The Transatlantic World of Higher Education: Americans at German Universities, 1776–1914 by Anja Werner (review)

Anja Werner’s book combines statistics and biography to examine both the numbers and lives of Americans who traveled abroad to Germany to attend university during the “long nineteenth century.” Her detailed study seeks to broaden the narrow focus of existing historiography. Werner argues that even the most respected authors in this field have produced studies that are inadequate in certain ways. On the one had, Konrad Jarausch’s important book from 1984, Deutsche Studenten, is a broad overview of the period 1800–1970 but lacks crucial detail. His contribution to the 1995 edited work, German Influences, on the other hand, is statistically detailed but focuses narrowly on the University of Göttingen. By combining comprehensive statistical analysis with geographic and temporal breadth, Werner’s study seeks to remedy these inadequacies. Her statistical analysis of the American student bodies of the universities of Halle and Leipzig, and to a lesser degree Heidelberg, aims to “provide a more multifaceted picture of student migration and its role within the evolution of an educational national mainstream” (5). Likewise, Carl Diehl’s 1978 study, American and German Scholarship examines only the decades up to 1870 (45). In contrast, Werner traces these student populations from 1776 to 1914, identifying five phases of student migration that, she argues, coincided with wars on both sides of the Atlantic as well as periods of major reform in American institutions of higher learning. She also uses letters, journals, and memoirs to take the reader beyond academic life to tell a story that she convincingly argues has not yet been told.

Among Werner’s methodological tools is a practice she describes as “zooming in” (5). She argues that, by focusing on one country, city, and university, it is possible to add individual nuance to a national or transatlantic picture and thereby “create a more comprehensive picture” of American student life in Germany (2). The value of this approach is evident in Werner’s ability to provide such wonderfully detailed examples of the daily lives of American students in Germany—such as one student’s concern that his German landlady’s Thanksgiving turkey would “be a poor substitute for the genuine article” (218). Zooming in also allows Werner to focus on students who did not fit the mainstream in various ways: women, African Americans, homosexuals, and the physically disabled. In the most intriguing of Werner’s eight chapters, “The German University, Masculinity, and ‘The Other,’” Werner offers the striking observation that “it did not matter why Germans gave African Americans a feeling of equality. It mattered that they did” (78). She passionately argues that these stories are intertwined with, rather than subordinate to, those of the white male heterosexual majority. It is therefore necessary that they should be told as part of, rather than separate from, the mainstream narrative. This noble sentiment is unfortunately undermined by the fact that these stories rarely reappear in other chapters.

In her endeavor to add nuance to our understanding of American student life in Germany, Werner sometimes “zooms in” too close. For instance, Werner draws heavily on the American Students Club to illustrate how academic concerns meshed with social life. It is not evident that this club is representative of the American student experience in Germany as a whole. It existed only in Leipzig, and only for four semesters between 1890 and 1892 with 28 members at its peak, although it did reconstitute itself as the American Association of Students from 1900 to 1909. By zooming in, therefore, Werner is herself perpetuating the narrow focus of which she is so critical. In addition, her extensive details come at the expense of valuable international context. Readers are thus asked to evaluate the influence of German education in a vacuum. How many students attended American universities in general and what percentage then went overseas? Of those who went overseas, what percentage attended German, as opposed to French...