Our Friend 'The Enemy'. Elite education in Britain and Germany before World War I

Abstract

The dreaming spires of Oxford University, with its colleges, and the famous German university of Heidelberg, with its various fraternities and its ideal of academic freedom, seem to be part of very different worlds. Examining the history of both institutions in the period before the First World War, Thomas Weber demonstrates in a subtle analysis that this is a prejudice. His book is also an important contribution to the debates about the comparative history of German and British elites. Weber studies the life and culture of both universities systematically and is especially interested in the collegiate members of the German and British national elites in Oxford and Heidelberg. After a conceptual introduction Weber defines the specific positions of Oxford and Heidelberg in their respective national contexts. In this first chapter he substantiates his comparison very convincingly. Weber here first demonstrates how productive his approach is. He is not satisfied with listing superficially institutional differences, but looks behind the surface and identifies the important equivalences. In Chapter 2, Weber shows that before 1914 there was a vital Anglo–German life, both in Oxford and in Heidelberg. Men who took part in it were central to the German and British elites. Weber describes them as cosmopolitan nationalists who linked their own national identities with a transnational European identity based on the idea of superiority of the related German and Anglo-Saxon cultures. Finding and analysing such kinds of (trans)national identities is an important challenge for the historians of nationalism. In the following four chapters Weber studies militarism, nationalism, student sexuality, the male reaction to women's emancipation, antisemitism and attitudes towards foreigners. Identifying many equivalent developments, Weber convincingly refutes central postulates of the German Sonderweg thesis and argues that before 1914 Oxford and Heidelberg were far more alike than they were different. He also argues that there is no convincing evidence for the assumption that the British and German elites wished for a war to stop social change and to defend their social and political positions. Instead, he argues that the hostility between German and British academics was the result of, rather than the cause of, the outbreak of the First World War, emphasizing the caesura of 1914.