Dueling Students: Conflict, Masculinity, and Politics in German Universities, 1890-1914, by Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker.

Abstract

Dueling Students: Conflict, Masculinity, and Politics in German Universities, 1890-1914, by Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker. Ann Arbor, Michigan, University of Michigan Press, 2011. 314 pp. $75.00 US (cloth). During the forty seven years of its existence, Imperial Germany was best known (apart from its military) for the exceptional quality of its universities. American students flocked to these institutions in the thousands, including two young Afro-Americans, W.E.B. Du Bois and Alaine Locke. Both sang the praises of their German education for decades. Germany, with its doctorates and research-oriented faculty was highly respected as the best academic system in the western world before 1914. This was recognized in Europe as well as the United States. Post World War II scholars, however, were quite negative about these same pre-1914 institutions. Historians such as Konrad Jarausch, Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Peter Gay, and Fritz Ringer found these institutions to have been ultra-nationalistic, anti-Semitic, as well as thoroughly conservative. To this list one has to add their distaste for the common student practice of sword fights, or To some extent, Germany's disasters in the first half of the century were seen as having roots in the pre-World War I universities and their professoriate. In her book, Dueling Students: Conflict, Masculinity, and Politics in German Universities, 1890-1914, Lisa Fetheringill Zwicker challenges the scholarship of the past forty years and offers a different analysis of Imperial German universities and their student body. Her research is prodigious. She has mined twenty archives, including all those having material on German universities in their prime. In a volume of 290 pages, 84 are devoted to footnotes and bibliography. Her book may not appeal to all members of an older generation of scholars (of which I am one), but it is certainly worth reading, and its attempt to offer a somewhat different narrative is worthy of serious consideration. Surprisingly, Zwicker is not particularly troubled by student dueling. She views it as no worse in Germany thanboxing was at British universities or football at US Ivy League institutions of the same period. I would disagree, since dueling had a long history in German-speaking Europe and, in many respects, was an aristocratic holdover from the distant past. Dueling fraternities did not permit Jews or women to participate. Dr. Zwicker romanticizes dueling in her chapter on the subject. As for anti-semitism, she quite rightly points to its existence in contemporary American and British universities. This is not to excuse the Germans, but to show it was a disease, if not a violent one in the pre-World War I west. In one respect she points out that Germany should be praised, since 6% of German students were Jewish and they comprised only 1% of the population. This, I would think, is a product of the Abitur system in Germany for university admission, which was based on excellence on exams and did not require interviews as in the US and UK. The latter made the rejection of Jews much easier. The strongest and most convincing argument in the book is the long discussion of anti-Catholic fever at German universities, a malady shared by student fraternities and professors. …