The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 07, No. 41, March, 1861

It may have contributed not a little to the reputation of Göttingen and Heidelberg with foreigners, that a good and clear German is spoken in both places by the professors. In Tübingen, on the contrary, even in Munich, to a great extent, the local dialect prevails to such a degree, that students from Northern Germany, many of whom frequent these cities in the summer session, find it difficult, nay, almost impossible, to understand at first, especially the broad Suabian of Tübingen. Here, however, as the system of dictation prevails, the slowness of utterance compensates in a measure for its indistinctness and incorrectness.

In some places, where academic freedom, as the students style it, exists to a high degree, a general scraping of the feet admonishes the lecturer to repeat his words or be more distinct and clear in his enunciation. This pedal language, though often disregarded, still does not fail in the end in producing the desired effect.

With such characteristics, it cannot be a matter of wonder, if some time be required to be spent in hearing lectures daily before the full benefit can be fairly appreciated. Many will appear slow in the extreme; and the constant recourse to notes, and the tedious manner, will create a feeling of weariness hard to overcome. However, these peculiarities are soon forgotten in the excellence of the matter, and their disagreeableness is scarcely noticed after a few weeks, except in extreme cases. The mannerism fades away, and the hearer learns to follow from thought to thought under the guidance of an experienced leader, whose living words he hears, whose thought he feels as it is communicated directly to him.

Not so much from the actual things heard, the actual facts mastered, is the lecture-system valuable to the student, as for the method of study which he derives from it. He is no longer like an automaton, a school-boy guided by his teacher and text-book, but is spoken to as an independent thinker. Authorities are quoted, which he may consult at his leisure. No subject is exhausted,—it is only touched upon. He learns to teach himself.

Far different is the mental training thus acquired from that gained in the same amount of time spent in mere reading. Thought is stimulated to a far greater degree. The lecture-room becomes a laboratory, where the mind of the hearer, in immediate contact with that of a man mature in the ways of study, of one whose whole life seems to have prepared him for the present hour, assimilates to itself more than knowledge. The lecturer gives what no books can give, his own force to impel his own words. His mind is ever active while he speaks. The hearer feels its workings, and his own is stirred into action by the contact. It is not given to all to enjoy the conversation and intercourse of the master-minds of the age: in the lecture-room they speak to us immediately; we feel the current of their life-blood; it pulsates through all they say.

That seeming exceptions may occur, as in the case of professors who year after year deliver the same written course, can have no weight against the system. The tone and gesture, the very look, must animate the whole;—and these very written lectures, read and delivered so often, are no dead stalk, but a living stem, which puts forth new leaves and blossoms every spring.

Nor is the hearer himself without his corresponding influence. His attention and eager desire for knowledge stimulate new thought in the speaker day by day, hour by hour; and many a German scholar must have felt with Friedrich August Wolf, when he says,—"I am one who has been long accustomed to the gentle charm which lies in the momentaneous unfolding of thought in the presence of attentive hearers, to that living reaction softly felt by the teacher, whereby a perennial mental harmony is awakened in his soul, which far surpasses the labors in the study, before blank walls and the feelingless paper."

THE STUDIES

The first entrance into a German auditorium or Hörsaal, as the lecture-rooms in the universities are called, will show much that is characteristic. But little care is bestowed on the decoration of the apartment. Whatever aesthetic culture the nation may have, it finds little manifestation in the things of daily life, and elegance seems little less than banished from the precincts of the learned world. The academic halls present to the view nothing but dingy walls, rough floors coated with the dust and mud of days or weeks, and, winter and summer, the huge porcelain stove in one corner,—that immovable article of cheerless German furniture, where wood is put in by the pound, and no bright glow ever discloses the presence of that warmest friend of man, a good fire. For the students there are coarse, long wooden desks and benches, with places all numbered, cut up and disfigured to an extent which will soon convince one that whittling is not a trait of American destructiveness exclusively. Here are carved names and intertwined lettering, arabesque masterpieces of penknife-ingenuity, with a general preponderance of feminine appellatives, bold incisures, at times, of some worthy professor in profile,—the whole besmutched with ink, and dotted with countless punctures, the result of the sharp spike with which every student's ink-horn is armed, that he may steady it upon the slanting board. The preceding lecture ended when the university-clock struck the hour; the next should begin within ten or fifteen minutes. One by one the students drop in and take their places,—high and low, rich and poor, all on the same straight-backed pine benches. The days fire over, even in title-loving Germany, though not long since, when the young counts and barons sat foremost, on a privileged, raised, and cushioned seat, and were addressed by their title.

As the hearers thus assemble, they present a motley appearance,—being, in the larger cities especially, from all lands, all ranks of society, and of every age. Side by side with the young freshman in his first semester, the Fat Fox, as he is called, who has just made a leap from the strict discipline of the gymnasium to the unbounded freedom of the university, will be a gray-haired man, to whom the academic title of Juvenis Studiosus will no longer apply. Here sits, with his gaudy watch-guard, the colors of his corps, one of those students by profession who have been inscribed year after year so long that they have acquired the name of Bemossed Heads. Were his scientific attainments measured by his capacities for beer-drinking and sword-slashing, he would long ago have been dubbed a Doctor in all the faculties. He hears a lecture now and then for form's sake, though it is rather an unusual thing for him. By his side, but retiring and earnest, may be one of the younger professors, who the hour before stood as a teacher, and now sits among some of his former hearers to profit by the experience of his older professional brother. Where the court resides and many officers are garrisoned, the hall presents a spangled appearance of bright epaulettes and glittering uniforms. It is no unusual thing for young men during their years of service to attend the courses regularly. The uncomfortable sword is laid on the knee, where it may not dangle and clink with every motion of the wearer,—no easy task in the very narrow space left between desk and desk. In the last century, it was a universal custom for all students to wear the sword; but this academic privilege, as it was considered, leading to numerous abuses, laws were enacted against it, as well as other eccentricities in dress.

The regular students are provided with portfolios, or rather, soft leathern pouches, which they can fold and pocket, containing the heft or quire of paper on which the lecture is transcribed by them wholly or in part. These hefts are often the object of much care and labor. Each plants his ink-horn firmly in front of him. As the time approaches, and all are in readiness with pen in hand, there is a universal buzz throughout the room. Though, when the auditory is large, many nations are represented, as well as the various provinces of the Confederation, still the language heard is predominantly that of the country. Though Poles and Greeks, English and Russians, may be in abundance, still they rarely congregate in nationalities,—save the Poles, who speak their own language at all times and places, and cling the more fondly to their own idiom since they have been robbed of everything else. After some fifteen minutes of expectation the professor enters. All is still in an instant. He advances with hasty strides and bent-down head to his rostrum, an elevated platform, on which stands a plain, high, pine desk. He unfolds his notes, looks over the rim of his spectacles at the attentive hearers, who sit ready to write down the words of wisdom he is about to utter, and begins with the short address, "Meine Herren." There is then an uninterrupted gliding of pens for three-quarters of an hour, until, above the monotony, rarely the eloquence, of the speaker, the great clock in the centre of the building gives the significant sound of relief to busy fingers and rest to ear and brain unaccustomed to such slow, entangled, lisping, laborious, in rare instances manly delivery. The lecture is at an end, and each prepares to enter another auditorium, or wends his way home, to study out the notes taken, consult the authorities quoted, complete or even copy his work anew. In the study of these hefts consists the main preparation for future examinations, as text-books are rarely used, save in Austria, and the examiners are the professors themselves, who will not ask the candidate much beyond what they have embraced in their own lesson.

With a remarkable degree of skill, the practised German student can take down, even when the delivery is by no means slow, the pith and essence of a whole lecture. Yet there is much abuse in this; and it has called forth, ever since the invention of printing has made the multiplication of books by transcription unnecessary, much just, though at times unjust criticism. A German writer has said, that the man of genius takes his notes on a slip of paper, he of good abilities on a half-page, while the dunce must fill a whole sheet. Now the reverse would be quite as true in many cases. For though thoughtless writing may be little more than wasted labor, yet there is nothing that can fix more steadily thoughts and facts in the mind than the precision and constant attention required in following a lecture with the pen, especially when the words of the professor are not taken down with slavish exactitude, but when, as is most generally the case, merely the thoughts are noted in the hearer's own language. The ideas thus gained have been assimilated and become the listener's own property. There is thus generated a steady transfusion, the surest remedy against flagging mental activity. Many a foreigner writes down the lecture in his own tongue, and values highly this training of constant translation, though, before many months, the mere transposition from one language into the other must become purely mechanical. It is amusing to see the puzzled expression of countenance of some Swiss student who takes his notes in French, when one of those long German compounds, involving some bold figure of speech, is uttered. What circumlocutions must he not use, if he wish to give the full force of the idea!

A real abuse, however, is the perpetual dictation-system still used by some. For these, the three worthies in profile on the title-page of old Elzevir editions are as if they had never existed; they teach as they have been taught, perpetuating the methods in use in the days of Abelard, when books were dearer than time. All that has been said and written against the custom will do less towards abolishing it than the recent introduction of lessons in phonography, or stenography rather, which is now taught in several universities. The question is agitated of introducing this study into the preparatory schools. The system is different from the English or American, being based on the etymological nature of the language. It is fast coming into use, though as yet not general. The old slow delivery seems little better than spelling to those that have mastered it. The students have usually special abbreviations of their own, and so find no difficulty in taking down all the important points, even when the utterance is rapid.

Not all, by any means, go through this labor of transcription. Many of the wealthier and high-titled attend but irregularly, and when they do, are impatient listeners. In Berlin may be seen many a youth who, from the exquisite fit and finish of his dress, if he be not an American just from Paris, must at least be a German count The young Graf plays with his lips on the ivory head of his bamboo, as he holds it with his kid-gloved hand, sitting carefully the while, lest the elbow of his French coat should be soiled by contact with a desk ignorant of duster for many a month. He is condemned, however, to hear, day by day, over and over, many a truth that will scarcely flatter his noble ears. The heft and the toil of writing down a lecture are unknown to him. He pays a reasonable sum to some poor scholar who sits behind and copies it all afterwards, while he takes his afternoon-ride towards Charlottenburg, or saunters along Unter-den-Linden, ogling the pretty English girls, and spying every chance of saluting, whenever a royal equipage, preceded by a monkey-looking lackey, rolls by. These are, of course, exceptions, rarer in the present than formerly. In Padua, in the sixteenth century, it became notorious that the richer students never attended in person, but always sent one of their servants who wrote a good hand. Laws were enacted to prevent the evil, yet long after this there were still many promotions of these paper-doctors.

Many, in taking their notes, abandon the German script as too illegible, and make use of the Latin letters. A word or two on this subject, as connected with general education. The German script, which any one may learn in a few hours, is a constant source of vexation to a foreigner. To write, and write fast, too, is easy enough; but then to read one's own handwriting, not to mention the crumpled notices of the professors tacked on the blackboard in the Aula, is almost impossible without much practice. Why the Germans should have kept their Gothic lettering and peculiar script, when all other European nations, save the Russian, have adopted the Roman, it is difficult to say, unless it be with them a matter of national pride. And they have been unnational in so many things! That the Russians should have their own alphabet is natural enough; they have sounds and letters and combinations—which neither the Germanic nor the Romanic group of languages possess. And yet both in Polish and Zechish, where the same sounds exist to a great extent, the deficiencies are made up by accented and dotted letters. So, though we have a universal standard of spelling for names and places on the Continent, we find in our most popular histories and geographies a divergence in the lesser known Russian names, not far removed from that we daily meet in the nomenclature of the gods of Hindoo mythology.

The like plea of necessity cannot be urged in regard to the Teutonic or Scandinavian languages. Within the last quarter of a century, the chief scientific works issued in Northern Germany, and many even in Southern, have been printed in the Roman character. Were there no other argument in favor of its universal adoption, it has been found less trying to the eyes. It can be read by all nations; and the other is at best but an additional difficulty for the learner, even in the case of native children, who are plagued with two alphabets and two diametrically opposite systems of penmanship in their earliest years. The result is evident: a good hand is a rare thing In Germany. It is a good sign, that of late years public acts and records, works of learning, all the higher literature, in fact, not purely national, as poetry and romance, are all printed in the Roman character. Nor will any look upon this as a servile imitation. Some of the most national of German writers and scholars, as the brothers Grimm, have pronounced themselves loudly in favor of the change. The tendency of the age is towards universality. It will occur to none to talk of French imitation because chemists make use of the excellent and universally applicable system of the decimal French weights and measures.

What has been said above is not altogether irrelevant as characterizing the tendency of the higher institutions of learning. Every movement in Germany, even the least, since the Reformation, whose chief propagators were professors in the universities,—Luther, Reuchlin, Melancthon,—every permanent and pervading conquest of the new and good over the old and worn-out, has issued from the lecture-room. Whatever sticklers for old forms and crab-like progress may be found, there is always an overbalancing power. The unity of Germany as one nation has never stood a better chance of being realized than now, when the very men who were students and flocked as volunteers when the iron hand of Napoleon I. weighed heavily on their Fatherland stand as lecturers in the days of Napoleon III., warning of the past, and preaching louder than Schiller or Körner or Arndt for the brotherhood of Prussian and Bavarian, of those that dwell on the Rhine and those that inhabit the regions of the Danube.

Thanks, not to her statesmen, not to her nobility, not to her princes even, that Germany has at last fairly shaken off the self-imposed yoke of servile French imitation, but thanks to her scholars who centre in her twenty-six universities! There was a time, and that not a century ago, when the German language was considered to be of too limited circulation for works of general scientific interest. Lectures were all delivered in Latin, until Thomasius broke open a new path, and now lessons otherwise than in the vernacular tongue are exceptions. French was long the universal medium. Even Humboldt wrote most of his works in that language; and it is not two years since one of the most distinguished Egyptian scholars of Prussia published his History of Egypt in French. The last representatives of this tendency are dying off. The days are over, when every petty German prince must create in his domains a servile imitation of the stiff parks of Versailles,—the days of powdered wigs and long cues,—when French ballet-dancers gave the tone, and French actors strutted on every stage,—when Boileau was the great canon of criticism, and Racine and Molière perpetuated in tragedy and comedy a pseudo-classicism. They are far, those times when Frederick the Great wrote French at which Voltaire laughed, and could find no better occupation for his leisure hours at Sans-Souci than the discussion of the materialistic philosophy of the Encyclopedists, while he affected to despise his own tongue, rejecting every effort towards the popularization of a national literature. Well is it for Germany that other ideas now prevail,—well, that Goethe in his old age overcame the Gallomania, which for a while possessed him, of translating all his works, and thenceforth writing only in French. The iron hand of Goetz of Berlichingen would burst the seams of a Paris kid-glove. The bold lyric and dramatic poesy of a language whose figures well up in each word with primitive freshness can ill be contained in an idiom blasé by conventionality and frozen into crystal rigidity by the academy of the illustrious forty,—in an idiom in which an unfortunate pun or allusion can destroy the effect of a whole piece. We need but call to mind that Shakspeare's "Othello" was laughed off the stage of the Odéon, owing to the ridiculous ideas the word "napkin" or "handkerchief" called up in the auditory.

Nor is the influence of the university in Germany exerted in matters of great national interest only. It pervades the social, literary, and political organization of the people. The least part of what characterizes an individual nation ever comes into its books. Here it finds its way from mouth to mouth to the remotest corners of the land. When Luther, the Professor of Wittenberg, spoke against indulgences, it was more than priest or monk that was heard. The voice of the monk would not have echoed beyond his cell, and the influence of the priest would have been arrested and checked before it could have been exerted beyond the limits of his parish or town. But the Professor Luther addressed himself to a more influential audience. His words were carried before many years into every part of the Empire.

Setting aside the Austrian universities, which are no longer what they were formerly, the teaching in these higher schools, whatever the State restrictions may be, is eminently free,—freer than in France,—freer than in England,—in many respects even, however it may sound, freer than in the United States. As a result, the land is a hot-bed of the boldest philosophical systems and the wildest theological aberrations. There is no branch of speculation that does not find its representative. In law, in medicine, in philology, in history, the old methods of study and research have been revolutionized. But the State stands before the innovators, firm and conservative in its practice. And in the end it has been found, that, whatever wild theories may spring up in theology and in philosophy, the corrective is nigh at hand, and truth will make its way when the field is open to all.

It must be remembered that the German university is no preparatory school; those who enter it have gone through studies and a mental training that have made them capable of judging for themselves. They hear whom they please. Their chief study, whatever they acquire in the lecture-room, is done when alone. They attend on an average for three or four hours a day, spending as much time in the libraries, from which they have the privilege of taking out books. As a completion to their lectures, the professors generally have Seminaren once or twice a week, or Exercitationes in history, philology, etc., in which the Socratic method of teaching in dialogue is made use of. Museums and scientific collections are richly provided in the larger institutions. In some of these lectures are held: thus, Lepsius explains Egyptian archaeology in the Egyptian halls in Berlin. The libraries provided by the State, and to which all have access, are often considerable: thus, Göttingen has 350,000 volumes; Berlin, 600,000; Munich, 800,000.

As for the expenses of study, they are inconsiderable; thirty or thirty-five dollars the term will cover them, as there are generally several courses public. The students often attend for months as guests, hospitanten. As they say,—"The Fox pays for more than he hears, and the Bursch hears more than he pays for." The lecturers take no notice of those present; and, provided the matriculation-papers have been taken out, the beadle has nothing to say. There is the fullest liberty of wandering from room to room, and hearing, if only once or twice, any one of the professors. As for the expenses of living, they vary. To one who would be satisfied with German student-fare and comforts, four hundred dollars a year will answer every purpose, even in the dearest cities: many do with much less. In Southern Germany, life is simpler and cheaper than in Northern, and the saying is true in Munich, that a Gulden there will go as far as a Thaler in Prussia. There are poorer students, who are exempted from college-fees, and support themselves by Stipendia, whose outlay never exceeds a hundred dollars a year.

When several hundred or thousand young men are thus thrown together, with their time all their own, and none to whom they are responsible for their actions, it may easily be supposed that many abuses and irregularities will occur. Yet the great mass are better than they have been represented; though regular attendance upon lectures is true only of those who ox it at home, as the phrase goes, and who by the rioting, beer-drinking Burschen are styled Philistines or Camels. These same quiet individuals, whom the Samsons affect to despise, will be found to be by far in preponderance, when the statistics of Corps, Landmannschaften, and all such clubs, are looked into; though the characteristic of the latter, always to be seen at public places of amusement with their colored caps, gaudy watch-guards, or cannon-boots, would lead one to suppose that German student-life was one round of beer-drinking, sword-slashing, and jolly existence, as represented, or rather, misrepresented, by William Howitt, in the halo of poetry he throws around it. No,—the fantastically dressed fellows whom the tourist may notice at Jena, and the groups of starers who stop every narrow passageway in front of the confectionery-shops of Heidelberg, or amuse themselves of summer-afternoons with their trained dogs, diverting the attention of the temporary guest of "Prince Carl" from the contemplation of the old ruined castle of the Counts-Palatine,—these are but a fraction of the German students. From, among them may be chosen those tight-laced officers who make the court-residences of Europe look like camps; or, as they are often the sons of noblemen or rich parents, they may reach some of the sinecures in the State. They make their student-years but a pretext for a life of rough debauchery, from which they issue with a bought diploma; and, in many cases, satiated and disgusted with their own lives, they dwindle down into the timeserving reactionaries, the worst enemies of free development, because they themselves have abused in youth the little liberty they enjoyed.

If the numbers be counted of those who lead the life so much extolled by William Howitt,—who, by the way, has left out some of its roughest traits,—they will be found, even where most numerous, as in the smaller towns, never to exceed one-fourth of those inscribed as students. The linguists and philosophers of Germany, her historians and men of letters, her professors and savans, have come from the ranks of that stiller and more numerous class whom the stranger will never notice: for their triennium is spent mostly in the lecture-room or at home; and their conviviality—for there are neither disciples nor apostles of temperance in this beer-drinking land—is of a nature not to divert them from their earnest pursuits.

Truth and earnestness are the distinguishing traits of the German character; and these qualities show no less strongly in the youth who frequent the universities than in the professors themselves. The latter, conscientious to a nicety in exposing the fullest fruits of their laborious researches, are ever faithful to the trust reposed in them. Placed by the State in a position beyond ordinary ambition and above pecuniary cares, they can devote themselves exclusively to their calling, concentrating their powers in one channel,—to raise, to ennoble, to educate. It contributes not a little to their success, that their hearers are permeated, whatever wild and unbridled freaks they may fall into at times, with the fullest sense of honor and manly worth, with an ardent love for knowledge and science for their own sake, not for future utility. Their sympathies are awake for the good everywhere, their minds receptive of the highest teachings. Their loves and likes are great and strong,—as it behooves, when the first bubblings of mental and physical activity are manifested in action. They abandon themselves, body and soul, to the occupation of the moment, be it study, be it pleasure. Their gatherings and feasts and excursions are ennobled by vocal music from the rich store of healthy, vigorous German song,– from which they learn, in the words of one of their most popular melodies, to honor "woman's love, man's strength, the free word, the bold deed, and the FATHERLAND!"

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