German universities were not always servants of nationalism. During the 1848 revolution they were engaged in the struggle for democracy. It was only under the auspices of Prussian militarism after German unification in 1871 that they made their peace with the reactionary establishment. In the 1860s the physicist Emil Du Bois-Reymond deplored the inferior quality of German guns when a terroristic attack on Bismarck failed. Only eight years later, now the rector of Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin, he praised German professors as intellectual safeguards of the Hohenzollern monarchy.

Most German academics shared this view. The new generations of professors appointed between 1871 and World War I believed mostly in power politics, in the splendor of German militarism, and in their country's assumed “mission of civilization.” The professors' ideology differed from that of the Stammtisch insofar as it was full of references to German history or ancient classical authors.

The new Germany was an authoritarian state where the old ruling class, the Junkers, continued to practice social discrimination against the Jews. Although the constitution of 1871 guaranteed Jews equal rights, Jews still could not achieve high ranks in the army. It was almost as difficult for them to be appointed as full professors at universities. The professoriat shared the authoritarian view of the Junkers and officers, including their anti-Jewish prejudices.

This is the background of the story that Aleksandra Pawliczek tells us, taking Germany's largest and most prestigious university as an example. In Berlin, as well as in other universities, professors did not fully identify with vulgar street antisemitism, but their attitude to a Jewish presence in academia was mostly that of half-outspoken disgust.

Before World War I, only around a dozen Jews were promoted to the highest academic rank of full professor in Berlin and, likewise, only a few more baptized scholars of Jewish origin attained that position. As the author shows, there were many more scholars of Jewish origin (baptized or not) among extraordinary or associate professors, but professors on this level were excluded from important decision making in university politics (e.g., new appointments for chairs). By contrast, there were many Jews among the Privatdozenten or unpaid lecturers. Many of these, however, had to leave the university after some years and went into the free professions, becoming mainly doctors, attorneys, or journalists. This is all basically well known, but the book shows in great detail the extent to which the different university departments were willing to tolerate a “Jewish” presence (Pawliczek refers to “Jewish” with quotation marks whenever she demonstrates that the Jewish origin of a baptized scholar played an unofficial role in appointment commissions). It was the department of medicine that allowed the most Jews to teach and to be promoted to the rank of associate professor. The prestigious professor title also helped these Jews find well-paid posts outside the university (e.g., as directors of large city hospitals).

At the beginning of World War I Berlin professors were at the forefront of nationalist activities. The majority of them regarded the German defeat of 1918 and the revolution as a national catastrophe. Hostility against the new republic and fear of bolshevism were mixed up with a new wave of antisemitism. A few professors became antisemitic agitators, such as the historians Eduard Meyer and Dietrich Schäfer. Most did not go so far, but many “adopted consciously or unconsciously the role of ‘midwifes’ for the emerging National Socialist order. They thought and influenced a whole generation of students with their vocabulary and their retrograde glorification of the monarchy. They opposed the democratization of universities and evoked a vision of a strong political ‘leadership’ in contrast to the weak government of the Weimar Republic” (p. 250).

All this could not prevent Jews from succeeding. German universities, which, after World War I, were isolated from international scholarship, had to keep up with international developments. They looked for new fields of research that could be included in university curricula, such as sociology and experimental psychology. In these and other disciplines Jews were quite numerous, not least because they had always looked for fields of scholarship in which no established conservative elite existed.

The University of Berlin only reluctantly opened its curriculum. Most of its professors were of relatively high age, since Berlin preferred to hire established scholars instead of young innovators. Even so, Jews excelled in new disciplines, such as in theater studies whose founder figure in Berlin was Max Herrmann, and in legal sociology, when Hermann Heller was appointed by the Prussian ministry of science against the vote of the Faculty of Law. The author explains that in some cases it was the state administration that promoted Jewish applicants, while in other cases it barred them from appointment.

Aleksandra Pawliczek shows that no other group in Germany was more susceptible to antisemitism than students after World War I. Many of them blamed Jews for Germany's defeat. A new student generation, which enrolled in the early 1930s during the Great Depression, was even more radical. Many demanded limits on the matriculation of Jews and also on the number of Jewish teachers. The Jewish reaction was mostly defensive. “The group of ‘Jewish teachers’ of Friedrich Wilhelm University did not constitute a single group in its self-understanding” (p. 429). More conservative professors and lecturers of Jewish origin tried to convince their enemies that they were out-and-out Germans and that their Jewish background was only an unhappy coincidence that could not limit their German patriotism. Only a few openly opposed the new antisemitism.

The great majority of university professors in Berlin, as in other universities, welcomed or accepted Hitler without hesitation. Most did not take action against their Jewish colleagues, but remained completely indifferent when Jews were dismissed from the university by state decrees. Pawliczek explains the extent to which forbearers of Nazism such as the jurist Carl Schmitt who replaced Heller presented their work as a justification of the Führer state and gave antisemitism an academic framework. She also mentions the few who maintained solidarity with their Jewish colleagues, such as the pharmacologists Otto Krayer (who himself left Germany for England), Wolfgang Heubner, and the physicist Max Planck (pp. 397–402).

The book does not present a thoroughly new approach to the topic, but shows in detail the transformation of “normal” anti-Jewish prejudices into acceptance and sometimes active support of massive antisemitic practice.