U.S.-German Intellectual Exchange
Although German American intellectual relations can be traced back to the early years of the American Republic, they remained a rather loose and noninstitutionalized transatlantic network of scholarly collaboration throughout the nineteenth century.
Distinguished scholars such as Charles Follen, Francis Lieber, and Carl Schurz, who emigrated to the United States, and scientists such as the chemist Justus Liebig were instrumental in the intellectual exchange between German and American academic cultures. In addition, German universities, especially those in Gottingen, Berlin, Leipzig, and Munich, attracted thousands of American students since the 1830s. Their number rose from just 4 in 1835 and 1836 to 450 in 1895 and 1896. In the academic year of 1880 to 1881 as many as 15.5 percent of all foreign students at German universities came from the United States (Drewek 1999, 201). These students were to become an important segment of the American intellectual elite, and it was they who championed university reform in the United States around 1900. For instance, twenty-eight of the forty-four founding members of the American Physiological Society (founded in 1887) had received their degrees from a German university (Frank 1987, 11-46). The reform of higher education in the United States was certainly influenced by the German experience of these university reformers, but it did not lead to a simple replication of the German university model. Although both countries experienced a tremendous expansion of research institutions and scientific research, Germany and the United States took different paths in the institutional structure of the universities and in the financing of new academies and institutes.Despite the large number of German emigrants who facilitated the spread of German culture to the United States in the second half of the nineteenth century, to German scientists and scholars the New World initially appeared simply uninteresting.
Only after the American Civil War and the founding of the German Empire, when both countries experienced significant industrialization and modernization and advances in transportation and communication made contacts and exchanges much easier, did German academics develop an interest in North America. At the same time the sheer number of scholars working at research institutes, laboratories, technical institutes, and universities increased. The mutual interest of German and American academics in each other’s research and teaching peaked at the world exhibitions in Chicago (1893) and St. Louis (1904), especially at the latter’s International Congress of Arts and Science with more than thirty leading German representatives of nearly all academic disciplines. The German Empire participated in both exhibitions with a large number of German experts and extensive displays of its academic and scientific accomplishments. In the decade prior to World War I, informal relations between German and American research institutes and universities were transformed into officially recognized partnerships. The most important exchange programs were the ones initiated by German American professors, such as Kuno Francke, Hugo Munsterberg, and Franz Boas, and by American professors who had received their doctoral degrees in Germany with Wilhelm Ostwald (chemistry) and Felix Klein (mathematics), just to name a few. But soon after the turn of twentieth century, the share of American students among the foreign students at German universities dropped from about 15 percent to about 5 percent (Drewek 1999, 210). Structural changes in the sector of higher education and intensive debates about the reform of education and research institutions resulted in a sharp decrease in Germany’s influence in American higher education. Scholars at the new universities in Chicago and Baltimore rejected the German university model, and American research institutions such as the Rockefeller Medical Institute inspired similar projects in Germany, such as the Kaiser-Wilhelm- Gesellschaft (Kaiser Wilhelm Society). The establishment of graduate departments was the last piece of the puzzle. Because students could acquire high-quality academic training in the United States, the need to go abroad diminished. Large donations enabled American universities to create structures that put them on the same footing as their European counterparts and contributed to the emancipation of American academia from its European predecessor. American universities, which were considered modern research centers, entered into a fierce competition with German universities. Strangely enough, international exchange programs gave American universities an edge.The department responsible for higher education within the Prussian Ministry of Education and Culture closely observed the reorganization of higher education in the United States from the 1890s onward and worked toward a closer relationship with American institutions of higher education as part of a foreign cultural diplomacy that aimed at increasing the influence of German culture and Bil- dung throughout the world. The most important element of this policy was the German American professorial exchange program between Harvard and Berlin universities, which was later broadened to include Columbia University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Cornell University. Until 1914, eighteen German and seventeen American professors were sponsored under this program to teach and research on the other side of the Atlantic. Even if some scholars denounced these exchange programs as part of a nationalistic and expansionist German foreign policy, they provided the foundation for an extensive academic network that allowed German and American scholars to invite each other for lectures and to collaborate in international associations and conferences before 1914. The lecture tours of the physicist Wilhelm Wien and the psychologist Sigmund Freud demonstrated the advantages of such close contacts. Such arrangements allowed American and German scientists to have quick access to the newest scientific inventions and explorations within the two countries.
In 1904 alone, four German professors received honorary doctoral degrees from the University of Chicago. The creation of the Amerika Institut in Berlin under the directorship of Hugo Munster- berg in 1910 provided a coordination center for the German American intellectual exchange.World War I interrupted the well-established avenues of German American academic exchange. The nationalistic attitude of German scientists, who often occupied important positions in the German war economy (for instance Fritz Haber, who did research on poisonous gas), spurred a wave of “Germanophobia” in the United States and a postwar boycott of German academia by the Allies, which in turn caused a German counterboycott. However, immediately after the end of the war, German American academic relations improved again. Because France and England were not as forgiving toward Germany as the United States and insisted on its isolation, these contacts had to be kept on an informal and private basis. Franz Boas organized American financial support for German scientists, research institutions, and libraries. German scholars, furthermore, received invitations to give talks at American universities. Between 1921 and 1926, the physicists Albert Einstein, Arnold Sommerfeld, and Max Born were invited by Robert Millikan to lecture at the California Institute of Technology and thus contributed to the German American transfer of their theories and concepts on quantum physics and atomic theory. Large American foundations, such as the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Corporation, provided financial aid for the renovation of laboratories, such as the Mathematical and Physical Institute at the University of Gottingen and the German Research Institute for Psychiatry in Munich, as well as the purchase of equipment. Furthermore, they provided the necessary funds for the acquisition of scientific publications and research projects (such as the biochemical research of Otto Warburg in 1923), and supported the democratic reform of higher education after the downfall of the monarchy.
In collaboration with the New York Institute of International Education, a student exchange program was reestablished in 1925 that brought more German students to American universities than American students to German universities. American foundations played an important role in this exchange by sponsoring German students at American universities. The professorial exchange program was revived when the Munich physicist Arnold Sommerfeld was appointed Carl Schurz Professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison for the academic year 1922 and 1923. In i927 the art historian Adolph Goldschmidt was invited to join Harvard University for one academic year as the Kuno Francke Professor of German Culture and Art. In 1931 and 1932 the exchange with Columbia University restarted, although only American professors were sent to Berlin University over the next three years to serve as Roosevelt professors.Just as before World War I, German American Jewish industrialists and bankers were the most important sponsors of these bilateral intellectual relations. The German American professorial exchange before 1914 was mostly financed by Jacob Schiff and James Speyer. Adolphus Busch and Hugo Reisinger were behind the founding of the Germanic Museum at Harvard University in 19ÎÇ. This did not change during the 1920s. American foundations, such as the International Education Board of the Rockefeller Foundation, footed the remaining bill. The Rockefeller Foundation had contributed to the funding of medical research institutes in Berlin and Frankfurt am Main already before World War I and throughout the Great Depression. It provided essential financial support for the medical institutes of the Kaiser Wilhelm Society, various research institutes at German universities, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes of Cell Physiology and Physics, founded in Berlin in 1930 and 1937. In addition, donations made by individual Americans supported German science, as in the case of the American ambassador in Germany, Jakob G.
Schurman, who helped to finance the construction of a new main building for the University of Heidelberg.After the National Socialist German Worker’s Party (NSDAP) gained power in Germany and after many German Jewish scientists were forced to leave Germany after 1933—altogether hundreds of academics, among them twelve Nobel Prize winners—German American academic relations did not suffer. In spite of the new political circumstances and the fact that the Nazi regime maintained not much interest in cultivating international scientific relations, the exchange of professors and students continued until the beginning of the 1940s. The German Academic Exchange Service awarded a total of 472 exchange fellowships for the time period from 1935 to 1937, 184 of which were granted to German researchers for study in the United States (Laitenberger 2000, 20-49). Political criteria, however, then replaced scholarship in the selection of candidates. Even official relations between universities remained intact and American foundations continued to finance research in Germany. Although the Rockefeller Foundation officially ended its financial support of German institutions in favor of awarding fellowships and additional research and travel allowances after 1933, two years later it still stood by its decision (made in 1930) to contribute funding to the construction of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute of Physics (1935-1939). At the same time, the Rockefeller Foundation supported German Jewish emigrants in their attempt to integrate into American academia after they had been expelled from Nazi Germany. Many of these refugees who had been employed by the Kaiser Wilhelm Society could also rely on American aid societies such as the Emergency Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars, which had been founded by Felix M. Warburg and Alfred E. Cohn in 1933. But it can be said that German American academic relations decreased gradually beginning in 1933, until the entry of the United States into World War II ended all cooperation.
Eckhardt Fuchs
See also American Students at German Universities; Amerika Institut; Bloch, Felix; Follen, Charles; Francke, Kuno; Fulbright Program; Gottingen, University of; Intellectual Exile; Jewish Refugee Scientists; Lieber, Francis;
Munsterberg, Hugo; Schurz, Carl; Warburg, Felix M.
References and Further Reading
Barclay, David E., and Elisabeth Glaser- Schmidt, eds. Transatlantic Images and Perceptions: Germany and America since 1776. Washington, DC, Cambridge, UK, New York: German Historical Institute/Cambridge University, 1997.
Diehl, Carl. Americans and German Scholarship, 1770—1870. New Haven, CT: Yale University, 1978.
Drewek, Peter. “Die ungastliche deutsche Universitat.' Auslandische Studenten an deutschen Hochschulen 1890-1930.” Jahrbuch fur Historische Bildungsforschung 5, (1999): 197-224.
Frank Jr., Robert G. “American Physiologists in German Laboratories, 1865-1914.” In Physiology in the American Context, 1850—1940. Ed.Gerald L. Geison. Bethesda, Md: American Physiological Society, 1987. 11-46.
Geitz, Henry, Jurgen Heideking, and Jurgen Herbst, eds. German Influences on Education in the United States to 1917. Washington, DC, Cambridge, UK, New York: German Historical Institute/ Cambridge University, 1995.
Heideking, Jurgen, Mark Depaepe, and Jurgen Herbst, eds. Mutual Influences on Education: Germany and the United States in the Twentieth Century (Paedagogica Historica 23:1). Gent: Paedagogica Historica, Universiteit Gent, 1997.
Laitenberger, Volkhard. “Der DAAD von seine Anfangen bis 1945.” In Der DAAD in der Zeit. Geschichte, Gegenwart und zukunftige Aufgaben — vierzehn Essays. Ed. Peter Alter Bonn: DAAD, 2000. 20-49.
Rohrs, Werner. The Classical German Concept of the University and Its Influence on Higher Education in the United States. Frankfurt am Main/New York: Peter Lang, 1995.
Rust, Val Dean. German Interest in Foreign Education since World War I. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, School of Education, 1965.
Thwing, Charles Franklin. The American and the German University: One Hundred Years of History. New York: Macmillan, 1927.