Gottingen, University of
Between 1810 and the American Civil War, the University of Gottingen served as a de facto graduate school for many scholars who later gained prominence in American life. Attracted by an extraordinary research library and eminent professors such as the theologists Gottlieb Jakob Planck and Karl Friedrich Staudlin, the legal scholar Karl Friedrich Einhorn, the physicist Wilhelm Weber, the mathematician and astronomer Carl Friedrich Gauβ, the chemist Friedrich Wohler, the classicists and linguists Karl Friedrich Hermann, Ernst Ludwig von Leutsch, Heinrich Ritter, and Friedrich Wilhelm Schneidewin, and the German philologist Georg Friedrich Benecke, American male students enrolled at the University of Gottingen as early as 1782.
Those who traveled the path to Gottingen included William B. Astor (1792-1875), businessman and investor; George Bancroft (1800-1891), historian, diplomat, and Transcendentalist; Edward Everett (1794-1865), public speaker; Basil L. Gildersleeve (1831- 1924), classics professor at Johns Hopkins University; George Ticknor (1791-1871), professor of French and Spanish at Harvard; Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), poet and Ticknor’s successor at Harvard; and William Dwight Whitney (1827-1894), linguist and Sanskrit scholar. As leaders in American intellectual life, these men encouraged others to study in Germany. They are credited with helping to introduce and popularize German literature, philology, and philosophy in the United States.The year 1837 would mark the beginning of troubled times for the university. After the death of Wilhelm IV in July of that year, the royal tie to England ended, and Ernst August I, the new king of Hanover, reigned over Gottingen. The new king soon announced his intention to revoke the Hanoverian constitution adopted by Wilhelm IV in 1833. Seven Gottingen professors, including Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, compelled by the oath they had sworn to uphold this constitution, signed a protest against the intentions of the new king.
The protest met with widespread support, and the king had all seven professors dismissed. Although two of the professors returned to the university after the 1848 revolution, it took several decades for Gottingen to rebuild its reputation for academic freedom and excellence and for enrollment numbers to rise again. In some fields, such as philology, it was impossible for the university to make up for the loss of its leading scholars. The enrollment of American male students also dropped off after 1837 and would not pick up again until the 1850s. Enrollment numbers continued to increase through the 1890s and then dropped off again at the beginning of the new century.Gottingen also played a significant role in higher education for American women. Gottingen, along with Heidelberg, was one of the first German universities to grant doctoral degrees to women. Gottingen was famous for having granted a PhD to seventeen-year-old Dorothea Schlozer in 1787 and to the remarkable Russian mathematician Sofia Kovalevskaia in 1874. Certain professors at Gottingen became known for encouraging and supporting the work of women scholars, even before women could officially enroll at the university. These professors included Felix Klein in mathematics, Max Lehmann in history, Georg Elias Muller in experimental psychology, Hermann Walther Nernst in physical chemistry, Moriz Heyne in German, Lorenz Morsbach in English, and Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf in classical philology. The first American woman to receive a doctoral degree from a German university was Margaret Eliza Maltby, who completed her degree in physics at Gottingen in 1895. The following year, Mary Frances Winston completed her PhD at Gottingen and became the first American woman to earn a doctoral degree in mathematics at a foreign university.
In the twentieth century, a new connection between Gottingen and the United States was born out of tragedy. In the early twentieth century, Gottingen became known throughout the world for the remarkable research in theoretical and experimental physics conducted there by scientists such as Max Born, Werner Heisenberg, Maria Goppert-Mayer, James Franck, and Robert Pohl.
This community of scientists was destroyed when the Nazi government forced leading Jewish scientists at Gottingen into exile. Several of these distinguished researchers, including James Franck, found a new home in the United States. The prominent mathematicians Emmy Noether and Richard Courant were also forced to give up their positions at Gottingen and reestablished highly successful careers in the United States.Sandra Singer
See also American Students at German Universities; Bancroft, George; Everett, Edward; Intellectual Exchange; Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth; Ticknor, George
References and Further Reading
Bohme, Ernst, and Rudolf Vierhaus, eds.
Gottingen: Geschichte einer Universitdtsstadt. Vol. 2. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 2002.
Jarausch, Konrad H. “American Students in Germany, 1815-1914: The Structure of German and U.S. Matriculants at Gottingen University.” German Influence on Education in the United States to 1917. Eds. Henry Geitz, Jurgen Heideking, and Jurgen Herbst. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995, 195-211.
Singer, Sandra. Adventures Abroad: North American Women at German-Speaking Universities, 1868—1915. Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003.
Thadden, Rudolf von, and Gunter J. Trittel, eds. Gottingen: Geschichte einer Universitdtsstadt. Vol. 3. Gottingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1999.