On the basis of a careful examination of tenure decisions by Prussian universities, as overseen by the Prussian Ministry of Culture, Hartwin Spenkuch concludes that, at least in this area, Prussia was “open to the future” and “dynamic” (180) during the Weimar Republic. Despite the significant financial pressures and intense political conflicts that marked this period, the universities and the Ministry of Culture successfully maintained standards of academic excellence and resisted attacks on university autonomy, even as the latter exerted pressure on the former to become more republican in their governance structures and in the selection of personnel. Adolf Hitler's government undertook to destroy these accomplishments almost as soon as it took power in 1933.

During the Weimar Republic, tenured faculty, the principal focus of these volumes, consisted of Ordinarien, the group with the greatest prestige and, in general, the highest compensation, and of Extraordinarien, who were disfavored in both respects. In the German university system, then as now, individuals occupying untenured faculty positions generally had no expectation of receiving tenure at their own university. There were no job advertisements or applications in the Weimar period; instead, committees dominated by Ordinarien proposed candidates to the Ministry of Culture based on the committee members’ own knowledge of the work of scholars in their fields—always with respect to research and, to varying degrees, with regard to teaching—as well as on other qualities ranging from collegiality to political convictions. In typical cases, faculty committees recommended three candidates, ranked by order of preference, to the Ministry of Culture, which then made the final selection. It periodically suggested candidates to universities, and, in a modest number of instances, appointed candidates—sometimes individuals with republican convictions—against the will of the faculty committees.

The two-volume set includes a substantial introductory essay, as well as several hundred documents, consisting primarily of faculty letters explaining the merits and deficiencies of individuals proposed or considered for positions as Ordinarien and Extraordinarien. Also included are responses by the ministry, as well as related correspondence drafted by ministry officials, members of the hiring committees, and candidates for the positions. The principal actors in this story were the political leaders and civil servants of the Ministry of Culture, among whom the most significant were Carl Heinrich Becker (either the senior civil servant in the ministry or the actual minister for most of the Weimar Republic) and his chief assistant, Werner Richter, as well as the roughly six hundred Ordinarien and three hundred Extraordinarien of the Prussian universities—all men. There were twelve universities in Prussia at the time: the university in Berlin was the largest, by far, with approximately a quarter of the total number of faculty members and students.

Both the introductory essay and the collection of documents are organized thematically, and the main subjects include levels of and policies regarding faculty compensation; the role played in hiring decisions by the political preferences of the professoriate and of the individuals being considered for selection; the influence of antisemitism in hiring decisions; and the professoriate's responses to the start of the Nazi era. Both parts of the work then focus on particular instances of hiring in six scholarly fields: public law, economics, history, sociology, pedagogy/psychology, and physics.

Becker and other leading Ministry of Culture officials sought to promote greater democracy in university governance in at least three ways: by eliminating the difference in compensation and rights between Ordinarien and untenured Extraordinarien, by giving students some voice in the making of university policies, and by promoting for professorships candidates who were sympathetic to republican ideals. The assembled documents highlight the ministry's efforts especially with regard to the last. For example, one series of documents describes the approval of the appointment as Ordinarius in Kiel of Hermann Kantorowicz, a liberal legal scholar who had aroused the anger of the nationalist right by his criticisms of Germany's role in causing World War I. Less successful were the ministry's efforts to convince the history faculties of the universities of Halle and Cologne to hire Johannes Ziekursch, a pathbreaking critical historian of nineteenth-century Germany, who, thanks to his willingness to challenge a range of patriotic myths, remained until his retirement an Ordinarius at the more provincial University of Breslau.

Spenkuch's sources provide insight into the contemporary priorities of a range of academic disciplines, into how networks of teachers and students influenced academic priorities and personnel decisions, and into the personalities and values of individual academics. One memorable document included in the collection is a 1921 memorandum written by Kantorowicz, then a lecturer at the University of Freiburg, to the Social Democratic Minister of Culture, in which he describes students’ frequent complaints about the “deadly boredom [and] lack of vividness” of lectures and about “the complete absence of the most modest skills in public speaking” of numerous university professors (436). That individuals who seemed so incompetent could become professors, Kanorowicz added, discouraged talented students from undertaking academic careers. He therefore advocated a systematic interrogation of successful students at the end of their studies about the abilities of their teachers, and he suggested that the results of these interrogations be incorporated into the personnel files of university professors and lecturers—to be considered when hiring decisions were made.

Documents related to Kantorowicz's own promotion illustrate how information about teaching ability affected hiring decisions in the absence of such a policy. In a memorandum composed in connection with Kantorowicz's hiring at Kiel, Minister of Culture Becker described Kantorowicz's superlative teaching skills because, as chance would have it, Becker's own son had been enrolled in one of his classes. In these and other documents, Kantorowicz emerges as an idealistic, energetic, and principled man. The very fact that the University of Kiel and the Ministry of Culture appointed him Ordinarius despite his controversial political views indeed supports Spenkuch's claim that Prussian universities were, to a significant degree in this period, “open to the future” and “dynamic.” Yet, systematic student evaluations of teaching were never instituted.

Spenkuch points out that the official evaluations of candidates prepared by faculty committees generally failed to capture the “very personal or ideological resentments” (183) that sometimes played an important role in hiring decisions. In fact, the document collection that Spenkuch has assembled also includes newspaper articles, protests by disappointed candidates or faculty committees, as well as private correspondence that discuss motives not found in the faculty evaluations. One that almost never appears in the official correspondence, at least before 1933, is antisemitism. As Spenkuch notes, available statistics regarding appointments to professorships support claims that, during the Weimar Republic, there was systematic discrimination against the hiring of Jewish Ordinarien. These statistics, as well as supporting evidence found in private letters and memoirs, are discussed in the introductory essay. Spenkuch nevertheless persuasively demonstrates here and in the documents he has assembled that the history of Prussian universities during the Weimar Republic must be understood as more than just a failed prelude to the catastrophe of Nazism.