Dueling Students makes an important revisionist argument about the nature of student life and politics in the Wilhelmine era. An earlier historiography gave us the image of the elitist, dueling, antisemitic, yet essentially apolitical, German student who would develop into the avid Hitler supporter of the postwar era. Zwicker directly refutes this Sonderweg interpretation, arguing that liberal and democratic ideas and practices were making significant headway into the universities in the two decades before World War I. University student bodies were becoming more socially diverse with the entrance of women and the rising numbers of Jews, Catholics, and students from lower-middle-class backgrounds. This fed an array of new student institutions, initiatives, and points of view. Mining their writings and speeches in student publications, the records of student organizations, memoirs, and letters, Zwicker argues that in the years leading up to World War I, “students increasingly embraced the democratic values of tolerance, equality, and freedom” (p. 15). This was most obviously the case in the growth of the democratic Free Students, an organization founded in opposition to the nationalist and elitist dueling fraternities (the Corps and the Burschenschaft). But even these latter bastions of student conservatism were partly undergoing a kind of liberalization in Zwicker's view. For example, among the elite Burschenschaft, known for their right-wing extremism in the Weimar Republic, Zwicker has found in their publications evidence after the turn of the century of the increasing presence of liberal, even progressive, ideas, including those in support of greater student autonomy and power vis-à-vis university administrations (in the form, most notably, of demands for democratically elected student councils). Their newspapers included articles supporting universal manhood suffrage and self-identifying with “reform.” Meanwhile, the right-wing Union of German Students was downplaying in public its antisemitism. Zwicker argues that an important reason for these changes among the fraternities had to do with the very existence of the Free Students to their left, which, in a competition for popularity and relevance on campus, was pushing at least the Burschenschaft in a more progressive direction.

It is much more these political contests, rather than the duel itself, that is the subject of Dueling Students. Where the duel does figure in Dueling Students is in the gender component of competing norms and ideals of masculinity. Most interesting are the divisions between Catholic and Protestant male students. Aristocratic notions of male honor in the Protestant dueling fraternities, which glorified physical strength, aggression, vitality, and courage, were quite different from the masculine ideal in Catholic fraternities. Not only did the latter not duel (the practice was banned by the Catholic church), but they embraced ideals of faith, chastity, and loyalty to community.

These competing notions of masculinity played into and reinforced the confessional tensions between Catholic and dueling Protestant students, the latter accusing the former of being “weak, cowardly, and ungerman” (p. 45). One wishes for some probing of honor among female students. To say, as Zwicker does, that women were denied the duel because of their long skirts (p. 57) is to miss the central point about honor and gender. Women could not duel because dueling signified a masculinity predicated on the protection of the “weaker” sex whose honor, accordingly, was defined by sexuality. By contrast, the very fact of women's presence at the university was a claim to a non-embodied intellectual realm. Some probing of how women negotiated this new terrain would have been very interesting.

Dueling Students is organized into thematic chapters (chapter two: honor and dueling; chapter eight: the Academic Kulturkampf) and those that deal with the spectrum of student organizations and political positions (chapter three: the Burschenschaft; chapter four: Free Students; chapters five and six: Jewish students and the issue of “segregation or integration”; chapter seven: Catholic fraternities). Students were divided more than anything by confession. But Zwicker very much downplays the pervasiveness and strength of antisemitism among them, arguing instead that Jewish students were on the whole integrated into and at ease with campus life. By contrast, the organization of Catholic students into confessional fraternities and other Catholic groups evoked intense hostilities from both the right and left among non-Catholic students. These hostilities played out in the early years after the turn of the century in the Academic Kulturkampf, which united non-Catholic students from across the political spectrum. The perception that Catholic organizations were inimical to liberal values was, among the Free Students in particular, a critical mobilizing force for student activism. Zwicker correctly points out the contradictions within the liberalism of the Free Students, who advocated a unitary, rather than pluralistic, notion of tolerance and who, most notably in the Academic Kulturkampf, were quite willing to jettison that tolerance when it came to Catholic and Russian Jewish students. Yet, importantly in chapter eight, Zwicker argues that, contrary to the earlier notion of intolerant, illiberal German students, in these contests “both Catholics and anti-Catholics … defended their positions using liberal rhetoric.”

The implications of Zwicker's study are of radical discontinuity across the caesura of World War I, given the disjuncture between the optimistic picture in Dueling Students of growing student democracy, on the one hand, and the later pervasiveness of far-right politics at German universities. Zwicker does not directly address this issue but it is implicit in her conclusion. The disjuncture raises questions, not only about how and why the later change occurred, which is outside the scope of Zwicker's study, but also about how representative and deep the liberal attitudes of Dueling Students actually were in the first place. It is not always easy for the reader to judge this. The book certainly offers plenty of convincing evidence that the older Sonderweg view needs revision. Yet, Dueling Students does not quote extensively from the sources, nor does it give close readings of them. Indeed, it tends to take the published statements from student newspapers, on which the book heavily relies, at face value without considering alternative readings or the immediate contexts and agendas of their authors. While Zwicker has consulted some memoir literature, more extensive use of biographical sources and perhaps the inclusion of several in-depth case studies of individual students could also have helped to flesh out and bring to life some of the issues and themes raised by the published sources. Dueling Students may not be the last word on student culture and politics. But, in revising the long-standing Sonderweg intepretation, it importantly uncovers new dimensions and complicates our understanding of students in the Kaiserreich.