The Student-Life of Germany

by William Howitt

[CHAPTER XXV.]

A REVIEW OF THE POLITICAL ASPECT OF STUDENT LIFE.

If we have hitherto regarded the life and pursuits of the university in an isolated manner, and entirely on its own account, yet it can by no means have escaped the reader that this life does not stand so completely sundered from the general stream of events, but that the mind and spirit of the university life is determined by the spirit of the times, and that, on the other hand, it operates again powerfully on the developement of the institutions and condition of the times. This must have become sufficiently clear to us in noticing the earlier Burschenschaft, and to increase and complete that conviction, we have only to take a hasty review of what has been now written, and to add a few other remarks.

The universities reflect the spirit of the times: its progress, its weakness, its strength, are all imaged forth again in the science of the age; and the schools are therefore exposed to the changes and revolutions of the times, but are not unconditionally subjected to them. They have strengthened that spirit of the time and of the people in their exhaustion, by their inquiries and results; and not less through teaching and the invisible power with which they have elevated and ennobled the minds of the youth. They have enriched the sciences, and adorned public affairs with beauty and wisdom. They have in part laid the foundations of the intellectual greatness and high accomplishment of Germany; in part strengthened and guaranteed them; and are the pillars of the fairest and most unrivalled glory which our country in the most recent times, and before the eyes of all Europe, has achieved. The university is the central point and the heart of science. From all sides stream to it the spirits which are athirst for knowledge; and as they are ennobled, again from that central point disperse themselves through all the members of Germany, diffusing through them fresh nourishment and a splendid growth. The teachers and accomplishers of the people go forth out of them. The battles of the church were fought out in the university; and if, as it happened in the contest of the Reformation, the faith of the Princess was forced upon the High-school by the hand of power, yet the teachers and scholars of the university seldom bowed before it. The teachers abandoned a place, which would lay their consciences in chains, and sacrificing office and income, sought an asylum in foreign lands. They often found a refuge in another university which held the same faith as themselves; they carried with them the troop of their scholars, who, as their faithful bodyguard, attended them; and there fought anew and victoriously for the success of the good cause.

The Professors of the High-schools have pre-eminently cooperated in working out the constitution of the German States, and many excellent men amongst them have contended for the freedom of the people, and have boldly stood forward against every usurpation of despotism. We need only give one example, and that of the most recent date; we need only call to the reader's mind the Seven Professors of Göttengen, who opposed themselves to the arbitrary violation of the constitution of the state with all their power, and on that account in the most unprincipled manner were ejected from their professorships. This scandalous, and in Germany till then, unheard-of example of despotism, notoriously threatened the destruction of the Georgia-Augusta, and for a long time annihilated its prosperity; but other states, by their reception and establishment of these professors, have shown that they approved of their proceeding, and the exiled professors were every where received by the German students with the testimonies of the deepest veneration. If the Bundestag did not condemn the King of Hanover as guilty, yet the judgments are well known, which many German universities at its desire gave in, and in which they expressed in the most strong and unqualified language their sense of the injustice of the deed. We call to mind that the tyrant called on the King of Wirtemberg to punish the audacity of the professors of Tübingen who had sent in such a judgment, according to the enormity of their crime,--an audacity which in Hanover would be expiated in chains; but the noble monarch answered that in his land the freedom of teaching was a sacred possession, which he would never infringe; but, for the rest, he observed sarcastically, he left it to the High Court of Justice at Celle to pronounce sentence on the guilt or innocence of his faithful professors.

If the universities in such a manner grapple mightily with the circumstances of the times, so are they, on the other hand, influenced by them. They receive from the times the impressions, the tendency, the frivolity as well as the earnestness, and distinguish themselves only from the other circles of society in this, that in them the good and the evil of the times more rapidly unfold themselves and take a determinate form. The moral effeminacy of the nation at the time of the French domination, operated on the ignoble natures amongst the youth, scattering and dissolving; while it spurred on the nobler to those Verbindungs out of which, at a later period, went forth hosts to do battle for the liberation of the nation from a foreign yoke. After the rising of the nation and its consequence--victory over the foe,--as all hearts felt themselves elevated, all exertions felt themselves refined, the new form of the time stood forth in the yet pure aims of the Burschenschaft, which at the time when the Tugend-bund extended itself, constituted, on its first appearance, a continuation of the brotherhood-in-arms, the Waffengenossenschaft, which with the student youth returning from the war, had this object,--to purify academical life from its dross, and to present it as an image of the union and ennobling of all the German races. Hereupon followed the period of undeceiving, of counteraction, of degeneracy, which run into so unrestrained a career, that to the wise and prudent, the beautiful time of enthusiasm, appeared as the dream and frenzy of good-natured fools. As the youth would not abandon the objects of their endeavours, whether rational or chimerical, but, on the contrary, held them equally fast as something great and noble, a portion of them fell a secure prey to the unquiet, the revolutionists and political intriguers, who abused their inexperience, and poisoned their noble endeavours by infusing a resistance to public order. The teachers of the universities were blamed by many, as though they were chargeable with being concerned in these aberrations of the youth, or, at least, were so far culpable that they had not prevented them.

So far as a direct participation of the teachers in these political disturbances is concerned, we may be well assured that, if only a single professor had at any time been an accomplice, or indeed only a concealer and protector, of the guilty, the exact, the strict, and in many places for years protracted inquiries, would to a certainty have come upon the trace of their crimes, and the guilty would have been conducted from the professorial chair to the dungeon. There remains only the question, whether they, though taking no part in the views and proceedings of the young people, were yet aware of them, and took no steps to prevent them. But were the youths who fell under the power of the law, the only ones who trod the same dangerous path? Were there not amongst the others, some, perhaps even as many, who, through the warnings and exhortations, or through the moral influence of distinguished teachers; and, in short, through the better spirit which every well conducted university developes amongst the nobler part of the youth, were preserved from that mischief? But, so far as the actually implicated students were concerned, the professors were in the same case with the Boards, expressly organized for the watching over the youth, and the matter was quite unknown to them, since the youths who were mutually pledged to that object, concealed it from the eyes of the professors just as scrupulously as from those of the university Commission of inquiry, and the Boards of police. But to the liberation of Germany from the dominion of Napoleon, the High-schools contributed no little. Joyfully their scholars gave themselves up to death, and scholars and teachers roused the nations to bravery through inspiriting songs; of which the names of Arndt, Schenkendorf, Körner, Hauff, Follen, Voss, Stolberg, Scharnhorst, and Haupt, stand as glorious testimonies.

Yet once more the youth wandered from their laudable endeavours in the years 1830-33, and one portion of them although a small one, suffered themselves to become the work-tools of political fanaticism. The revolution in Poland, and the unhappy fate of that country, had made a vivid impression on their minds. Demagogic agitators again were busy in secret; private Verbindungs were formed; the catastrophe of the French Revolution of July occurred, and flung the firebrand into the powder magazine. People thought they must follow the example of France, and began loudly, with writing and by speech, to attack the governments and to abuse the princes. But the youth who attached themselves to these agitators, were no longer the old Burschenschaft, who steadfast to their one idea,--"One Fatherland, which should declare itself the worthy antagonist of the arch-enemy France; one church, and freedom," fought out this with word and deed: no, the modern Burschenschaft, an abused work-tool of a greater party, had sworn death to the hereditary princes, and did not shrink, as a means of achieving such an object, to offer the hand even to the old enemy, to France itself. They would dare the highest extremes; and, allured by the apparent quietness of the government, the assembly at Hambach, which has become so widely celebrated, was held in 1833, where the French colours, and the tri-colour of the Burschenschaft, fluttered from the same staff. There, death to the princes was sworn, and within a short time revolutionary movements broke out in all parts of Germany. A number of the academic youth plunged themselves into misfortune through the attempt at Frankfort, since the governments now found it necessary to exercise stringent measures with all their power, and all partisans of such demagogue Verbindungs were quickly either arrested, or, having been timely warned, fled.

It may well be supposed that from this time forward, a much stricter eye was kept upon every sort of Verbindung of the students. No Landsmannschaft dare lift its head, and the academical liberty was in many particulars restricted. Another injurious effect also became apparent. Many states, more particularly Prussia and Russia, forbade their subjects to frequent any but their own universities, and no university felt the loss occasioned by this order more than Heidelberg, where the attendance of Prussian subjects has only again been recently permitted.

Yet, after all, only a small portion of the student youth, suffered themselves to be carried away by these imprudences; and what might be the reacting effect of these lamentable occurrences, the reflection of the students on themselves and on their calling, on what became them and was for their real advantage, further strengthened and quickened by the seriousness with which the governments pursued the guilty, produced in them a greater exactness, and gave thereby a higher moral firmness to the academical life, so that far from being represented as a sink of wickedness, as some people believe it, it may much more justly be regarded now as a fruitful, purified, well-drained, and well-sown, field. The channels, constructed to lay dry the boggy places, are cleared; the unsound spots are probed and made good; and if the watchful superintendence of circumspect and well-disposed Boards, and the professional faithfulness of the majority of the academical teachers continue what they are, this corn-field of our future will yet bear continually more beautiful and affluent harvests.