Berlin and Boundaries: Sollen versus geschehen

On the morning of 1 August 1892, William Edward Burghardt Du Bois stepped off an Atlantic steamer at Rotterdam. From there, the twenty-four-year-old Harvard graduate traveled up the Rhine to Eisenach, where he spent several weeks living with a German family named Marbach and learning the German language. After spending the summer with the Marbachs, Du Bois was fairly fluent in German and felt prepared to attend classes at the prestigious Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, where he matriculated on 17 October 1892.¹ Over the next three semesters, he attended sixteen classes, most of which were in political economy, while working toward a Ph.D. Du Bois, who had received an M.A. in history from Harvard University the year before, had already done some research for the doctorate, so it seemed nothing could stand between him and a Doktortitel from Friedrich Wilhelm University. In December 1893, he submitted his Ph.D. thesis, entitled “Der Landwirtschaftliche Gross-und Kleinbetrieb in den Vereinigten Staaten 1840–90.” His dream of attaining a Doktor, however, would remain unfulfilled. Du Bois was obliged to return to the United States in the spring of 1894 without the desired title.²

Du Bois’s stay at a German university needs to be understood in the context of the broader transatlantic academic migration that took place from 1820 to 1920, when as many as nine thousand American students and scholars studied in Germany, then considered to be an academic mecca. But how did a black American at the end of the nineteenth century manage to finance two years of study abroad? When Du Bois heard that the John F. Slater Fund, a philanthropic organization dedicated to the education of black Americans, had money available to support the European education of a black student but had been unable to find a black scholar, Du Bois contacted its head, the former U.S. President Rutherford Hayes, to apply for a scholarship. Du Bois had always wanted to study in Europe; in his valedictory speech at Fisk University, he had boldly and prophetically posed the question, “Why isn’t there a Fisk student at Leipzig or a Fisk metaphysician at Berlin?” He wrote to Hayes, informing him that he was a black scholar who could provide several letters of recommendation from his Harvard professors. When Hayes turned him down, claiming that no money was available, Du Bois wrote him a polite but direct letter expressing his disappointment and anger. Hayes responded with an apologetic letter, and, in the following year, the Slater Fund agreed to give Du Bois a $750 grant (half of which was a loan to be paid back at six-percent interest). Thus, by confronting a former U.S. president, accusing him of hypocrisy, and revealing the latent racism of liberal-philanthropic organizations such as the Slater Fund, Du Bois became the first black student from Fisk to attend the University of Berlin.

But why did Du Bois not receive the Ph.D.? Du Bois gave this answer in retrospect: “I wanted to take the examination but the rule was that you could not come up for an examination until you had been three semesters at the university and I’d only been two and that’s [because] I only had money for that. They tried to make an exception but the English professor had a lot of candidates so that no difference could be made.”³

The University of Berlin required six rather than three semesters of work for the Ph.D. However, because his dissertation supervisors expressed “so favorable an opinion in regard to Mr. Du Bois,” as Professor Gustav Schmoller put it in a letter to the Slater Fund, the Prüfungsamt would have dispensed with one or two semesters. In spite of this strong support from his dissertation advisor, the strict administrative requirements of the university prevented Du Bois from admission to the oral exam (Rigorosum). Thus the fact that Du Bois...