The emergence of the UNRRA University

The UNRRA University emerged out of the DP centre established by UNRRA at the Deutsches Museum. According to the centre's first director, Charley del Marmol, Munich's status as ‘a traditionnal center for scientific researchs and academic work’Footnote ¹¹ drew large numbers of DP students and professors to the city. By summer 1945 the museum had become known as a gathering place for academically minded DPs. In August 1945 they decided to pool their resources. Under the banner of a new organisation, International Academic Self-Help (Internationale Akademische Selbsthilfe), they organised a set of courses. Similar to the Vorsemesterkurse organised simultaneously at many German universities, these courses were intended for students whose university studies had been interrupted by the war, as well as for those who had not been able to finish their secondary education. They covered a wide array of topics, including experimental physics, analytic geometry, ethics, commercial law, modern German literature, English and Spanish. A total of 471 students registered for these courses.Footnote ¹²

Reflecting the pent-up demand for education, the scope of the project expanded from week to week. However, it is not clear that the idea of creating a university was present at the beginning. According to one account, when lectures began in September 1945 the participants had no idea ‘that from these modest beginnings, a great institution – namely a recognised university – would develop’.Footnote ¹³ This is not surprising, as it was common for DP camps to offer lectures and courses. Moreover, the earliest courses offered at the Deutsches Museum were to some extent intended to prepare students for German universities, which, at least in the US and British zones, were required to set aside 10 per cent of all places for DPs. At the same time, it was clear that the 10 per cent quota would not accommodate all DPs who wanted to study.Footnote ¹⁴ This consideration no doubt helped to push the project forward. By October 1945 it had been clearly defined as a university, and ambitious plans were being laid for its future.Footnote ¹⁵

During these first months, Polish and Russian DPs played a prominent role in the university. Two Polish concentration camp survivors, Walter Hnaupek and Jozef Proch, did much to stimulate the development of the project, perhaps building on the cultural work they had performed in Dachau. Russian DPs provided much of the project's early professoriat, while early student organisers were drawn from numerous nationalities. Also important were local UNRRA and US Army officials, who enthusiastically supported these efforts as a step in the rehabilitation of DPs. Indeed, the UNRRA welfare officer at the Deutsches Museum, a Polish-American named Halina Gaszynska, became the university's director and one of its most passionate advocates. As the university developed, individuals initially uninvolved in the project also came to the fore. Otmar Pirkmajer, a Slovenian jurist and concentration camp survivor, chosen rector after a series of Russians had been rejected as politically inappropriate (Soviet sentiments were at issue here), played a central role in defining the university as a humanist institution. Also important in defining the university's mission was a group of students associated with the UNRRA University Students’ Union (UUSU). The leaders of this group were Valerius Michelson, a Russian-Estonian who had served in the Red Army during the war and then, after his capture, in the German army; Ihor Suchowerskyj, a Ukrainian from Chernivtsi, Romania, who arrived in Germany in early 1944, around the same time that the Soviet Union occupied his home town; and Eduard Alperovitch, a Latvian Jew who had narrowly survived the Holocaust.

The university was officially opened at a ceremony in Munich's infamous Bürgerbräukeller on 16 February 1946. The event was attended by a number of dignitaries, including Lucian Truscott, the commanding general of the Third US Army, and John Whiting, Director of UNRRA for the US zone. In his opening remarks Truscott situated the university in the context of an Allied struggle against National Socialism. He identified the opening as ‘a symbol of the relationship between the allied armies, which have destroyed the evil force of Nazism, and those unfortunate persons of the world who have suffered so much at the hands of the Nazi tyrants’. The university, he stated, ‘symbolizes the desire of displaced persons for a return to normal living, and no less does it symbolyze the desire of UNRRA and of the Army to do all within our power to assist these persons’. At the same time, he was careful to define the university as a transitional institution, designed to tide DPs over as they ‘await[ed] the opportunity to return to normal life in a normal social community’.Footnote ¹⁶ Indeed, both UNRRA and the Americans defined their support for the university as provisional.

Although the university did not conform to any established model, in its general contours it resembled contemporary continental universities much more than British or US ones. This is evident in the structures of governance, the organisation of the faculties and the programmes of study. According to its statute, the university had nine faculties: philosophy, law, economics, natural sciences, medicine, veterinary medicine, civil engineering, mechanical engineering, and agriculture and forestry.Footnote ¹⁷ However, some of these existed only on paper. The faculty of philosophy, viewed as the keystone of the university, never opened because it lacked qualified personnel. The same was true of a planned faculty of theology. Programmes that depended on specialised facilities such as laboratories had an especially difficult time; students and faculty had to create these facilities from scratch.

The student body at the university reflected the disruptive effects of the war. The majority of students had begun their studies before the war. Many had spent time in forced labour, concentration and prisoner-of-war camps. The result was an unusual age distribution, with students between 21 and 25 years of age making up the largest age cohort (45 per cent), followed by students between 26 and 30 (19 per cent).Footnote ¹⁸ Women made up about 30 per cent of the student body, compared with about 13 per cent at German universities.Footnote ¹⁹ According to the records for the summer semester of 1946, the largest national groups were Ukrainians (649 students), Poles (348), Lithuanians (297), Russians (233), Latvians (210), Jews (134), Byelorussians (122) and Estonians (115). In general, the students gravitated to scientific and technical fields. The most popular programmes of study were engineering (36 per cent of students) and medicine (25 per cent), followed by natural science (18 per cent), economics (14 per cent) and law (7 per cent). This is similar to the pattern at German universities, where both German and DP students favoured medicine (32 and 36 per cent, respectively) and engineering (24 and 26 per cent). Philosophy, ranked third at German institutions (16 per cent of both German and DP students), was not an option at the UNRRA University.Footnote ²⁰

As the numbers above suggest, the popularity of scientific and technical fields was not something specific to DPs. Rather, it reflected a broader trend in European higher education: in an industrialised society, students increasingly saw universities as sites of professional training rather than personal cultivation.Footnote ²¹ At the same time, DP students had their own reasons for choosing these fields. Here, what Bella Brodzki and Jeremy Varon have written regarding Jewish DP students holds true more generally. Since their knowledge of German was often limited, it made sense for DPs to choose fields that had their own ‘universal’ languages. Further, since they did not plan to remain in Germany but were uncertain where they would ultimately end up, it made sense to pursue degrees that met the needs of the contemporary marketplace and offered a certain amount of portability.Footnote ²²

While the student body was restricted to DPs, the faculty also included non-DPs, brought in to supplement the limited number of qualified DP academics.Footnote ²³ Most of the teaching staff had been educated in continental Europe. Many had studied at German universities or universities influenced by the German model (e.g. in Austria-Hungary or Poland). Some had worked in Germany, German-occupied territories or German-allied countries during the war. For example, the Russian émigré zoologist Mikhail Mikhailovich Novikov, dean of natural sciences at the university, had worked at the University of Bratislava during the war. In his memoir, he argues that working in Slovakia, a Nazi puppet state, was preferable to remaining at his previous position in Prague, where he would have been forced to work directly under the Nazis.Footnote ²⁴ Other professors, such as Pirkmajer, had participated in the resistance and been interned in concentration camps.

Numerically, the academic staff was dominated by Russians (31 per cent) and Ukrainians (23 per cent). Only three faculty members were Jewish. Most strikingly, Russians dominated at the rank of full professor (occupying 10 of the 27 chairs) and among the deans. This Russian dominance appears especially significant when one considers that Russians were outliers among the DPs. They consisted, on the one hand, of ‘old émigrés’ – refugees from the Bolshevik Revolution and Civil War, who did not have DP status – and, on the other, of ‘new émigrés’ – Soviet citizens displaced during the Second World War, who were technically DPs but were subject to forcible repatriation and thus could only remain in Germany by hiding their identity.Footnote ²⁵ Many of the Russian professors had begun their careers long before the revolution, subsequently emigrating to such places as Yugoslavia and Czechoslovakia, where they continued their academic work in native universities or in émigré academic institutions. The presence of these old émigrés, experienced in creating and sustaining institutions in a context of displacement, may have been central in pushing the project in the direction of a permanent institution.

Despite moving towards ever greater legitimacy, the university struggled to establish itself. It was plagued by financial uncertainties, and the staff were paid irregularly. As noted earlier, not all of the planned faculties were able to open. According to some former students, the quality of instruction was not very high, and they did not view the university as a ‘serious’ institution on a par with the German universities.Footnote ²⁶ Others, however, have judged the teaching staff quite favourably.Footnote ²⁷ Language posed a particular problem. The lingua franca at the university was German, but not everyone knew the language well.

More fundamentally, the university's very existence was threatened by uncertainty over how, if at all, it fitted into the Allied DP programme. According to B. I. Balinsky, a former professor at the university, ‘UNRRA obviously did not know what to do with the University in the long run’.Footnote ²⁸ Although local UNRRA and army officials were enthusiastic about the university, broader policy objectives militated against supporting it. The Allies wanted to see displaced persons repatriated as quickly as possible; UNRRA's mandate was to assist in this process. The Soviet Union was especially eager to see its citizens return home. It was sensitive to any opposition among DPs and suspected the United States of turning a blind eye to anti-repatriation activities in its zone. Any project that slowed repatriation was thus deeply problematic from the Soviet point of view. As UNRRA personnel acknowledged, the university's relationship to the goal of repatriation was ‘very slight’.Footnote ²⁹ Indeed, the university seemed to pose a deterrent to repatriation. Although there was ‘no overpowering evidence’ of an organised anti-repatriation campaign, many students and professors were clearly unwilling to returning home.Footnote ³⁰ It was also clear that establishing the university on a more permanent basis would have ‘unsatisfactory implications from the point of view of repatriation’.Footnote ³¹ UNRRA thus refused to allow the university to expand its operations, despite strong demand from DP students. Finally, it has to be remembered that UNRRA itself was a temporary institution, with a mandate due to expire in June 1947. Hence any project initiated under its auspices was by definition transitory. In essence, then, the university foundered on the contradictions of Allied policy.

In December 1946 UNRRA announced that it was withdrawing its support.Footnote ³² The following month it ordered the university to vacate the Deutsches Museum.Footnote ³³ When students and faculty returned from the winter holiday, they found their access to the university's quarters barred by UNRRA camp police. More significantly, once inside, they discovered that the classrooms and laboratories had been vandalised. This discovery led to an outcry among students and staff. Students staged a hunger strike and held a vigil outside the Deutsches Museum, and petitioned the Office of Military Government for Bavaria. On 25 January, they marched on the military government's headquarters in the outskirts of Munich, demanding that the university be reopened.

These actions succeeded in convincing the military government to give the university a reprieve: it would be allowed to continue until the end of the winter semester. Beyond that point, however, its existence was not ensured. US officials were divided over this issue. A sense of moral obligation towards DPs competed with concerns about sponsoring a project that postponed the resolution of the ‘DP problem’ and aggravated relations with the Soviet Union. General Stanley Mickelsen of the army's Civil Affairs Division argued that ‘the establishment and continuance of an International university in Germany would be a symbol of democracy and anti-Nazi philosophy. It is also considered that the continuance of educational opportunities for those DPs whose repatriation or resettlement may be long delayed is desirable’.Footnote ³⁴ However, this view was countered by the military government, which argued that ‘the establishment of a foreign university in Germany would be an irritant rather than any helpful democratic symbol’.Footnote ³⁵ The project ‘would be fraught with international political complications’ (read: conflict with the Soviet Union) and would constitute a large economic and financial burden for Bavaria.Footnote ³⁶ The latter perspective ruled the day; the idea of supporting the university was rejected.

At the end of May 1947, the UNRRA University officially closed. Throughout the rest of 1947 and into 1948 the university's most dedicated students and staff searched for new sponsors, soliciting aid from governments, intergovernmental agencies, religious organisations and other universities. At the same time they lobbied for students and academics to be accepted into German universities and sought opportunities to emigrate. For a while it seemed that the university might be revived under the sponsorship of a German Christian organisation, whose plans were supported by the Bavarian ministry for education and culture.Footnote ³⁷ However, these plans fell through.

War and the new humanist university

From early on the university's organisers focused not only on putting their institution on a firm academic, financial and legal footing, but also on defining the university project to themselves and the outside world. Like many Europeans, they identified universities as a critical site of post-war cultural renewal. They produced numerous texts explaining how their institution had developed and what it was supposed to be. The UNRRA University, they argued, was something ‘more’ than a DP university; conversely, a DP university was something ‘more’ than an average university. Defining the displaced person as a victim of war in general and National Socialism in particular, they sought to secure for DPs a prominent role in shaping the post-war reconstruction of higher education.

Centrally, the UNRRA University was presented as a new kind of international institution dedicated to the revival of humanism, interpreted as a defence of modern liberal and democratic ideals. This model was juxtaposed not only against National Socialism, but also against Soviet communism. It was thus both anti-fascist and anti-communist. While committed to training students as specialists in particular fields, the university would also guard against the dangers of specialisation by providing them with a solid general education. Disconnected from specific national traditions – and the state support European universities traditionally received – the UNRRA University would impart cross-cultural knowledge and ‘universal’ values. In this way, it would create a new international elite.

This process of definition and explanation involved staff, students and administrators. Driven in part by ideological commitment, it was also determined by the need to justify the university's existence before actual and potential sponsors, including UNRRA, the US army, the US military government and the German authorities. Indeed, as the university's situation became more precarious, efforts to define it as something more than a temporary institution for DPs intensified. The threatened closure of the university in January 1947 had an especially galvanising effect.

Although driven by concerns specific to DPs, the discussion about the university's mission focused on issues of broader interest: the place of humanistic scholarship in the modern research university, the virtues of general education as opposed to specialisation, the nature of university governance and the role of the intellectual in an age of mass politics. These issues, vigorously debated during the inter-war period, surfaced anew after the war, especially in Germany. Although the faculty and students of the UNRRA University were deeply suspicious of their German counterparts, their conversations about university reform often paralleled those conducted in German universities. Like many German academics they worried about the dangers of specialisation and emphasised the need to return to universal humanist values. At the same time, they took positions more in concert with those of the occupiers and a minority of reform-minded Germans. Embracing the concept of education for democracy, students in particular advocated general education and the democratisation of university governance. Moreover, as we shall see in the next section, they believed that true humanism could be realised only in an international context. Here they parted company with German academics, who at most focused on cultivating a cosmopolitan outlook within a national context.Footnote ³⁸

To begin with, the university represented itself as an institution dedicated to the revival of humanist ethics. Its goal was to place the human being (back) at the centre of contemporary values and to safeguard human rights. This was the theme of the speech of the rector, Otmar Pirkmajer, at the university's opening ceremony. The UNRRA University, Pirkmajer argued, ‘will show the students their way to critical observations and nurse the sense for the reality of things without undermining the idealism. The DP student should become bearer of Idea, Moral, Truth, Justice, Freedom and Humanity’.Footnote ³⁹ The university's commitment to these ideals was identified as the source of its value for the post-war world.

In talking about their commitment to humanism, the university's proponents stressed the recuperation of an older university tradition. The UNRRA University, they claimed, represented a return to the humanist principles that had motivated the creation of universities before the modern era. They portrayed university history as involving a progressive abandonment of liberal humanism, for which the university was the sum of all human knowledge. According to this interpretation, ‘the Universitarian idea . . . has passed the stages of a transformation from liberal University to national University, from humanistic to political University’.Footnote ⁴⁰ As a consequence, ‘the universal character of the idea of University has lost much of its . . . importance’ and ‘the prevailing tendency was the safeguarding of national and political aims and interests’.Footnote ⁴¹

The decline of the university was most closely associated with the rise of the nation-state in the nineteenth century. According to Eduard Alperovitch, a Latvian Jewish student and one of the leaders of the student union, the university and the nation-state were based on fundamentally different principles. The modern state served utilitarian purposes, whereas the university was concerned with the world of the ‘spirit’. Moreover, the nationalism of the modern state conflicted with the pursuit of knowledge, which knew no bounds and was thus inherently international.Footnote ⁴² Not surprisingly the decline of the university was most pronounced in countries like Germany where nationalism had conquered the state most completely.Footnote ⁴³

However, it was not only the nation-state that had an adverse impact on the university: beliefs in scientific and technical progress were also to blame. Concerns about overspecialisation and the instrumentalisation of scientific knowledge had featured prominently in inter-war debates about universities and intellectual leadership, but they were important in post-war debates as well. In post-Nazi Germany some commentators viewed a secular humanist ethic as the best bulwark against the dangers of specialisation, while others, notably Karl Jaspers, felt that only a religious conception of mankind could protect against instrumentalisation.Footnote ⁴⁴ At the UNRRA University, too, religious belief was seen as central to a truly humanist ethic. This comes through most clearly in the writings of student leader Valerius Michelson.

According to Michelson, faith in progress endangered humanist ideals. He traced such faith back to the idea of ‘natural development’ (natürliche Entwicklung), a reference, it seems, to Darwin's theory of natural selection. This idea suggested that man was an organism like any other, motivated by reflexes and instincts rather than conscious reflection; he evolved by relentlessly overcoming extant social and political forms, whatever their intrinsic value. Over the course of the nineteenth century, as more and more people embraced this understanding of human development, they abandoned ideals such as God, truth and love. Hence scientific and technical progress, far from engendering improvements for mankind, led to the destruction of human life. The history of the university mirrored this general social development, with science channelled into providing society with weapons of destruction. Like Jaspers, Michelson stressed that scientific and technical knowledge were dangerous without the guidance provided by philosophy and religion.

While Michelson's views on scientific progress closely resembled those of German commentators such as Jaspers, there were also some significant differences. For post-war Germans the problem of science without humanism was identified almost exclusively with National Socialism. For Michelson, by contrast, the issue was ‘totalitarianism’. From his perspective, National Socialism and Soviet communism were equally dangerous, because both promoted materialism and godlessness. ‘In the name of this ossified future’, he wrote, ‘natural men shoot, strangle and gas each other, and none of the guilty parties is plagued by his conscience, since “the party”, “the movement”, “the state” carefully distributes the weight of the crimes among all the participants’.Footnote ⁴⁵

In this context of decline and deformation, the UNRRA University represented the revival of the ‘original’ university idea. Its aim was to recuperate the universal character of the university by returning to the humanist values of an earlier era – by ‘further[ing] the evolution in the reverse direction’.Footnote ⁴⁶ The division between universities and technical colleges, emblematic of the shattering of the unity of knowledge, had to be overcome. In all areas of study, both theoretical and practical, ‘the composition of the subjects [of study] must be made not along traditional lines but rather according to their real significance for the development and in the development of mankind’.Footnote ⁴⁷ Disciplines devoted to the ‘study of man’ and the manmade world, such as sociology and law, would have a place of honour in this project.

Despite the emphasis on recuperating earlier traditions, the UNRRA University's proponents were not anti-modern. On the contrary, they saw themselves as mediators between the humanist tradition and modern social ideals. This was especially true of the students. The university could not simply be reconstructed on the old model, Alperovitch argued; it had to keep pace with social developments. In particular, it had to become more democratic. Despite his reservations about the university's compatibility with the nation-state, Alperovitch viewed the modern democratic state as a model for the university. Not only should universities devote themselves to the study of democratic and parliamentary traditions, they should also incorporate these traditions into their inner workings.Footnote ⁴⁸ Thus the curriculum should be redesigned to focus more firmly on general education, as was the case in US universities.Footnote ⁴⁹ Similarly, university governance should be redesigned on more democratic principles, with students given a greater role to play in running the university.Footnote ⁵⁰ These proposals were similar to many put forward for German universities, again especially by students.Footnote ⁵¹

The effort to revitalise the humanist tradition was often presented as a response to National Socialism and the Second World War. In an emotional appeal to their fellow students, for example, the leaders of the student movement presented the university as a vindication of the values repudiated by National Socialism, ‘which sought to destroy everything universally human, all humanist ideals, all democracy and all belief in God’.Footnote ⁵² This perspective was also articulated by Otmar Pirkmajer. In his speech at the university's opening ceremony, Pirkmajer identified ‘the war of the Third Reich’ as a moral catastrophe of global proportions. ‘It was not only a war of distruction against men and material’, he argued, ‘but it was also a war of extermination against Religion, Moral, truth, right and humanity. Just think for a moment of the violation of the International law and the frequent crimes against Humanity, against mind and the most primitive of the laws of nature’.Footnote ⁵³

Indeed, the university's organisers argued, displaced persons were intimately familiar with these crimes. As a result, they had a special role to play in reconstruction. Displaced persons, Pirkmajer noted, had ‘suffered in prisons, jails, concentration camps and torture-chambers and brought innumerous human sacrifices’.Footnote ⁵⁴ Perhaps playing with the concept of the concentration camp as a ‘school’, he identified the university's participants as individuals who had endured a painful but enlightening education. This education should now be put at the service of society. ‘I wish from the bottom of my heart’, he stated, ‘that the UNRRA University would enjoy the privilege of setting into the world a new type of man, who, having gone through the hell of suffering, purged and ennobled, moulded and formed, animated with true and deep morality of man, may display beneficial activity in the service of truth and the interests of the whole to the good of all peoples and mankind.’Footnote ⁵⁵ The idea that the UNRRA University was a new kind of institution invested with special moral authority thus rested on the wartime experiences of its participants, in particular their experiences of Nazi brutality.

Nationalism and internationalism

Of course, it was one thing to say that the university should be the embodiment of a new ethos, quite another to give this ethos a concrete form. In this context, the idea of the university as an international institution emerged as the main answer to how the university should fulfil its moral mission. Humanism was identified with internationalism, and the university's multinational population was presented as a true international community.

In its emphasis on internationalism, and its linking of internationalism with universal human values, the university mirrored a broader trend in early post-war thinking. The immediate aftermath of the war saw a resurgence of interest in international education, as witnessed in the history of UNESCO, which was widely expected to spearhead the formation of an international university.Footnote ⁵⁶ Students and teachers in Munich were clearly aware of these developments. They not only styled themselves as carriers of the ‘United Nations idea’, they also petitioned UNESCO for support, suggesting that their institution could serve as the kernel of a new UNESCO university.Footnote ⁵⁷ The head of UNESCO's natural sciences division, the British scientist and sinologist Joseph Needham, even visited the university, but support was not forthcoming.Footnote ⁵⁸ More generally, the university's ideas about the nature and purpose of an international institution were similar to those promoted by other post-war enthusiasts. They featured the two main components of almost all proposals: an international body of students and staff, and an international approach to studying topics or problems.Footnote ⁵⁹

Although the UNRRA University's internationalism was part of a broader trend, it also had local origins. First, as the university's participants often stressed, their internationalism was an outgrowth of their wartime experiences of persecution and displacement. The internationalist ethos of antifascism – or, more cynically, the myth of antifascist internationalism – became a central element of the university's self-image. Second, the university's participants were united as members of the international forced community of DPs. The university's internationalism can therefore be read as a calculated effort to reframe this wartime compulsory community as a voluntary community based on commitment to international co-operation.

Finally, according to their status as DPs, the university's participants were beholden to the international community for care and protection. Through the establishment of agencies like UNRRA, the international community of the post-war period had reaffirmed its commitment towards the displaced. Moreover, local UNRRA officials enthusiastically supported the university. It is thus not surprising that displaced persons viewed internationalism as an important framework of action.Footnote ⁶⁰

Scholars distinguish two types of internationalism: liberal and cosmopolitan. Both types were employed at the university. According to liberal internationalism, the world consists of discrete nations, and the maintenance of good relations between them is the basis for improving relations among individuals. Liberal internationalism thus takes nations for granted – indeed, it creates the nation form. The United Nations is its paradigmatic contemporary expression.Footnote ⁶¹ According to cosmopolitan internationalism, the world is not a community of nations, but a community of individual ‘world citizens’. Here differences of nationality do not come into play and may in fact be transcended. Here internationalism means ‘a willingness to overlook national interest in favour of the welfare of humanity as a whole.’Footnote ⁶²

The earliest manifestations of internationalism at the university can be found in the student organisations. Created by multinational groups, these organisations identified ‘international fraternisation’ as one of their goals.Footnote ⁶³ Thus, for example, in a December 1945 letter to the military authorities, the organisers of the International Students’ Association argued that an international organisation was the best way of fostering co-operation among foreign students and, indeed, promoting humanist ideals:

Although practical motives were no doubt paramount, the outlines of a humanist international ethos can also be seen here.

This collaborative ethos, as the above quotation suggests, was often juxtaposed against the combative ethos of the Third Reich. The Nazi regime was represented as a national chauvinist one, and its national chauvinism was identified as the source of its propensity for war-making. According to the organisers of the International Students’ Association, an international organisation

The commitment to internationalism thus represented an indictment of national chauvinism in general and Nazism in particular.

At the same time the students suggested that the experience of living under the Nazis had taught them the value of international co-operation. National Socialism thus represented not only the antithesis of international co-operation, but also its source. According to the UNRRA University Students’ Union,

In this statement and others like it, the Nazi concentration and forced labour camps were identified as sites of internationalist formation. The experience of persecution was represented as a shared one – a kind of enforced identification, which taught the students to respect one another. Here the popular post-war trope of the concentration camp as a ‘school’ was explicitly linked to the lesson of international co-operation.

The university's participants occasionally suggested that the creation of an international university in the liberal mode was not their ultimate goal. Rather, it was a step on the road to the achievement of a cosmopolitan society. ‘The development of relations’, the university argued, ‘will never move in the direction of real good will and cooperation, will never lead to a continental citizenship or even to a world citizenship, unless the idea of the collaboration and coexistence of nations paves the way for a supranational and supraideological understanding.’Footnote ⁶⁷

Representations of the university as a supranational institution drew on the idea that displaced persons had lost their national attachments by virtue of having been displaced. DP-ness was interpreted as a form of homelessness, which compelled DPs to develop new non-national identifications. In short, displacement led to cosmopolitanism. This perspective was articulated most forcefully by Pirkmajer. In his opening address, Pirkmajer argued that the DP student ‘will have to bear in mind that the wide world with all its problems has become his home and that he has to adapt all his interest, all his faculties of thinking and all his knowledge to this one fact. The UNRRA University can, therefore, in no way be an institution with national or locally limited aims.’Footnote ⁶⁸ Unlike the German philosopher Theodor Adorno, who argued that today ‘it is part of morality not to be at home in one's home’, Pirkmajer did not view homelessness as an intellectual responsibility.Footnote ⁶⁹ Nonetheless, he believed the university could make a virtue of necessity.

Despite these gestures in the direction of cosmopolitanism, for the most part the university's participants conformed to a liberal model of internationalism. Indeed, they engaged in elaborate processes of national classification and representation. For example, student groups were organised like the United Nations itself, with each nationality receiving a single ‘mandate’. Thus internationalism, far from trumping nationalism, tended to reaffirm it. Arguably, displaced persons found internationalism appealing and useful precisely because it defined nations as the core constituents of the human community.Footnote ⁷⁰ At a moment when displacement threatened their place in established nationality categories, internationalism served as a useful means of affirming the reality of nationality.

Although the emergence of the university's international DP community was often rhetorically linked to National Socialism, experiences of and attitudes towards Soviet communism played an equally if not more important role in unifying the university's participants – or, at least, its non-Jewish participants. During the university's existence, anti-communism by necessity remained muted, but it can be read between the lines, especially in references to ‘democracy’.Footnote ⁷¹ After the university's closure, it emerged more clearly. Indeed, letters to potential sponsors sometimes presented the university's troubles as the product of communist machinations.Footnote ⁷² Anti-communism also features prominently in retrospective accounts. Thus Boris Pawlow, an old Russian émigré who worked as a research assistant at the university, writes in a 1985 account that the nationally heterogeneous nature of the students and faculty did not pose a problem because ‘all felt united by the work and by the communist danger in the immediate vicinity’.Footnote ⁷³ Similarly, Borys Daniluk, a former student of Byelorussian nationality, notes that the harmony among the students was due largely to shared attitudes towards the Soviet Union.Footnote ⁷⁴ Missing from this harmonious image are Jewish DPs, who did not view communism as the major threat and may well have found the anti-communism of other DPs worrying, due to its potential associations with antisemitism.

As we have seen, the university's claims to internationality were premised in part on the diversity of its participants. Clearly, however, the university's participants represented a rather narrow segment of the world's population. Indeed, the university's international community was essentially homologous with the community of displaced persons and foreigners in Germany. Most striking, given the setting, is the lack of German participation. Although this was largely the product of UNRRA policies, it is also clear that DPs did not wish to share ‘their’ university with Germans. Nor did they envision Germany as the university's permanent home.Footnote ⁷⁵ However, the search for material support drove them to adopt a more conciliatory attitude. In October 1946 they therefore conceded that ‘German Students will, of course be also permitted to study in an International University, because political polemics must stop and no single nations will be privileged in the International University.’Footnote ⁷⁶ Given the lack of German interest in the university, and its flagging prospects, this turned out to be a purely symbolic gesture.

Yet the realisation of the international idea was not only a question of personnel: it extended to the nature of teaching and research. Like other world university projects, the UNRRA University also promised to internationalise scholarship. This was seen as especially relevant to the humanities, which, it was argued, were less ‘naturally’ international than the sciences and more susceptible to national manipulation. Identifying modern internationalism with medieval humanism, the university argued that ‘science and art have in all ages been international’.Footnote ⁷⁷ Hence the university's internationalism was the realisation of an ancient ideal. Conversely, a modern international curriculum was seen as promoting the ends of humanism.

The extent to which the university actually internationalised research and teaching is debatable. In some departments, the faculty mainly strove to reproduce traditional programmes of study. In others, significant changes were introduced. The activities of the law department provide the clearest example. Taking seriously the goal of providing students with an international education, the law department focused on teaching the general principles of law, liberal and democratic thought and international law.Footnote ⁷⁸ National legal systems were not ignored, but were studied in a comparative framework, in keeping with the mission of producing ‘individuals with a broad and deep legal training’ rather than lawyers, judges and civil servants for specific countries.Footnote ⁷⁹

Creating new elites

Although the university's organisers presented their institution as a model for post-war democratic renewal, they were also unabashedly elitist. They viewed the university as a training ground for a new intellectual elite – an ‘elite of cosmopolitanism’ – schooled in the values of ‘tolerance, friendship, and co-operation’.Footnote ⁸⁰

The emphasis on elite reformation at the UNRRA University is best understood in the context of an ongoing debate about intellectual leadership. As Mark W. Clark notes, this debate, which often crossed with discussions about the future of universities, ‘gained its greatest currency during the period immediately following the earlier European catastrophe, World War I’.Footnote ⁸¹ At issue was the role of intellectuals in an era of mass politics:

Commentators such as Julien Benda and José Ortega y Gasset viewed intellectuals as independent thinkers operating above the masses, whom they judged mere followers.Footnote ⁸³ On the left, Antonio Gramsci articulated the concept of the ‘organic intellectual’, who, far from feigning autonomy from prevailing political powers, emerged out of and identified with the interests of a given social class.Footnote ⁸⁴

The debate over intellectual leadership resurfaced at the end of the war, given new point by the collaboration of intellectuals with fascist regimes. In Germany, a broad phalanx of writers addressed this issue. While all agreed that the catastrophe of National Socialism was the product of intellectual irresponsibility, they differed widely in their prescriptions. Commentators such as Karl Jaspers and Friedrich Meinecke believed that political renewal was predicated on a reawakening of intellectuals to their traditional duties. Although they saw some need for modernisation, for the most part they harked back to the idea of a politically disinterested intelligentsia operating above the masses.Footnote ⁸⁵ The leftist intellectual Bertolt Brecht, on the other hand, articulated a position close to Gramsci, arguing for a new class of ‘revolutionary intellectuals’ engaged in progressive political struggle.Footnote ⁸⁶

On the spectrum of positions regarding intellectual leadership, the UNRRA University can be located somewhere between the conservative and the liberal democratic. Although they distrusted the masses and viewed intellectuals as a unique class, the university's advocates believed that intellectuals should play a leading role in politics. They also believed that the process of elite formation had to be democratised. This impulse put them at odds with contemporary German commentators, even reform-minded academics such as Jaspers, who spoke of democratisation but in practice helped to reinforce old patterns of elite formation.

The vanguard idea was most clearly articulated by student leaders Eduard Alperovitch and Valerius Michelson. Defining intellectuals broadly to include scholars, technical elites and artists, Alperovitch and Michelson argued that these individuals had a special role to play in society by virtue of their greater intellectual capacities and training.Footnote ⁸⁷ ‘Greater intellectual maturity’, they suggested, ‘also entails a greater degree of social responsibility.’Footnote ⁸⁸ In a manner strongly reminiscent of Ortega y Gasset, they represented the intellectual as a heroic individual thinker, whose entire way of being was opposed to that of the masses.Footnote ⁸⁹ The intellectual's ideas, Michelson argued, were the expression of an independent intelligence and a strong personality; the masses, on the other hand, were incapable of putting forward new ideas and were susceptible to propaganda. Intellectuals were therefore indispensable to the progress of society. Their role was to point the way to the future, to serve as the ‘guides of society’.Footnote ⁹⁰

However, recent history had demonstrated the failure of intellectuals to live up to their responsibilities. Far from fulfilling their role as society's guides, intellectuals had allowed the masses to succumb to the influence of demagogues.Footnote ⁹¹ Thus, before society as a whole could be transformed, the intellectual class would itself have to undergo an ‘inner transformation’. Alperovitch wrote,

Clearly, then, intellectuals could not remain above the fray. Rather, they had to recognise their political responsibilities.

As many participants in the debate over intellectual leadership recognised, the fate of intellectuals was closely connected to the fate of the university, for universities were the principal training ground for intellectuals. The weaknesses of the intellectual class were a reflection of the university's weaknesses. Here Alperovitch and Michelson again focused on the corrupting influence of nationalism and overspecialisation. As the university had declined from a liberal-humanist institution to a national-political one, they argued, intellectuals had declined from a broadly learned elite to mere technical specialists and civil servants. The reconstruction of the intellectual class thus depended on the reconstruction of the university as a whole.

Centrally, Alperovitch and Michelson argued, universities had to reconsider how they selected their students. They had to reconcile themselves to the modern democratic state, with its emphasis on equality of opportunity. The old sociological elite, selected according to criteria such as class, rank and property, should be replaced with a democratically selected ‘intellectual elite’. To create this new elite, they argued, it was not enough to make exceptions for gifted students without the proper academic qualifications: the student body as a whole had to be transformed. To facilitate this process, they proposed instituting a Werkstudententum: a working student body. They envisioned the Werkstudententum as both an educational and a financial tool. On the one hand, the work requirement would provide students with practical experience in their areas of specialisation. On the other, it would provide the university with a new source of revenue, which could be used to replace lost tuition. Indeed, they reasoned, the introduction of the work system would allow the university to eliminate tuition altogether. Thus, rather than subsidise individual students, the work system was envisioned as a form of social redistribution which would fund the student body as a whole.Footnote ⁹³ Implicitly, it addressed the problem of providing an education to students who could not draw on the resources of their families or the state.

Alperovitch and Michelson's ideas about a new intellectual elite were clearly influenced by German discussions about selection. In particular, they were inspired by Karl Jaspers's concept of an ‘intellectual aristocracy’, an important (and controversial) aspect of his post-war plans for university renewal.Footnote ⁹⁴ However, their proposal went far beyond Jaspers. As Craig K. Pepin and Mark W. Clark have written, ‘the language of democracy did not come easily to German professors, who traditionally equated democratic government with interest group politics, antithetical to their university ideals’.Footnote ⁹⁵ This was certainly true of Jaspers. More willing than most of his peers to recognise the failure of German universities in the face of National Socialism, he was nonetheless hesitant to sanction major structural reforms. With regard to selection, he worried about the consequences of opening the university to students who had not undergone the traditional route of academic preparation, the Gymnasium. These concerns were reflected in his involvement in drafting the University of Heidelberg's new constitution, which for the most part reaffirmed the role of the Gymnasium as a prerequisite for admission.Footnote ⁹⁶ Seen from this perspective, the proposals put forward at the UNRRA University were quite radical in their emphasis on democratisation through social redistribution.

The new elite envisioned by the university was supposed to be international, skilled in democratic traditions and educated in the workings of new international institutions such as the United Nations. At the same time, the goal was to create new national elites. As a 1947 plan for the new international university stated, ‘the students can and must be introduced to parliamentary and democratic habits, for very soon they will form the leading stratum of their country’.Footnote ⁹⁷ Similarly, in a report drafted after the UNRRA University had closed, Michelson argued that the fate of the university's students was an issue of general concern, because they were the future elites of their countries:

As this last statement suggests, the goal of creating new national elites was linked not only to hopes for emigration, but also to the dream of return. This dream was specific to non-Jewish DPs. While most Jewish DPs rejected the idea of returning home, where the non-Jewish majority had collaborated in the Nazi persecutions and where native antisemitism continued to threaten their well-being, the opposition of many non-Jews was conditional. Although they rejected the idea of returning to countries under Soviet or communist control, they nonetheless dreamed of a post-communist future.

At issue, then, was the future of intellectuals in Eastern Europe. Echoing Ortega, who in 1930 had identified fascism and Bolshevism as twin expressions of the new era of ‘mass-men’, Michelson identified National Socialism and Soviet communism as the greatest dangers to the intellectual class.Footnote ⁹⁹ Incapable by nature of submitting to dogma, true intellectuals were destined to be ruthlessly eliminated by totalitarian regimes.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Hence the UNRRA University had a critical role to play in creating a new class of intellectuals for the post-communist era.

Jews and non-Jews

The university's internationalist ideology was explicitly oriented towards transcending differences of nationality, religion and race. In this context, it is worth considering how Jews and non-Jews interacted at the university and the extent to which the university acknowledged specifically Jewish wartime experiences.

The university's proponents generally avoided making qualitative distinctions between different groups. In keeping with the internationalist idea, all participants were presented as equals in a horizontal community of suffering. Only occasionally were Jewish experiences highlighted. In a letter to the UN Secretary-General, for example, the university's representatives emphasised the fate of Jews in the concentration camps.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Jews were also promised priority in admission to the university because, as the administration acknowledged, they had ‘suffered most’ during the war years.Footnote ¹⁰² Typically, then, Jewish experiences were placed on a spectrum of wartime suffering.

Jewish DPs were ambivalent about the university.Footnote ¹⁰³ On the one hand, Jewish students attended it in large numbers. In June 1946, 117 of the 196 students registered with the Jewish Students Union attended the UNRRA University.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Jews also made up the sixth-largest student group.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ On the other hand, with the exception of individuals such as Alperovitch, most Jewish students were not enthusiastic about the university. Reflecting the dominant Zionist ethos, they saw themselves as part of a new Jewish national elite, not an international one. Like other Jewish survivors, they viewed non-Jewish DPs primarily as participants in the murder of European Jewry. They did not want to study with non-Jewish students. As the Jewish Students Union stated, ‘we are forced to study with those who just yesterday were our murderers (together with Germans at the Munich University, the Technical University and so on), or with Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, Ukrainians, Slovaks etc., among whom the majority were the able helpers of the Germans during the ghetto liquidations and colonizations’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ For many Jewish students, it seems, the UNRRA University was merely a place to be tolerated.

Even if they were willing to study with other DPs, Jewish students were under great pressure to devote themselves to the national cause. According to the Central Committee for Liberated Jews, the main Jewish DP organisation in the US zone, Jewish students were not doing enough for their people, and their studies were getting in the way of preparations for emigration to Palestine. The committee criticised them for studying German and neglecting Jewish languages, literature and history. It did not want them to collaborate with other DPs. At a meeting with the Jewish Students Union, a representative of the Central Committee insisted that ‘no discussions should be carried on with other DPs, for example with Latvians, Lithuanians, Poles, etc., for all of them have in fact been the persecutors of Jewry’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷

Jewish students and professors had reason to be suspicious of their non-Jewish colleagues. Many of the university's participants had less than impeccable wartime records. Most spectacularly, in February 1946 the president of the university's student council, a Ukrainian named Suchenko, was unmasked as a former SS member. This incident, which came only days before the university's official opening, unsettled the university community. Especially disturbing was the fact that Suchenko had ‘worked hard for the establishment of the University’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ Indeed, he had participated in creating the first student organisation and had spoken of the need to ‘cultivate comradeship between the peoples’.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ His unmasking thus called into question the project as a whole. If a Nazi collaborator could wave the banner of internationalism, what kind of internationalism did the university represent?

The Suchenko case may have been on the minds of the university's Jewish participants when they met to discuss the future of the university in late 1946. With the university's prospects for survival placed in question by the impending withdrawal of UNRRA support, university leaders brought representatives of the DP national committees together to discuss its future. Speaking on behalf of Jews, the Central Committee voiced a measured approval of the university. In a resolution read to the gathered planners, it affirmed that Jews wished to participate, as one nation among many, ‘in the realization of the fine idea of bringing into being an International University’.Footnote ¹¹⁰ The ideals of the university, it averred, conformed to those of the Jewish people. ‘As representatives of that people [Volk] which suffered most from fascism’, the Committee stated, ‘we feel ourselves first and foremost responsible for freedom, progress, equality before the law and democracy.’Footnote ¹¹¹

At the same time the Central Committee questioned the university's commitment to democracy. It was only willing to participate ‘if assurance is given that this University will in no way be a haven for conquered but not yet eradicated fascist elements’.Footnote ¹¹² The university's director responded positively to this call for political house cleaning. However, nothing came of this meeting. After UNRRA's withdrawal, most Jewish students drifted away. Increasingly, the university was presented as an institution promoting Western Christian values, a vision more in line with conservative anti-communism than progressive anti-fascism.

Idealism and pragmatism

Writing about post-war German universities, Konrad Jarausch has juxtaposed the reformist aspirations of a minority of students against the professional goals and apolitical stance of the majority.Footnote ¹¹³ The same could be said about the UNRRA University. Although the university's most ardent promoters aimed at creating a new kind of institution, students and academics had many other reasons for participating in the university. In fact, many students were merely formal members of the university community. According to an estimate of autumn 1946, only 1,200 of the 2,150 students registered at the university could be considered active.Footnote ¹¹⁴

On the most basic level, the university provided DPs in post-war Germany with an alternative to German institutions. The desire for education among DPs was great. But some DP students could not meet the entrance criteria of the German universities, while the 10 per cent quota put a definite limit on how many could attend. Moreover, the atmosphere at German universities was decidedly hostile towards DPs. As one student wrote in a letter describing his experiences at the University of Munich, DP students were subjected to numerous ‘petty offences’ that made them feel unwanted, merely tolerated ‘out of charity’. In his estimation, although the universities had ostensibly been purged of Nazi teaching staff, a racist and nationalist atmosphere continued to dominate.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Thus many students, uncertain which institution would serve them best, attended both the UNRRA University and a German university. For DP professors, on the other hand, the university was one of the only places in Germany where they could find academic posts, as the German universities were all but closed to them.

The university also served the goal of professionalisation. Despite the official emphasis on humanism, research and teaching were strongly oriented towards technical and professional training. According to Michelson, most faculties ‘oriented themselves on the market, but not on the ideology’. The humanist ideology ‘was carried by the students union and by individual professors’, but not the faculty as a whole. This situation, Michelson notes, was difficult to avoid, ‘because one wanted to preserve the students, the opportunity to continue studying, one couldn't really break this pattern without endangering the future of the young people’.Footnote ¹¹⁶ As we have seen, moreover, students gravitated towards scientific and technical fields. Although an interest in these fields did not preclude commitment to the university's idealistic goals – student leader Eduard Alperovitch, for example, studied chemistry – it does suggest that most students placed professional accreditation above personal cultivation.

Finally, material benefits were also a motivation for enrolling. Although UNRRA's generosity has often been exaggerated, the agency did provide students and faculty with assistance. It helped DPs who did not live in camps to find rooms in private lodgings or dormitories. It also provided many DPs with meals at the university. This was especially important for DPs who did not reside in camps, generally the sole places where DPs could get meals. In an economy dominated by material scarcity, then, association with the university provided many DPs with material benefits. This helps to explain why many students registered but did not actively attend. At the same time, many DPs made sacrifices to attend the university. In particular, students who lived in DP camps often travelled long distances and had to forego meals, because as camp residents they did not qualify for meals at the university canteen.

Conclusion: the forgotten elite

In September 1948, students and staff gave up trying to revive the UNRRA University. Many students continued studying at German universities. Most eventually left Germany for the United States, Canada, Israel and other countries.

As the focus of efforts to resolve the DP question shifted in 1947 from repatriation to resettlement, refugee professionals and intellectuals came to be seen as a special problem. Most resettlement programmes were governed by the demand for manual labour, and receiving countries were generally unwilling to accept DPs who could not immediately be put to work in the factories or the fields. Moreover, native elites in receiving countries were anxious about competition from DPs. In the United States, ‘professional organizations . . . lobbied state regulatory boards to make it difficult for DP doctors and dentists to get licensed in their state’.Footnote ¹¹⁷ As a result, in 1950 some 26,000 DP medical professionals, agricultural specialists, engineers, teachers and artists still remained in DP camps, part of the ‘hard core’, that portion of the DP population that was especially difficult to resettle. They were referred to as ‘the forgotten elite’.Footnote ¹¹⁸

On account of these difficulties, UNRRA's successor, the International Refugee Organization (IRO), discouraged displaced persons from pursuing higher education and refused to offer DP students special assistance. As one IRO official wrote in March 1948,

The issue of refugee intellectuals was also taken up by the European movement. At the Congress of Europe in May 1948, refugee delegates drew attention to the plight of displaced intellectuals, identifying it as one of the great problems facing post-war European culture. Implicitly, they suggested that by neglecting displaced intellectuals, the West was ceding a critical resource in the battle against totalitarianism.Footnote ¹²⁰ The congress ended with the passage of a resolution calling for the establishment of a ‘European Cultural Centre’ to foster unity and promote the exchange of ideas. This call was reiterated at the European Cultural Conference in December 1949. Reflecting the hardening of battle lines in the Cold War, the conference openly called for ‘assistance for intellectuals and students from countries with a totalitarian regime’.Footnote ¹²¹ The European movement, it was argued, would provide an intellectual home for displaced scholars – or, more precisely, for those displaced scholars who defined themselves as opponents of communism, thus presumably excluding most Jews. However, not much came of these plans. It would be decades before another European university was founded.

The UNRRA University was a product of the early post-war moment, when many displaced persons sat stranded between past and future, unwilling to return home yet unable to resettle elsewhere. Initially conceived as temporary, like their stay in Germany itself, it developed into an ambitious project to reimagine higher education for the post-war world. The university was defined as an institution committed to the revival of humanism, interpreted as the defence of modern democratic and liberal ideals. Internationalism was identified as the best means of realising the humanist ideal.

This project was no doubt determined by the need to justify the university's existence before actual and potential sponsors. However, it was also the product of ideological commitment. It reflected displaced persons’ engagement with a larger ongoing conversation about universities and intellectuals. In this regard, the university can be seen as an important contributor to post-war debates about educational reform. Here it is again helpful to distinguish between two registers, one German, one European and international. In the German context, the university sheds new light on the problematic of reconstructing higher education in the aftermath of National Socialism. While sharing the dominant belief in liberal humanism as the foundation for post-Nazi education, its emphasis on internationalism was distinct from the German focus on reforming national institutions. This, of course, was partly a product of displaced persons’ sense of alienation from the German universities.

In the European and international context, the university illuminates the still under-explored history of movements for integration. In particular, it represents an important chapter in the history of European and international education. In the early post-war period, education and culture were seen as essential components of the integration process. One of the only international university projects realised at the time, the UNRRA University reflected the contemporary faith in liberal internationalism as the path to peaceful coexistence. Indeed, it represented a post-war project that remained unrealised for many decades. In this regard, it was an institution ahead of its time. At the same time, it prefigured the international universities created in Europe since the collapse of communism. In particular, its anti-communist internationalism anticipated the post-communist ethos of the European universities created in the 1990s, in which ‘democracy’, ‘human rights’ and ‘intellectual responsibility’ have similarly been identified as the cornerstones of the university idea.

Finally, the history of the UNRRA University suggests that the long-held image of displaced persons as ardent nationalists needs to be revised. Nationalism was by no means absent at the university. Indeed, the primarily liberal understanding of internationalism articulated at the university confirms the centrality of the national among DPs. At the same time, the university's role as a site of exchange among DPs of different self-defined ‘nationalities’ should not be underestimated. In its successes and failures, the university illustrates the tensions that existed among DPs, especially between Jews and non-Jews, and the effort to bridge these tensions through the post-war terms of international dialogue and friendship.