The past three decades have seen an increasing number of dissertations and books that have probed the interconnected nature of German and American history. Much attention has been paid to Germany's Americanization in the twentieth century, whereas the Germanization of the United States in the nineteenth century remains an open field of research. German society and culture enjoyed widespread admiration among American elites until 1914, which provided the basis for extensive intercultural transfers from the German states to the United States. American museums, social reform projects, holiday celebrations such as Christmas, and even mainstays of American political culture—from the constitution to philanthropy and foundations—emerged under the influence of German precedents. Institutions of higher education were no exception. While there is disagreement about the extent and impact of perceived German models and ideas, scholars agree that the large number of Americans studying at universities in German-speaking central Europe ensured a steady import of German ideas and innovations to American campuses until World War I.
Scholars such as Gabriele Lingelbach have made it very clear that language barriers—many American students arrived at Göttingen and Leipzig without a working knowledge of German—posed a significant obstacle to students trying to follow the lectures of their German professors and understand the inner workings of the universities and the education system they encountered. Werner concedes that language was a problem for many American students. To take just one example: when George Ticknor arrived at the University of Göttingen in 1815, he was unable to understand his German professors and tried to get by with his knowledge of French, English, and Latin. American students sought out professors who delivered their lectures with a clear pronunciation and favored Göttingen over other universities because of the relative ease with which they understood the local Hanoverian-German dialect. In the end, however, Werner too easily dismisses the limitations imposed on American students by their inability to speak or write in German. And while Werner acknowledges that Americans had created an idealized picture of Germany and German universities before embarking on their educational sojourn, she does not elaborate on the transfer, if any, of ideas initiated by American students. Their perceptions were as much influenced by the knowledge they had acquired before their departure from the United States as it was by the guidance they received from local American residents and friends. Instead of embracing a theoretical framework such as intercultural transfer to examine German influences on the shaping of the American system of higher education, Werner focuses almost exclusively on detailed, unstructured, and sometimes tedious stories of American students and their education at Leipzig University.
Werner's book does little to add substantial knowledge to our understanding of the intercultural transfers between universities in German-speaking central Europe and in the United States. Even though the title suggests that this book is about German universities, Werner makes it very clear that Americans preferred Göttingen, Heidelberg, Leipzig, and Halle over all other northern and southern German universities. Yet, there is no discussion of what implications these spatial limitations might have had for the transfer of ideas about higher education. Further, as Lingelbach has reminded us, we should not speak of “the German university,” since political, educational, administrative, and cultural differences did not allow for the emergence of one unified German university model (“Cultural Borrowing or Autonomous Development,” in Traveling between Worlds, ed. Thomas Adam and Ruth Gross [2006], 100-123). Such considerations are missing from Werner's account.
Werner nevertheless raises some innovative and intriguing questions. For example, she addresses the question of the significance of German education for academics in the North and South of the United States. The historiography of American higher education suggests that the North had to educate the South, thus stripping the South of any intellectual agency and independence. Even the educational pilgrimage of Southern scholars to universities in the German-speaking world was interpreted as a result of Northern guidance. It would have been fascinating to see whether there were different patterns of student migration from the American South and North, and how these patterns changed over time, but Werner only raises this question without pursuing it. She also provides a long list of individual students who studied at Leipzig with eminent professors such as Wilhelm Wundt, and who returned home with ideas about integrating the things they had learned into the practice of teaching at American colleges and universities. But nowhere in the book does Werner analyze these influences on the creation of academic fields, subjects, and degrees. Did the experience of studying history, linguistics, mathematics, or medicine at Leipzig have a real impact on the establishment of these fields at the university or college at which the Leipzig-trained student would later become a professor? Werner resigns herself to a statistical and overly detailed biographical study rather than an examination of student migration and its impact on the two spaces involved. What remains is a detailed study of student migration between the United States and Germany that, with an emphasis on the University of Leipzig, leaves scholars with more questions than answers.
