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Just as the worldview, the concept of science, and the image of Germany held by William James were shaped by his encounters in Central Europe, so the mental map of the European continent in the minds of other American academic teachers and administrators was equally formed by their years of study spent at German universities. The impressions that John W. Burgess (1844–1931), a professor of political science at Columbia University, had gathered at a number of German universities accompanied him throughout his career. It culminated in his acceptance of a visiting professorship under the aegis of the German emperor.1 Even before Harvard established an academic exchange with the University of Berlin in 1904, various university presidents were eager to reform their institutions, among them Andrew White from Cornell University, James Angell from the University of Michigan, G. Stanley Hall from Clark University, and Nicholas Murray Butler from Columbia University. During the restructuring they drew on their own experiences at German universities.2 That Lincoln Steffens (1866–1936), who was to become a prominent journalist and social critic, completed his education at the universities of Berlin, Heidelberg, and Leipzig (1889–1891),3 and that W. E. B. Du Bois, the future spokesman of the African Americans, went on to read cultural and social studies in Berlin with the intention of earning a much desired doctorate, resulted from several of their teachers having spent what had become by then the almost obligatory semester in Germany. These visiting students had gained an insight into the German university scene and into the political, social, and ideological fabric of the German Empire; they had, however, also noted many a phenomenon which, in a period of estrangement between Germany and the United States, were to serve as ammunition for political and cultural conflicts.4 That the cultural scene in northern Germany, and the academic and scholarly institutions there, greatly appealed to American graduates in those decades (though it also furnished material for adverse criticism), is apparent in CHAPTER 4 TRANSATLANTIC ENCOUNTERS FIN-DE-SIÈCLE ESTRANGEMENT the reactions of members of the Dabney family. After seven years of education at Hampden-Sidney and at the University of Virginia, Charles William Dabney (1855–1945) decided to study chemistry and mineralogy at Göttingen, where he received the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in August 1880. In his correspondence with his future wife, Mary Brent of Kentucky,5 who herself toured Europe after their relationship began in Göttingen early in 1879, Dabney wrote enthusiastically about the music he had enjoyed with her in Berlin. He also dwelt on the romantic feelings engendered in him during a visit to picturesque Heidelberg, where she very much occupied his mind. In anticipating her return to their own country, he admitted the absence of many of the cultural attractions he enjoyed in the heart of Germany but consoled himself with the prospect of living as a (re)united couple in their homeland.6 Dabney’s praise of the cultural scene in Germany and the considerable bene fits he had derived from his postgraduate studies in Göttingen (which secured him senior scientific and then administrative positions at home),7 did not prevent him from taking an active role during World War I in the conflict with the large segment of the population of Cincinnati of German provenance. His father, Robert Lewis Dabney, a prominent Presbyterian clergyman, had accepted his son’s invitation to join him in Germany and undertake a grand tour in 1880. He felt uneasy when observing papist rituals in various European countries but also expressed his dissatisfaction with the theological “vagaries” he had found in German divinity schools. In his contacts with German scholars , he was struck by their relative lack of information on America and on the South in particular, and criticized them for their ignorance of the scholarly achievements of other nations. “Their contempt for the scholarship of other nations is absurd and most blamable.”8 That element of alleged arrogance may have stuck and continued to trouble not only him but also his son in the following decades when the estrangement between Germany and the United States in the political sphere came to affect academic relations. It also helped to put an end to the great reputation German academia had enjoyed in America. At first, however, respect for German cultural achievements still predominated , and the activities of prominent historians and Germanophile writers like Bancroft and Taylor, ambassadors to Berlin, consolidated...

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