variables under examination, this book applies one uniform combined approach to each variable. In other words, it applies the approach which has been used within the context of one national history to the other national history. When this is done, many of the perceived differences between the two countries dissolve. Recently, comparative history has come under attack. "Comparative history is 'out,' ... for it suggests artificial boundaries between societies," says one historian. 3° Comparative history "reif[ies] the very category that it set out to transcend," says another historian. 31 The way to solve this problem for the two historians is to examine transnational developments, in other words, "relations and constellations, which transcend national boundaries." 32 This reasoning is based on the erroneous assumption that if you compare you will always assert and stress differences. This book shows that applying a comparative approach reveals the flawed methodology that has often been applied to British and German history and amplified national differences. Hence, both the comparative chapters of the book and the chapter on Anglo-German life at the two universities serve to bring to light transnational developments 33 among the British and German elites before I9I4· If it is true that most of the differences between British and German elites are not real but were imagined by historians, what does that then mean for our understanding of the world before r9q? It is a strong indicator that the comparison of elites at Oxford and Heidelberg is not a comparison of two independent instances but, in the words of Charles Maier, "of one over-arching ideal type exemplified in different places." 34 That ideal type here consists of the possibly rather similar responses of elites to the modernization of, or-for readers who no longer believe in the usefulness of "modernization" theory-to the rapid changes of life in Britain and Germany. Volker Berghahn has recently called upon us to think harder about how the cultural and social histories that have been produced in recent years bring us closer to explaining how the world got into the First World War. 31 If the responses in different European countries to the changes that European modernity was bringing were drastically different, as the conventional view has often assumed, we can explain quite

Introduction

9

easily how national differences and antagonism grew and how Europe thus got into the First World War. That war broke out over the July crisis was, of course, not inevitable, and it was contingent on the handling of the crisis by policy makers. However, the different cultural mentalities of Britain and Germany would have made a clash of cultures sooner or later likely. Historians who have redefined national exceptionalisms in cultural terms and also stress the collective psychoses of Germans, Britons, and Europeans about crises and decline thus, maybe unintentionally, do not stand too far apart from Samuel Huntington's concept of "the clash of civilizations." According to the concept, civilizations are cultural entities, and a combination of a growing consciousness of cultural separateness and of crises will lead to a clash of civilizations. 36 If, however, that difference in mentalities did not exist, we have got to explain how stable or unstable European society as a whole was. In his recent book on why the First World War broke out, David Fromkin described pre-1914 Europe as "a torn, conflicted world caught up in the grip of an arms race that one might well have called suicidal." 17 Similarly, according to Volker Berghahn, European society as a whole was fatally flawed. War broke out in 1914 primarily because of decisions taken in Berlin and Vienna during the July crisis. However, that those decisions could lead to war was only possible, according to Berghahn, because European society, from capital cities to small villages, from Britain to Germany, from France to Russia, had been dominated by European "men of violence" who worshipped militarism. European history, for him, has to be understood not as the clash of British liberalism and German chauvinism but as the contrast between European martial society and a peaceful and civil American mass consumer culture. 1s The interpretation Berghahn is offering us here is thus one of a dichotomy between European militarist society and American civil society and one between a pre-1945 Europe of violent antagonisms and a post-1945 Europeanization 39 with the gradual dissolution of nation states. This book raises the question of whether European society can really be understood using these binary opposites. Were national and transnational identities mutually exclusive concepts? Did nationalizing tendencies run opposite to transnational tendencies? Or was a marriage of transnational and national identities before 1914 more common than we have hitherto thought? Had the time of cosmopolitan nationalists really passed by the early twentieth century, as Berghahn suggests? 40 Or did British and German elite identities coexist with a European or Western identity? This book contends that at least the cases examined here suggest that the overarching characteristic was not one of an emerging clash of nations and of instability but one of fragile stability.

IO

Introduction

III How can a comparative and transnational study of universities contribute to a reassessment of British and German exceptionalisms and of European stability? If we understand elite universities not so much as places of academic research but first and foremost as institutions that groomed the political, administrative, and social elite of a country, comparing elite universities means comparing the class that ultimately took decisions over war and peace and that defined inclusion and exclusion in the nation and the state. Moreover, as Geoff Eley and James Retallack have suggested, the defenders of German exceptionalism have allowed that German society as a whole might have been more dynamic than previously assumed but retreated to the core area of political power and political institutions, stressing the "backwardness of the Imperial state ... and the unreformability of its practices."41 If differences existed anywhere, they should have thus been visible where the people who manned political institutions of power were trained and formed. Indeed KonradJarausch has argued that liberal forces at German universities were too weak and could not counter the rise of anti-Semitism, anti-Socialism, and imperialism, the result being academic illiberalism. 42 This is a view to which Wehler returns repeatedly in his recent work. 43 Likewise, if European society was unstable and fatally flawed, it should be visible in the comparison and interaction of the political, governing, and administrative elites of Britain and Germany. For Ralf Dahrendorf, the traditional university was indeed "one of the most formative institutions of history."44 Besides academic research in which universities were potentially a threat to the state, universities had a second role: the training and forming of leaders. It is in this task that the university was closely linked to the state authority: Universities perform part of the task of socializing individuals with which educational institutions (among others) are entrusted. In universities, the skills for certain specialized professions, and sometimes the general qualifications for leadership as well, are imparted. In tasks of this kind, the university is ... tied to and bound by the values and ruling powers of the time, that is, it is close to the "needs of the state." From this perspective the social structure of the university has, in principle, the same drop of authority that characterizes schools and armies, churches and business enterprises; in this side of their activity, universities are essentially conservative institutions. 45

Similarly, Hans-Ulrich Wehler has argued that "in social and political terms ... the universities remained bulwarks of the status quo and merely perpetuated the social structure and the social power relations

Introduction

II

of Imperial Germany." 46 Others have argued that Britain as well as Germany possessed a "hierarchical system of education that tended to reproduce and fortify the class and status structure of society," 47 while John Scott has pointed to the growing power of the elite educational institutions (Oxford, Cambridge, and the public schools) as "selfrecruiting and self-perpetuating institutions composed of men recruited from the establishment."48 According to these views, universities then produced policy makers and reproduced the establishment and its values of their states. Who formed the elite? In the broadest sense, modern sociology defines elites as those persons who have outstanding qualifications, have made extraordinary achievements, or exert special influence in a society, in a political system, or in an institution. 49 This definition includes on the one side cultural and intellectual elites and on the other what political theory terms as "functional elites": leadership groups which have special functions of command, coordination, or planning and thus stand under formalized responsibility, 50 or in plain English governing, political, administrative, economic, and military elites. For the purpose of this book, we are primarily concerned with "functional" elites and particularly with governing, political, and administrative elites. I have used the term in an inclusive way, including those whose function or whose social class had given them political influence. We will look primarily at students from elite families and students whose post-Oxford and Heidelberg careers gave them political influence but also at academics insofar as they acted as more than merely intellectual elites. What this book necessarily does not look at are military elites. In Germany, as in Britain, the path to the nation's military elite normally did not lead via universities. The case of Douglas Haig who had attended Brasenose College, Oxford before entering Sandhurst was the exception, not the rule. Officers in both countries attended officer schools rather than universities. However, British officers had normally attended the same public schools as Oxford students. 51 In addition, the influence of the army varied greatly in the two countries because of the privileged constitutional power of the German military and of the Ministry of WarY Yet as we shall see in an analysis of educational backgrounds of Wilhelmine senior ministers in Chapter I of this book, the importance of military institutions for the education of the civil Imperial elite should not be overrated. Nor should we overestimate the importance of technical universities for the education of the country's civil elite. 5·1 We shall see in more detail in Chapter I to what degree Oxford and Heidelberg produced the civil political, governing, and administrative elite of their countries. The chapter sets out to establish how far Oxford

I2

Introduction

and Heidelberg differed in their structures and how a comparison of the two universities can shed light on the broad questions raised in this book. It concludes with a comparison of the forms student life took at the two universities. Chapter 2 tells the story of Anglo-German life at Oxford and Heidelberg. It raises the question of whether the classic conceptualization of Anglo-German antagonism has used a binary model which has allowed only the labeling of people as either exclusively politically antiGerman/anti-British or pro-German/pro-British and has thus led historians to exaggerate the importance of Anglo-German antagonism. It asks whether attempts to counter Anglo-German antagonism did, in the German case, really only originate in liberal and socialist critics of the German government; or whether it is more appropriate to characterize the students involved in Anglo-German life at Oxford and Heidelberg as cosmopolitan nationalists close to the British political establishment and von Bethmann Hollweg's government; in other words as students for whom a national and transnational European identity was no contradiction. Chapter 3 naturally follows from the discussion of Anglo-German antagonism and tackles the core of Berghahn's argument about European society before 1914: the nexus between militarism and nationalism. The chapter investigates the difference between the most popular pastimes of Oxford college students and Heidelberg corporation students-rowing and student duels-and what their involvement in military and paramilitary organizations tells us about the degree to which Oxford and Heidelberg were martial societies. It challenges the idea that British militarism was a response to German aggression. Finally, it asks whether Oxford's and Heidelberg's militarism was mutually antagonistic and whether it was a source of stability or instability. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 cover areas to which historical research has prominently moved since the advent of the "new cultural history" (and since the Holocaust moved to the center of historical interest in the 1990s): the inclusion and exclusion of groups from dominant society and the nation, the establishment of hierarchies as the central feature of what constituted the nation; in other words, the study of gender, sexuality, and the treatment of ethnic and religious minorities. Chapter 4 deals with student sexuality at Oxford and Heidelberg, Chapter 5 with women's emancipation, and Chapter 6 with Jews and foreigners. (For reasons of space, I am focusing in this book primarily on Jews rather than also prominently including Catholics.) The chapters discuss cultural practices and then follow the career paths particularly of Jews and women to test whether the degrees of success of women and Jews support the view that

Introduction

13

German, British, and European society before 1914 is best described in terms of a continued exclusion of anybody but white Protestant males. Or is it more appropriate to say that Oxford and Heidelberg, Britain and Germany, and Europe were moving toward greater equality and emancipation? This book covers life at Oxford and Heidelberg at the end of a long era of change. To us-as well as to visitors at the time-life at the two ancient universities that had existed since the Middle Ages might easily appear as quaint and unchanging. In fact, life at Oxford and Cambridge in 1914 was more different from what it had been at the beginning of the long nineteenth century in 1789 than the change that happened in any comparable period, including our own. In 1789, the experience of speed was still unbeknown to humanity. If students wanted to get from Oxford and Heidelberg to London and Berlin, they had a long journey in a carriage, on horseback, or by foot through a world of villages ahead of them. Most rivers had to be crossed by ferries. Students had to study by candlelight. By 1914 all that had changed. Students now lived in cities and universities illuminated by electricity. From Oxford and Heidelberg, they could get by train anywhere within the borders of their countries in a matter of hours. As they sped home during university vacations, they raced past seas of chimneys, industrial complexes, housing estates, and urban sprawl. The first motor cars had started to appear in the two cities. If students wanted to get around town, they increasingly used their own bikes (even though bikes were less popular in Heidelberg than in Oxford.) And if students wanted to get their portrait taken, they could go to a photographer. In shops they could buy mass-produced commodities, and they could watch movies in cinemas. The rich ones could use telephones or buy typewriters. Students could follow news events anywhere in the world within hours or days of occurrence. Medieval college buildings all over Oxford had been torn down throughout the nineteenth century. At Heidelberg, many fires over the centuries had obliterated all but a handful of medieval buildings anyway. To be sure, in place of the torn-down buildings, Oxford colleges and the central universities erected, more often than not, neo-Gothic buildings or other buildings full of spires, but these were seen as symbols of the party of reform at Oxford. 54 Amidst these changes, the social order had also been challenged. The universities were still very small compared to today but compared to an earlier age, they had been swamped by middle- and lower-class students, women, and foreigners who were all symbols of the changes that not just the two universities but Europe as a whole had to face. The old elites had lost all certainties and often did not know how to navigate through these new times.

14

Introduction

Historians have often reminded us that the changes described here-in other words, the social and political implications of modernization and industrialization-caused a deep crisis. With regard to Oxford and Cambridge, Paul Deslandes speaks of a "pervasive culture of uncertainty, anxiety, and instability that marked the tumultuous decades around the turn of the century." In those crises, says Deslandes, traditional elites tried to defend the boundaries of the status quo as they recast the way they kept their hegemony. Student rituals and traditions reinforced new insider/outsider distinctions which were aimed at keeping elite status in a changing world. Students defined themselves in opposition to women, religious dissenters, nonwhites, and the working class, culturally constructing their superiority. The invasion of female and foreign students reminded undergraduates that Britain's strong imperial position and its supremacy over other countries was unstable. 55 Male students in Britain, Carol Dyhouse tells us, were displaying "siege mentalities.'' 56 Patrica Mazon, meanwhile, speaks of a deep crisis in German universities caused by widened access, the influx of women and foreign students, and anxieties about overcrowding and academic standardsY Others speak about an Edwardian crisis or of the Wilhelmine era as a "nervous" age. 58 Recently, David Blackbourn remarked that "the more we learn, the more the unstable hybridity and ambiguity of the Kaiserreich is underlined," 59 while Volker Berghahn argued that the perception of the existence of a deep-seated crisis before 1914 is pivotal in explaining the behavior of individuals and groups, both domestically and in foreign relations. 60 Two years after the completion of the dissertation upon which this book is based, Sonja Levsen defended a PhD dissertation on Cambridge and Tiibingen students before and after the First World War, also stressing the gender crisis in prewar Britain and Germany. 61 That a crisis was widely felt at Oxford and Heidelberg and in Britain and Germany is beyond question. More contentious is the question of whether Oxford and Heidelberg were incapable of embracing or at least of absorbing change. Were elites worshipping stasis, and was the European civil war of 1914 to 1945 an apocalyptical attempt by elites to keep the status quo? Or was reform accepted as a "reluctant response to stasis rather than a ringing endorsement of change"? 62 Or had reformers at both Oxford and Heidelberg won the day by 1914? Our verdict on attitudes among elites toward change at Oxford and Heidelberg is thus central to judging how stable or unstable life in Britain and Germany was on the eve of the First World War.

CHAPTER ONE

Oxford and Heidelberg in Their National Contexts

From his exile in Second World War England, Hans Ehrenberg, a Jewishborn academic turned Protestant pastor, looked back to the lost pre1914 world and observed that his "intellectual evolution is not that of an Englishman who has studied at Oxford, but of a German who has moved from one academic centre to another and settled at Heidelberg." 1 The implication here is that Oxford and Heidelberg were parts of very different academic worlds. Ostensibly, though, the images of pre-1914 Oxford and Heidelberg were very similar. Established in the noos and in 1386, respectively, Oxford and Heidelberg were the oldest universities within the modern borders of their Empires. 2 Both presented images of themselves as academic powerhouses steeped deep in history. Moreover, the view of Old Heidelberg and of Oxford's dreaming spires were romantic national symbols. 3 Heidelberg graduates raved for the rest of their lives about the colorful student life at their alma mater, the romantic beauty of the ruins of Heidelberg castle, and a climate that would allow roses to blossom when winter still held its firm grip over Northern Germany. 4 Holderlin described Heidelberg as the "most beautiful of all towns of the fatherland." 5 Oxford was, according to Henry James, "the finest thing in England." 6 Another observer noted in 1904: "Beautiful as youth and venerable as age, she lies in [the] purple cup of the low hills, and the water meads of [the] Isis and the gentle slopes beyond are besprent with her grey 'steeple-towers and spires whose silent finger points to heaven.' " 7 Both universities were at home in medium-size towns whose economies were still dominated by the university, printing, and tourism. 8 However, as Ehrenberg suggested, the similarities stopped there. The ethos of Heidelberg was very different indeed from that of Oxford. Heidelberg professors saw themselves first as scientists and research

r6

National Contexts

scholars and only secondly as teachers. Modern German universLtles existed for the pursuit of research and self-development. By 1914, almost three times as many of the academic Nobel prizes were awarded to academics teaching at German institutions than at British ones. It was believed that even students without any academic ambitions were best served by learning how to research and thus how to develop their critical faculties. Things at Oxford could hardly have been more different. Many Oxford dons perceived themselves predominantly as teachers whose duty it was, in Reba Soffer's words, to teach both "the moral requirements of character" and "patriotic obligations" and thus to transform "immature young men into responsible and capable leaders, at home and within the empire." 9 Benjamin Jowett, the legendary master of Balliol, put all his efforts into creating a tutorial system which would allow students to thrive in civic life. That system required skilled tutors, not unworldly, bookish scholars who were useless as far as Jowett was concerned. "Research!," he once said, "Research! A mere excuse for idleness; it has never achieved, and will never achieve any results of the slightest value!" 10 These differences raise the question of how comparable Oxford and Heidelberg really were. In this chapter we shall see how prominent the two universities were as academic institutions in their respective countries; how close they stood to the state and church; and how their student bodies as well as life compared at the two institutions. Ultimately, it makes the case that despite very different academic structures, the two

P H O T O 1. Oxford: A British National Symbol-The university's dreaming spires seen from Magdalen College. SOUR CE: Davidson, Things Seen, p. 45·

National Contexts

I7

PHOTO 2 . Heidelberg: A German National Symbol-The view from the philosophers' path. SOURC E: Pfaff, Karl, Heidelberg und Umgebung (Heidelberg, 1902 [r 885]), illustration No. 29 (the picture was taken in r896).

universities are comparable as microcosms of the elites of Britain and Germany which will allow us to use the cases of Oxford and Heidelberg as a test case of attitudes among British and German elites toward Anglo-German relations and international affairs, militarism, nationalism, and equality in society (as evident in the treatment of women and minorities).

TH E PROMINENCE OF OxFORD AND HEIDELBERG IN BRITISH AND GERMAN ACADEMIA

Oxford's position in Britain was unique in a way Heidelberg's position was not in Germany. This was in part due to the much smaller number of long-established universities in Britain and especially in England. In 1789, German lands were home to twenty-four universities, while England had just two-half the number of universities in Scotland.

18

National Contexts

By 1900 this all had changed. The University of London had already been founded in 1836 as the first nondenominational university. The late nineteenth century and the first years of the new century saw an unprecedented growth in higher education all over the British Isles.U But German academia was quantitatively still much larger than its AngloSaxon counterpart, even though the total number of universities was similar in both countries: By 1913, Oxford had almost 4,ooo students and was one of nineteen universities in the United Kingdom, compared to the twenty-one German universitiesP However, in 19rr the total number of English university and technical college students was just 16,6oo, in contrast to Germany's 63,000 students. The German population was, of course, much larger; nevertheless, the number of university and technical university students for every 1oo,ooo inhabitants was roughly twice as high in Germany. 13 The proportion of all British students and dons at Oxford exceeded by far the respective proportion of all German students and academics at Heidelberg. In 19rr, approximately 36 percent of all students attending British universities and about 28.5 percent of all university staff were at either Oxford or Cambridge. 14 By comparison, only 5·5 percent of all German university teachers in 1908-09 were employed by Heidelberg University, while the student body there (consisting of 2,668 students) only comprised 4·4 percent of all German university students in the summer semester of 1914.U Oxford's relative size in British academia was without a doubt translated into academic importance. Together with England's other ancient university, Oxford clearly stood out against all other British universities. In 1894, only four of the thirteen professors of the University of Liverpool had not attended either Oxford or Cambridge. Of the fellows of the British Academy in 1910, a mere 8 percent were London graduates, compared to a staggering 74 percent of fellows with an Oxford or Cambridge degree as their last degree. 16 This high percentage is a good indicator that the importance of Britain's two oldest universities was far bigger than the ratio of its students to the total size of the national student body would suggest. In the absence of institutions in Germany similar to the British Academy, a good way to assess the academic importance of Heidelberg is to evaluate how attractive a university it was for professors. Heidelberg ranked among the five most popular German universities according to this criterion. Posts at Berlin, Munich, and Leipzig crowned an academic career but Bonn and Heidelberg closely followed the three universities. Unlike professors from other middle-sized universities in middle-sized towns, Heidelberg and Bonn professors would primarily move on to

National Contexts

Berlin, Munich, and Leipzig. Heidelberg's professors in the humanities were particularly attracted by Berlin. In the sciences Heidelberg was even in the same category as Berlin, Munich, and LeipzigY By I9IO, a decade after the first Nobel prize had been awarded, Heidelberg already had with Philipp Lenard and Albrecht Kossel two Nobel prize winners among its professoriat. 18 In short, in terms of the prominence of their staff, Oxford, together with Cambridge, was indisputably the national leader, while Heidelberg was very high up in the German pecking order but stood in the shadow of Berlin. Another good indicator for the relative importance of a university is its international reputation and its ability to attract foreign students. A comparison between Oxford and Heidelberg suffers from an absence of statistical material on foreign students on the Oxford side, as indeed is the case for British universities in generaU 9 However, several indicators draw a conclusive picture of Oxford standing out as a world-famed university: the immediate success of the Rhodes scholar scheme, drawing students from overseas; the ever-increasing number of German students there; the high percentage of students who had received their schooling abroad; the urge of the Indian establishment to send their sons to Oxford; and the importance of Oxford for and in the British Empire. 20 Heidelberg, was likewise, if not even more so, a mecca for foreigners. It was by no means a provincial university. Before the war the percentage of foreign students at the Ruperto Carola-the Latin name of Heidelberg University-was 385 percent higher than at Tiibingen, and it exceeded the figure for Munster by more than 4,300 percent. 21 In the two decades before the First World War Heidelberg was consistently a stronger magnet for foreign students than German academia overall. Indeed, in the last semester before the war a total of 13.1 percent of its students came from abroad, which was a figure that exceeded that for Germany as a whole by almost a third. This was not a case of liberal Southern Germany versus an illiberal Prussia. The percentage of foreigners at Prussian universities was roughly the same or even slightly higher than the average at all German universities. In both absolute and relative terms, an even slightly larger number of foreigners studied at Berlin (r5.2 percent) than at the Ruperto Carola. 22 Oxford and Heidelberg were, then, both academic powerhouses, even though Heidelberg did not stand quite as much in a league of its own as Oxford and Cambridge did. Yet if we want to compare Oxford and Heidelberg as more than mere academic institutions and see if they were intertwined with their national political, administrative, and social elites, the question remains how representative they were of these groups.

20

National Contexts THE RELATIONSHIP OF OxFORD AND HEIDELBERG WITH STATE AND CHURCH

Heidelberg and Oxford, like the elites of their countries, both had a quintessential Protestant character, representing to a high degree the churches headed by their respective monarchs. 23 Even though Oxford was, by 1914, despite secularization, still fundamentally Anglican in character, it was no longer principally a place for the training of the clergy. While more than half of Oxford's undergraduates had been ordained in the 183os, the percentage had fallen to 19 percent by the early twentieth century. The great majority of students by 1914 were still members of the Church of England, a state institution with the King at its helm and whose bishops were state appointees. Until 1854, only members of the Church of England had been allowed to enter Oxford University. Though institutions for students from nonestablished churches (Mansfield College and Manchester College) as well as Catholic institutions such as Campion Hall had been founded, they were still not part of the university. Students of Mansfield, for instance, also had to become a member of a "real" college or enroll as noncollegiate students if they wanted to matriculate in the university. 24 Furthermore, many of Oxford's colleges continued to attempt to enforce chapel attendance, many still on a daily basis. Until well after the First World War, undergraduates also still had to take and pass "Divvers" -as the Examination in Holy Scripture was commonly known-after their first year to qualify to proceed to an honors school. 25 Senior members also continued to be heavily biased toward the Church of England and many institutional links between the Church and Oxford University survived. Until 1870, fellows had to be members of the Church of England. By 1840, 330 of 550 fellows of Oxford colleges had still been in holy orders 26 and even by 1914 the bishop of Oxford was a student (i.e., a fellow) of Christ Church, the college that had been founded in the aftermath of the Reformation on the grounds of a medieval monastery. Moreover, the Cathedral of Oxford was and is both the college chapel of Christ Church and the mother church of a diocese. Furthermore, the headship of Christ Church was restricted to a member of the Anglican Church and appointed by the Crown. Hertford College, meanwhile, was founded in 1874 as a denominational college, limiting membership to AnglicansY Furthermore, in 1841 Oxford had erected a Martyrs' Memorial, a seventy-two feet high symbol of antiCatholicism, right in the heart of Oxford. As they walked past the monumental statue for three Anglican bishops burnt at Counter-Reformation

National Contexts

21

Oxford, pre-1914 students could read the inscription that the memorial bore "witness to the sacred truths which they had affirmed and maintained against the errors of the Church of Rome." 28 The link between Heidelberg University and the churches was institutionally much less visible and immediate. In the nineteenth century, the university had never been primarily a place for the training of clergy. Yet the junior and senior members had a heavy leaning toward the Protestant church. It was, like the national ruling elite 29 and universities in general (but unlike Baden, the state in which Heidelberg lay, as a whole), predominantly Protestant. In 1900, 74 percent of all professors at Heidelberg were Protestant compared to only I I percent who were Catholic. 30 Indeed, the university had no Faculty of Catholic Theology. The ratio of Protestant students at the Ruperto Carola was even marginally higher and of Catholic students lower than at Prussian universities. In the summer semester of 1904, nearly seven out of ten Heidelberg students of German nationality were Protestant (69.3 percent) and only 21.1 percent Catholic. Heidelberg itself was predominantly Protestant, and 32 percent of all registered voters at Heidelberg in 1902, including the Heidelberg professors Ernst Troeltsch, GeorgJellinek, Erich Marcks, and approximately 465 other academics, signed a petition against thereturn of Catholic male orders to the town. Somewhat gloomily, Wilhelm Windelband, a professor of philosophy at Heidelberg, told his audience at a 1903 electoral assembly that "the clouds are already gathering on the horizon for a coming Counter-Reformation storm." 31 Many students were just as anti-Catholic as Windelband, and the student council of Heidelberg University tried unsuccessfully between 1905 and 1907 to exclude Catholic corporations. 32 In short, the religious leaning of Oxford and Heidelberg represented the respective religious character of the politically influential sections of their nations as well. Nevertheless, ostensibly Oxford and Heidelberg were very different in their relationship with the state. But even here differences should not be overdrawn. According to common wisdom, Oxford and Cambridge were private institutions, independent of state control, while German universities (with the exception of Strasbourg) were institutions of the individual German states. 33 Werner Conze and Jiirgen Kocka have thus concluded that higher education in the Anglo-American world was unlike in continental Europe a "world of education mostly free from the state." 34 For Charles McClelland, part of an English and American Sonderweg was that Oxford, Cambridge, and American colleges were private, free of "interference of a police state," and not "closely interwoven with the state." 35 What was the character of the relationship between state and university then? It needs to be stressed that, in theory, the German states only

22

National Contexts

set up university structures and that academics were at liberty to teach and research as they pleased. In other words, the states were supposed to be guarantors of academic freedom against private particularistic intrusion. 36 In his speech as vice-chancellor (Prorektor) of Heidelberg in 1906, Ernst Troeltsch defined academic freedom as "one of the highest and noblest forms of freedom, if at the same time, as it should, it represents self-discipline and a sense of responsibility." 37 However, realities were often somewhat different, as German states tried to influence and control the universities. While academics at Oxford were not civil servants and were thus formally independent from the state, German professors were appointed by the individual states, following, in theory, the proposals of universities. However, Prussia under its famed Minister of Education and Religion Friedrich Althoff bypassed the proposals of the universities on several occasions (though this was not the case in Baden). Moreover, universities depended on direct funding from the state. 38 The nominal head (Rektor) of Heidelberg University was indeed the Grand Duke of Baden, the head of state of the South-West German state, 39 while the chancellor of Oxford University was elected by all masters of arts, that is, all graduates, of the university. 40 Yet it is a myth that Oxford was independent from the state. Realities at Oxford were not as different from its German counterpart as is often assumed. Albert Venn Dicey, professor of law in pre-1914 Oxford, described the effect of nineteenth-century legislation on Oxford and Cambridge as a process of "nationalization" of the universities. 41 Oxford could only administer its own affairs within limits and was always afraid of direct state intervention. When Max Muller arrived in mid-Victorian Oxford, he observed that "from many different sides one hears of a wish for reforms in the life of the University, but they are afraid of the Government; and that if they once give it the opportunity it will interfere far more than they desire."42 Even though calls for reform had also come from within the university, reformers were never strong enough to succeed without state intervention. Against the wishes of the Hebdomadal Board (Oxford's principal executive body until r854) and several heads of colleges, the House of Commons established a Royal Commission in r85o and again in r87r, of which the r854 and r877 University Reform Acts were the result. The r854 Commission had to obtain a copy of the statutes of New College from the British Museum as the college refused to divulge its statutes. St. John's, meanwhile, rejected every draft of the new statutes proposed to the college with the result that the Privy Council imposed new statutes on the college against its will. The Reform Acts

National Contexts

23

dramatically reshuffled Oxford, remodeling its executive institutions, scrapping religious entry restrictions, weakening the hold of the Church of England on the university, abandoning the prohibition of fellows to marry, widening the system of study, introducing new subjects, promoting the power of faculties, changing internal financial provisions, and creating new laboratories. 43 Some academics at Oxford were even state appointees, as the British government appointed the Regius professorships.44 Furthermore, All Souls had nonresident fellows who had made careers in parliament, the civil and diplomatic service, the colonial administration, or the law. 45 Nor should the state control of German universities be exaggerated. As discussed earlier, the Prussian state sometimes took decisions against the wills of its universities. But Althoff did not question the right of the universities to choose their professors as such. In the great majority of cases, he followed the wishes of universities. Between r882 and 1900, Prussia appointed the professors proposed by the university in 83.5 percent of all cases (the percentage was even higher at Berlin). 46 As we have seen, direct state interference at Oxford was considerable. But the real issue is not the degree to which the state directly interfered at Oxford but the degree to which Oxford and the state were interlinked. The lesser degree of conflict between Oxford and the state was not the result of greater but, ironically, of less freedom. In theory Oxford was a private institution, in practice Oxford and the state were intertwined; that happened sometimes institutionally but more importantly through personal links. The nominal head-the chancellor-of Oxford University was, in contrast to Heidelberg's Rektor, certainly not a state appointee or state official ex officio but instead elected by all of Oxford's academics and graduates. In practice, however, the chancellor always reinforced the link between the government and Oxford as it became practice to elect statesman as chancellors. Oxford's three chancellors between r869 and 1914 consisted of one active prime minister, a former chancellor of the exchequer, and one former viceroy of India. 47 In addition, while Heidelberg University sent a representative to the First Chamber of the Badenese Assembly, the members of Oxford University formed a constituency of their own, sending their own two members of Parliament (MPs) to Westminster. For instance, both Peel and Gladstone had been MPs for Oxford University. While being Warden of All Souls, William Anson was MP for Oxford University and served from 1902 to 1905 as parliamentary secretary to the board of education. 48 This was possible because of the continued and undemocratic principle of plural voting in

National Contexts

Britain. All members of the University of Oxford thus had at least two votes in national elections. Some individuals had as many as ten votes. In total, in the respective last elections before the First World War overall plural votes amounted in each election to over soo,ooo or 7 percent of the total vote. 49 Furthermore, the close relationship of Oxford with the state church functioned as another link between Oxford and the state. And it was through an Act of Parliament that Magdalen Hall and Hart Hall were transformed into Hertford College in 1874. 50 Moreover, Oxford University had the right to police the streets of Oxford and could force any nonuniversity member who was implicated in an incident involving a member of the university, including, for example, college servants, to appear before the vice-chancellor's court. 51 The state had thus transferred state power onto Oxford University. Against this background it is difficult to agree with the claim that the German bourgeoisie was compared to the West, particularly strongly tied to the state, and that the German state intervened quite vehemently into bourgeois society. 52 At least after the state interferences of the Reform Acts, little direct antagonistic state interference was necessary to uphold state control of Oxford, as the university and the state were intimately linked, in formal and informal ways, which functioned as a safeguard of state control over Oxford. What the Heidelberg academic Max Weber has said about German academia is thus equally true for Oxford, namely that "the 'freedom of science' exists in Germany within the limits of ecclesiastical and political acceptability. Outside these limits there is none." 53 As a result, just as in the German system 54 it was impossible for a significant number of Catholics, Social Democrats, and Socialists, or any group that did not stand close to the state, to become academics at Oxford. The simple fact that observers tended to refer to Britain indiscriminately as England immediately reveals that Oxford's geographical position in Southern England put it in the political heartland of the United Kingdom. The situation for Heidelberg is much more complex and thus needs more discussion. Heidelberg, of course, was not situated in Prussia-Imperial Germany's most dominant state-but rather in the Grand Duchy of Baden, the heartland of German liberalism. 55 At least according to the historian Martin Green, Germany was characterized by patriarchal oppression, while "it was in Badenian and above all in its university towns, that all reasonable, useful, responsible, serious resistance to Prussianism seemed to center." Heidelberg itself was for him "liberal, reformist, legal, intellectual" and "the city of light, the domain of Apollo, the home of all in Germany who resisted the excesses of patriarchalism." 56

National Contexts

Differences between liberal Baden and conservative Prussia should, however, not be overdrawn. Recent research has confirmed that particularist identities were very strong in non-Prussian GermanyY However, regional identities coexisted with a German Prussian-embracing identity as the Reich matured. Baden was not only the stronghold of the I848 radical liberal revolution and the state in which liberal imperialists like Max Weber were professors. It was also the state in which a conservative liberalism was dominant and supported Wilhelmine Germany until well beyond the outbreak of war. 58 Heidelberg as a town was predominantly National Liberal, while the majority of Heidelberg's professors were Liberal imperialists. 59 What a lot of the (often idealized) writing about Heidelberg's liberal spirit60 tends to omit is that Ernst Bassermann, the leader of the National Liberals in the Reichstag and Old Boy (Alter Herr) of the Heidelberg Corps Suevia, 61 was more representative of Heidelberg and Baden than the "only non-reactionary German professor" 62 Max Weber. 63 Weber, at Heidelberg since I897, was prevented by a nervous disorder from teaching for most of his time as professor there. He could not do so much as read a book, spending his time playing with a box of stone blocks and modelling wax instead while his wife Marianne made herself a name as a women's rights activist. 64 His posthumous fame lets us easily forget that he had been a quarrelsome failure in both his personal and academic life. 65 After Weber had resigned his chair in I903, he had, as far as ordinary students were concerned, virtually disappeared. 66 Unlike his wife, he was a publicly unknown figure when, in a political meeting in I9o8, he spoke again after ten years of silence: "As they were leaving the hall, one petty bourgeois asked another: (... ) 'Who's that Max Weber, anyway?' The answer: (... ) Oh, he's Marianne's guy." 67 Meanwhile, the archnationalist Dietrich Schafer (who left Heidelberg for Berlin in I903) had been professor at Heidelberg longer than Weber, as had earlier in his career the most notorious of Berlin's nationalist academics, the historian Heinrich von Treitschke. 68 The professors who stayed at Heidelberg and continued to be visible in student life celebrated Imperial Germany and emphasized that there was not much to choose between Baden and Prussia. The professor of history Erich Marcks celebrated Wilhelm I in I90I as the "personification of Germandom [deutschen Wesens], of German might and greatness as such." 69 And during a I907 memorial ceremony for Duke Friedrich I of Baden, Karl Wild, also a professor of history at the Ruperta Carola, declared: "To be Badenese and to be a good German is for us one and the same thing." 70 The question of how liberal Baden compared politically to Prussia is not particularly relevant anyway as Heidelberg was the "Prussian Junker students['] (... ) favourite (non-Prussian) university." 71 As the focus on

National Contexts liberal Heidelberg academics tends to forget, Heidelberg was, if judged by its student body, not a Badenese University.

THE STUDENT BoDIES OF OxFORD AND HEIDELBERG

Heidelberg's graduates and academics certainly did not exert the same dominance in Germany that Oxford enjoyed in Britain. No German equivalent existed for Gladstone's belief that "to call a man an Oxford man is to pay him the highest compliment that can be paid to a human being." 72 Did this mean that Oxford was a national university and Heidelberg a provincial one? The recruiting base of Oxford immediately reveals that Oxford was a national university, as Oxford did not take its students primarily from its own region. Students came from, as A. H. Halsey has put it, where the "national elites of politics, administration, business and the liberal professions" lived. By contrast, approximately three-quarters of students of English provincial universities and two-thirds of London's students came from within a thirty mile radius of the university. 73 The situation in Germany with its large number of long-established universities, shifting power centers through the centuries, and a tradition of students studying at more than one university, was less clear. Yet all available evidence suggests that Heidelberg was also not merely a provincial university or-in the German term-a Landesuniversitat (university for students from a specific state) of the Grand Duchy of Baden. For instance, the Burschenschaftlichen Blatter, the magazine of the national association of student fraternities, had incorporated a drawing of the ruins of Heidelberg Castle in its masthead, suggesting that Heidelberg University was the epitome of a German university. 74 Heidelberg was by its student body indeed first and foremost a non-Badenese university. As Table 1 reveals, three out of four of Heidelberg students in 1913 came from outside Baden. By contrast, in a "real" provincial university like Tiibingen more than two-thirds (winter semester) or threequarters (summer semester) of students came from within the Kingdom of Wiirttemberg. 75 The composition of the student body also found its expression in the self-image of Heidelberg. It perceived itself as a German national university rather than a Badenese Landesuniversitat.76 By the regional origin of their students and by the religion of their students, both Oxford and Heidelberg were thus national universities. The impact of Oxford graduates and academics on British national life was certainly more immediately visible than that of their Heidelberg

National Contexts TABLE

27

I

Region of Origin of Heidelberg Students, Summer Semester I9I3 Territory

Heidelberg % of students

German Reich Southern Germany Northern Germany

88.5 37.6 52.0

Prussia Baden Bavaria Hesse Hamburg, Bremen, Liibeck Thuringian states Wiirttemberg Saxony (Kingdom) Mecklenburg (Schwerin & Strelitz) Alsace Braunschweig Other German states

36.0 25.7 8.9 5.6 2.5

Foreign countries Europe (excluding Germany but including Britain) Britain

2.2 2.2

1.9

% of German population

by territories,

1910

20.0 80.0

61.9 3.3 10.6 2.0 2.3 2.4 3.8 7.4

0.9 0.8 0.7

1.2 2.9

1.2

1.7

0.8

11.5 10.2 0.5

SOURCE: Data from GSL,]ahrbuch, I9IJ, 271; KSA,]ahrbuch, I9IJ, I. NOTE: Southern Germany= Baden, Bavaria, Alsace-Lorraine, and Wiirttemberg.

counterparts. Oxford and Cambridge on the one side and provincial universities on the other catered to completely different needs. 77 The subtle but important differences between Oxford and Cambridge cannot be discussed here. But what can be said is that Oxford did train the political and administrative elites of Britain. Life was, in the words of a contemporary observer, "on a different and altogether higher plane" than life at the provincial universities. 78 Oxford was a national institution, not merely a university. 79 Graduates of the two ancient universities also dominated the law and civil service: In 188o of the seventy-eight candidates admitted to Lincoln's Inn (one of the four institutions that trained barristers), thirty-two were Oxford graduates, twenty-seven Cambridge men, and only five had been to London. Between 1909 and 1914 as many as So percent of all civil service entrants had an Oxford or Cambridge degree. 80 Similarly, as George Parkin noted in 1912, Oxford furnished the men to rule and administer the British Empire: "Sons of Oxford have been among our greatest Empire builders and Empire rulers. (... ) The tone of the place-its idealsits merits and defects, are felt wherever the British flag flies." 81 Where we can directly compare Oxford and Heidelberg's importance in producing elites is in the educational training British cabinet ministers

National Contexts TABLE 2

Education of the Members of Arthur Balfour's Cabinet (I902-I905) and of Herbert Asquith's Cabinet {r9o8-I9I5) Educational institution Oxford Balliol Christ Church Exeter Lincoln Merton Oriel University Cambridge Christ's Trinity Coil. Trinity Hall London Edinburgh National University of Ireland Trinity College, Dublin Gottingen Ecole des Sciences, Paris Sandhurst Other military institutions Attended neither university nor military school

No. of members of Balfour's Cabinet

12

No. of members of Asquith's Cabinet

7 2 3 1 1 1 4

6

9

6 1 1 1

1 1 1

1 1 2

2 1

2

5

SOURCE: Data from Spuler, Bertold (ed.), Regenten und Regierungen der Welt, Teil II, Bd. 3 ., 2nd ed. (Wiirzburg, 1962), 205-9; DNB, I90I-I9II-I96I-I97D, Who Was Who, 19r6-r928.

and German senior government ministers received: The dominance of England's two ancient universities in the education of the British political elite is clearly visible in a ranking of universities according to educational backgrounds of all British cabinet ministers between 1902 and 1915 (Table 2). A little under two-thirds of cabinet ministers (63 percent) had attended either Oxford or Cambridge. While Oxford came first in an overall ranking (35.2 percent) as well as in the ranking of Conservative ministers in Arthur Balfour's cabinet (44·4 percent), Cambridge topped the ranking of Asquith's Liberal cabinet with 33. 3 percent. A ranking of educational backgrounds of Imperial German government ministers of the rank of Staatssekretar (senior government minister) makes it evident that Heidelberg was, like Oxford, a university for the education of the Imperial German establishment (Table 3). The table reveals that the popular view that the education of the Wilhelmine elite centered on Berlin and Potsdam82 tells only half the truth, as Berlin as well as Heidelberg dominate the ranking. (Despite Germany's reputation for militarism, in both the British and German governments the percentage of senior government and Cabinet ministers with a full-time military

National Contexts

29

education was the same: between I I and 12.5 percent). 83 Indeed, 56.3 percent of all sixty-four senior government ministers for whom details are available had attended Berlin and/ or Heidelberg. 84 Thirteen ministers had studied at both universities, six at Heidelberg and universities other than Berlin, and seventeen at Berlin and universities other than Heidelberg. 85 The combined figure for Oxford and Cambridge exceeds the combined figure for Berlin and Heidelberg by only 6.7 percent. 86 Both Oxford and Heidelberg were thus preeminent as grooming grounds for the governing elites. We will now turn our attention to the question of how important students from socially elitist backgrounds were within the two student bodies and how membership of certain colleges and corporations paved the way to the political and administrative elite of the two countries. One way of testing the importance of a university in producing elites is to see whether any specific subject was typically chosen by future political and administrative leaders and then to test the prominence of that subject at Oxford and Heidelberg. The dominant subject in both public schools and at Oxbridge was classics, which functioned to form a cohesive elite and thus made it difficult for outsiders who had not received a classical education to make inroads TABLE

3

Ranking of German Universities According to the Number of Senior Government Ministers (Chancellor and Staatssekretare) Who Attended Them, I87I-I9I4 University (or other educational institution)

Berlin Heidelberg Leipzig Gottingen, Strasbourg Bonn Breslau, Munich Tiibingen Freiburg i.Br., Greifswald, Halle, Konigsberg, Wiirzburg

No. of ministers

29 19 14 7 6 5 4 3

University (or other educational institution)

Erlangen, Cologne, Miinster, London, Calcutta, Neuchatel GieSen, Kiel, Marburg, Rostock Unspecified universities Officer schools Vocational training

No. of ministers

1

4 8 3

SOURCE: Data from Schwarz, MdR; Kosch, Staatshandbuch, i & ii; Degener, Wer Ist's, 5th ed.; Hass, Lexikon; Mann, Handbuch, Krethlow-Benziger, Donata-Maria, Glanz und Elend der Diplomatie (Frankfurt/Main, :2.oor), 558; NDB; ADB, vol. 47-55; Fabian, DBA; Gorzny, DBA, Neue Folge. NOTE: Ministers normally attended more than one university. In total, sixty-eight men served in the Imperial government as senior government ministers between 1871 and I9I4· Of those, details about the education of four ministers (Eduard Hanauer, Otto Riidlin, Eduard Heusner, and Friedrich Hollmann) were not available in the handbooks consulted. Of the remaining sixty-four, eight were trained as officers, three underwent vocational training, and fifty-three attended universities (in the cases of Rudolf von Jacobi, Gottlieb von Jagow, Karl von Hofmann, and Siegfried Graf von Roedern the consulted handbooks did not specify which university they attended).

National Contexts into the upper realms of British public life. Both Greek and Latin were compulsory subjects at Oxford, and the most popular subject was Greats-a mixture of Greek, Latin, Ancient History, and Political Theory. Oxford University's Student's Handbook advised students that the School of Literae Humaniores (the school in charge of Greats) "is the oldest and is admitted on all hands to be the premier School in dignity and importance. It includes the greatest proportion of the ablest students, it covers the widest area of subject, it makes probably the severest demands, both on examiner and candidate, it carries the most coveted distinction." 87 It was widely held that Greats was the ideal preparation for any job inside and outside of politics. In Commons debates, MPs regularly threw quotes from Virgil's Aeneid at each other. 88 Greats also perfectly prepared undergraduates for the civil service entrance exam, as the examination papers were modeled on the honors papers of Oxford and Cambridge. According to the 1913 McDonnell Commission, candidates who had taken Greats at Oxford could win enough marks for the civil service entry exam without any further preparation. 89 Yet as no similar subject existed in Britain outside the ancient universities/ 0 it is impossible to compare the relative importance of Greats. The other subject that was becoming increasingly popular at Oxford was modern history. The goal of history was, as in the case of Greats, to groom responsible political and civic leaders. The British delegation at Versailles in 1919 did indeed include ten Balliol men who had read history in Victorian and Edwardian Oxford. 91 Heidelberg was particularly attractive for students of law, which was Germany's most elitist subject. Unlike in Britain, the great majority of civil servants and politicians graduated from faculties of law and, on average, law students came from more privileged backgrounds than their peers in other faculties. 92 In Hans-Ulrich Wehler's words, "the law faculties represented an 'armoury of political rule' and 'in a sense possessed a feudal character.' " 93 Compared with other universities, Heidelberg attracted a disproportionately large number of law students. In 1913-14, for example, 28.2 percent of all Heidelberg students, excluding medical students, were enrolled for the faculty of law, compared to 22.6 percent of nonmedical students at all German universities. 94 But what is more important in this context is the region of origin of the law students. A disproportionate number of Heidelberg's law students (44 percent) came from Imperial Germany's politically most important state Prussia. In total, 60.5 percent of law students came from Northern Germany and only 24.4 percent from Southern Germany, compared, for example, to 38.7 percent of North Germans and 55·5 percent of South Germans in the Faculty of Protestant Theology. 95

National Contexts

Heidelberg, for all its attractions, had a reputation as a "summer university" and thus attracted the Wilhelmine ruling elite: in summer semesters, between 20 to 25 percent more students studied there. The difference was most marked in law (as the subject not only of future lawyers and judges but also of civil servants and politicians), with a 47 percent higher enrollment in the summer semester 1909-10 than in the previous winter semester. Students spent their winter semesters in working universities in the North, such as Berlin or Leipzig. 96 Where did we find the elites at Oxford? The university was organized according to residential and widely autonomous colleges and was, strictly speaking, a federation of independent colleges. The reputation of colleges varied greatly according to their success in attracting traditional elites and in producing new elites. Balliol, in particular, the "nursery of statesmen, pro-consuls, scholars, lawyers and men of letters" 97 trained its students for service in national politics and administration. 98 Benjamin Jowett had once remarked that he "should like to govern the world through my pupils." 99 This was no hyperbole on Jowett's part. More than forty Balliol men sat in the House of Commons in the 189os alone. 100 At a dinner party celebrating his appointment as prime minister, Herbert Asquith expressed Balliol's self-confidence when he "said that Balliol men were distinguished from lesser souls by their 'tranquil consciousness of effortless superiority.' " 101 Milner's Kindergarten, the group of young men administering South Africa, meanwhile, consisted of nine New College graduates and four young fellows of All Souls. Half the Viceroys of India came from Oxford and most of them from Christ Church. 102 Another way to show the privileged position of Oxford students and of certain colleges among the British elite is to investigate the links colleges had with certain ancient public schools. The fact that 25 percent of all civil service entrants between 1909 and 1914 were former students of "Clarendon schools" -as the nine most famous public schools were called-immediately reveals the importance of public schools for the British administrative elite. 103 Moreover, So percent of male students between 1900 and the First World War who took examinations in arts subjects had attended independent fee-paying schools, many of which had close ties to individual colleges. 104 As no German equivalents of English public schools existed, we must limit our focus here to Oxford. Those colleges with links to famous public schools tended to be the colleges with the closest links to the establishment. Tellingly, Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street, set in Edwardian Oxford, used the Magdalen ties with famous public schools to create an atmosphere of social exclusivity in his fictional account of student life at the college. When the novel's

32

National Contexts

protagonist Michael Fane arrives at the college, he finds that "Eton, Winchester, Harrow, or Charterhouse (... ) seemed to have produced all but six or seven of the freshmen. (... ) 'What chance,' thought Michael, 'could he stand against such an impenetrable phalanx of conversation as was bound to ensue from such preponderance.' " 105 And indeed, in 1900 one in four students at Balliol alone was an Etonian. A year later, nearly half of Christ Church's undergraduates had been at Eton. 106 Another good indicator that colleges were to different degrees colleges for the production of political and administrative elites is the involvement of undergraduates of different colleges in the Oxford Union, the university-wide debating society and grooming ground for British politicians. Of the four colleges which were generally regarded as preeminent at the time (Balliol, Christ Church, Magdalen, and New),t 07 three had the three highest shares in Union posts. The Eights Week Magazine dubbed the Union indeed "the Balliol Workhouse." 108 Balliol filled 22.6 percent of all Union posts between 1890 and 1914 and was thus overrepresented by a factor of almost four compared to the percentage of Oxford's total student population at Balliol. The 6.5 percent of noncollegiate students among all undergraduates in 1913-14 did not provide any Union officers. Keble meanwhile was underrepresented by a factor of nine and Worcester of thirty-three. 109 Heidelberg was, of course, not organized according to colleges but many students were members of one of the thirty-four student corporations (1910). Colleges and student corporations were really very different entities. Colleges were integral institutions of the university and, with the exception of the 6.5 percent noncollegiate students, 110 all students were members of a college. By contrast, corporations were only registered with the university and only loosely under its control. Most importantly, they were voluntary and private associations of students. Oxford colleges were voluntary associations only to the degree that prospective students could choose which colleges to apply to when they applied to Oxford. Yet they were not voluntary associations at all in the sense that students had, in principle, to join a college. Furthermore, life in student corporations was-unlike in colleges-under direct control of the student members themselves. In addition, student corporations were much smaller than colleges. The Frankonia-the largest corporation in 1902-had merely forty active members. 111 The twenty-three members of the radical nationalist Society of German Students in 1886 amounted to no more than 2 percent of the student population. 112 Most important of all, only a minority of students were members of a corporation at all. Corporation students only comprised about 37 percent of the student body, while noncorporation students constituted almost two-thirds of all students. 113 In general, between a quarter and a half of students at

National Contexts

33

Imperia 1 German universities were members of a corporation. 114 In light of these figures it is easy to agree with Thomas Nipperdey's assertion: "The strength of corporations has been overrated." 115 A comparison of colleges at Oxford and only student corporations at Heidelberg would thus distort the picture, as it would contrast a self-selected minority of students in one case with the total student body in the other. Nevertheless, the most socially elitist students at Heidelberg tended to be members of student corporations. The university's five Corps topped the social ranking of the corporations, with the Suevia and Saxo-Borussia (which was federated with Wilhelm II's old Corps Borussia at Bonn and the Corps Saxonia at Gottingen) the most exclusive and most aristocratic of all of German student corporations. Corps students constituted the ideal of the Wilhelmine elite. In total 7.6 percent of all male students at Heidelberg in the last semester before the outbreak of the First World War were members of one of the five Corps. Heidelberg attracted a huge number of aristocratic students in the nineteenth century. More than half the members of the Saxo-Borussia were aristocrats, and many Old Boys exerted a tight grip on politics and the administration: twenty of its members alone went on to become Reichstag deputies (including two presidents), forty became deputies in state parliaments, and thirty-eight became members of the Prussian Upper Chamber. Associated members included the Grand Duke of Baden and the Greek King Constantine. As a special honor, in 1878 the future Wilhelm II came to Heidelberg to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the Corps. Prussian ministries, the Foreign Service, and Prussian posts of Regierungsprdsidenten (district governors) were full of Old Boys of Heidelberg Corps. The fact that the eleven most exclusive Corps of Imperial Germany included all five Heidelberg Corps shows that Heidelberg indeed was not a provincial Badenese university, but rather a university for the education of the Imperial largely north-German elite. 116 On the whole, however, Oxford and Heidelberg were not aristocratic institutions. Though some colleges (such as Magdalen or Christ Church, "the chief resort of the aristocracy"), 117 and some Heidelberg Corps such as the Saxo-Borussia had a high percentage of aristocrats among their members, in general the universities were bourgeois. By 1910 only 2 percent of all students at Bonn (which had like Heidelberg an aristocratic reputation) belonged to the nobility. Even among Bonn law students the figure was just over 7 percent before the war, and for the snobbish Corps students the figure was just 8 percent. 118 Sons from educated and wealthy bourgeois families, like Ernst Bassermann, the later National Liberal leader who was a member of the Suevia at Heidelberg, were now absorbed into the nation's civil power elite via student corporations. 119 It was for students from these strata of society that the university and

34

National Contexts

student corporations had a social bridging function that helped to form what Konrad Jarausch has called "a rapprochement between aristocracy and educated bourgeoisie." 120 Does this mean that a new meritocracy had been absorbed into the established elite? Entry requirements of German universities were indeed remarkably meritocratic. As James Albisetti has argued, Imperial Germany had a more open and adaptable social and political system than much of the scholarship on the topic has suggested. That scholarship had argued that the existence of a state examination as the entrance requirement for all state jobs had turned Imperial Germany, only in theory, into a meritocracy, but, in practice, social networks had remained more important than any exam. 121 In John Rohl's words: "In contrast to the British system, the Prussian (and therefore also the Reich) system of recruitment was not one of open competition. The government made frequent use of its right to refuse to appoint qualified candidates for political or other reasons." 122 According to Wehler, merit had no place at all in the German civil service. Only the "'Old Boys'' network of student corporations mattered: [The] German 'fraternity nepotism' ensured that a career in the administration and the judiciary was open only to the 'reliable' civil servant who had acquired his 'worldly wisdom' in practice dueling and by giving 'satisfaction' in duels fought in deadly earnest." 123 In theory an entrance examination existed even for the diplomatic service. But in reality, only aristocratic or well-connected students could enter the service. Significantly, of the forty-nine diplomats who are listed in a study of the German Imperial diplomatic service only seven were nonaristocrats. 124 In short, the German elite had successfully drawn new members into its midst, especially through the membership of student corporations or a career in the Army. The effects of the introduction of entrance exams for the civil service in Britain were perhaps not as different as has been suggested as they forced students to work harder to achieve good degrees. In theory, it introduced a meritocracy to Britain and made all public posts equally accessible for students from all universities. In practice, however, Oxford's Old Boys' network also secured students with poor degrees jobs in their career of choice and helped keep its grip over politics and public life. 125 In addition, until 1918 all entrants into the diplomatic service had to have a personal recommendation, either by the Foreign Secretary himself or one of his acquaintances; therefore, it was little wonder that 67 percent of all new attaches between 1908 and 1913 were Old Etonians. 126 Next in line in prestige to the Corps at Heidelberg came the Burschenschaften, such as the Frankonia, followed by other fencing corporations (Landsmannschaften and Turnerschaften) and corporations such as the singing corporation Schwarzburgia that did not organize

National Contexts

35

fencing matches with other corporations but allowed their members to give satisfaction and duel themselves. Then came color-bearing non fencing corporations and noncolor-bearing nonfencing corporations, ending with academic societies and corporations which are difficult to place, such as the Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish corporations. The Burschenschaften had been the vanguards of German liberal nationalism in the first half of the nineteenth century but had purportedly abandoned most of their liberal past by the end of the century. Burschenschaften were less socially exclusive than the Corps (only 1.5 percent of Old Boys and current members of the Frankonia in r896 were aristocratic) but equally filled the ranks of the civil power elite of Imperial Germany (particularly of the judiciary). 127 The Frankonia, for instance, produced at least three elected heads of German federal states 128 and together with other Burschenschaften various ministers, parliamentary deputies, and diplomats. Like law students, the majority of Heidelberg's fraternity students came from North Germany: over 76 percent of students in the Allemannia between r894 and 1905 came from the North. 129 Indeed, the academic subjects of the Old Boys and current members of the Frankonia also underline the fraternity's link to the civil power elite; 6r.r percent of Old Boys and students who entered the Frankonia between 1870 and 1900 were law students or law graduates, compared to 27.8 percent of all Heidelberg students in the winter semester r898-99. In total, approximately 78 percent of the active and old members of the fraternity came from outside Baden, and approximately 56 percent of post-r87o's Old Boys were employed by the state or held political offices. 130 Difficult to place among corporations is the ultranationalist Society of German Students, established at Heidelberg in r883 by twelve students. Unlike other corporations the society had an open political (though not party-political) agenda. Under the motto "With God for Kaiser and Empire," the society's aim was to further a Christian anti-Semitic German nationalism, and the society's students were required to own an essay collection titled Deutschland, Deutschland uber alles. The founding chairman of the Leipzig Society, Diederich Hahn, was from 1897 director of the Farmers' League, one of the most important and notorious nationalist pressure groups. Another Old Boy, Kuno Graf von Westarp, as leader of the Deutschkonservative Partei in the Reichstag, attacked the policies of Bethmann Hollweg's government as too liberal. Liberals like Friedrich Naumann had also been in the Societies of German Students but were bitterly attacked for their continued liberalism, and Naumann left the corporation in 1905. The conventional view generally suggests, perhaps too uncritically, that only marginal differences existed socially and politically between the Societies of German Students and traditional corporations. 131

National Contexts It would be misleading to present Oxford and Heidelberg as universities only for privileged students, as an ever increasing number of students from nontraditional backgrounds were entering the two universities. Both institutions had seen decades of rapid change. By 1914, Oxford was fundamentally different from what it had been at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Other than the diminished influence of the church, the reform acts had dramatically reshuffled the university. College access had been widened and exclusive links of colleges to specific schools had been cut, new subjects had been introduced, new laboratories established, and the sciences strengthened. 132 Like British academia, the German university system had been in a deep crisis at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and Humboldt's reforms had reshaped and remodeled German academia. But the universities continued to change their faces in the decades before the First World War. 133 The number of students at all German universities had almost quadrupled between 1848-49 and 1908-09. In addition, technical and trade universities had been established, though, unlike in Britain, expansion in higher education came primarily from within existing institutionsP 4 Heidelberg, a university of 1,117 students in the summer semester of 1891, had more than doubled in size to 2,668 students in the summer semester of 1914 135 and had been turned into what has been called a "scholarly factory." 136 In short, both Heidelberg and Oxford had undergone rapid change which had also resulted in the arrival of a large number of new students from nontraditional backgrounds. It cannot be repeated often enough that 63 percent of students were actually not members of a student corporation. However, even the corporations formed far from a homogenous group. Despite occasional protestations to the contrary, 137 Corps, Burschenschaften, Landsmannschaften, and Turnerschaften certainly shared roughly similar lifestyles and values by the turn of the century. But the same cannot be said as easily about Catholic and Protestant corporations or other academic corporations, such as the Mathematische Verein or the Philologische Verein (though some of the academic societies were later transformed into Landsmannschaften and thus became proper corporations). Jewish corporations might have promoted similar lifestyles and values, but their relationship with other corporations was problematic, to say the least. Similarly, the unsuccessful attempt by the Heidelberg student council between 1905 and 1907 to exclude Catholic corporations 138 is a reminder of the difficult relationship between Catholics and Protestants in Imperial Germany. At the same time, Catholic corporations were the most populous ones in Germany. In 1912, no national association of student corporations had as many members as the Cartell-Verband, the association of Catholic color-bearing student corporations. 139 In other words, it does

National Contexts

37

not suffice, as has been done all too often, to identify the most radical, nationalist, anti-Catholic, and anti-Semitic remarks by students belonging to student corporations and to take them as representative of German student corporations, or even German students in general. Charlotte Sidgwick, the wife of the Oxford classicist and fellow of Corpus Christi College Arthur Sidgwick, told her readers in a sketch about Heidelberg student life, written around 1900, that the mental picture visitors to Heidelberg had of German students was that of "a young man who does nothing but drink, fight duels, sing Volkslieder and Trinklieder, and make love to pretty, low-born maidens." In reality, only a minority lived up to that image. Recalling a visit to Berlin University, she said that she saw "a crowd of serious, well-mannered young men, most of them carrying books and papers. They are swarming like bees to the various lecture-rooms, they are as quiet as the elderly professors who appear amongst them. They have no corps caps, no dogs, no scars on their scholarly faces. (... ) They are the men of next year's Germany." 140 The fact that the attempt to rigidly organize the unorganized in 190304 as a "Heidelberger freie Studentenschaft" (Heidelberg Free Student Association) was no success and that it was dissolved again even prior to the First World War, 141 does not justify-as is commonly done-brushing two-thirds of Heidelberg's student body aside. The whole point of noncorporation students was that they did not want to be rigidly organized. In the election to the Heidelberg student representative body, the list of noncorporation students received almost So percent of the votes (400 votes), while the list of corporation students merely received ro9 votes. 142 Bertram Graubner, the leader of a group of students visiting Britain in I9IO, reminded his interviewer that, it is true that many [German students] wear a cap with coloured bands (... ), but these have nothing to do with their University. The caps merely show that they belong to different associations of corps, (... ). These corps, I may tell you, are fast dying out (... ). There is no doubt that they were responsible for encouraging students in their former wild days, in drinking bouts and those duels of which formerly so many students showed the effects in the scarred faces of which, disfiguring as they were, they were so proud. Nowadays, face slashing is very little indulged in. I doubt whether one in twenty of our modern students can show any scars. 143

A recent study has shown that the assumption that noncorporation students consisted almost exclusively of lower-middle-class students is wrong. In fact, a significant proportion of Heidelberg's "Free Students" were from upper-middle-class families with fathers in professions that required a university education but had voluntarily chosen not to join a

National Contexts

student corporation. 144 Nevertheless, there was an ever growing number of students from nonacademic backgrounds flowing into German universities. The lower middle class had already constituted the largest group at German universities since the 184os, and their number was continuing to grow. Students used the university to acquire the minimum of knowledge required to enter the learned professions as soon as possible. In Prussia almost 50 percent of students came from petty bourgeois backgrounds. Lower-middle-class students were practically barred from university and civil service careers. This was because law Referendare (trainees) and Privatdozenten (Professors-in-waiting) were virtually unpaid and because lower-middle-class students generally could not enter Corps (and thus make use of the Old Boys' networks) due to the expensive social life in the Corps. 145 Though universities became less elitist and though the traditional elite had absorbed a significant number of middle-class students, upward social mobility thus remained impossible for the great majority of students. This was because these students either could not afford or were formally excluded from elitist career paths or could not identify with the ideals associated with such paths. The German elite was thus formally open and practically closed. A large number of Oxford students equally did not fit into the traditional image of a hedonistic gentlemanly student life learned at public schools and continued at colleges like Magdalen or Christ Church. As we will see, female students were not even members of the university. Compton Mackenzie's Sinister Street also makes a distinction between different types of colleges: "As individuals, perhaps [ecclesiastical people] were in tone with Oxford, but, eating bacon-and-eggs and talking about bishops, they belonged evidently to Keble, and Michael could not help feeling that Keble like Mansfield and Ruskin Hall was in Oxford, but not of Oxford. " 146 Oxford was as much a generator of social change as it was an obstacle to it: According to one school of thought, Oxbridge was first of all a generator of social change, and the British elite became thus more and more open and receptive to change. Unlike in Germany, where the middle classes embraced the aristocracy, in Britain the aristocracy and the middle classes mutually embraced each other. The British elite can thus be described as an "open aristocracy based on property and patronage" (Harold Perkin). 147 For Perkin, the university was a "vehicle of social mobility rather than an obstacle to it." 148 Similarly, William Rubinstein and F.M.L. Thompson have argued that the traditional and new industrial and commercial elite had merged in Britain. 149 Rubinstein has pointed out that the argument that the British elite was homogenous because of the common public school and Oxbridge background of members of the

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39

elite cannot be an argument for the closed character of the elite because of the extremely varied social background of public school students. For him, a public school and Oxbridge education had replaced landownership as definitional attributes of elite status. 150 This school of thought is certainly right in that an increasing number of students from nontraditional backgrounds were going to Oxford and that at both Oxford and Cambridge more undergraduates came from business backgrounds than entered business for a career. 111 Yet realities were not quite as rosy. It is easy to agree with Norman Davies's belief that the British aristocracy was neither closed nor static. It kept its cohesion by attending the same schools, usually Eton, and Oxbridge and was open in that it "reinvigorated its blood with fresh ennoblements." HZ However, as Roy Lowe has shown, its reinvigoration did not threaten the establishment's position: public schools and Oxbridge colleges "admitted growing numbers of 'first generation' entrants without seriously threatening the grip exercised by those social groups which were already privileged." 153 Lawrence Stone's argument that the British elite was not particularly open 154 thus still holds true in its core. It is important to recall that Ruskin Hall, the colleges for students from nonestablished churches (Mansfield and Manchester), as well as the Catholic institutions (Campion Hall, St. Benet's, and Greyfriars) were, like the female halls, not even part of the university. 155 Six and a half percent of all undergraduates in 19131I4 were noncollegiate students, that is, students who were members of no college at all. Noncollegiate students tended to be either foreign students or poor students who normally could not afford the expenses of college affiliation. 156 While the university made half-hearted attempts to improve their situation/ 57 they were excluded from the expensive collegiate social life of Oxford and thus from adequate career opportunities. The simple fact that the cost of a year at Oxford and Cambridge was about 175 percent of the value of a scholarship158 reveals immediately why students from nontraditional backgrounds had difficulties being fully engaged in the collegiate social life. True, Jude, the protagonist of Hardy's famous novel, 159 could have been educated at Oxford after the foundation of Ruskin Hall in 1899 (called Ruskin College from 1903), which was intended for the education of workers. 160 However, this education would have only opened a minimal career path, as Ruskin College was (and is) not part of the university. 161 In short, the great majority of students had no access to the elite through universities. It was, not unlike the German system, formally open but practically more often than not closed. But what was the social effect on those who were drawn into the elite? Unlike in Britain, the German aristocracy was, according to the

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neoorthodox view, not willing to ally itself with the upper sections of the middle classes/ 62 although R. D. Anderson has argued that the British middle classes had also "surrendered to the pre-industrial landed class." 163 Student corporations in Germany supposedly functioned to create homogeneity among the elite and to instill premodern militarist feudal values in new members. 164 This view was most famously advanced by Hans-Ulrich Wehler: Another feature of the universities was linked to their informal task of "feudalising" the bourgeoisie. The institutions which carried out this form of political socialisation were the student corporations, especially the duelling fraternities, (... ). Their social and political function was (... ) to impress a neo-aristocratic code of honour and general conduct upon the sons of the bourgeoisie, inculcating them with norms and values intended to bind the potential representative of future middleclass politics to the pre-industrial aristocratic ruling groups. Their potential nuisance value was to be defused by instilling a new shared mentality. 165

Although an increasing number of historians have come to realize that the " 'feudalisation' process was much more limited than had been postulated,"166 the common view still assumes that-despite the fact that entrepreneurs and other professionals maintained their own identity or pride-at least student corporations instilled premodern values in their members. In other words, in both Britain and Germany new members were drawn into the establishment but the outcome was, following this line of interpretation, different: The German elite only accepted middleclass men who capitulated to the premodern views of the aristocracy as new members, while in Britain the aristocracy was happy to take liberal middle-class ideas on board. The British aristocracy kept its influence and social habits by embracing the middle classes and their political values, while in Germany the process was the reverse. The process of the modernization of Britain and Germany thus produced diametrically different results. This book challenges whether this process of socialization really resulted in a stark contrast of mentalities and of values among future political and social elites.

STUDENT LIFE AT OXFORD AND HEIDELBERG

Superficially at least, student life was rather different in Heidelberg and Oxford. Hans Ehrenberg told his readers in his Second World War exile how different life for a student had been in Germany from that in England: "Academic freedom was practiced to excess; we could chop and change in the things we studied just as easily as we could move from one university to another, (... ) we could choose our lectures and our

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tutorial classes much as we liked. This custom of wandering from university to university is (... ) a common thing among German students." 167 The Heidelberg lecture and seminar system, which centered on faculties rather than a tutorial system based on residential colleges, made the contact of academics and students less immediate and frequent than that at Britain's oldest university. In contrast to Oxford, Heidelberg was only responsible for providing academic teaching. As Ehrenberg indicated, the students would then choose those lectures and seminars which they-not their professors-deemed most relevant for their pursuit of Bildung (the formation of the "spirit through [the student's] own choice of lectures, readings, and possibly original research"). As we have seen earlier, professors were, unlike their Oxonian counterparts, not responsible for providing a gentleman's general education. Universities existed, in theory at least, for the development of Wissenschaft, or "science, knowledge, systematically pursued and prized in and of itself." 168 Oxonians were under much stricter control than Heidelberg students. Discipline was established through a system of written and unwritten rules and standards of conduct. 169 Students normally lived in their college (colleges housed about three-quarters of undergraduates), dined and attended chapel together, were supposed to wear gowns, and were not allowed out after their college gates had closed for the night around 9 P.M. 170 Lucky latecomers managed to climb unseen into college. The unfortunate ones were disciplined. According to Charles Dickens (the son of the novelist), "the first thing that will be learned in connections with [the 'bulldogs' (the university police)] is that they every evening perambulate the streets of the city, when their most common and mechanical duty is to arrest, and enquire the name and College of, any Undergraduate found in the streets without cap and gown." 171 At Corpus Christi, the college rules reminded students that "a list of those who come in or go out of College after 9·5 P.M. is sent to the President and the Dean" and students would subsequently be fined. 172 Students living in private lodgings were no better off, as landlords were obliged to keep a register of when students returned at night. Undergraduates were also prohibited from frequenting restaurants or pubs without prior special permission. Between 1910 and r920, Oxford's "bulldogs" caught approximately 620 students in pubs without permission. 173 The special jurisdiction of Heidelberg University over its students, meanwhile, had been abolished in r868. Although the university retained some disciplinary powers, students were much freer than their Oxford counterparts. The university was not interested in when they went to bed and only in extreme cases sent students for periods of a few days or up to four weeks into the student prison for misdemeanors such as "grober Unfug" (gross mischief), extreme drunkenness, harassment,

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or sometimes dueling. It needs to be stressed that at least corporation students tended to be extremely proud to have spent some time in the student prison, as the inscriptions on the prison walls bear witness to the present day: "Auf dem Karzer lebt's sich mollig, Auf dem Karzer's ist so schon" (Life in the student prison is cosy, the student prison is so pleasant). 174 Just how different the daily life of students at Oxford and Heidelberg was is epitomized by the fact that the municipal council of Heidelberg campaigned in 1907 that university towns like Heidelberg should abolish closing time (the Polizeistunde) altogether, at least in student districts. 175 Differences did not go unnoticed by contemporary observers. After visiting Heidelberg, the former British MP and Cambridge graduate Sir Lees Knowles observed in 1913: "A German University differs greatly from an English University. There are no colleges, and the students live in personal equality with the professors, in absolute freedom, each being his own master." 176 German universities followed the ideals of "Lehrfreiheit and Lernfreiheit-liberty of the teacher and liberty for the learner." 177 Nor did students remain in Heidelberg as long as Oxford students stayed at their colleges. At Heidelberg students could spend their days as they pleased. Indeed, a correspondent to the editor of the Berlin newspaper Tagliche Rundschau pointed out in a 1910 article how different the social life of students at German universities and at Oxford was: "The romantic side of student corporation life is too attractive for most school leavers, who still can easily afford to lose two years, than that they would decide to go abroad. They are particularly put off by Oxford because every student there has got to be home by midnight." 178 Bertram Graubner, meanwhile, told the Morning Post during his tour of British universities, including Oxford, in 1910: "We were surprised to find that at your Universities the young men are treated as though they were schoolboys. (... ) In Germany students are treated as men. They go where they like and return home when they like." 179 At a second glance, life in the two universities was not so different. Middle- and upper-class students dominated the stereotypical student cultures in both universities. It was Heidelberg's five Corps and Oxford's gentleman students who set the social "tone." What colleges and Corps alike encouraged was an aristocratic or gentlemanly lifestyle. Oxford students even had their own scouts, or servants, who brought breakfast to students' rooms, took orders for lunch, and took care of the laundry. 180 Both shared, as we will discuss in Chapter 4 in more detail, cultures of masculinity in which a "hidden curriculum" 181 of drinking, a leisurely life, and sport played a defining role. Both were marked by a strong esprit de corps. Oxonians proudly wore scarves or ties in their

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college colors, while their German counterparts wore hats and ribbons in the colors of their student corporation. 182 What one historian has argued young English middle-class men were looking for can be applied to both Oxford and Heidelberg alike: "A well developed bachelor culture for young men in their twenties." 183 For those who could afford it, Oxford and Heidelberg were certainly not places of serious academic study. Kurt von Stutterheim, a student of the Corps Saxo-Borussia, later remembered that there was not much space for academic work in the daily life of his Corps: "Fencing duels, drinking, jokes, hunting tales, and the unending discoveries of kinship between individuals were the main themes of conversation." 184 The warden of Michael Fane's college in Sinister Street, likewise, has no illusions as to the function of Oxford when he addresses new students: "You have come to Oxford," he concluded, "some of you to hunt foxes, some of you to wear very large and very unusual overcoats, some of you to row for your college and a few of you to work. But all of you have come to Oxford to remain English gentlemen." 185 Likewise, J. A. Mangan has pointed out that Oxbridge in the Victorian era had been marked by an abundance of sports and games and by low intellectual standards. 186 Some students "studied; others studied and played, many simply played." 187 Mangan's claim and Mackenzie's fictional account of Oxford life might be an exaggeration, but not by much. Academic work was certainly becoming ever more important in the late nineteenth century than it had hitherto been. Balliol's Master Benjamin Jowett had made work fashionable at his college and turned it into Oxford's academic powerhouse. Gone were the days when New College students could proceed to degrees without taking exams. The introduction of competitive examinations at Oxford had started to transform Oxford. Examination results were not just published at Oxford but also in national newspapers. 188 The effect of this transformation should, however, not be exaggerated. The ideal for undergraduates at a lot of colleges remained not academic excellence but an education for gentlemen. In r895, a recent graduate of Oxford could still write that "the average New College man is not intolerant of learning, but he is possibly more prone to admire it in others than to seek it for himsel£." 189 In the same year, Jacques Bardoux, a visiting student and the son of the former French Minister of Education Agenor Bardoux, confided to his diary his surprise at the "absence of intellectual curiosity" among Oxford's undergraduates. 190 Many undergraduates indeed deemed a full social life more important than books. During the first decade of the twentieth century, more than 20 percent of undergraduates left Oxford without qualifying for a degree and less

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than 6o percent qualified for honors. In 1913 at socially exclusive Magdalen, of the nineteen candidates in the history honors school, only one received a first, five a third, two a fourth, and eleven failed. 191 Tellingly, The Isis, Oxford's student paper, celebrated a rugby player and president of his year at Brasenose as one of their weekly "idols" in 1913, proudly writing that "for the present his brain refrains from work of scholarship." 192 Willie Elmhirst, meanwhile, described in the diary of his first year at Worcester College in r9rr-12 days full of rowing, drilling, reading the paper, acting in plays, or indulging with his friends in pleasures of questionable character: "After lunch there was a sort of hunt in the Pump Court. Bellard had purchased 6 rats and they were going to let Salmon's terrier slay them." 193 Even though some academics disapproved of the prominence sports took at Oxford, 194 sports had moved to the center of Oxford student culture in Victorian times and were seen by Oxbridge dons as "educational agencies." 195 As early as 1864, Matthew Arnold had already quoted critics of Oxford crying out: "The real studies of Oxford are its games." 196 The Oxford-Cambridge Boat Race on the Thames turned into a national event. In 1869, the London Echo had brought 25,000 copies of a special edition out within three-quarters of an hour of the race. The OxfordCambridge cricket match, meanwhile, attracted a crowd of 46,ooo in 1883. 197 In 1896, a satire set in Oxford in 1950 appeared that told that academia in the university had been on a downward slope for a long time, culminating in the closure of Cambridge in 1933. Oxford had followed suit in 1942, but unlike Cambridge it reopened in 1943 as the New University of Oxford, focusing on what Oxford was really good at-athletics: Dons were now chosen solely for their reputation in athletics, sports, or pastimes, and not, as formerly, for their learning of knowledge. Consequently we find that whereas before many of the Dons had been old men, now however they were quite young or in the prime of life. (... ) With regard to the undergraduates the change was scarcely so perceptible as in the Don, for the young men at Oxford had ever been an athletic set. Of course in the old days there had been a certain number of bookworms, chiefly scholars, who were not now to be found; but as they had always been in the minority they were hardly missed. 198

Even the son of the future prime minister H. H. Asquith, Raymond, who claimed that he was a serious scholar, recorded in 1898: "I have been boxing, fencing, playing tennis, racquets and football every day this term." 199 Success in sports rather than the examinations generally brought glory to colleges, as is evident, for instance, from the fact that six out of the eight weekly "idols" about whom the Isis printed feature articles m Michaelmas Term 1913 were chosen for their sporting successes. 200

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As the reproduced photographs suggest, Oxonians, as well as Heidelberg social elitist students, were notorious for and proud of drinking to excess.201 Until r886, Brasenose College had even brewed its own beer. 202 Raymond Asquith reported that the Balliol rugby team got so drunk at a postmatch dinner that they wrecked a train and assaulted

PHOTO 3. Heidelberg: The Cult of Drink. sou R CE : Buselmeier, Auch eine Geschichte, 152. (The photograph was taken in 1902.)

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4. Oxford: The Cult of Drink. SOURCE: University College, O xford. By permission of the Master and Fellows of University College, Oxford. PHOTO

porters at the station." 203 His sister Violet blamed the "smugness and satisfaction" she encountered among many Oxonians to the fact that "drunkenness etc. is considered chic at Oxford." 204 Drinking at Oxford was, as it was at Heidelberg, where corporations had with the "Bierkomment" exact rules governing when and how students would drink together, 205 strongly formalized and thus functioned to generate social cohesion and control. It is simply not true, as has been claimed, that students in the Anglo-Saxon world, unlike in Germany, drank in a socially relaxed environment. 206 Tellingly, Charlotte Sidgwick noted that "the laws of a 'corps' remind you of the laws made by English schoolboys for themselves,-they are solemnly binding, as educational, and as absurd." 207 For instance, the presiding scholar, that is, student, of a table during the daily communal college dinners had the power to "sconce" students on his table who had broken one of the many dinner rules: "The culprit was 'sconced' in two quarts of ale or beer bought in a special tankard, it was first presented to the man being sconced and, then, unless he could drink it in a single draught (known as 'flooring' the sconce), it was passed round the table." 208 If anything though, drinking was even more central to Heidelberg's student culture. The daily motto of Corps students in Meyer-Forster's Aft-Heidelberg was: "Today we will drink from dusk till dawn" (Heute

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wird durchgezecht). 209 A small minority of corporation students certainly promoted nondrinking. 210 But they were the exception which proved the rule. A I904 German student song defined the freedom of a student as the liberty to drink, to have love affairs, to sing, and to fence. Lees Knowles told his readers, "On certain evenings a Corps will sit at its table drinking the excellent light, frothy, German beer, and singing national songs from the Kommersbuch, or Students' Club Song-book, a book containing a wealth of patriotic poetry of the German Fatherland and full of praises of 'Wein, Weib und Gesang' [Wine, Women and Song]." 211 One such song, "Walpurgisnacht in Heidelberg" (Walpurgis Night at Heidelberg) describes a Faustian student-drinking orgy in the lanes beneath the ruins of Heidelberg Castle. The castle itself was famous for housing "the great Heidelberg Tun," which Mark Twain described as "a wine-cask as big as a cottage, and some traditions say it holds eighteen hundred thousand bottles, and other traditions say it holds eighteen hundred million barrels." 212 Like their Oxford counterparts, Heidelberg corporation students had quite a liking for frolics, amusements, and pranks. Knowles recorded that Corps students "rode their chairs as if they were horses down the lane to the river" (Knowles was probably witnessing the "Fuchsritt," an initiation ritual of Corps) or blocked the High Street of Heidelberg one night by erecting a wall of bricks. 213 After Count Bernhard von Schwerin, president of the Heidelberg student body in I904-05 and son of a Regierungsprasident, had set his dog on some police officers, he was rusticated for a year. 214 Charlotte Sidgwick observed, "anything further removed from learning than a German corps student cannot be imagined." 215 College student and corporation student life differed in that corporation students had more immediate freedom and in that beyond student fencing 216 sport did not play any sizeable role at Heidelberg. 217 Yet the student life of both Oxford college students and Heidelberg corporation students centered around a privileged social life rather than academia. What we have then seen is that the academic setups of Oxford and Heidelberg were very different. On the one side, we saw a university steeped in the tradition of German Wissenschaft that gave its students far-reaching liberties, while on the other we have an institution that tried to instill a sense of civic duty and kept its students on a very short leash. However, both universities, particularly but not only in terms of their student bodies, were closely linked to the national political, administrative, cultural, and social elite which allows us to compare how they responded to the modernization of their universities and of their countries.

CHAPTER TWO

Transnational Nationalists Anglo-German Life at Oxford and Heidelbet;g

In 1912 at least 100 Old Boys of Heidelberg College-a British boarding and prep school for the Oxford, Cambridge, civil service, and army entry examinations sitting on the bank of the river Neckar-assembled for their annual reunion at the Trocadero Restaurant in Piccadilly. After dinner, various toasts to good Anglo-German relations were proposed. Various telegrams were read out loud including one that, rather surprisingly, was from Lord Roberts, who wrote, "Its pupils [i.e., of Heidelberg College] have the advantage of becoming acquainted at first hand with the great German nation, can learn its views toward Great Britain and are in a position to correct erroneous impressions and to foster better understanding between the two peoples than at present exists." 1 Traditionally, Lord Roberts has been represented as anything but a champion of Anglo-German understanding. A former commander-in-chief of India, Ireland, and the British troops in South Africa during the Boer War, Field-Marshal Roberts was the president of the National Service League and a leading advocate of compulsory military service. He had also written a warm introduction to William Le Queux's invasion scare novel The Invasion of I9IO. A study of British Germanophilia has seen Roberts as a prime exponent of growing Germanophobia in Britain. 2 For another historian Roberts displayed "xenophobic paranoia" by insisting in the House of Lords in 1908 that there were already 8o,ooo trained German soldiers in the country. 3 Lord Roberts's telegram thus reveals the difficulty of relying on a binary system that classifies people as either pro-German/pro-British or anti-German/anti-British. We will see how this binary model has been used to analyze AngloGerman relations before 1914 and the coming of the First World War. A more complex model, by contrast, allows for greater ambiguities in AngloGerman attitudes and takes into account that for every anti-German/

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anti-British quote from the period there exist pro-British/pro-German equivalents, often from the same people. Challenging the orthodox interpretation, this chapter argues that attempts to counter Anglo-German antagonism did not just originate in liberal and socialist critics of their governments. In fact, significant sectors of the British and German ruling elites tried to ease tensions between the two empires. Greater focus will be paid to Oxford than to Heidelberg because Anglo-German life was more significant at Oxford than at Heidelberg, mostly because Oxford had attracted a larger number of the German social and political elite than Heidelberg had of the British elite. Moreover, life at Oxford was covered more prominently in the press, making it a more appropriate place to express goodwill between the two countries. This chapter first looks at the academic establishment-the segment of university culture where we would most expect expressions of Germanophilia and Anglophilia. Then we move on to student culture and focus particularly on those students from families of the social, political, and administrative elite-in short, the section of society where we would most expect Anglophobia and Germanophobia.

I A wide-ranging consensus exists that the birth of Imperial Germany transformed the foundations on which good Anglo-German relations and friendship were built. As Adolf M. Birke has observed: "Britain rubbed its eyes in surprise when it saw a rather kindly continental dwarf beginning to transform itself into a giant, whose economic and political resources made it a serious, and ultimately threatening, rival." 4 For Paul Kennedy it was not a long way from there to the outbreak of war in 1914, contending in his The Rise of the Anglo-German Antagonism that "the wartime struggle between London and Berlin was but a continuation of what had been going on for at least fifteen or twenty years before the July crisis itself."5 Though certainly not ignoring attempts to improve Anglo-German relations, for Kennedy they are a sign of how sour relations had turned, arguing that they would have been superfluous had it not been for "the prevailing rivalry and enmity" between the two countries. 6 He mentions some of the activities aimed at reconciliation7 but always presents them as the cries of an insignificant minority. Kennedy's model is one that supports the wartime theory of the two Germanies. But this chapter proposes that it does not suffice to describe the German generators of Anglo-German reconciliation as a diverse group of "Quakers, businessmen, intellectuals, landed aristocrats and radical journalists," 8 "burgomasters, trade unionists and churchmen,"

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and "pacifists" 9 who stood outside the group of dominant decision makers and its milieu. Since its publication, Kennedy's book has certainly come under fire. A growing body of literature stresses that the status quo between Germany and Britain had been accepted by 1914 and/or that the outbreak of war cannot primarily be explained in terms of Anglo-German tensions. 10 Rather than focusing on the Anglo-German side of the story, recent historiography on the origins of the war has seen a revival of military history, cultural and fiscal explanations, the nonnaval arms race, the challenge to the international system by the New Imperialism and the dynamics of the summer of 1914Y Hew Strachan has even gone so far as to say that by the 1980s the idea that the Anglo-German naval race caused the outbreak of war in 1914 seemed absurd.U Yet particularly in general accounts of German history and German historiography the idea of Anglo-German antagonism is still alive and well, focusing on the German challenge to British interests. 13 The Germanocentricity of much, but by no means all, 14 of the historiography of Anglo-German and international relations of the period has taken this challenge as the starting point of any discussion of Anglo-German relations and then condemned the challenge, at least implicitly, as immoral while attributing a higher degree of morality to Britain. German foreign policies and especially armament policy are perceived as active, whereas British, Russian, and French policies are seen only as responses to German policies. Thus French colonialism is interpreted as a response to German annexations in 1870-71, while British naval policies were a supposedly understandable drive to remain the ruler of the seas. 15 The conventional view thus is that "in Wilhelmine Germany, people in politically strategic positions who were willing to cooperate were hardly to be found, whereas in the English cabinet and leadership circles of every persuasion there were always politicians advocating detente. 'Normalcy' in British-German relations is attributed to British, and 'antagonism' to German conduct." 16 This view figures prominently in the work of Hans-Ulrich Wehler. Ignoring that leaders in Britain had to pursue foreign policies like German leaders in the context of domestic crises and mass hysterias, 17 for him Anglo-German antagonism was not the all-decisive factor in the coming of war in 1914, yet Anglo-German rivalry was the necessary result of the policies of "Germany's Bonapartist semi-dictatorship" and "pre-industrial oligarchies" to maintain its power. They felt threatened, so the argument runs, by "the liberalising repercussions that might result from any Anglo-German cooperation." 18 Recently, Annika Mombauer explained away virtually all responsibility of powers other than Germany for the First World War by labeling any critic of her own moderately

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Fischerite interpretation of Germany as apologetic, nationalistic, conservative, and politically driven. 19 Yet as Christopher Clark has remarked, much of the historiography on the subject has been marked by a "perplexing tendency" to "accept implicitly the notion that British colonial expansion and British perceptions of British rights constituted a 'natural order', in the light of which German objections appeared to be wanton provocations." 20 The different standards that have been applied to Britain and Germany is perhaps best epitomized in the Spanish proverb according to which "some men steal horses to great applause, while others are hanged for looking over the fence." 21 One might well argue that German foreign policies in the Wilhelmine era were at times extraordinarily foolish and hence dangerous. Still the fact remains that Britain continued to expand her already large empire, while Wilhelm II was on the German throne. 22 Tellingly, the editor of the Westminster Gazette, J. A. Spender, wrote in a 1912 publication promoting better Anglo-German relations that there was little to choose between British and German attitudes: The leading characteristic of the Anglo-German contention is that each side makes exactly the same complaints against the other. (... ) Clause by clause the two indictments are exactly parallel, (... ) "You want to lord it over us at sea," says the German; "You are trying to get the hegemony of Europe," says the Englishman. (... )What makes it the more absurd is that both German and Englishmen are all the time convinced of their own innocence and of the utter groundlessness of each other's suspicions. 23

There are several reasons to be skeptical about the traditional interpretation of Anglo-German tensions. Andrew Bonar Law, the Conservative

leader from r9rr and later interwar prime minister, is best known with respect to Germany for his demand for "naval supremacy and not merely naval superiority over Germany," for conscription and for pressuring the Liberal government in the July crisis 1914 to go to war against Germany. 24 Little known in the historiography is his attendance at a 1912 symposium of seventeen British "statesmen, politicians, and leaders of thought" held in London in the aftermath of the failed Haldane mission. It was organized by the German review Nord und Sud to discuss "a better understanding between Great Britain and Germany." 25 Thereview was owned by the liberal-conservative academic Ludwig Stein, a confidante of the former German Chancellor von Bulow and co-owner of the influential liberal Berlin-daily Vossische Zeitung. Its aim was to support peaceful cooperation between nation states and, in particular, between Germany and Britain. 26 It is surprising that Stein, who also had close contacts with Bethmann Hollweg has, with few exceptions, 27 received no attention from scholars

Transnational Nationalists of Anglo-German relations. For Stein's efforts had the support of both the German and British governments. Richard von Kuhlmann at the German embassy in London (the later wartime foreign secretary) informed Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg about Stein's mission and the embassy's support for him, while the British Minister of War Lord Haldane and the British ambassador to Berlin Lord Goschen were among those who helped him organize the 1912 conference. With the exception of the former Tory Prime Minister Arthur Balfour, all the authors who published pieces in the two special editions of Nord und Sud expressed optimism about Anglo-German reconciliation. Contributors also included Ernst Bassermann (the leader of the National Liberal Party and Old Boy of the Suevia at Heidelberg), one former secretary of the interior, two vice-admirals, the president of the Colonial Society, and the future and last prewar German ambassador to London. Only the Pan-German press criticized the Nord und Sud conference, while conservative (e.g., the Kreuzzeitung) and liberal papers by and large supported the specials. The print-run of the special editions was 1oo,ooo copies each in Britain and Germany, several times higher than Friedrich von Bernhardi's supposedly popular, militarist, and social-Darwinist Deutschland und der nachste Krieg with its prewar print run of 6,6oo copies. 28 The Old Boys' magazine of the boarding school Heidelberg College, Aft-Heidelberg, approvingly quoted Bonar Law's denunciation of the idea that "war someday is inevitable": I never believe in these inevitable wars. (... ) twenty five or thirty years ago the same thing was said far more persistently about our relationship with Russia. It is never said now. Why? For one reason, because the whole perspective of the world has changed. It is constantly changing and I see no reason to think that, ten or fifteen years hence, it may not completely change again. If, therefore, war should ever come between these two countries, which Heaven forbid, it will not, I think, be due to the irresistible natural laws, it will be due to want of human wisdom. 29 Another conference, the Deutsch-Englische Verstandigungskonferenz, held in the autumn of 1912, similarly reveals that the people on the German side behind attempts to improve Anglo-German relations were more than people who stood on the fringes of the Wilhelmine establishment. To be sure, the conference was organized by various "friendship" societies usually associated with liberal minorities in both countries. But the twenty German vice-presidents and the president of the 1912 conference came predominantly from the "establishment," including aristocrats, a recent former government minister, eminent diplomats, deputies of both the Prussian Upper Chamber and the Reichstag, a retired vice-

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admiral, lord mayors, and the Kaiser's chief court preacher. 30 Therefore, the orthodox interpretation of friendship conferences as not being representative of the political and administrative establishment is incorrect. In addition, at least one of the delegates at the conference also does not fit into the conventional interpretation of friendship societies: Karl von Eisendecher, another retired vice-admiral, former Imperial German envoy to the United States, and at the time of the conference in charge of Wilhelm Il's yacht "Meteor." 31 After Marschall von Bieberstein's death in 1912, Wilhelm actually asked Eisendecher to become the new German ambassador in London, an offer Eisendecher declined because of his age. Yet Eisendecher continued his behind-the-scenes diplomacy aimed at improving Anglo-German relations with the full support of Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg. 32 With the exception of the lord mayors and possibly some of the businessmen, none of the vice-presidents or the presidents fit into Kennedy's group of supporters of Anglo-German reconciliation, consisting of "Quakers, businessmen, intellectuals, landed aristocrats and radical journalists."33 They hardly stood on the fringes of Wilhelmine society. The great majority of the vice-presidents and the president had either attained eminence in the Imperial foreign service, Reich and Prussian parliaments, and the navy or they were members of the Prussian Upper Chamber or had been ennobled by the Kaiser. Hence the social make-up of the conference's executive stands in stark contrast to orthodoxy in the historiography of Anglo-German relations. The same was true of the committee of the Berlin-based Deutsch-Englisches Verstiindigungskomitee (Anglo-German Friendship Committee), replete with diplomats, aristocrats, and deputies and ministers of Reich and state parliaments and governments. 34 Attempts to improve Anglo-German relations, particularly by the group around Richard von Kuhlmann at the German embassy in London, have certainly been investigated by historians. Yet more often than not they have been described as the activities of an irrelevant minority, while the involvement of many others has been brushed aside, as is evident in the treatment of Germans at Oxford. Kennedy mentions that an Oxbridge education continued to have an appeal especially to certain parts of the aristocracy and the "Grossbourgeousie." He refers to a society at Oxford of mostly aristocrats and reports that they had been in favor of the 1913 German military increases as well as the idea "that from every consideration of national temperament, culture and politics, Germany and England ought to be ABSOLUTE ALLIES in the strictest sense of the phase." Yet Kennedy does not explore the activities of these families further but dismisses their Anglophilia as springing from only

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"the great magnates of Silesia and south Germany." 35 Ironically, another historian puts it just the other way round, arguing that before 1914 it was not South-German or Silesian aristocrats but "a small North German and Prussian elite that traditionally displayed its Anglophilia by sending its sons to Oxford." 36 Barbara Tuchman, meanwhile, quotes, without revealing her sources, a member of Balliol College, according to whom the German Rhodes scholars were "vulgar rich people, who don't have a good effect at all." She claims that one shot a deer in Magdalen College park and when they got drunk "they threatened Oxford colleagues 'with invasion and castigation at the hands of the German Army.' " 37 By contrast, this chapter proposes that the attempts of these families to improve Anglo-German relations were far more wide-ranging than Kennedy and others have suggested and that the support for their ideas came from a larger section of the Imperial power elite representing Prussian heartlands as well as Southern Germany. It presents the degree to which Bethmann's policy of cooperation with Britain found support beyond groups that have traditionally been associated with attempts at Anglo-German rapprochement. It also questions their antiWestern impulse as seen by Fritz Fischer and others 38 and discusses their place in the polycracy of forces 39 of late Wilhelmine Germany. Beyond Anglophile and Germanophile activities of academics which have been recorded at length, the two universities played a crucial role in attempts by the social, political, and administrative elite to create better AngloGerman relations. II

In academic circles Anglo-German relations had traditionally been amicable. Before the last quarter of the nineteenth century, it was common for many young scholars from Oxford and other British academic institutions to spend some time at German universities and research institutions,40 while German scholars such as Theodor Mommsen were welcome guests at Oxford. German academic institutions were seen as a model for university reform at Oxford and other British institutions, even if German influences were not always publicly acknowledged and were occasionally criticized. 41 Generally, German academia was highly admired at Oxford, and many subjects were strongly influenced by German scholarship. 42 The university reformer and Rector of Lincoln College, Mark Pattison, thought in 1857 that "the capital of world learning is in the hands of the Germans.'' 43 Pattison, who had attended Heidelberg in 1856, even considered reconstructing the collegiate system at Oxford on the German model. 44 The chemist, Balliol man, and Giessen

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PhD Benjamin Brodie is cited in the 1867 Special Report from the Select Committee on the Oxford and Cambridge Universities Education Bill in full praise of German influences: "amongst [Heidelberg's] professors are some of the most eminent men in Europe (... ) The contact with such men creates an enthusiasm for knowledge. We have nothing approximating to it in this country in scientific education."45 The British "inferiority complex"46 toward German academia and the Germanophile tendency at Oxford in the 187os was famously satirized by Lewis Carroll in The Vision of the Three Ts: nowadays, all that is good comes from the German. (... ) No learned man doth now talk, or even so much as cough, save only in German. The time has been, I doubt not, when an honest English "Hem!" was held enough, both to clear the voice and rouse the attention of the company, but now-a-days no man of Science, that setteth any store by his good name, will cough otherwise than thus, Ach! Euch! Auch! 47

Oxford's Professor of Comparative Philology, Max Miiller, was the personification of the Anglo-German affinity at Oxford. 48 Once called Germany's "spiritual ambassador in England,"49 he regularly stayed with the royal family at Windsor, lectured privately for Queen Victoria, was a personal acquaintance of the German Crown Prince and future Emperor Frederick, and corresponded with Gladstone. He believed that a "true alliance between Germany and England" was possible. 50 So many of Oxford's dons had a German educational background that it would be tedious to cite more than a few examples, such as Reginald Walter Macan, the master of University College; John Rhys, principal of Jesus College, who had studied at Heidelberg, as had the Regius professor of civil law Lord Bryce; or Bryce's friends, the Oxford professor of law Albert Dicey, and T. H. Green, the Oxford philosopher. Alfred Milner, meanwhile, a young fellow and tutor of New College, subsequently high commissioner for South Africa, secretary of war at the end of the First World War, and then finally chancellor of Oxford shortly before his death, had been born in Darmstadt and schooled at Tiibingen. 51 Even when political relations between Britain and Germany worsened, Anglo-German life at Oxford was characterized by much more than academic friendship in times of deteriorating relations between the two countries. The Oxford German Literary Society, founded in 1909 as an initiative of the professor of German, Hermann Fiedler, was a society of dons as well as students. The society was more than the endeavor of a handful of Germanophiles. It had the backing of the university at large, as T. H. Warren, Oxford's vice-chancellor and president of Magdalen, had

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agreed to become the society's patron. 52 Furthermore, during its first two terms between forty and sixty people attended meetings to "promote the study of the German language, literature and institutions." The society found ever-increasing interest and support at Oxford in the years immediately before the First World War. After two years, the society had almost 150 members, both British and German. 53 Where the university attempts to embrace German academia and to improve Anglo-German relations became fully visible was in the honorary doctorates given to prominent Germans at Oxford in the prewar years. Significantly, Germanophile activities by academics did not just continue but intensified in times of political tensions. Furthermore, the activities to improve Anglo-German relations in times of trouble originated in the official university and not just in a minority of Germanophiles. For the university not only honored outstanding German scholars but also German statesmen. The University of Oxford had conferred honorary degrees on Germans well before the war. However, in the decade and a half before 1914 the policy to give honorary doctorates became more marked, when a total of twenty-eight honorary doctorates (excluding Doctors of Civil Law by Diploma) were given to Germans, compared with a mere five in the fifteen years between 1885 and 1899. 54 The Congregation of Oxford University, the body deciding on honorary doctorates, consisted of all resident masters of the university and thus primarily of academics. But does this mean that conferring honorary doctorates was simply a gesture of admiration for German academia standing outside the realm of politics? The answer must be no, since German heads of state and diplomats as well as academics and artists were honored. Most notably, in 1907 the university conferred a Doctor of Civil Law by Diploma upon Kaiser Wilhelm II. This is an honorary doctorate that is only conferred on heads of state and newly elected chancellors of the university. 55 The Kaiser himself had always displayed a personal interest toward the university, as had his grandfather Wilhelm I, when he sent a message of congratulation when Oxford won the boat race. 56 The decision to confer the degree had been taken unanimously by convocation, and two years later a large and pompous picture of Wilhelm II, the gift of the Kaiser in gratitude for the degree, was hung in a lecture hall in the Examination Schools. 57 Besides the emperor, Prince Christian of Schleswig-Holstein in 1910 and the King of Wiirttemberg in 1914 were among the four other heads of state to receive Doctorates of Civil Law by Diploma between 1900 and 1914. 58 In contrast to the large number of honorary degrees for Germans, in the ten years before the war only four Frenchmen were honored, 59 demonstrating where Oxford's affinities lay.

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In the last year before the war 25 percent of all honorary degrees went to Germans. No honorary degree was conferred to anybody outside the British Empire and the German-speaking world. 60 In other words, nobody from any of Britain's future wartime allies was honored in 1914. Among the recipients were the composer Richard Strauss as representing for the Oxford Magazine "the beautiful art in which Germany is so pre-eminent" and the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (Karl Eduard), who was, of course, the brother of Edward VII and Anglo-German head of one of the minor German states from which most of European royalty descended. 61 In June 1914, only weeks away from years of war between Germany and Britain, the university also honored the official representative of Imperial Germany, Ambassador Count von Lichnowsky, 62 making Lichnowsky one of only two members of the Corps Diplomatique to hold an honorary degree from Oxford. 63 The public orator, in his speech praising Lichnowsky, exclaimed "Totam Germaniam animo salutamus." 64 After Lichnowsky's ceremony, a dinner was given in his honor by the members of the Anglo-German Club and the German Literary Society to-as the Oxford Magazine noted-"glorify the 100 years of peace with our Western kinsfolk.»G 5 The official university, not just a handful of Germanophile academics, had worked very hard to improve Anglo-German relations right up until 1914. Oxford's academic world of the late spring of 1914 had little, if anything, in common with the world of the later summer after the outbreak of hostilities, when Oxford historians rushed out their antiGerman Why we are at War. The last honorary degree for a German could not even be conferred as planned. Hermann Fiedler had been asked by Thomas Banks Strong, Oxford's Vice-Chancellor, whether he could present an honorary diploma to the King of Wiirttemberg at the end of September. 66 Yet according to the conventional interpretation, the real problem of rising academic antagonism lay not with British but with German academics. While prewar British academics have often been presented as Germanophile, German academics are thought to have relinquished any remaining Anglophilia well before 1914. Indeed, when the later Conservative Chancellor of the Exchequer Austen Chamberlain attended Treitschtke's lectures at Berlin on a visit to Germany in 1887, he is said to have felt "disquiet." 67 The intellectual warfare of the former Heidelberg professor Treitschke against "perfidious Albion," which had already started while still at Heidelberg, is often seen as the archetypical response of German academics in Imperial Germany to Britain. 68 However, we should not forget that before him the image of Britain in German academia generally had been positive. By the end of the eighteenth century more than 50 percent of German

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universities had already offered English language courses and lectures in English Studies. It was arguably German translations of Shakespeare more than anything else that gave rise to the appreciation of English among eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Germans. Soon Shakespeare came to be seen as the third German classic author next to Goethe and Schiller. 69 This was partly due to the Heidelberg scholar Friedrich Gundolf, who celebrated Shakespeare's impact on German culture in his 19n Shakespeare und der deutsche Geist (Shakespeare and the German Spirit), in which he argued that the influence of Shakespeare on German poets and philosophers had made the revival of German culture possible.70 And it needs to be added that Gundolf treated Shakespeare as British, unlike Julius Langbehn's far-fetched and weird definition of Shakespeare as German. 71 Furthermore, in the same year as Gundolf published his book, the topic of the first public lecture of the Heidelberg Privatdozent Hans Ehrenberg, a converted Jew, was "The Tragic Personality in Shakespeare." 72 And in the winter semester 1913-14 the Catholic corporation Unitas organized a talk on Hamlet. 73 In the same period as the anti-English agitation of Treitschke and his apostles, chairs in English Language and Literature proliferated at German universities. After Wilhelm Ihne had already taught English at Heidelberg University from 1873, Heidelberg established a Chair of English in 1893. The professorship was filled by Johannes Hoops in 1896, who, before taking up his professorship, had taught at a local grammar school and was well known as the doctor who had introduced rugby to Heidelberg schools. 74 As a student at Jena in the 188os, Hoops had dreamed of traveling the world as a "Sendbote der Wissenschaft" (ambassador of academia). As a professor his dream from his student days came true. He now served as intermediary between British universities and Heidelberg University.75 In 1910, the students' representatives and guilds of eighteen British universities and colleges appointed him "to act as 'Honorary British Academic Council' in Heidelberg to give information, help, and advice to all British students and graduates purposing to study there, and to act as intermediary in our relations with your University." 76 Heidelberg, in particular, had a long-standing relationship with Britons. It had particularly been Turner's 1838 painting "Heidelberg in the Olden Time" which had made the romantic image of Heidelberg popular in Britain and had helped to turn the old town on the Neckar into a mecca for poets, artists, and travelers of any kind. 77 When Frederick William Robertson, the preacher and thinker, first came to Heidelberg in 1841 just having graduated from Oxford, he immediately fell in love with the place: "When I first saw it," he wrote five years later,

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"I thought it the loveliest I had ever seen." 78 Heidelberg had a thriving British colony. So many Britons stayed at Heidelberg that the British colony had its own priest who ran an English church there. As early as 1843 a British school had been founded there. 79 Under Frederick Armitage, an Oxford graduate and the school's headmaster from the 185os to 1891, the Neuenheim College flourished: The school was mainly staffed by young British schoolmasters who wanted to work and research at Heidelberg University, including Joseph Wright who became professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford from 1901 and G. G. Coulton, the Cambridge historian. 80 The school song was happily sung at reunions of Old Boys of the school in Britain: "We Neuenheimers will ne'er forget I The days that now are past I And memories of the dear old place I We'll always treasure fast." 81 Furthermore, a decade after the foundation of Neuenheim College, a "Mistress Duncan" and "some English ladies" set up a small school on Heidelberg's castle hill where they taught some eighty poor local children in both German and English. 82 The eighty-eight Britons who were still listed in an October 1914 directory of foreigners resident at Heidelberg give us a good idea how significant the British colony at Heidelberg had been before the war. 83 As we can see from an 1892 letter to the editor of The Norwich Mercury by "a retired civil servant," members of the colony found the old city on the Neckar a most agreeable place to live: "Our small English colony (... ) is second to none. (... ) As a seat of learning it is needless to be commended, many Oxford and Cambridge men being amongst the students of the time-honoured University." 84 The British royal family felt especially attached to Heidelberg. The Observer wrote in a 1911 article "that the Stuart Princess Elizabeth, who married the Elector Palatine, held her court in the old Castle, and that, through her, the House of Stuart was connected with the present Royal Family." Heidelberg was also the place where King Edward VII and Alexandra of Denmark had first met and had become engaged to be married. "The late King's affection for Heidelberg," The Observer continued, "was subsequently shown when he sent his two sons, the late Duke of Clarence and the present King, to the house of Professor Ihne," 85 with whom the Prince of Wales, Albert Victor, stayed in 1884 to learn German. 86 During the sooth anniversary of Heidelberg in 1886, the university celebrated the profound contribution of British academics to the world of learning when it gave honorary doctorates to six Britons. 87 Lord Bryce, who had attended both Oxford and Heidelberg, meanwhile, was the official representative of Oxford at the festivities. 88 However, critical voices against Britain had been on the rise at Heidelberg as well as

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elsewhere since the end of the century. Anglo-German antagonism was primarily played out among Heidelberg academics in the fervent agitation of professors for a German fleet and against Britain during the Boer War. To be sure, few historians would now accept without reservations the assertion of the late Gordon Craig that German professors did not come second to anyone in their uncritical support of German nationalism, dubbing the German professoriate "the intellectual bodyguard of the Hohenzollerns." 89 In fact, German professors were not as involved in party politics as they had been in preunification Germany. We also know now that they were by and large more politically modern than previously thought. 90 But when it came to consolidating the German Empire through popular publications as well as legitimizing and propagating an ever-increasing role of Germany in the world, German and Heidelberg professors (particularly historians and economists) were still eager to play their role as Protectores Germaniae. 91 Ostensibly, Max Weber's belief in cooperation with Britain on foreign policy was the exception, not the rule, among Heidelberg's academics. 92 His own brother Alfred, the Heidelberg economist, not only supported naval armament but, in 1912, privately defined Germany's future task to join the submerged peoples of the British Empire for "Weltbefreiung" (a liberation of the world).93 For Georg Jellinek, the professor of law and future vice-chancellor, naval expansion was "a precept of national prudence and historical foresight" because of his belief that "the twentieth century will see again a battle for control of the seas-this time with long-lasting effects-and it serves our benefit as well as the benefit of the rest of the world for Germany to stop being pushed into a subordinate role." Ernst Bekker, another professor of law at the Ruperta Carola, left no doubt as to who was to blame for Germany's underrepresentation in the global arena: "patriotism and political calculation demanded a strong and rapid increase in the German fleet" because "England can stili play with its neighbours like cats and mice. (... ) Opposing the increase of the [German] fleet means curing Germany's itch to be a world power." 94 Finally, the Berlin historian, former Heidelberg professor and archnationalist Dietrich Schafer, while professor at the Ruperta Carola, had published a pamphlet titled "Deutschland zur See" (in which he had pushed for naval armament) and had been a leading activist of the Baden section of the newly founded Naval League. 95 He claimed in a 1912 pamphlet, published by the Heinrich von Treitschke Foundation of the ultranationalist Societies of German Students, that it was "England's envy" that had prompted Britain to take up a colonial race with Germany. 96 Fraternity students were, if anything, even more fervent supporters of a strong German fleet.

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The Burschenschaftlichen Blatter printed a poem in 1901 calling for a rebirth of the spirit of the Hanseatic fleet and for German ships to carry the German flag across the seas. 97 However, the Anglophobe drive in the activities of the Flottenprofessoren (fleet professors) should not be overrated. Although only leftleaning liberals and the few social democratic liberal academics were Anglophile in a traditional sense in that they admired the British political system as a model for Germany, 98 the desire of many national liberal and conservative academics to achieve an understanding with Britain has been underrated. As we shall see, Georg Jellinek, for instance, insisted in a speech as vice-chancellor in 1907 on the relatedness of "Zivilisation" and "Kultur" and expressed his desire to establish Anglo-American-German world power. This puts his demand for naval expansion into a different light. In other words, he thought that only if German naval power grew would Britain cease to push Germany into the sidelines and learn to cooperate with her. As Rudiger vom Bruch has emphasized, although approximately 270 German professors publicly supported naval expansion, this only amounts to about one in eight German professors who openly supported naval expansion. Of them only sixty to seventy professors supported the German navy with "vivid or at least decisive personal involvement." Vom Bruch has warned us against lumping all professors together, preferring to underline the diversity of motivations in supporting naval expansion. 99 The relative number of German professors publicly supporting naval expansion is even smaller than vom Bruch has argued, as the list includes 29 professors at technical universities (12), foreign universities (1), at other institutions of higher education (7), and at other institutions, such as archives (9). From the remaining list of 241 professors we still need to subtract 4 retired or former professors as well as 16 Privatdozenten who for the purpose of establishing the relative number of professors in favor of naval expansion should have been excluded. This leaves only 221, instead of 270, professors at German universities who publicly supported naval expansion. This means that 9 out of ro German professors did not publicly support naval expansion. 100 It also needs to be stressed that contrary to the dominant images of militarist and reactionary Prussia, in contrast to a more moderate and liberal Baden in the historiography, the support of naval expansion was virtually the same in Baden and Prussia. 101 Even the Burschenschaftlichen Blatter stressed in a 1909 article the defensive character of the German fleet, stating that the goal of the German navy was to protect the interest of German merchants, to defend German colonies, and to defend Germany's status quo in the international system. 102

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The case of the Heidelberg national-liberal professor of history and Old Boy of Heidelberg's Frankonia fraternity, Hermann Oncken, epitomizes the difficulty of using a simple binary model of Anglophile versus Anglophobe. At the suggestion of the Berlin free-conservative historian Hans Delbriick and Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg, Oncken (who had been Professor at Chicago for the academic year 1905-06) 103 delivered a speech on Anglo-German relations at the local branch of the Navy League in January of 1912. The speech was printed as a pamphlet and went into several editions. On the one hand, he harshly criticized the Pax Britannica and its apostles on both sides of the English Channel. Yet on the other hand, he vigorously criticized Pan-Germans for their naivety. He explained why German naval armament was bound to be perceived in Britain as directed against Britain and could not bring a "peace based on the principle of equality." Germany should not fear war but would do better to increase her power without war: "Nations do not arm themselves only in order to wage war or protect themselves against attacks: they arm themselves just as much in times of peace, in order to appear to the other as a force to be reckoned with." The result of abandoning the naval race while continuing to build up the army would be the possibility of a peace in equality between Britain and Germany. The Pan-Germans and the Naval Office were not amused about the government supported publication of Oncken's pamphlet, as evident in the publication of a Pan-German pamphlet by Adolf Stein which had been inspired by the Naval Office as a response to Oncken's pamphlet. 104 Oncken also defended the Kaiser's policy toward Britain against Pan-German attacks in his official speech during the ceremony at Heidelberg University celebrating Wilhelm's twenty-fifth anniversary as emperor. 105 Heidelberg University cherished its academic links with Britain. When the Heidelberg Academy of Science and Arts (which was affiliated with the university) was founded in 1909, its founding charter stressed the international orientation of the academy: "The purpose of the endowment is to support scientific and scholarly work and cooperation [Zusammentritt] with the joint academies of Europe." 106 First Americans and then Russians had dominated the foreign student body at Heidelberg. 107 But judging from the official congratulatory messages Heidelberg University sent to foreign academic institutions, the Ruperta Carola felt particularly attached to the academic world of the British Empire. Of the eleven messages sent between 1900 and 1914, six were addressed to academic institutions in Britain or its Empire, stressing mutual influences between the German and British academic worlds, while only one message each was sent to institutions in Russia, AustriaHungary, Italy, Switzerland, and Norway. 108

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A dinner hosted by the municipality of Heidelberg for some forty British city councilors who came to Heidelberg in 1907 gives further proof that German nationalism and Anglophilia were not contradictory terms. In an after-dinner speech, the lord mayor of Heidelberg, Karl Wilckens, dwelled on the importance of good Anglo-German relations, recalled traditions of British life at Heidelberg, and expressed his hope that the visit would be a sign that both nations wanted to live in peace and friendship with each other. When the then vicechancellor of Heidelberg University, theN ational-Liberal Georg Jellinek, addressed the guests, he argued that the British concept of "Zivilisation" and German concept of "Kultur" (whose alleged differences would be claimed to the fullest in the war of the professors during the First World War) 109 were interchangeable and peaceful concepts: "Indeed civilization [Zivilisation] itself is nothing other than urban culture [Kultur], whose purpose is to fashion the average man into a citizen, rather than a battlehungry warrior. We should wholeheartedly celebrate the English municipalities, which carry the unifying ideals of a powerful national and international civilization [Zivilisation]." Jellinek also argued in deeply jingoistic and imperialistic terms for an alliance of Britain, Germany, and the United States, not unlike Cecil Rhodes's idea of an alliance of "Germanic peoples": However [the English people] also have now their eye on continental developments-new evidence that today, common ideas are bringing nations everywhere closer together. To be sure, the universities of the old [European] nations [Kulturnationen] have known how to wrap a common ligament around all the limbs of the occidental nations for a long time. Bologna and Paris, Oxford and Cambridge, Prague and Heidelberg founded the science of uniting nations as brothers more than 500 years ago. Even today, German sciences and arts perceive themselves as universal. (... ) Rome wanted to rule for the sake of ruling, England wanted to rule to secure its freedom. She wanted to rule the ocean, but that was in order that "Britons shall never be slaves." The Germanic notion of freedom excludes every frivolous, oppressive war. Should England wish to remain true to its great history, it should harbour peaceful convictions, particularly with respect to nations of similar origins. The leadership of human culture today is owed to the Germanic peoples, and Germany, England, and America together are called upon to bring about the Germanic era of human history.

The professor of English, Hoops, agreed with Jellinek that times had changed and that Germany now was and had to be a great power but that it wanted to be a great power shoulder to shoulder with Britain. The Heidelberg Tageblatt noted: When he spoke of the good relations between England and Germany, he said that England must get accustomed to the fact that Germany is a country that

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has grown up in the last few decades. War has been spoken of foolishly in both countries, but as it concerns Germany, nothing would be more distant to the people. Germany is surrounded on all sides and must maintain a strong army; the army is to Germany what the fleet is to England. The sentiment of these speeches was echoed by the British guests. After both Britons and Germans had sung "Alt Heidelberg du feine," Sir John Gorst, the educational reformer, former cabinet minister, and driving force of the National Union of Conservative Associations, 110 toasted Heidelberg and its university and insisted how English universities were indebted to German universities. Henry Lunn, the founder of the travel agents Lunn Poly, emphasized that the delegation did not only come to Germany to study municipal institutions, but also to promote international friendship. Then he emphasized the central role of universities, especially Oxford and Heidelberg, in bringing the two nations together. In the words of the newspaper article covering the event: Oxford has been home to many German scholars, and many of Germany's best sons came to Oxford on Rhodes scholarships, while England has for her part sent many of her sons to German universities, especially Heidelberg. Nothing, in his opinion, is more conducive to promoting international friendship. To conclude, Dr. Lunn remarked that one of the goals of this exchange was to spread a certain sense of brotherhood that would render war impossible. The contention that war is unavoidable is the most detestable of all heresies. 111 Were the after-dinner speeches just polite utterances divorced from the real beliefs of the speakers or were they honest expressions of their wishes? As we have seen, it was no contradiction for men like Jellinek to be fervent supporters of German naval expansion and at the same time to be in favor of Anglo-German understanding. We have also seen that Oncken's pamphlets and speeches were supported by Bethmann Hollweg and were fiercely attacked by the Pan-German League and the Naval Office. A visit of German students in 1910 whose objective was to overcome "misunderstanding and mutual mistrust" and to which we will return later was officially supported by academics from all over Germany, including the Heidelberg academics Professor Johannes Hoops, Professor Adolf Koch (a member of the nationwide Deutsch-Englisches Verstiindigungskomitee), Professor Weber, and Lionel Strachan, the Oxford-educated lecturer in English. 112 Many Heidelberg scholars had academic and private bonds to Britain. The Heidelberg academic and economist Edgar Jaffe, for instance, took academic leave in 1907-08 to carry out research in England, where he himself had worked for many years and where his sister-in-law Frieda Weekley (the future wife of D. H. Lawrence) had lived since her marriage with the Nottingham academic Ernest Weekley. The principal librarian

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of the University Library at Heidelberg, Jakob Wille, meanwhile, was an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. 113 For Karl Wilckens, there can be little doubt about the sincerity of his after-dinner speech. Heidelberg's lord mayor, sometime leader of the National Liberal Party in Baden, and former president of the Second Chamber of the Diet of Baden, was one of seven Heidelberg members of the previously mentioned Deutsch-Englisches Verstandigungskomitee in 1911. The municipality of Heidelberg itself was one of ten towns (of which five were Prussian) that were corporate members of the committee. 114 In 19n, Heidelberg conferred the freedom of the city (Ehrenbiirgerwiirde) upon the fourth Duke of Sutherland, a former MP, in recognition of his gift of an old painting depicting Heidelberg's Anglo-German past, showing the wedding party of the Stuart Princess Elizabeth in front of Heidelberg Castle.U 5 The ruins of the castle were in the popular imagination a symbol of French aggression 116 -Bismarck recorded in his memoirs that visiting Heidelberg as a student had filled him with vengeance and bellicosity117-as well as a pro-British symbol. In 1913, the town indeed celebrated what Lees Knowles referred to as "the Anglo-German alliance of three centuries": 118 a big Anglo-German Festival at the castle in commemoration of the 30oth anniversary of the Stuart Princess Elizabeth's arrival at Heidelberg, with Hermann Fiedler, Oxford's professor of German, on the English committee. 119 What we have seen is that Anglophilia was not as influential among German academics as Germanophilia was among British academics. However, the great majority of German professors did not get involved in anti-British agitation and even those who did formed a heterogeneous group, including many academics who would have described themselves as Anglophiles. Although the university stressed its many links with Britain, it was not in the same way that Oxford tried to improve Anglo-German relations. Yet according to the orthodox interpretation, we would expect that the real problem of the deepening of AngloGerman antagonism did not lie with academics but rather with students, particularly those connected to the political and administrative elites: the section of society where we would most expect Anglophobia and Germanophobia.

III The origin of the idea that prewar student life had been dominated by Anglo-German antagonism lies to a large degree in the immediate postFirst World War era. Nowhere does this become clearer than in the preface to the 1920 Oxford University Roll of Service, which lists the war

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service of 14,561 members of the University of Oxford. The author of the preface claimed that prewar undergraduate life at Oxford had been dominated by the German threat: "During the eight or nine years before the war there had been a great quickening of military activity in the Universities, partly, no doubt, this quickening was due to the tension of the political atmosphere and the imminence of the German threat. (... ) the University contingent of the Officers' Training Corps grew and flourished."120 This postwar statement is unsurprising for an author involved in the sad task of compiling a list of war survivors, the wounded, and the dead of his university, a task that was part of a process to make sense of the losses of the war. Yet as we shall see in Chapter 3, the growth of the Oxford University Officers Training Corps cannot be read predominantly as being directed against German aggression. It is true, though, that suspicions toward Germany became more pronounced as the nineteenth century drew to a close. Jacques Bardoux noted that even though Oxford students disliked the French and had sympathy for the Germans, they started to worry about Germany's "genius for warfare." 121 The establishment of Mls-Britain's domestic secret service-a few years before the war had its roots in twenty-four cases of alleged espionage. Among them was the case of a German Oxford student who had allegedly surveyed the region north-east of Portsmouth for a possible invasion. 122 Those suspicions found their expressions in spy-scare novels such as William Le Queux's Spies of the Kaiser Plotting the Downfall of England (1909), in which a clever and witty Ballioleducated barrister hunts down dozens of German spies whose main characteristic was their stupidity. 123 Still, we should not read too much into the existence of these spy-scare novels. The Isis indeed made fun of the naval scare in a 19r3 article: We cannot afford to keep our fleet like a brick wall, to defend the coast-line of a nation where men are selfish bachelors and where women are babbling Suffragettes. In this great crisis we naturally turn to Oxford for help and advice-rapidly to turn away in disgust when we find that they are studying the Danish invasion and the scare of ro66. (... )on the way we catch sight of a new poster, (... ) "The Truth about the Dreadnought." Now thoroughly alarmed, we scuttle into the nearest miniature rifle range and pot at midget targets with an erratic son-of-a-gun. 124

In January 1914, The Isis then published "nonsense rhymes, with here and there a touch of Sense" about "Teutonica," which included the lines "V for the Vater land. Sing loudly, 'Hoch, Hoch,' -And drink to our friends in a bottle of Bock." 125 This is not to say that suspicion toward Germany was not growing at all at Oxford, as is evident from debates in

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the Oxford Union. The Isis could not have poked fun at an anti-German hysteria, had there been none of which to make fun. And in 1905 students voted in the Oxford Union in favor of the belief that a "diplomatic isolation of Germany is essential to the peace of Europe" and three years later "that this House regards the Kaiser's policy as hostile to the peace of Europe." On four out of five occasions, a motion for "the introduction of a system of universal military training" was carried. However, the most anti-German motions passed only with marginal majorities. While 51·4 percent wanted to see Germany diplomatically isolated, 55.6 percent thought that the Kaiser's policy put the peace of Europe at risk. Yet in 1912, 55.8 percent of students defeated a motion "that in view of the existing European situation a rapprochement between England and Germany is an unrealisable idea." 126 On the balance sheet, the Oxford Union thus hardly qualifies as a hotbed of Germanophobia, even though the debates are evidence that at least an important section of the student body were alarmed by Germany. At least as important as the question of what the attitude of British students toward Anglo-German relations was is the question of what the attitude of German Oxonians was. Is Barbara Tuchman's description of German students as drunkards who threatened their English hosts with invasion a fair account of the German student encounter with Oxford? Previous research on Anglo-German life at Oxford has concentrated almost exclusively on German Rhodes scholars. 127 But an analysis of the bulky University of Oxford Registers of Matriculation reveals that the Rhodes scholars constituted a surprisingly small percentage of the German student body. Indeed, only approximately one in five German matriculants in 1914 was a Rhodes scholar. 128 As Table 4 reveals, the first fourteen years of the twentieth century saw an explosion in the number of German students at Oxford. The German community was by far the largest non-English-speaking foreign student community. For instance, 19rr-r2 saw the matriculation of forty-three Germans, as compared to only three French students. 129 More than three times as many Germans matriculated at Oxford in the academic year 1905 than during the first year of the century. Even after excluding German Rhodes scholars, there still were 2.4 times as many German freshmen in 1905 as there had been five years earlier. In total, the number of German matriculants increased by 371 percent between 1900 and 1914, totaling 332 German students, whereas the total number of matriculants rose by only 23.4 percent during that period.U 0 Table 4 may even understate the absolute number of German students at Oxford, since it does not include German students who chose not to matriculate.

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TABLE

4

Matriculation Numbers of Germans at the University of Oxford Year

1899-1900 1900-1901 1901-2 1902-3 1903-4 1904-5 1905-6 1906-7

No. of matriculants

2 (1) 7 (2) 7 (2) 8 (4) 15 (4) 16 (5) 23 (6) 21 (7)

Year

1907-8 1908-9 1909-10 1910-11 1911-12 1912-13 1913-14 TOTAL

SOURCE: BLO, MS DPhil/c.r6923, Appendix 3· NOTE: The first figures include both aristocratic

No. of matriculants

35 24 35 30 43 33 33

(5) (8) (13) (9) (8) (9) (8)

332 (91)

and nonaristocratic students. The figures

in parentheses only refer to aristocratic students.

What kind of Germans went to Oxford? The matriculation register of Oxford University provides sufficient detailed information to describe the character of the German student body. As noted above, both the claim that German Oxonians predominantly consisted of "the great magnates of Silesia and south Germany" and that only "a small North German and Prussian elite" had sent their sons to Oxford has been made. Neither claim is accurate. As Table 5 reveals, only 14.7 percent of all students whose fathers lived in Germany or 24.9 percent of all aristocrats whose fathers lived in Germany came from Silesia, Bavaria, Baden, or Wiirttemberg, while just over 53.6 percent of all students or 4 7·4 percent of all aristocrats came from Prussian provinces other than Silesia. Silesians, Bavarians, Wiirttembergers, and Badenese were somewhat underrepresented at Oxford, as the total population from these four states made up 25.7 percent of the German population in 1910, while students from Berlin and the Prussian heartland of Brandenburg were slightly overrepresented. Otherwise, the breakdown of regions of origin for German students roughly followed the general structure of the German population at iarge. What was unusual was the very high proportion of aristocrats among the German student population in Oxford (Table 4). While 2.7.4 percent of all prewar German students at Oxford belonged to the nobility, only a mere 2 percent of students at German universities were still aristocratic at the time. 131 Just like the number of all German matriculants, the number of German aristocrats at Oxford sharply rose in the prewar years. As might be expected, aristocratic students were in disproportionate numbers sons of government ministers; deputies of the Reichstag and parliaments of the states; and high-ranking civil servants, diplomats,

TABLE 5 Residence of Fathers of Matriculated German Students at Oxford r899ir9oO-I9I3!r 4 on Their Date of Matriculation % of students whose

o/o of German

aristocratic

fathers live in a specified German

population living in any given

students

state or province

% of students whose

Territory Prussia (a) Brandenburg (incl. Berlin) (b) Pomerania (c) Silesia (d) Eastern Prussia (e) Western Prussia (f) Hanover (g) Schleswig-Holstein (h) Hesse-Nassau (i) Saxony (j) Rhine province (k) Westphalia (I) Hohenzollern (m) Unspecified Prussian region Mecklenburg (Schwerin & Strelitz) Hamburg, Bremen, Lubeck Braunschweig Saxony (Kingdom) Thuringian states Hesse Bavaria Wiirttemberg Baden Alsace Other German regions German region non-identifiable Britain Other European countries Ottoman Empire India Africa No information given

lathers live in a specified German state or province

166 40 2 9 1

56.7 13.7 0.7 3.1 0.3 0.3 3.1 3.4 3.4 1.0 19.8 6.5 0.3 10.2

43 10 2 7 0 0 3 3 1 2 7 6 0 2

56.6 13.2 2.6 9.2 0 0 3.9 3.9 1.3 2.6 9.2 7.9 0 2.6

1.4 6.1 0.7 9.6 2.4 5.8 6.5 1.7 3.4 4.8 0.9

2 2 1 8 0 4 7 2 3 2 2 10 1 3 1 0 0 0

2.6 2.6

l

9 10 10 3 58 19 1

3 4 18 2 28 7 17 19 5 10 14 3 17 9 6 2 1 2 2

1.3

10.5 0 5.3 9.2 2.6 3.9 2.6 2.6

state in

I9IO

61.9 9.5 2.6 8.0 3.2 2.6 4.5 2.5 3.4 4.8 11.0 6.4 0.1 0 1.1

0.9 0.8 7.4 2.4 2.0 10.6 3.8 3.3 2.9

DPhil/c.r6923, Appendix 3; SR, ]ahrbuch, I926, 4· For the fifty-eight students whose fathers had already died prior to the date of matriculation, the student's place of birth has been taken instead.

souRcE: BLO, MS NOTF:

No. of

No. of students (bth aristocrats and 1\{lnaristocrats)

1.3

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TABLE

6

Profession of the Fathers of the Matriculated German Students at Oxford r899h900-I913h4 Profession Government ministers, MPs, high-ranking civil servants, diplomats, and mayors Middle- or low-ranking civil servants Landed proprietors, farmers Gentlemen Officers Judges, lawyers, and public prosecutors Academics, headmasters, teachers Banker Company director Manufacturer Merchants Clerk (Angestellte) Free professions Architect Physicians Engineers Clergymen Workers Other Retired No information available

No. of fathers

%of fathers

67

20.2

0

0

No. of

%of

aristocratic

aristocratic

fathers

fathers

44

47.3

0

0

25 23 14 22

7.5 6.7 4.2 6.6

8 5 13 5

8.6 5.4 14.0 5.4

27

8.1

0

0

19 5 17 44 2 9 3 14 2 5 0 10 2 22

5.7 1.5 5.1 13.3 0.6 2.7 9.0 4.2 0.6 1.5 0 3.0 0.6 6.6

6 0 1 0 1 0 0 1 0 2 0 0

6.5 0 1.1 0 1.1 0 0 1.1 0 2.2 0 0 0 6.5

I

6

SOURCE: BLO, MS DPhil/c.r6923, Appendix 3· NOTE: for the professions of fathers of aristocratic

students biographical handbooks have been used in addition to the matriculation lists. However, this additional information has not been included in the break-up of fathers of all German Oxonians. In two cases, where fathers were officers in the German army but also held political or ambassadorial office, their professions have been counted twice.

and officers (Table 6). Fathers of nonaristocratic students, however, were also prominently represented in this section of society, including politicians, high-ranking civil servants, army and navy officers, judges, and leading industrialists. 132 Many of the aristocratic German Oxonians before the First World War were sons of members of the government, such as the son of the Imperial Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg, or the son of the diplomat and Imperial foreign secretary between r89o and 1897, Adolf Marschall von Bieberstein.B 3 Albrecht von Bernstorff was the nephew of the German ambassador to the United States and son of a deceased Reichstag MP and member of the Executive Committee of the Deutsch-Englisches Verstiindigungskomitee,134 and Prince Hugo von Hohenlohe-Oehringen

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was the son of a senior diplomat and a relation of the former chancellor, Chlodwig von Hohenlohe-Schillingfi.irst. German Oxonians also included Ludwig Schwerin von Krosigk, Hitler's finance minister and son of the long-time president of the Diet of Anhalt. 135 These data give clear evidence that the sons of the imperial political and administrative elite formed a large proportion of the group attracted to Oxford. Admittedly, sending children to study in Britain was not necessarily a sign of Anglophilia. Even Admiral Tirpitz, not exactly famous for his Anglophilia, sent his daughter to Cheltenham College. 136 Sufficient knowledge of English, people agreed, would be an asset for any student. 137 As Peter Pulzer has said: "one could admire Germany or Britain, or at least aspects of their life, without drawing political conclusions from this episode." 138 However, ample evidence exists that a majority of German Oxonians related to the German political elite were deeply involved in attempts to improve Anglo-German relations. Cecil Rhodes was the man behind the best-known attempt to use Oxford to strengthen Anglo-German relations. It was in the belief that "a good understanding between England, Germany, and the United States of America will secure the peace of the world, and [that] educational relations form the strongest tie" 139 that the British-born former South African prime minister and old member of Oriel initiated the German Rhodes scholarships in 1901. Under the terms of Rhodes's will, five Germans, in addition to the scholars from the United States and the British Empire, came each year as Rhodes scholars to Oxford, starting in 1903. 140 The Times noted that "human nature has been touched by the intense faith Mr. Rhodes has shown in the possibility of binding together the great English-speaking races with their Teutonic kinsman by the association of the choicest of their youth in University life under old traditions permeated by new ideals." 141 As it turned out, the Rhodes scholarships were of prime importance for Anglo-German relations, largely because the selection of the German students was politically motivated. Rhodes's will had endowed the Kaiser with the right to choose the scholars personally. Effectively, a Rhodes Scholarships Selection Committee, chaired by the former Heidelberg student and high official in the Prussian Ministry of Culture and Education Friedrich SchmidtOtt (the future Prussian minister of the same department), drew up a short list of about seven candidates whose nominations sometimes originated with the Kaiser himself. In the majority of the cases in which the Kaiser had not personally proposed candidates, scholars usually had the backing of a senior civil servant, the Prussian envoy to one of the other German states, or one of Germany's top headmasters. From the short list, the Kaiser then selected five candidates personally, normally following Schmidt-Ott's advice. 142 As a result, the great majority of the Rhodes

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scholars came from families of the high nobility and upper ranks of the Imperial German civil service, including the son of the German Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg. 143 It was over this socially exclusive German selection policy that in 1910 controversy erupted in British and German papers. A letter from an Archibald Marshall, published in the Daily Mail, triggered the debate, when he fiercely argued that neither scholars nor the university would gain anything from the German Rhodes scholarships. Though Freiherr Wilhelm von Sell, a former Rhodes scholar, suggested that the publication of Marshall's attack was part of the agitation of the notoriously anti-German Daily Mail, the bottom line of Marshall's attack was very different. It was that German Rhodes scholars were mostly rich aristocrats who only came to Oxford to enjoy themselves and not to pursue serious studies. 144 The complaint Schmidt-Ott received from Oxford in 1908 about the laziness of two scholars confirms this reading: "I am sorry to have to report to you neither Baron von Diergardt nor Baron von Veltheim in the end took [examinations]. In each case the College (... ) has complained to me formally. I am afraid neither of these scholars can be said to have given satisfaction in the matter of industry." 145 Although some Rhodes scholars were serious students and some passed their examinations with distinction, 146 the majority of Rhodes scholars were hardly academically outstanding students. They had been chosen because of their social origin in the high nobility and/or upper ranks of the Imperial civil service. In this regard Marshall's observation had been accurate. Yet this fact emphasizes why the scholarships were politically of great significance for Anglo-German relations. As is underlined in the response to Marshall's attack by Wernher von OwWachendorf, a former Rhodes scholar, sections of the German Imperial elite saw the scholarships as a means to promote good Anglo-German relations. The founding member of the Oxford Anglo-German Society (who would later be attacked by William Le Queux during the war),K thought: Many a young man whose acquaintance [the German Rhodes scholar] has made (... ) will later occupy a leading position, and the friendships formed in youth will be to the great advantage of both nations. (... ) He should be a young man who in later life will make for himself an opportunity of using what he has learned in Oxford. In Parliament, in the Press, as diplomatist, economist, politician, or merchant, he ought to be able to influence Anglo-German affairs. I think that this is the view and intention of the Kaiser. 148 In 19II another scholarship scheme important for Anglo-German relations was founded: the Cologne-born businessmen and friend of the

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deceased Edward VII, Ernest Cassel, instituted the "King Edward VII British-German Foundation." The foundation provided funds for young graduates of British and German universities to study for one year in the respective other country, thus creating a new Anglo-German elite. The concept behind the scholarships was "that the students will form lasting friendships, and that the wider knowledge of the German people [that] will be gained during their stay will help to promote a good understanding between the two nations." 149 Cassel was none other than the person who in 1912 suggested to Richard Haldane, the Gottingen-educated secretary of war, that he travel to Germany-officially to discuss some educational questions but in reality to discuss a possible naval, colonial, and nonaggression agreement with Chancellor von Bethmann Hollweg, von Tirpitz, and the Kaiser. 150 The year before, Haldane had already delivered a lecture in favor of better Anglo-German relations in the Sheldonian Theatre at Oxford, a lecture that appeared in a translated form also as a pamphlet in Germany in late 1911. 151 Anglo-German life also found its expression at Oxford in student exchanges. The summer of 1910 saw the German flag flying over Oxford at the building of the university press when fifty-eight German students accompanied by two professors stopped at Oxford during a visit of British universities. The visit had been organized by the "Deutsche Freie Studentenschaft" and the Anglo-German Students' Committee. Two years later, twenty-seven British students (including five Oxonians) accompanied by the Pembroke fellow A. A. Seaton went to Germany to return the visit, where they were received by former German Rhodes scholars. 152 At first the visit seems insignificant for two reasons: First, the impact of a study visit on relations between two countries is seldom great; second, and more importantly, the two societies behind the visit were organizations usually seen as marginal and not representative of the student body at large (though twelve of the German students were members of student corporations). 153 However, visits of the kind were still a novelty at the time and major German and British newspapers, including the Times and the Vossische Zeitung, reported the visit in some detail,1 54 True, if we believe most of the newspaper articles covering the visit, it had no political significance. The Cambridge Chronicle and University Journal commented: Suspicious and nervous people may imagine that the visit has some ulterior political purpose. Not so! It is specially laid down as a condition of the tour that the students must not take part in any discussions on politics and armaments. In its intent the visit is purely social and educational, and those taking part in it being trained to close observation, may be trusted to gather profitable knowledgeY 5

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In an interview with the Morning Mail, Bertram Graubner, the leader of the German party declared: "Our mission was purely educational and the members of it had no eyes or ears for anything in the nature of politics."156 Similarly, the confidential letter sent out by the German committee in charge of the return visit to find support for the visit does not read like a passionate credo for Anglo-German friendship: "Any political touch [politischer Anstrich] should be avoided, big festivities should be avoided and the visit should strictly keep the character of a study visit." 157 Yet the Cambridge Chronicle and University Journal also noted that the German ambassador to Britain, Count Paul Wolff-Metternich, took an interest in the visit and met the students. 158 Moreover, a confidential letter sent out to find support in British universities to host the Germans stresses the political importance of the visit and an envisaged return visit of British students to Germany: The objects of the visit in each case will be to enable representatives of the rising generation to make themselves better acquainted with the life, customs and institutions in England and Germany respectively, as it is felt that nothing is so likely to dissipate the prevailing cloud of misunderstanding and apparent mutual distrust between the two nations, than such better acquaintance between the people. 159

The letter makes clear that at least the British participants believed the visit would serve to improve Anglo-German relations. The committee responsible for this letter was chaired by none less than the former British ambassador to Germany, Sir Frank Lascelles. The other seventeen members of the committee consisted of British academics, some of whom were well-known Germanophiles or had also left a mark on national politics. 160 But the German committee set up for organizing a return visit of British students to Germany did not consist primarily of Anglophile critics of Imperial Germany. On the contrary, it included Theodor von Holleben, the former Imperial ambassador to the United States, as the chairman; the lord mayors of Berlin and Weimar; Freiherr von Stengel, a former Bavarian secretary of state; the rectors of Berlin University and Munich University; and further eminent academics. 161 Whatever might be said publicly, such academic exchanges always had political significance, as had the visit of a Magdalen undergraduate in 1913. In that year, Hermann Fiedler, Oxford's professor of German, was asked by the parents of the student to accompany their son on two extended visits to Germany where he was to meet some relatives, tour some famous German towns including Heidelberg, and to improve his German. As the parents were King George V and Queen Alexandra and the undergraduate was the Prince of Wales (the later King Edward VIII),

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Fiedler was thrilled to accept. As unremarkable as a visit of a future king to his relatives in Germany would have been in peaceful times, the tensions between Germany and Britain gave the visit a potentially political dimension. 162 As a recent book has pointed out, Anglo-German royal visits in the prewar years were not successful in the sense that they did not prevent war. 163 However, this does not diminish the political element of those visits. As usual, there were attempts to downplay the political significance of Edward's tour. The Times noted that the aim of his visit simply was to improve his knowledge of German and to visit his German relatives, a characterization followed uncritically by a 1978 article in History Today. 164 But Reuters, whose news report was printed in both German and British newspapers such as the Tagesblatt and the Morning Post, as well as German newspaper correspondents in London, took a different view: It is scarcely necessary to say that the news will produce a most favourable effect everywhere, (... ). His visit is a happy symptom of the friendly relations which to-day exist between Berlin and London and to which responsible Ministers, both in Germany and England, have referred. Only yesterday Mr Asquith spoke of the development of trustful relations between the two countries. 165 According to the letters of Fiedler to his wife, as well as newspaper reports by the group of English journalists that accompanied the prince, Edward was thrilled about Germany. During the two trips, the King's son visited many German courts, including those of at least four former and future Oxford honorary doctors (the Emperor, the King of Wiirttemberg, the Duke of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, and Duke Carl of MecklenburgStrelitz). They visited the Zeppelin airship works, saw Dreadnoughts, steamed the Kiel Canal, and toured many German towns. They also paid Heidelberg a visit where they met Fiedler's Heidelberg counterpart, the professor of English, Johannes Hoops. 166 It was thought that Heidelberg's "old-world atmosphere will be very agreeable to one who loves Windsor very dearly and is already steeped in the tradition of his own alma mater." 167 At the court of Max von Baden (the later German Imperial chancellor), Fiedler and Edward met the Grand Duchess of Luise who used her personal influence in the prewar years to foster behind-the-scenes Anglo-German cooperation. 168 From the court, the "Prince's mentor" 169 wrote to his wife: The Mother of the Grand Duke (only daughter of Wilhelm I) [Grand Duchess Luise] (... ) began at once about Anglo-German relations and the great mission I had undertaken viz. to initiate the Prince into German life. (... ) [Prince Max of Baden] also dwelt on the importance of the visit for Anglo-German relationsY 0

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She talked a great deal about the Anglo-German relations and the importance of the Prince's visit to Germany of which she expects great things. (... ) She asked me to send her anything bearing Anglo-German friendship. 1- 1 And when Fiedler and the Prince stayed at the summer house of Prince Henry of Prussia (the inspector general of the German navy and the Kaiser's younger brother who was on excellent terms with George V) on the Baltic Sea in July, Prince Henry told Fiedler over lunch "how little knowledge the English have of German history." Hence he stressed "the importance of teaching our Prince a correct view of things." 172 Before returning to Oxford, the Prince and Fiedler visited the Imperial court at Berlin where they not only met the Kaiser but also the British ambassador and the German foreign secretaryY 3 On leaving, "the Kaiser emphasised his hope that Edward had learned something of the German people from his stay, adding that, despite all the terrible things the English thought about them, he and they were not so difficult to get along with." 174 Anglo-German activities at Oxford were generated by students who have traditionally not been identified as champions of Anglo-German friendship. At Oxford, German students felt so intrigued by Rhodes's idea of Anglo-German friendship that they stated they wanted to follow the "example of Cecil Rhodes (... ) to promote a better understanding between the two nations." In October r9o8, they established with the support of the German ambassador, von Metternich, the Deutscher Wissenschaftlicher Verein-Anglo-German Society, Oxford. In a letter to Friedrich Schmidt-Ott seeking governmental support for the foundation of the society, Wernher von Ow-Wachendorf made clear what the objective of the society was: "We believe (... ) that the society would facilitate and deepen the mutual understanding between the two great neighbouring peoples." Within a week all German students at Oxford had joined the society, giving clear evidence that students coming from important sections of the German elite did more at Oxford than improve their English. Initially, only Germans were entitled to become ordinary members of the foundation. Soon after its foundation, British students were admitted, too, and the society expanded to include about fifty members in total. In addition, a large number of people outside Oxford both in Germany and in Britain became associated members. Only one year after its establishment, the society had more than 300 members, many of whom belonged to the German aristocracy. 175 The society was not secretive about its clear political agenda. Posters put up throughout the university announced in bold letters: "The SOCIETY is in connection with the GERMAN GOVERNMENT AND

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UNIVERSITIES.( ... ) The society hopes in a modest degree to contribute to mutual understanding and to facilitate and strengthen the interchange of ideas between the two countries." 176 In 1909, the Times reported a dinner of German Rhodes scholars in London in the presence of Richard von Kuhlmann (the Anglophile diplomat with a Heidelberg PhD, who had two relatives study at Oxford in the period): 177 "Baron Wernher von Ow-Wachendorf, a Rhodes scholar and founder of a society for promoting an entente cordiale between England and Germany, responded. He described the German Rhodes scholars as the German trustees of Cecil Rhodes, who believed that blood was thicker than water, and that the Teutonic nations were destined to realize hand in hand a thousand dormant possibilities of the future." 178 The society became very active, regularly holding meetings, talks, and debates about political issues. A reading room with German papers and journals and a German library was established on Cornmarket; the senior members wrote letters of recommendation to enable British students to travel to Germany, and graduates were given aid in finding employment. British students were encouraged to attend summer courses in Germany. And in Germany talks were given under the auspices of the society about Anglo-German relations. 179 In 1909 von Ow-Wachendorf and the future British diplomat Eugen Millington-Drake went on a tour of German universities to promote the society and its aims, arguing that "all Anglo-Saxon and Germanic races should form a cultural federation for progress shoulder to shoulder." 180 In 1913, then, the Isis summed up its high hopes as to how it thought the Anglo-German Society could influence and improve Anglo-German relations: The Anglo-German Society held its first annual dinner on Tuesday last. It is strange that a club which has such great capabilities for influencing the destinies of two of the greatest nations on earth should not have held a dinner before. The atmosphere of a dinner is congenial to the commonsense understandings, and uncongenial to the useless cobwebs of the old diplomacy. If there is to be a closer friendship between England and Germany it will be the work of the younger men; and societies composed of the younger men of both countries must have an influence in the right direction. As Lord Sandon remarked in his speech on Tuesday, the day may come when he and Mr. von Senger (the President of the Club) meet to solve some diplomatic problem: and the fact that they have dined together in Oxford and learnt to understand one another would go a long way towards making that problem easy of solution.

Before wishing the Anglo-German Society "every success; for it is certainly doing good work," the Isis emphasized the importance of the

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5. Cosmopolitan Nationalists: Oxford's Anglo-German Club, 1913. St. John's College Archive, Photo 2II f.r4r. By permission of the President and Fellows of St. John's College, Oxford. PHOTO

SOURCE:

dinner by reporting that Baron Marschall von Bieberstein (the son of the recently deceased German foreign secretary and ambassador to Britain) had also given a speech and that the guests had included Sir Henry SaxIronside, the British ambassador at Sofia, and Major Lionel James, the military correspondent of the the Times in the Balkan War. 181 Although the Anglo-German Society regularly organized debates, the society thought it desirable to found a special debating society to discuss Anglo-German relations. At the instigation of the nephew to the German ambassador to the United States (who was a good friend of Richard von Kuhlmann), 182 Albrecht von Bernstorff, the Hanover Club was founded in 1909. 183 Its aim was "to promote the cause of good feeling between Germany and England by giving Englishmen and Germans in the University opportunities of meeting, and discussing topics of interest and importance to both nations." 184 German Oxonians also used the Oxford Union to address AngloGerman issues. Two sons of German army officers, the aforementioned Rhodes scholar Wernher von Ow-Wachendorf and the former Heidelberg student and founding member of the Oxford Anglo-German Club Kurt von Kampenhover delivered speeches against the 1908 motion that "the

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Kaiser's policy [was] hostile to the peace of Europe." The year 1912 saw Kurt Hahn and his friend Lord Sandon (who would exchange letters during the war discussing who was to blame for the war) 185 on opposite sides of the Union when the motion that a rapprochement between their countries was an "unrealisable ideal" was defeated. At the end of May 1914, two months away from the war, Wilhelm von Richthofen spoke on the winning side of the house, when 6r.5 percent of members condemned "the Triple Entente [of Britain, France, and Russia] as embodying both an unnecessary and unnatural policy." 186 In the previous year, A. 0. F. Marschall von Bieberstein had already spoken in support of the eventually unsuccessful motion "that war between civilized modern States is impracticable and unreasonable." 187 This sentiment was surprising for the son of a deceased former German Imperial foreign secretary who also had been German ambassador to Britain in 1912. It sheds further light on the involvement of Bethmann Hollweg's government and administration and their families in AngloGerman relations. Marschall von Bieberstein's father himself, a friend of Richard von Kuhlmann, 188 had arguably been Anglophile all his political life (though often also frustrated about Britain) and had worked for political Anglo-German cooperation. It is surprising that we have not heard more about him in the historiography. 18 Y Bieberstein had already claimed in 1895 that the German government had constantly fought against a tide of popular Anglophobia and following the Kruger Telegram found soothing words about Anglo-German relations in the Reichstag. 190 In 1912, he was seen as the natural choice as new German ambassador to Britain to improve the political relations with Britain, yet died unexpectedly seven weeks later-an event seen by many as disastrous for AngloGerman relations. 191 Bethmann Hollweg, whose own son had been a Rhodes scholar at Oxford, wrote to Marschall that he wanted him to be ambassador to Britain, since I consider the status of our relations with England pivotal to our present and future. The discussions we have begun here will not lead to any conclusion at the moment. However I consider a friendly modus vivendi between the two nations to be such a historical necessity that the effort to make it a reality demands the efforts of our best man. 192 The students who graduated between 1900 and 1914 and went into public life were still in relatively junior positions prior to the First World War. Writing of Oxford's Anglo-German Society and of German Rhodes scholars, Richard Sheppard has argued that "but for the war, the Society might have developed into a more officially sanctioned institution since the largest proportion of pre-1914 German scholars, unlike those from

8o

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elsewhere, was destined for state service. This would (... ) have allowed them to exert influence in Germany on the Society's behalf." 193 It is also difficult to judge German Oxonians by their postwar activities as it is questionable to what degree they represented prewar sentiments or had been prompted by the war experience. However, German Oxonians represented families forming an important part within the Wilhelmine elite. It also must be added that the efforts to form a future Anglo-German elite by young German Oxonians bore fruit even before 1914, particularly in the Deutscher Oxford Club, founded in 1906 as an Old Boy society by German Oxonians returning to Germany. 194 A year later an Oxford Anglo-German Society was founded in Germany. The society had the active support of the German government, senior diplomats and clergymen, and eminent academics. Only six months after the foundation of the society, it already had 566 German members as well as 370 British honorary members. Top priority for the Oxford Anglo-German Society was the establishment of a scholarship scheme-similar to the Rhodes scholarships-for British students studying in Germany. With the subscription fees, the society bought British government bonds to endow a scholarship scheme which only failed to materialize because of the outbreak of war in 1914. 195 The fifteen former students who signed a greeting to Friedrich von Schmidt-Ott in the Prussian Ministry of Culture-which they had scribbled on the back of the menu during an annual reunion of Rhodes scholars and the German Oxford Club-provide clear evidence that the Anglo-German activities of German Oxonians originated from inside the Wilhelmine elite. For the signatories were drawn not only from families traditionally seen as Anglophile, like George de Neufville, but also included the sons of the cabinet secretary of the Empress Augusta and German delegate on the Egyptian debt commission, Ottmar von Mohl, of the deceased General and Imperial German Ambassador to Russia Lothar von Schweinitz, and of the Prussian Under Secretary of State Hermann von Chappuis. 196 Hans von Lindeiner-Wildau, one of the first Rhodes scholars and the son of a lieutenant-general, is a good example of a student for whom a feeling of German superiority and a belief in good Anglo-German relations were easily reconciled. A future Reichstag deputy and senior executive of the ultranationalist Deutschnationale Volkspartei (DNVP) in the Weimar period, when leaving Oxford in 1905 he considered German universities as academically superior. He also thought that British students did not have enough freedom. But he equally emphasized that he spent the best year of his life at "beloved Oxford." At a farewell dinner, he expressed his hope that "the private links [between Britons and Germans at Oxford may] grow into the chain which shall unite our kindred nations in friendship." 197

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The attitude of British students toward attempts to improve AngloGerman relations as well as the involvement of German Oxonians in these attempts is perhaps best summarized in the above-mentioned dinner for Prince von Lichnowski in June 1914 and the way it was covered in the student press. The Isis had already remarked in the announcement of the dinner that the Anglo-German Club "is entering upon a fresh era of prosperity, full of new aims and enthusiasms. Various people of prominence, genuinely interested in the promotion of Anglo-German affairs, have generously given their support to meet the expenses contracted by the Club's new extension." 198 Speakers stressed the literary and scientific ties between England and Germany, and the "Wahlverwandtschaft [elective affinity] between German Geist and Oxonian Kultur." One speaker remarked that the dinner company "represented two peoples, who had only to know each other better in order to conclude an eternal friendship." 199 If it was difficult to imagine German Oxonians with elite backgrounds working toward better Anglo-German relations, this is even more the case for German corporation students at Heidelberg. Yet as we will see, the German-British encounter at Heidelberg was much more amicable than might be imagined. Although the British elite did not send their sons to Heidelberg in the same way that that the German elite did to Oxford, Britons had held, as we have seen above, a long and enthusiastic preoccupation with Heidelberg. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, however, some British visitors to Heidelberg experienced what has often been interpreted as strong Anglophobia among students. Still, we should not assume that every critical remark about Heidelberg that did not share the general British enthusiasm about Heidelberg was a response to Anglophobia, as epitomized by the case of George V. When after the premature death of the Prince of Wales (Albert Victor), Edward VII sent his younger son in 1892 to Heidelberg, the young George was less than enthusiastic about learning German with Professor Ihne. 200 In a letter to his friend Oliver Montagu, he did not exert any restraint in stating how bored he was: "Well, I am working away here very hard with old Professor Ihne at this rotten language which I find very difficult & it certainly is beastly dull here." Yet he did not complain about Germany as such. George-who was not exactly famous for his intellectual powers-was complaining that he had to learn a language instead of being allowed to go shooting. He told Montagu: "What a splendid sport you must be having at Gordon Castle( ... ) how I envy you.( ... ) I( ... ) miss all my shooting & hunting in England, as I had none last year at all." 201 Although George had not been considered particularly Germanophile before he came to the throne, once he was King he privately doubted the government's

Transnational Nationalists policy toward Germany and believed more than his government in the benefits of good relations with Germany. 202 Nevertheless, judging from the inclusion of the "Deutsches Flottenlied" [German Naval Fleet Song] in the Allgemeines Deutsches Kommersbuch, the song book of student fraternities, the obsession with dueling among fraternity students indeed went hand in hand with Anglophobia. The first stanza of the song in the official songbook used during the infamous drinking functions of fraternities can quite easily be read as anti-English. It ended: "We refuse to be pushed aside. Full steam ahead! Full steam ahead!" 203 Primarily at the instigation of the Society of German Students, rallies in support of the Boers against the British were held in Heidelberg and other German universities in 1901. At a rally in November 1901, students loudly and enthusiastically cheered when Dietrich Schafer told his audience: "Chamberlain is a mean liar." 204 The sentiment prevailing among students attending the rallies was expressed in the Burschenschaftliche Blatter (the national magazine of German fraternities), which reported a torpedo boat excursion of students from the Heidelberg Frankonia together with Schafer. 205 On another occasion, it would only give lukewarm support for the Rhodes scholarships at Oxford, 206 and it published the deeply anti-British poem "Reiterlied" by Erich Wienbeck, a member of the Berlin Allemania and later Reichstag deputy. The poem derided Lord Kitchener and Lord Roberts for having violated international law and called for them to be hung. 207 The Anglophobic character of such songs makes it tempting to label student corporation culture as essentially Anglophobic. Realities were, however, much more ambiguous, as is evident in the continued positive encounters of Britons with Heidelberg student corporations. After obtaining his degree from Cambridge, Sir Lees Knowles met a Heidelberg Corps student on a trip to Switzerland in r888 and befriended him. Subsequently he learned German and over the years visited and revisited Germany, particularly Heidelberg. He noted of Heidelberg Corps students that "my circles of friends have extended as the years rolled on." He eventually became godfather to the daughter of a corporation student, one society of Corps students made him an honorary member, and he was invited to a breaking-up of the Heidelberg Corps Guestphalia in r89r, where he was presented with a casket decorated with a bouquet of flowers in the colors of Britain and Germany. zos Knowles's experience was far from unusual. Henry Roscoe, despite being critical about the dueling and drinking habits of German students, thought in 1906 that the German is a "real good fellow (... ) quite as hard a worker as an Oxford and Cambridge average man, with more 'Geist' and far more thorough training." 209 In the same publication, he also expressed his

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doubt that Germans were Anglophobes: "My knowledge of the Germans and Germany has led me to love the Fatherland, and, I venture to think, to understand as well as to respect and admire the nation. As to any feelings antagonistic to England and the English existing in the minds of the many Germans with whom I became intimate, I never found." 210 Furthermore, the Briton Robert Hall had been made an honorary member of the Rhenania in the early 187os. He was one of only eight people and the only foreigner so honored before 1914. 211 Oxford's professor of comparative literature, Joseph Wright, meanwhile, had been made an associated member of the Burschenschaft Frankonia while a student at Heidelberg, 212 as had been Leslie Hore- Belisha just before the First World War. 213 Moreover, Lord Lyveden, the Eton-educated president of the British Committee of the Study of Foreign Municipal Institutions told his audience, while staying with the party of British mayors at Heidelberg in 1907 which we have encountered above: Your (i.e., Heidelberg's) student duels are famous in every country, and we hope that the fact that serious duels are becoming increasingly rare here as well as in other countries is one of many signs that, despite exaggerated international armament, we are approaching a period that will entail uninterrupted world peace. We hope that the day is not far-off when nations will not harm one another at the emergence of differences in opinion, with the same results as are today so pleasantly visible in the case of the Heidelberg student duels. 214

When around 1912 the Heidelberg Landsmannschaft Cheruskia invited British students from Heidelberg College to attend a Mensur and a Kneipe [drinking function], the British students could not quite share their hosts' obsession with dueling: "At the end of half a dozen duels, one might well imagine he was at a cattle slaying entertainment, such as a bull fight, rather than at an exhibition of skill." But at the same time the writer covering the visits in Alt-Heidelberg also noted "what extremely good fellows all those students are and how hospitable," that "the combatants apparently think there is a lot less danger in this 'sport' than in our Rugby Football" and how proud the fraternity students were of their ability to speak English. 215 Equally, the students who had thought that student life at Jena was as different from their student life as the sixteenth century was from the twentieth century, abstained from criticizing German student life. Rather, they emphasized that they left Germany "filled with friendly and grateful feelings towards the great nation which had treated us so well." 216 We should also not forget that three and a half years before publishing the above-quoted anti-British "Reiterlied," the Burschenschaftliche Blatter had printed a poem dismissing and ridiculing the idea that Germany needed a strong navy,

Transnational Nationalists instead pressing for a shift of German foreign policies toward Central and Eastern Europe. 217 The inclusion of the "Deutsches Flottenlied" in the 1912 edition of the Allgemeines Deutsches Kommersbuch also should not be considered out of context. The book certainly contains an abundance of nationalistic and often explicitly anti-French songs with titles like "Deutsches Blut" (German Blood) but the "Deutsches Flottenlied" (German Fleet Song) (which even falls short of explicitly mentioning Britain at all, yet presses for a strong German fleet) is the only one of 850 songs which can be interpreted as anti-British. Particularly noteworthy as an indicator as to how well British students at Heidelberg got along with their German fellow students immediately before the war is the fact that the copy of the 1912 Kommersbuch held by the Bodleian Library at Oxford is the copy that belonged to William Connor Sydney. Having graduated from Oxford University and having studied for a semester each at Jena and Munich, Sydney at the age of forty came to study at Heidelberg for the last two semesters of peace. The book originally had been the copy of the Heidelberg corporation student Fritz Ritter. In July 1914, probably before Sydney's return to England, he dedicated it to Sydney: "W.C. Sydney from Fritz Ritter, Heidelberg Juli 1914." 218 However, the question remains whether British students only interacted amicably with their German fellow students or whether they got involved in attempts to improve Anglo-German relations in a similar manner to German students at Oxford. We have noted earlier that the Burschenschaftlichen Blatter had initially only given lukewarm support to the Rhodes scholarship. However, their initial unenthusiastic support has to be seen in the context of the Boer War. By 1908 things had changed. The magazine now supported Rhodes's endeavor and expressed its hope that others would follow the example of Rhodes and institute further scholarships for German students to study in Britain and the United States. 219 Anglo-German academic exchanges before 1914 were on a far larger scale than has traditionally been assumed, not just at Oxford but at Heidelberg too. In contrast to Russian students at Heidelberg, 220 research has widely ignored Britons at Heidelberg in the immediate decades before the First World War. In fact, crowds of British students and dons were attracted by the old town on the Neckar and other German universities. As a world-class university as well as an emblem of a romantic mythical German past, Heidelberg was a magnet for British students. When Mark Twain visited Heidelberg, he was invited by students to address the thriving "Anglo-American Club." 221 The image of Heidelberg in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century remained untouched by Anglo-German tensions and continued to be nothing short of idyllic, as

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evident in newspaper and magazine articles from the time: "A halo of romance surrounds the very name of Heidelberg to English ears, probably on account of the English Princess who was once chatelaine of the now ruined Castle." 222 Among those who studied there were Sir Jacob William Barth, who became attorney general in I9I2; the novelists William Somerset Mangham and Samuel Crocket; the president of the Physical Society Silvanus Thompson; and Archibald Clark Kerr (the later Lord Inverchapel and British ambassador to the Soviet Union). 223 In addition to those Oxford's dons who had been educated at Heidelberg, many British Jews-as we shall see in Chapter 6-also came to study in Heidelberg because there were more career opportunities for Jews in German academia. In I909, on his death, Ludwig Mond, the Jewish chemist, Heidelberg graduate, and honorary doctor of both Oxford and Heidelberg, left £5o,ooo to Heidelberg University. 224 When the Principal of Jesus College, John Rhys, wrote a letter of recommendation for his student Joseph Jones to study at Heidelberg in I9II, he looked back fondly on his own days at Heidelberg University: "I was an undergraduate at your university in the Sixties and never met with more kindness and courtesy than there, so I am always pleased to hear of any of our students going to Heidelberg." 225 The former member of the Oxford University Officers Training Corps, Joseph Jones, 226 was one of at least I58 British students who matriculated at Germany's ancient university between I899-I900 and I9I4 alone. In addition to these I58 students, I4 students came from the Dominions. This figure does not even include Britons who spent some time at Heidelberg University but did not matriculate, such as the future Minister of War Leslie Hore Belisha, 227 as well as most of the students of the Heidelberg College to which we will return shortly. It has been estimated that in total about 9,ooo British students were enrolled at German universities between I844 and I9I4. 228 To be sure, Heidelberg did not see an explosion of the numbers of British students comparable with the growth in the number of German Oxonians (Figure I). Indeed, the ratio of British students among the total number of foreign students fell steadily in the decades leading to the war (Figure 2). In the winter semester I9I3-I4 only 3.8 percent of all foreign students were British as compared to I0.6 percent in the summer semester I893· The main reason for this development certainly lies in the growth of higher education in Britain, with the result that more places at universities in their own country had become available for British students. As we will see in Chapter 6, the relative decline did not result from a change in Anglo-German relations but was a result of the political situation in Russia and the subsequent influx of Russian students in Heidelberg. Indeed, Figure I shows that

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