GERMAN UNIVERSITIES IN THE AFTERMATH OF THE WAR

Germany's occupation (1945–9) was a particularly eventful period in the history of its universities. It was a time when a new academic landscape emerged. Venerable institutions such as Königsberg and Breslau ceased altogether to be German; others, including Berlin, Jena, and Leipzig, were refashioned along Communist lines. In the Western zones, the organizational challenges were compounded by the fact that many university buildings had been seriously damaged in the fighting. Moreover, the immediate post-war period was a time of reckoning. A great many compromised professors were dismissed, although a fair few of them were soon reappointed. There were also attempts at innovation on the part of both the occupying forces and existing interests, but they only skimmed the surface. The nature and mission of Germany's universities remained essentially intact.Footnote ¹

During this brief but significant period, there was intense reflection on the nature of the university. Many of Germany's leading thinkers were desperately worried about how best to revitalize a country that was in such a parlous state culturally and academically. The post-war debate about the country's universities drew on a long German tradition of contemplating the nature of the university, even if in part it was prompted by a profound questioning of that and other traditions in the wake of Nazism. What might seem to have been a limited debate about the university in fact touched on the larger question of Germany's future. The university was still a “centre of national identification,” especially for the educated middle class that dominated public life.Footnote ²

The dominant issues—the fundamental principles of the university and the traditions it should retain—were not considered in an intellectual vacuum. In several studies, Axel Schildt has made clear just how important a Christian, conservative mode of thought was in shaping the intellectual landscape of early post-war West Germany. Instead of embracing passing trends, many Germans in the late 1940s put their faith in timeless, non-individualistic values, often rooted in a classic Western tradition. It was as if the Nazi catastrophe had engendered a mistrust of the immediate past, which developed into a mistrust of all things contemporaneous.Footnote ³ The rediscovery of das Abendland (the Occident) was one way to overcome the overwhelming sense of crisis—not only the immediate crisis, the tangible and humanitarian need, but also modernity as a state of crisis. Where technological and scientific developments had left society in turmoil and undermined the social order, it was hoped a return to enduring values could bring new stability to Germany.Footnote ⁴ Strong hopes were placed in the German university. Academic institutions were credited with a specific spiritual task, reflecting their ability to manage and refine the best in the German tradition.Footnote ⁵

It is against this background that I have explored the nature of the dominant university ideals in the wake of the Second World War. In the present essay, I analyse the role of what was taken to be Germany's classical heritage in attempts to revitalize the university. Of particular importance is the direction given to the debate by Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), the Prussian educational reformer and driving force behind the foundation of the University of Berlin in 1810, and the tradition associated with him. I also consider the impact of the German mandarins and their generation's academic ideals and experiences. I thus speak to the larger debate about Germany's modern intellectual history in the aftermath of Nazism, for my argument is that the immediate post-war period would be the last time this particular intellectual elite gained a hearing for their idea of the university.

THE HUMBOLDTIAN TRADITION AND THE MANDARINS

In recent years, the understanding of the Humboldtian tradition has undergone a radical change. It is no exaggeration to say that the view that Humboldt was a university reformer was born not in 1810, but in 1910 at the earliest. Research has shown that Wilhelm von Humboldt was little in evidence in the nineteenth-century debate about Germany's universities: his writings were unknown, his ideas had little currency, and it was the universities of Halle and Göttingen, rather than Berlin, that were the benchmarks. Then, suddenly, at the turn of the twentieth century, Humboldt was discovered—in Prussia, at least. His programmatic essay on higher education was published and became famous when the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin celebrated its centenary in 1910. At the same time, influential education policymakers and educators such as Adolf von Harnack and Eduard Spranger began to spread his ideas.Footnote ⁶

The bulk of the new research on Humboldt dwells on the decades around 1900. Such analyses as there are of the 1920s and 1930s suggest that his name continued to be invoked. In the Weimar Republic, his neo-humanist disposition was taken by some to be a guarantee of stability in a turbulent time; in the Third Reich, he was a hateful figure, worthy only of contempt. All this underscores a central observation: Humboldt's legacy is not timeless. It has always been determined by the predicaments and issues of the day, inspiring criticism, reform, or the glorification of bygone greatness by turns. This historicizing insight is the basis for my argument here.Footnote ⁷

There are few comprehensive studies of notions of the university in the immediate post-war period, and even fewer that specifically address the Humboldtian tradition. Arguably the most important is Barbara Wolbring's Habilitation dissertation, in which she demonstrates how extensive the discussion was about the role of the university and the meaning of education: while it was true that several ideas that had been accepted for nigh on fifty years had suddenly lost their appeal, there were still opinions aplenty about what the future might hold. One group, she says, sought a return to Humboldt's ideas; however, it remains unclear which ideals they associated with him, or the extent to which they drew on an even older German tradition. This was not the focus of Wolbring's analysis, which gives me more reason to analyse in detail the central issues in the intellectual debate.Footnote ⁸

Today, there seems to be a widespread belief that Humboldt and his ideals experienced a renaissance after 1945. There is talk of a “noticeable return to Humboldt's ideas after 1945,” or that leading professors were engaged in an “evocation of Humboldtian ideals.”Footnote ⁹ Specialists in modern German university history apparently share the same picture of the era. Hence Sylvia Paletschek writes that in the debate “the return to ‘German’ or ‘Humboldtian ideas of the university’ was a central topos.”Footnote ¹⁰ In a survey of the West German university system, Konrad H. Jarausch takes a similar line and develops it further, arguing that “the postwar chaos prompted a return to Humboldtian rhetoric as an uncompromised tradition,” but that the once-inspiring vision “had rigidified into a ruling discourse.”Footnote ¹¹ Ralph Jessen refers to “the post-war renaissance of educational rhetoric,” pointing to the belief that a return to classic, neo-humanist ideals was the best way forward, but also, in the early stages of the Cold War, to a looming conflict over who was entitled to the German heritage. After all, West German academics, just as much as the East German, claimed to be “the sole heirs of the Humboldtian tradition.”Footnote ¹²

Dieter Langewiesche, meanwhile, is not convinced by the talk of a resurgence of Humboldtian rhetoric. He has studied 142 German university rectors’ speeches from 1945 to 1950 and finds that Humboldt was mentioned on only seven occasions, and then almost exclusively in Berlin; in the rest of the German-language area, the talk was rather of a German university model. That said, many of the rectors referred back to older academic slogans (such as Bildung durch Forschung) and stressed that the university had a character-forming mission, both being very much Humboldtian tropes.Footnote ¹³

In this essay, rather than look at how frequently Humboldt's name was invoked, I consider how the leading figures in the debate expected to revitalize Germany's universities, and particularly how they framed their arguments in terms of a classic German university model, concentrating on the ways in which their historical understanding underpinned their academic ideals. Exactly who those leading figures were is an important factor. After 1945, German society at large turned to an older generation, born in the first decades of the German Empire, who resumed positions of power. Students and younger academics, who in the Third Reich had sided with the Nazis in significant numbers, were actively prevented from leaving their mark on the post-war period, in part because of a very real concern that the younger generation would refuse to be converted to democracy.Footnote ¹⁴

However, it was not just the high average age of its participants that gave the debate a particular flavour. The more intellectually challenging contributions came almost exclusively from the academics whom Fritz Ringer in his influential analysis of 1969 called mandarins—a particular socio-intellectual class who by virtue of their education and academic status occupied a special position in German society. Their golden age had been in the decades around 1900, but even in the Weimar Republic they had remained powerful. In their own minds, the mandarins were upholders of civilization (Kulturträger) and expected to play a special role in leading the nation's spiritual advancement.Footnote ¹⁵

It was this group of mandarins who played a key role in the university debate immediately after the war. They were mainly older humanities professors who had habilitated before the Nazi takeover and were distinctly early twentieth-century in their intellectual ideals. Scientists and medics were notable by their absence. The mandarins’ claim to be the mouthpieces for a greater cause lived on after 1945, as is evident in what they published. “Although the authors of the professorial literature of self-understanding always claimed to speak for all academics,” Ralph Jessen noted, “they only represented a characteristic subset of that group.”Footnote ¹⁶ At the same time, is behoves us not merely to accept posterity's verdict on the mandarins, as Peter Uwe Hohendahl has said. In the 1960s, they were accused of having wanted to revive a conservative university. Was that actually true? How are we best to understand their real ideals?Footnote ¹⁷

It is necessary to see those first post-war debates in the light of the history of the German university under the Third Reich. For a long time after 1945, German academics were without sin, whether of omission or of commission; for decades, the standard view was that they had avoided all ideological involvement and gone into what amounted to internal exile for twelve long, dark years. True, in the 1960s younger radical researchers did revisit the “brown university,” but they failed to dent the image of the university as basically an apolitical institution.Footnote ¹⁸ During the 1990s, however, the official line finally began to change. A series of critical studies showed just how large a proportion of academics had willingly offered their services to the regime, providing the ideological underpinnings for Nazi policy; their own self-understanding, of course, was that they had merely acted as neutral experts, making knowledge available and nothing more.Footnote ¹⁹ In the 2000s the critical exploration continued, but with the picture becoming more complex. An important anthology, Gebrochene Wissenschaftskulturen (2010), summed up many of the leading researchers’ findings. They dispute the earlier thesis that Nazism was antimodern in the sense of being opposed to science and scholarship, but equally they stress that the Nazis’ enthusiastic investment in cutting-edge research was combined with traditional educational models and authoritarian academic governance (the Führerprinzip).Footnote ²⁰

Similarly, historical opinion on the mandarins’ role in Nazi Germany has splintered in recent years. It is clear that the humanities were agreed on certain common standards and approaches, but without being forced into line by the regime.Footnote ²¹ In a balanced overview, Jan Eckel instead demonstrates the strong degree of continuity from the end of the nineteenth century to the 1960s, with fundamental concepts and paradigms established in the days of the German Empire surviving in all material respects into the post-war period. In many fields, humanists initially tried to adjust to Nazism by embracing racial theories, but unlike the new Ostforschung and other similar fields, racism never became a supporting element in the established disciplines. Yet, in the end, even the well-established humanities subjects made a substantial contribution to legitimizing Nazi beliefs, Eckel concludes.Footnote ²²

The mandarins who spoke up in the university debate after the Second World War had thus firsthand experience of how German academic institutions had been used by the Nazis, directly or indirectly. There had never been a question of an absolute Gleichschaltung, but rather the brutal abuse of every academic freedom. These experiences were very fresh in the minds of those active in university politics in the late 1940s.Footnote ²³

In what follows, I will concentrate on three leading figures: the philosopher Karl Jaspers, the historian Gerhard Ritter, and the Germanist Werner Richter. All three were older mandarins, and all three shared much the same experiences: born in the 1880s, they had been professors of the humanities in the 1920s, and had opposed Nazism in a variety of ways. Equally, between 1933 and 1945 their lives had unfolded very differently, for while Jaspers and Ritter stayed in Germany and lived in what amounted to internal exile, Richter fled and spent the war in exile in the United States.

THE REBIRTH OF THE UNIVERSITY

Karl Jaspers (born 1883) used his speeches, articles, and books to set out how Germany's universities should best be revitalized after the great disaster. In an exchange with the Romanist Ernst Robert Curtius he was even referred to as “a Wilhelm von Humboldt of our time.”Footnote ²⁴ Jaspers's impact on the debate was all the greater because he had emerged as a leading moral authority in a country that more than anything else needed guidance as it took stock of its past and its future.Footnote ²⁵

Jaspers had long been the epitome of the apolitical mandarin. When the Nazis seized power in 1933, however, he soon discovered, being married to a Jewish woman, just how unpopular he was with his new masters. He was forced to resign his positions of trust, and ultimately was subject to a publication ban. He spent the war in Heidelberg, with the constant threat of deportation hanging over his family. Despite his intellectual quarantine, Jaspers continued his philosophical work and devoted himself to the contemplation of his country's development. At war's end, Jaspers saw it as his mission to restore Germany's honour. He realized that this would require more than dispassionate observation. It was clear to him that, as a philosopher, he had to break with the traditionally apolitical line if he was to articulate a message that would reach a wider audience.Footnote ²⁶

Revival for Germany entailed a close examination of German history, according to Jaspers. It was possible neither to naively return to a pre-Nazi existence nor to break wholly with the past. In his controversial book Die Schuldfrage (1946) he accepted moral responsibility for German crimes. True rebirth assumed, however, that one would also make the most of all that was good and edifying in Germany's heritage. Its universities had an absolutely vital role to play in this spiritual—and, by extension, political—renaissance. For Germany to rise again, the Germans had to trust to their universities.Footnote ²⁷

In the immediate post-war period, Jaspers repeatedly returned to the same theme: it would be decisive for Germany if its universities recovered their strong position. He was also putting the final touches to Die Idee der Universität (1946), the most elaborate disquisition on the nature and destiny of the university. In 1923 Jaspers had published a book with the same title, but, as he impressed on his readers in the 1946 preface, the new publication was “not a second edition, nor yet a revised edition, but due to the experience of the last two terrible decades, a new version.”Footnote ²⁸ Barbara Wolbring calls attention to the fact that Jaspers's post-war text became “an important reference point for the discussion; here, from their own, neo-Humanist-idealist German university tradition, the idea was formulated of attempting a new beginning.”Footnote ²⁹

Die Idee der Universität is a crucial text if one is to understand Jaspers's views on scholarship and higher education. In its 123 pages, he moved from the abstract to the concrete, beginning with theoretical deliberations on the nature of scholarship, and so to the university's task, and finally the questions of politics and economics. In the book's preface, Jaspers presented in condensed form the notion of the German university that he would return to and develop in the years that followed. The university's future depended on “the further renewal of its original spirit,” he wrote. For half a century, it had undergone a decline, and finally had sunk low; however,

To understand Jaspers's vision of how Germany's universities could be revitalized, one cannot content oneself with this one book, however. Other texts from the same time provide a deeper insight into his world of ideas.Footnote ³¹ In the summer of 1945, for example, he gave a speech in Heidelberg, which would later make its way into print as “Die Erneuerung der Universität.”Footnote ³² He set the tone at the very start: after twelve dark years, they were now witnessing a new beginning. Despite the devastation wrought by the Nazis, there were professors and students who had stood firm. At heart, Germany's universities had remained untarnished and could now be resurrected.Footnote ³³

“The new beginning of our university cannot, however, be a simple return to the state of affairs before 1933,” Jaspers maintained in a key formulation. Too much had happened; the intervening disaster was too great; there was a chain of evil that had to be broken. The Germans had to look into their real past to find a foundation on which they could build.Footnote ³⁴

Jaspers argued that it was in this spirit that the university would be rebuilt. He hoped to see academic institutions re-form, students return, and research and teaching pursued under similar conditions as before; however, none of this would amount to a renewal of any sort. Instead, as he said,

Jaspers argued that a renewal of this kind would set a tone for seminars, institutes, and clinics, for publications and textbooks. Thus far, however, there was no common basis on which to proceed. The idea of the university had not yet come fully alive again.Footnote ³⁶

In the beginning, the university formed a single whole, Jaspers reminded his audience. Its three faculties existed to serve basic human needs. In his eyes, it was an abomination when this unity was lost during the second half of the nineteenth century. Knowledge was scattered, mixed up with unscientific elements. This reached its height during the Nazi era. It also left the university unable to tackle the real driving forces of the era, particularly technology. Jaspers argued that its mission should once again reflect all parts of life. He could countenance a new technological faculty, and the faculty of philosophy should be reconstituted as a whole.Footnote ³⁷

There were thus several strands to Jaspers's approach to the revitalization of the university. The first was to capitalize on the academic ethos that had survived the Nazis’ barbarism. When Jaspers argued that the university was sound at heart, it was with a nod to the Prussian education minister in the 1920s, Carl Heinrich Becker, who had said that the German university was “im Kern gesund.”Footnote ³⁸ The second was to restore it to some semblance of unity; it would not do for the country's universities to be a mere aggregation of vocational colleges.Footnote ³⁹ The third was to tackle the problems of the day, not least the role of technology in society. Last but not least, Jaspers's vision was closely linked to his understanding of the historical development of the university. There are glimpses of this in various speeches and writings in the early post-war period, in particular the lecture “Vom lebendigen Geist der Universität,” which he gave in Heidelberg in January 1946.Footnote ⁴⁰

In this lecture, Jaspers outlined the university's development from the Reformation onwards as falling into three stages. The Protestant university saw its purpose as meeting the state's needs for clergymen and public officials. Compared to the medieval university, the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century university represented an intellectual curtailment.Footnote ⁴¹ During the eighteenth century, the classical–humanist university emerged. Students broke free of institutional constraints to seek out the lecturers they felt had something to offer. Kant, Fichte, and Schleiermacher formulated the idea of the university, and Humboldt hit upon a practical design that was realized in the founding of the University of Berlin. There was freedom of research and freedom of teaching, but at the same time they were inseparable. Realizing the idea of the university was certainly not an easy thing, but a scholarly community was created nevertheless.Footnote ⁴² Then, in the mid-nineteenth century, what Jaspers called the modern university materialized. Its representatives said that they would like to preserve the old values, but to little effect. They founded no principles of their own, and, by doubting the value of the university's unity, showed that they had forgotten their origins. Instead they founded institutes of technology and allowed the old faculties of philosophy to be split up. Students flocked in, the number of professors rose, and the mass university took shape. Standards fell and teaching became more instrumental. No one took responsibility for the whole, and scholarship was dominated by territoriality or sophistry.Footnote ⁴³

On the strength of this historical account, Jaspers turned to the present day to ask himself what the university's rightful mission might be. In one passage, he declared,

The university could certainly reassume its traditional tasks, said Jaspers. But much had changed, and the old educational world had been torn apart. One important undertaking was to draw a picture of German history that could capitalize on the good heritage. This required research; it was not enough simply to re-evaluate previous perceptions.Footnote ⁴⁵

Historical perceptions of the university, as Christoph Markschies noted, fall under the heading of either decadence or progress. In the former case, they frequently contain an element of golden-age myth.Footnote ⁴⁶ This was undoubtedly true of Jaspers. His ideal, the classical–humanist university, had gradually taken shape during the eighteenth century, but by the mid-nineteenth century had begun to be undermined. With Nazism came utter disaster. At the same time, it is clear that Jaspers felt ambivalent about the historical trend; he was still well aware that there was no turning back. Too much had changed.

In Jaspers's vision of the German university, the Humboldtian tradition played an implicit role. In Die Idee der Universität, he only mentioned Humboldt a handful of times, and in his other writings references to the Prussian educational reformer were very few and far between. On one occasion, however, when he was discussing the relationship between the university and the state, he quoted Humboldt without further reference: “The state must always remain aware that the thing would be done much better without it.” It is worth noting that this is the tenor of Humboldt's Über die innere und äußere Organisation der höheren wissenschaftlichen Anstalten in Berlin (1809/1810), although not in as many words.Footnote ⁴⁷

For Jaspers, Humboldt seems to have been a familiar name, but he was not one of the great figures in the German university tradition; Kant and Weber were far more important sources of inspiration. Nor was the University of Berlin's foundation in 1810 a milestone in his historical understanding. He instead traced the origins of the classical–humanist university to the eighteenth century. Philosophers such as Kant and Schleiermacher created a cogent idea of the university at the turn of the nineteenth century; Humboldt had had the honour of being the first to realize this new university, and he thus appeared neither as a thinker nor as a synthesist.

It is hardly surprising, then, that Jaspers found no reason to evoke Humboldt for rhetorical purposes. In Jaspers's efforts to revitalize the German university, he nevertheless seized on the things that would later come to be strongly associated with Humboldt, including many of the ideals he personally associated with the classical–humanist university, but which today are associated with the Humboldtian tradition. One that he often returned to, for example, was the importance of the unity of scholarship. Like many others engaged in the university debate in the occupation years, he worried about academic specialization.Footnote ⁴⁸ In Die Idee der Universität, he argued for the unity of scholarly thought. It is true, he wrote, that students apply to universities in order to prepare for a profession. But they expect more than that. The university should represent scholarship as a whole, and from this students should be able to shape their own world view.Footnote ⁴⁹

Time and again, Jaspers also defended die Verbindung von Forschung und Lehre, “the link between research and teaching”—today another ideal often associated with Humboldt. He objected to those who wanted to create a distinction between the two, transforming Germany's universities into pure research institutions in the process. Only if research and teaching were combined would students come into contact with the actual processes of knowledge.Footnote ⁵⁰

Academic freedom, in all its variety, was another issue where Jaspers followed the classic German line, but without making much of Humboldt. Even before Die Idee der Universität he had hailed die Freiheit der Lehre and die Freiheit des Lernens—the freedoms of teaching and learning—as fundamental principles, and he returned to the question on several occasions.Footnote ⁵¹ Closely related to academic freedom was the issue of the university's relationship with the state. Jaspers acknowledged that the university was dependent on the state, but in the wake of the war it seemed obvious to underline the need for freedom from the state.

A brief mention of these three ideals—the unity of scholarship, the interplay of teaching and research, and academic freedom—is not in itself sufficient to characterize Jaspers's philosophy of the university. Nevertheless, his most important writings illustrate the fact that his was very much in the classic German tradition, which he wanted to revive. In hermeneutic terms, one could say that Jaspers attempted to actualize Germany's classical–humanist heritage, but without reference to Humboldt. He was aware that the university had to adapt to the modern world, but equally he stressed the need to strengthen academic freedom after the horrors of Nazism. He also knew that it would require hard, protracted effort to breathe life into the German university, with little hope of immediate happiness or success. But it was the only option.Footnote ⁵²

Karl Jaspers was a prominent figure in the university debate in the immediate post-war period. However, others too made important contributions. Like Jaspers, the issues they all faced were how to revive Germany's universities and to what end. And, like Jaspers, there were many who harked back to the German university tradition, but they valued it differently and drew different conclusions. Two examples, Gerhard Ritter and Werner Richter, give a picture of the post-war exchange of ideas that is more diverse.

A HUMANIST–LIBERAL STATE UNIVERSITY

Gerhard Ritter, born in 1888, was one of his generation's leading historians. He devoted himself to the major political, military, and religious figures in history. By 1925, Ritter was a professor in Freiburg im Breisgau, and he remained faithful to the university, even in the Third Reich. His initial interest in the new Nazi regime, national–conservative as he was, gradually gave way to aversion. During the Second World War, he showed his distaste for Nazism by joining resistance organizations such as the Freiburg Circles and the Confessing Church. Immediately after the war, he threw himself into rebuilding what was left of German academe. He took part in the local denazification of Freiburg, contributed to the intellectual inquiry into the origins of Nazism, and played an important role as the German Historical Association's first president after the war.Footnote ⁵³

Gerhard Ritter also made an elaborate contribution to the debate about the nature of the university. In October 1945 he delivered the inaugural address in the first public lecture series in Freiburg after the war. Entitled “Die Idee der Universität und das öffentliche Leben,” it would later make its way into print.Footnote ⁵⁴ It was not the first time he pondered the conditions of academic life: in 1936 he had written a history of the University of Heidelberg, and he was very familiar with the Prussian reforms of the early nineteenth century, having written a biography of Karl vom und zum Stein.Footnote ⁵⁵

In his address, Ritter started where so many others had begun: the calamity of Nazism and the search for new, sustainable values. He called for a reliable guide that would at least suggest a general direction. Society, he said, should turn to scholarship to understand the deeper causes of Germany's present condition. The questions were many, however. In looking for answers, Ritter considered the idea of the university in Germany in historical terms.Footnote ⁵⁶

Ritter sketched the emergence of the German universities in the Middle Ages. His point was that until at least the seventeenth century, they were first and foremost intellectual institutions: their philosophical–philological mission was more important than the vocational training they offered. In absolutist princely states, the vocational element grew and pure scholarship was pushed to one side. The emergence of the natural sciences took place outside the university, and the same was true of the rationalist philosophy. The enlightened rulers of the day showed little understanding of university autonomy, or indeed of scholarship as an end in itself.Footnote ⁵⁷

The seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were thus for Ritter a period of decay in university history. It was therefore to his mind one of the greatest achievements of the German history of ideas that the university was able to rise from the ashes of its destruction. He spoke of a “German movement,” which changed Germany's character and enabled it to become the leader of the West. Although “the reform of German universities in the era of Humboldt, Fichte, and Schleiermacher was only a partial manifestation of the greater movement,” he said that Germans should be more grateful than ever to that movement.Footnote ⁵⁸ In the midst of political defeat, it had achieved a cultural revival of a type seldom seen. For example, it led to a reinforcement of academic autonomy, and a new kind of institution saw the light of day—the humanist–liberal state university.Footnote ⁵⁹

Ritter contrasted this new German university with the system of centralized state colleges that Napoleon had introduced in France at the same time. Nineteenth-century German universities, according to Ritter, were notable for their self-management, even if the state intervened to prevent abuses of academic freedom. This interaction between the “free” university and the protective hand of the state was very fortunate for academic life. Ritter saw it as a golden age for German scholarship. Today—yes, especially today, Ritter argued—there was every reason to rethink the basic principles of the humanist–liberal university.Footnote ⁶⁰

Ritter then dwelt at length on what distinguished this new type of university. His argument, being chronological and largely narrative, was distinctly historical rather than analytical or systematic, yet it is still possible to identify the principles that he considered to characterize the humanist–liberal university. Above all, Ritter stressed the importance of academic freedom. He traced the new university programme back to Humboldt's Ideen zu einem Versuch, die Gränzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen of 1792, a pamphlet that he said had been long regarded in German nationalist circles to be an antistate, “liberal” pamphlet, but now, after the failure of the totalitarian system, many realized that government interference had to be qualified. For Humboldt, he said, limitations on state power could release suppressed energies, and thus Humboldt's liberal political philosophy was closely related to his educational vision. These basic truths also left their mark on the education system Humboldt designed while a Prussian government minister: character formation, and not professional skills, was all. Ritter announced that Humboldt's goal had been independent, scholarly research, conducted in a spirit of intellectual fellowship between teachers and students, and he cited several key formulations from Humboldt's writings of 1809–10.Footnote ⁶¹

Yet did not academic freedom lead to sophistry or useless abstraction, Ritter went on to ask. “Yes,” was his response, “academic freedom, like any other freedom, is a very dangerous thing,” but in order to generate real knowledge, one must dare to take that risk, because as soon as the state becomes involved, there is a rapid descent into trend-following and propaganda; that was proved once and for all by the Nazi state.Footnote ⁶² Extrapolating from the Nazi experience, he was thus convinced that academic freedom might come at a price, but one had to be prepared to pay it. The alternative, as the Third Reich showed, was chilling. In this instance, Ritter thus turned to Humboldt the liberal for guidance and arguments.

In his interpretation of the humanist–liberal university, Ritter linked academic freedom with two other basic principles. The first was the pursuit of pure knowledge. Here again he referred to Humboldt, claiming that genuine scholarship was a “never-ending process” and its only goal was knowledge. The state, said Ritter, had to be made aware of the fact that such a scholarship could only be realized by free, creative forces, not at the state's behest; it could only thrive in Einsamkeit und Freiheit, solitude and freedom.Footnote ⁶³

Bildung was the other academic principle Ritter emphasized in his historical account. The leading lights of German Idealism never doubted that intellectual freedom had a character-building quality. “Science, which comes from within and can take root within, also forms the character, and for the state and not least for mankind is to do not with knowledge and speech, but with character and actions,” he quoted approvingly from Humboldt's memorandum of 1809–10. The humanist–liberal university was not at all cut off from society, Ritter concluded.Footnote ⁶⁴

Thus far, in his address Ritter had accentuated the ideals that formed the basis of the new German university. However, he went on to ask how well they had been realized. The first generations after 1810 were affected by the new centres of education, and the following decades turned out to be a happy period—“Never before and never after have German academics played a greater role in society than between 1815 and 1866,” he said.Footnote ⁶⁵ Against this golden era, he set his personal experience of the earlier twentieth century, with its unbridled anarchy and self-centred individualism. The rot had set in not under Nazi rule, but long before in the later stages of the Bismarckian age.Footnote ⁶⁶

In Ritter's account of modern German history, two golden ages thus presented themselves: the period of intellectual reassessment in the years around 1800, and the period from 1815 to 1866, when the humanist–liberal state university was realized.Footnote ⁶⁷ During the latter half of the nineteenth century, this harmonious unity dissolved, and Idealism was replaced by materialism and positivism. Increasingly, higher education lost sight of Humboldt's dream of comprehensiveness, Ritter claimed, revealing it as another ideal he associated with the humanist–liberal university. As specialization increased, it became more difficult for researchers to distinguish the essential from the inessential.Footnote ⁶⁸

In the aftermath of the First World War, there was a sense of academic crisis, with loud calls for sweeping university reform. The generation of students who returned from the battlefields were disappointed that university could not offer them guidance in the large questions of life. Despite this, the great reform never came. With ever greater numbers of students flocking to their doors, Germany's universities risked becoming institutions of mass education, their lectures little more than high-school lessons. “And yet the close connection between research and teaching, which is the special characteristic and particular advantage of our German university enterprise, required teamwork from teachers and students in close, carefully selected spheres,” Ritter stressed, touching in the process on another characteristic feature of the classical German university: the combination of research and teaching.Footnote ⁶⁹

In the 1920s, universities failed to offer young people what they needed, Ritter concluded, and oversubscription brought with it the risk of uniformity. The threat of superficiality became much more evident following the Nazis’ violent attempt to make the universities into propaganda centres. He characterized the majority of the Party's representatives as semi-literate, and claimed that they had largely failed in their attempt to convert senior academics into spokesmen for racial teaching. At the same time, he was anxious not to whitewash the past, and he pointed out that the degree of acquiescence with the Nazis’ line varied from subject to subject, with the vast majority taking an apolitical stance. Ritter's conclusion was that the Nazis had had limited impact on the actual research done at universities.Footnote ⁷⁰

But what about today, asked Ritter, when everything is in ruins after the unparalleled destruction? He did not deny the tremendous difficulties, yet, even so, he put his faith in the German university. He was well aware of the hatred that the Nazis had spread across the world, but the rehabilitation of the German people would be through scholarship—genuine scholarship, which called for genuine research.Footnote ⁷¹

At the end of his speech, Ritter returned to his belief that scholarship should serve no other end than the pure truth. The university would do most for society if it devoted itself to its core mission—untrammelled research. Genuine, pure scholarship was turned away from life (lebensabgewandt), and thus turned away from life's immediate, practical needs, but was nevertheless not alienated from life (lebensfremd). It was undoubtedly true that academic study was by no means a guarantee of sanity and insight, as he acknowledged; however, he wanted to believe, as Wilhelm von Humboldt had once done, that an academic education also had an ethical effect on the young, that it shaped a free, independent character.Footnote ⁷²

Gerhard Ritter's address was indeed historical in nature. He had begun with the Middle Ages, and traced a sweeping arc through to the modern era. Like Jaspers, he sought in the past the sources that could give new life to the German university. These he found it in the humanist–liberal state university, conjured up shortly after 1800 and with its heyday in the first half of the nineteenth century. More so than Jaspers, he referred to Humboldt as a major force behind the emergence of this new type of university. Ritter was clear-sighted about the extent of Humboldt's historical achievement, and by no means mythologized his actions. It was obvious that he had read Humboldt and saw him as one of several people who contributed to the reform of the German university in the early nineteenth century. Particularly, Ritter drew inspiration from the young, liberal Humboldt and his notion of limiting the state. A few years after the end of the war, Ritter was hailing academic freedom in the shape of university autonomy. Academic freedom was a prerequisite for the realization of the free pursuit of knowledge and education—something that had applied as much during the early 1800s as in the 1940s.

Christoph Cornelißen, Ritter's biographer, has stressed that his political thinking during the immediate post-war period was marked by an increasing conviction that at all costs they should prevent absolute and uncontrollable forces regaining mastery over Germany. In this perspective, his university ideals—which Cornelißen does not consider in detail—can be seen as an extension of a general, ideological principle.Footnote ⁷³ Samuel Moyn has noted another side to Ritter. In Basel in 1948 he gave a lecture on the history of human rights, which formed the basis of an article published the following year in Historische Zeitschrift. Moyn illustrates how Ritter examined the origins of human rights in specific Christian sources, his point being that Ritter was seeking to reconstruct and defend a Christian, Western identity at a time of crisis and loss.Footnote ⁷⁴

These examples show that Gerhard Ritter strove to find his intellectual footing after the Second World War. As an eminent historian and conservative intellectual, he set out to renew Germany by reconnecting with the past. He combined passionate German patriotism with a belief that Germany had to be inspired by the Christian West. His faith in the search for truth and unconditional academic freedom, as embodied by Humboldt and the young University of Berlin, should be seen in this light.

A TESTING TIME

Werner Richter (1887–1960) offered a very different perspective on the German university's history and future. He was at heart a Germanist, and had held professorships in both Greifswald and Berlin. Between 1920 and 1932, he also worked at the Prussian Ministry of Culture. A close associate of Carl Heinrich Becker, he had had a hand in drawing up the Weimar Republic university reforms. All this came to an abrupt halt when, because of his Jewish ancestry, he was forced to leave Germany in 1933. He ultimately made his way to the United States, where he became familiar with a number of academic environments, which left a deep impression. Richter returned home a few years after the war, first as a professor and then as rector of the University of Bonn. His interest in Germany's universities and education policy had, if anything, grown, and he became involved in the public debate on research and higher education. During the 1950s, Richter played a vital role in re-establishing ties between West Germany and the international academic community, not least as the first president of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD).Footnote ⁷⁵

His first notable intervention in the post-war debate on the German university came in a lecture he gave in Marburg and later Munich in the summer in 1948, published the following year as Die Zukunft der deutschen Universität (The Future of the German University). In the space of forty pages, he considered the German tradition and what the future might hold. Like so many others who were wrestling with the same issues, Richter cast about for means to renew the German university. His approach was novel, however, for it was influenced by his American experiences and critical views on elements of the German legacy.Footnote ⁷⁶ Richter recognized this himself, so he began his lecture by emphasizing that his starting point was very different, for, having lived and worked abroad, he felt he saw the current situation in a broader perspective. It was quite simple, to his mind: if Germany's universities wanted to lead German culture as they had done in the nineteenth century, then they had to rally behind a new programme. Yet, however new that programme might be, it was unthinkable to speak of the German university's future without considering its glorious history before 1933.Footnote ⁷⁷

Like Jaspers and Ritter, Richter gave over much of his address to a historical account. “The German university of the nineteenth century, the neo-Humanist university . . . owed its origin to the idealistic philosophy and awareness of life of Classical–Romantic poetry,” he began. On German soil, an Idealism developed that reached transcendental heights. “The service of scientific truth was for Humboldt and his circle a religious experience,” and therefore, he went on, there was an almost religious motive to Humboldt, Fichte, Schelling, and Schleiermacher's desire to make the nexus of research and teaching a fundamental principle of the German university. Humboldt had wanted lecturers and students to serve scholarship, united in a shared quest for truth.Footnote ⁷⁸

Meanwhile, the scholarly ideals that had underpinned what Richter called the “humanist university” were noted for the individualism that they lent it. For Humboldt, there had been no tension between scholarship and life as was now the case, and a synthesis of scholarship, education, and life had been achieved at the humanist university that had not been seen since Greek antiquity. Richter knew he was not alone in looking back with nostalgia to those early nineteenth-century dreams, when Humboldt “became an archetype of this ideal of life.”Footnote ⁷⁹

Yet, although Richter cast wistful glances at the early nineteenth-century humanist university, he was convinced it belonged to a bygone era. He reminded his audience that this first phase of the new university's history had soon come to an end.Footnote ⁸⁰ Richter singled out Leopold von Ranke, professor of history in Berlin from 1825 to 1871, as representing the new phase. The unifying ideal, which had been so central to the founders of the humanist university, faded into the background. Gradually, said Richter, two scholarly trends emerged: a politically moralizing historiography and the growing influence of the natural sciences.Footnote ⁸¹

Among his contemporaries, there were those who thought that the best response to current problems was to espouse the academic ideals of earlier times. Richter doubted this. What did Humboldt's dreams have to offer those who fought in the age of machines, industry, and overpopulation, he asked.Footnote ⁸² It is obvious that Richter believed that the ideals of the humanist university that he associated with Humboldt were antiquated; now, with the desperation of the war in recent memory, it was difficult to maintain classic, individualistic university ideals. The old idea of the full-scale university was still cherished by an older generation, but seemed more and more like a fiction. Richter compared it with developments in the United States, and predicted that the ideal of vocational training would inevitably come to Germany too. He saw how many young people rejected the old education notions and looked to the practical needs of life.Footnote ⁸³

However, post-war Germany found itself in a political and intellectual vacuum, and had to take such guidance as was offered. Consequently, it was essential to relate to the past, even though he was convinced that it was not enough to hark back to the nineteenth century and the Humboldtian ideal of the university. The German university had to hit upon a new concept of education.Footnote ⁸⁴

So, where should the German university turn for its inspiration? Richter's advice was to listen to the criticism of German scholarship to be heard in English-speaking countries: the Germans’ tendency to lapse into pedantry, their fondness of the absolute and abstract, their exclusive focus on preparing for a life of research and not for the practical needs of life, and their inability to work for the common good. Instead of rigidly sticking to their native mindset, Germans should learn from Anglo-Saxon criticism.Footnote ⁸⁵

Richter then turned to the question of what the future should hold. His main concern was that the German university system should be imbued with a respect for Western values. In 1945 he had published a book in English, Re-educating Germany, in which he advocated an educational ideal intended to make “good Europeans” of the Germans. This he now repeated. He was still utterly convinced that an orientation towards Western Europe and America was right for Germany, and that scholarship could help to restore a sense of Western solidarity after the rifts of the war. One condition was that academics would have to rise above their national parochialism and instead help to increase knowledge of other countries.Footnote ⁸⁶

Richter thus employed a variant of the Abendland rhetoric. Unlike many others who wanted to see a German rapprochement with the West, he had the greatest respect for the United States.Footnote ⁸⁷ Like many others, he saw de-Christianization as a major problem. Secularization not only led to nihilism and relativism, it also led to secular utopias. In particular, he called for a living Christian humanism as one element in a general cultural rebirth in the West.Footnote ⁸⁸

Richter also underscored that the Germans must fully embrace democracy. Democracy should henceforth permeate both politics and everyday life. Richter was fully aware that democracy had a weak footing on German soil; all the more reason, then, to mobilize all forces in the cause of democracy, including all the institutions of higher research and education. In Germany, broad academic freedoms had shielded the university from the rest of society, while in America it had been quick to promote individual freedom and collective responsibility. He called for Germany's educational ideals to be remodelled, paying greater attention to society's collective needs.Footnote ⁸⁹

In his historiography, Richter thus differed little from Jaspers and Ritter. He acknowledged that the University of Berlin had been immensely important, and looked back on its early days with frank admiration. At the same time, he was fully convinced that German professors should not settle for merely passing on a great tradition. When it came to the future of the German universities, however, he found his inspiration elsewhere than had the other two mandarins. Richter did not emphasize the classic German principles of self-cultivation, academic freedom or the combination of research and teaching, but instead argued that it was crucial to open up to the outside world and unite behind democracy. His conviction sprang from his experiences as a German Jew in exile in North America.

THE HUMBOLDTIAN TRADITION IN THE IMMEDIATE POST-WAR ERA

The idea of the university was much debated in the years after the Second World War. A number of eminent professors—mandarins all—felt called to formulate their ideas about research and higher education. Yet few, if any, provided a detailed plan for the future of the country's universities. At points, there was disagreement over how Germany's heritage should be managed and what conclusions should be drawn from the Nazi catastrophe, but, seen in a wider perspective, they were all part of the same academic culture and were caught up in the same rhetorical patterns.

Lectures were the most typical rhetorical vehicle at this date, often in the form of opening or inaugural addresses. Many of them were later published in university publication series or one of the many periodicals that flourished. Rectors’ speeches were numerically the most common, but several of the more elaborate addresses were given by other professors. On the other hand, few lengthy reflections on the university were published during these years; Jaspers's Die Idee der Universität was a notable exception.Footnote ⁹⁰

There was widespread consensus that the German university had to undergo a regeneration. The title of Jaspers's speech, “Erneuerung der Universität,” could equally have applied to many of the contributions. After the period of decline under the Nazis, it was time to breathe new life into an old institution. This mattered, not only in order to promote research and teaching, but also to revive German culture. The university could help to “restore our self-awareness as a people,” wrote Jaspers.Footnote ⁹¹

In terms of how the university should be revitalized, there was a range of opinion. In the immediate post-war period, many felt that there were the two paths to spiritual renewal. One led back to classical German culture—a Heimkehr zu Goethe. The Germans should turn in on themselves and look to the past in order to tap the rich literary and philosophical heritage that was also part of their history. The other path would bring the Germans back into the fold of the Christian West. Europe became an Ersatzvaterland in those first few years after the war. The two paths might intersect, or even merge into one: by affirming the classic German tradition, the Germans recognized that in the deepest sense they were a European nation with a self-evident place in a Christian West. So said Jaspers, Ritter, and Richter—although the latter was clearly ambivalent about the German tradition. The rhetoric of the West ultimately harked back to the nineteenth century; it was as if the language and eternal values of Idealism were particularly appealing after Nazism's moral bankruptcy. The classic German university ideal was a dream of a brighter, more worthy, and more stable order.

Opinions on university regeneration were closely linked to views on what historically had constituted the modern German university. For Jaspers, the university remained fundamentally intact, despite Nazism. He thought the answer was to bring this heritage up to date, which would make for a fruitful atmosphere and help the university return to its full breadth. Similarly, Ritter's confidence in the prospects for German scholarship was essentially unshaken. Not for him elaborate explanations of how the university should be reconstructed, although he did stress that the only way it would regain its old power was by concentrating on true research and knowledge. Richter, for his part, questioned how healthy the German university tradition really was. Revitalization for him meant openness: geographical openness to Europe and America; political openness to real democracy. For the university to have a bright future, it had to be involved in “social work” and not close its doors to the outside world.

It is striking that none of them attacked head on all the Nazis who had populated the German university; if anything, there was a tendency to downplay the Nazis’ influence on academic institutions, and that certainly did little to speed local denazification on its way. Their contributions to university debate were more philosophical or historical than overtly political. Like that of many other intellectuals in the immediate post-war period, their concern was to grasp the German catastrophe in general terms.Footnote ⁹²

It was a distinctive feature of the period that the ideas of the university formulated then were not at their sharpest in visions of the future, for they relied on historical accounts that affected the certainty of their conclusions. Even though Jaspers, Ritter, and Richter were all well schooled in history (Ritter, the historian of the trio, spent almost his entire speech considered here going over German university history, while Jaspers and Richter each supported their arguments with a historical analysis), this must still be seen rather as evidence of the willingness in the late 1940s to examine the trains of thought that had led to Nazism.

Historical judgements, especially on the German university's past, in many ways united Jaspers and Ritter. They both believed that the German university's decline had begun during the second half of the nineteenth century. In this sense, neither of them saw 1933 as an absolute cut-off point. Rather, it was a culmination. Yet with the Nazis, the university finally lost all dignity, all originality. The experience of Nazism also strengthened these men in their conviction that the university should be re-established, whether through unfettered academic freedom or through the pure search for truth.

One interesting difference between them, however, concerned what they chose to portray as the exemplary epoch in German university history. Jaspers spoke warmly of the “classical–humanist university” and dated its origins to the eighteenth century: it embodied the ideals of humanism, education, science, freedom, and unity, until, in the mid-nineteenth century, it was to be replaced by the “modern university”—for Jaspers a pejorative term. In contrast, Ritter believed the turn of the nineteenth century was crucial because of the emergence of a new kind of institution, “the humanist–liberal state university.” For him, Wilhelm von Humboldt was a prominent figure in a broad movement that renewed the German university, not just as an organizer, but also as a thinker. Ritter admittedly contemplated the larger context around the year 1800, and mentioned the likes of Schleiermacher and Fichte, but if there was one figure he was particularly keen on, it was Humboldt.

Jaspers and Ritter thus illustrate two different approaches to the Humboldtian tradition. Jaspers's relationship with Humboldt was tenuous. He mentioned his name a few times, but showed no familiarity with his texts and clearly found other thinkers much more important. Yet when Jaspers argued for the unity of scholarship, the combination of teaching and research, and academic freedom, he was nevertheless invoking the classical German university. Ritter, meanwhile, singled out several of Humboldt's works and cited them appreciatively. The Prussian educational reformer was undoubtedly a point of reference, but it did not stop there. Ritter repeatedly raised the question of Humboldt's legacy and argued for its continued importance. Even more so than Jaspers, he held academic freedom to be priceless. The university's independence from the state was all—a freedom that the young, liberal Humboldt had inspired. Going much further than Jaspers, Ritter said that without an absolute distance from the state, a university's intellectual energies would be crushed and no real research would be done. He also referred to the Humboldtian tradition to emphasize the importance of a close relationship between research and teaching, which in turn was a condition of a character-building education. Generally speaking, Humboldt and the humanist–liberal state university were incarnations of the ideal of a harmonious unity of theoretical and practical reason, of truth-seeking and learning. In contrast to Jaspers, however, Ritter was not worried that the unity of scholarship had been lost.

For Richter, too, historical events were at the heart of his account, but his were different accents and different conclusions. Like Jaspers and Ritter, he looked to the early nineteenth-century “neo-humanist university” as a model. A combination of research and teaching was then a fundamental principle, as was the priority of the search for knowledge. Its heyday was brief, however, and soon its living Idealism began to ossify. Richter identified a pronounced individualism in the educational ideals of the day, one that had originally been central to the neo-humanist conception of education, which would explain much of its allure, but would eventually prove disastrous for German academe. This individualism was ultimately to alienate the German university from society at large, concluded Richter.

Richter's views on the Humboldtian tradition were ambivalent. He was enchanted by neo-humanism's educational and scientific ideals, but he was convinced that they belonged to the past. Unlike Ritter, and indeed Jaspers, he did not advocate a return to a classic German university ideal; instead, he believed that tradition would only be renewed if the German universities espoused democracy and overcame their national limitations. In Richter's treatment of German university history, Humboldt was a central point of reference. Yet even more than Ritter, Richter had a perfunctory relationship with Humboldt, and in referring to him omitted his given name.

A picture thus emerges of Humboldt's importance to the post-war university debate that is more differentiated than that found in the literature. Whether his name was mentioned or not, one can see how versions of a classic German university were evoked as exemplars or deterrents. The historical argument thus provided debaters with rhetorical ammunition, but also with a guiding light in a tumultuous time.

THE MANDARINS’ UNIVERSITY

In a broader perspective, the immediate post-war debate about Germany's universities tied in with the other major topics in modern German intellectual history. Crisis was one such theme. As early as the Weimar Republic, a crisis discourse had evolved that very much involved the university: after the heyday of the German Empire, its scholarship had fallen into disrepute, but academe's predicament was also seen as a symptom of the serious crisis in classical modernity as a whole, which many experienced during the interwar period.Footnote ⁹³ After the Second World War, the crisis discourse appeared in various guises, to such an extent that the question is whether twentieth-century German university history was not in fact the history of a permanent crisis.

Another major theme was mass education. The fear that German universities would become overcrowded had already surfaced in the nineteenth century. When the same concerns were raised in the early post-war period—by Ritter and Jaspers, among others—it was not just a question of rising numbers of students and falling standards; rather, the criticism was part of a general conservative rejection of mass society. In Friedrich Meinecke's frequently cited work Die deutsche Katastrophe (1946), Nazism's origins were sought in a similar manner in the rise of the masses—and their intoxication by power. Discussions of the mass university would continue throughout the post-war period.Footnote ⁹⁴

The main figures in this account were all well-established humanities professors who had obtained their chairs in the Weimar Republic. Ever since the nineteenth century, such leading mandarins had seen it as their duty to expound on the idea of the university, and they duly continued this tradition after 1945.Footnote ⁹⁵ They had plenty in common, but there was also considerable variation when it came to the conclusions they drew from German university history. The differences can largely be explained by their different experiences and intellectual profiles. Jaspers's concern in the immediate post-war period was to examine the German tradition and create a new foundation for the university of the future, and he was keen for both the German nation and its universities to find their place in a changing world. Ritter was similar in his interest in restoring German academic life, but pursued it in a national and conservative vein. He looked back and saw an untainted national tradition that he wanted to revive. Richter's exile meant that he viewed things with a more jaundiced eye, and he advocated a radical renewal along Anglo-Saxon lines. They thus fit the overall picture of post-war ideas posited by Axel Schildt and others, but one must also be alert to the variations and nuances: with their different experiences and visions of the future, these three mandarins represented various standard intellectual and political positions.Footnote ⁹⁶

Earlier I noted that several historians have written of a Humboldtian renaissance in the aftermath of the Second World War. In this essay, I have painted a more multifaceted picture, emphasizing the special role played by the mandarins. A few historians have also considered the Humboldtian tradition after the Second World War in more overarching terms, and there is reason to revisit their work here. Konrad Jarausch argues that with the approving rhetoric of Bildung, the universities also returned “to the problems of elitism, arrogance, and apoliticism.” As a consequence, West German universities were plagued by “Humboldt syndrome” in the post-war period, which hampered much-needed democratization and reform.Footnote ⁹⁷ It would require a larger study to determine if Jarausch is correct in this, but his criticism has certainly been echoed by others. Above all in the 1960s senior academics were accused of having glossed over the full extent of academics’ ideological commitment to the Nazis, and hence of having hindered the course of democratic reform.Footnote ⁹⁸

That said, Peter Uwe Hohendahl has warned against taking the 1960s understanding of the early post-war period at face value. Hohendahl wonders whether Jaspers and his contemporaries were conservative in their approach, and believes that we must distinguish between different forms of conservatism. According to his classification, the mandarins should be considered conservative in the sense that they wanted to draw on a classical tradition, but they were not necessarily conservative in a political or reactionary sense.Footnote ⁹⁹ We have to get away from the simple dichotomies of conservative versus modern—if recent research teaches us nothing else, it shows how unsuitable these concepts if we are to understand Nazi attitudes towards the German university. When the mandarins, who had experienced the Third Reich's research and education policies at first hand, set about formulating their ideas of the German university of the future, not only did they look to classical models, but also each applied the bitter lessons of his own Nazi experiences. Hence Ritter, a political conservative, concluded that henceforth the university must protect academic freedom at all costs, a notion that in other times has been associated with radical or liberal ideas. Simply to contrast, say, conservative and modern does little to further our understanding.Footnote ¹⁰⁰

In her work on the university debate in the occupation years, Barbara Wolbring suggests that the basic pattern of West German higher-education policy emerged at this point.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Given the remarks made by leading figures in the debate, I find I cannot agree with her. By the time the debate flared up again the early 1960s a new generation had taken the lead, and their attention was on different issues. Jürgen Habermas, Ralf Dahrendorf, Helmut Schelsky, and other intellectuals dealt with the new mass university's place in modern, democratic, industrial society. They too, like their predecessors, asked questions about the freedom of research, educational content, and research focus, but their responses were based on different perceptions of reality, and different dreams for the future.Footnote ¹⁰²

Instead, both Wolbring's work and this essay demonstrate how the discourse was shaped in a very specific phase of modern German history. In common with other recent studies of the Humboldtian tradition, I would argue that the debate about Germany's universities was deeply embedded in that specific epoch, and any answers were to very specific questions. The idea of the German university formulated in the immediate post-war period was therefore anything but timeless, for it was an expression of that particular generation's experience and ideals. It was the swansong of the mandarins.