Germany and the Germans from an American Point of View

by Price Collier

The German youth, owing to widely different customs and ideals, chooses his university for other reasons. If he be of the well-to-do classes, and his father before him was a corps student, he is likely to go first to the university, where his father’s corps will receive him and discipline him in the ways of a corps student’s life, and rigorous ways they are, as we shall see. Young men of small means, and who can afford to waste little time in the amusements of university life, go at once where the more celebrated professors in their particular line of work are lecturing.

Few students in Germany reside during their whole course of study at one university. The student year is divided into two so-called semesters. The student remains, say, in Heidelberg two years or perhaps less, and then moves on, let us say, to Berlin, or Göttingen, or Leipsic, or Kiel, to hear lectures by other professors, and to get and to see something of the best work in law, theology, medicine, history, or belles-lettres, along the lines of his chosen work.

One can hardly say too much in praise of this system. Many a medical, or law, or theological, or philosophical student, or one who is going in for a scientific course in engineering or mining, would profit enormously could he go from Harvard to Yale, or to Johns Hopkins, or to Princeton, or to Columbia, and attend the lectures of the best men at these and other universities. Many a man would have gone eagerly to Harvard to hear James in philosophy, Peirce in mathematics, Abbot in exegesis, or to read Greek with Palmer; or to Yale to have heard Whitney in philology in my day; or now, to name but a few, Van Dyke at Princeton, Sloane at Columbia, Wheeler at the University of California, Paul Shorey at Chicago, and many others are men whom not to know and to hear in one’s student days is a loss.

The German student is at a distinct advantage in this privilege of hearing the best men at whatever university they may be. The number of students, indeed, at particular German universities rises and falls in a large measure according to the fame and ability of the professors who may be lecturing there. One can readily imagine how such men as Hegel, or Ranke, or Mommsen, who lectured at Berlin; or Liebig or Döllinger, at Munich; or Ewald, at Göttingen; or Sybel, at Bonn; or Leibnitz or Schlegel, in their day, or Kuno Fischer, in my day, at Heidelberg, must have drawn students from all parts of Germany; just as do Harnack, and Schmidt, and Lamprecht, and Adolph Wagner, Schmoller, or Gierke, or Schiemann, or Wach, Haeckel, List, Deitsch, Hering, or Verworm, in these days. Though the German professors are somewhat hampered by the fact that they are servants of the state, and their opinions therefore on theological, political, and economic matters restricted to the state’s views, they are free as no other teachers in the world to exploit their intellectual prowess for the benefit of their purses. Each student pays each professor whose lectures he attends, and as a result there are certain professors in Germany whose incomes are as high as $50,000 a year.

Even in intellectual matters state control produces the inevitable state laziness and indifference. One could tell many a tale of professors who arrive late at their lecture-rooms, who read slowly, who give just as little matter as they can, in order to make their prepared work go as far as possible. Some of them, too, read the same lectures over and over again, year after year, quite content that they have made a reputation, gained a fixed tenure of their positions, and are sure of a pension.

There are twenty-one universities in Germany, with another already provided for this year in Frankfort, and practically the equivalent of a university in Hamburg. The total number of students is 66,358, an increase since 1895 of 37,791. Geographically speaking, one has the choice between Kiel, Königsberg, and Berlin in the north, Munich in the south, Strassburg on the boundaries of France, or Breslau in Silesia. At the present writing Berlin has 9,686 students, and some 5,000 more authorized to attend lectures, over half of them grouped under the general heading “Philosophy”; next comes Munich with 7,000, nearly 5,000 of them grouped under the headings “Jurisprudence” and “Philosophy”; then Leipsic with 5,000; then Bonn with 4,000; and last in point of numbers Rostock with 800 students. There are now some 1,500 women students at the German universities, but a total of 4,500 who attend lectures, and Doctor Marie Linden at the beginning of 1911 was appointed one of the professors of the medical faculty at Bonn, but the appointment was vetoed by the Prussian ministry.

In addition to the universities is the modern development of the technical high-schools, of which there are now eleven, one each in Berlin, Dresden, Braunschweig, Darmstadt, Hanover, Karlsruhe, Munich, Stuttgart, Danzig, Aix, and Breslau. These schools have faculties of architecture, building construction, mechanical engineering, chemistry, and general science, including mathematics and natural science. They confer the degree of Doctor of Engineering, and admit those students holding the certificate of the Gymnasium, Realgymnasium, and Oberrealschule. They rank now with the universities, and their 17,000 students may fairly be added to the grand total number of German students, making 83,000 in all, and if to this be added the 4,000 unmatriculated students, we have 87,000.

While the population of Germany has increased 1.4 per cent. in the last year, the number of students has increased 4.6 per cent. and of the total number 4.4 per cent. are women. Since the founding of the empire the population has increased from 40,000,000 to 65,000,000, but the number of students has increased from 18,000 to 60,000. The teaching staffs in the universities number 3,400, and in the technical high-schools 753, or, roughly, there are, in the higher-education department of Germany, nearly 90,000 persons engaged; as these figures do not include officials and many unattached teachers and students indirectly connected with the universities. There are in addition agricultural high-schools, agricultural institutes, and technical schools such as veterinary high-schools, schools of mining, forestry, architecture and building, commercial schools, schools of art and industry; a naval school at Kiel; a colonial institute at Hamburg, with sixty professors and tutors, where men are trained for colonial careers, and which serves also the purpose of distributing information of all kinds regarding the colonies; there are 400 schools which prepare for a business career, with 50,000 pupils, and the Socialists in Berlin maintain an academy for the instruction of their paid secretaries and organizers in the rudiments and controversial points of socialism, military academies at Berlin and Munich, besides some 50 schools of navigation, and 20 military and cadet institutions. There are also courses of lectures, given under the auspices of the German foreign office, to instruct candidates for the consular service in the commercial and industrial affairs of Germany.

At several of the universities evening extension lectures are given, an innovation first tried at Leipsic, where more than seven thousand persons paid small fees to attend the lectures in a recent year.

If one considers the range of instruction from the Volkschulen and Fortbildungsschulen up through the skeleton list I have mentioned to the universities, and then on beyond that to the thousands still engaged as students in the commerce and industry of Germany, as, for example, the technically employed men in the Krupp Works at Essen, or the Color Works at Elberfeld, to mention two of hundreds, it is seen that Germany is gone over with a veritable fine-tooth comb of education. There is not only nothing like it, there is nothing comparable to it in the world. If training the minds of a population were the solution of the problems of civilization, they are on the way to such solution in Germany. Unfortunately there is no such easy way out of our troubles for Germany or for any other nation. Some of us will live to see this fetich of regimental instruction of everybody disappear as astrology has disappeared. There is a Japanese proverb which runs, “The bottom of lighthouses is very dark.”