The loss of the First World War, the end of the monarchical system and the ensuing political revolution accompanied by economic collapse and catastrophic hyperinflation served to deepen the divisions within higher education and between higher education and
36 Fritz K Ringer, referring to the German case in ‘Segmentation: the case of French secondary education’ in
Detlef K. Müller, Fritz Ringer and Brian Simon (eds), The Rise of the Modern Educational System:
Structural change and social reproduction 1870 – 1920, (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987), pp 63 and 68
37 Beyerchen, ‘On the Stimulation of Excellence in Wilhelmian Science’, p 155 38
Ben David, OECD Fundamental Research and the Universities, p 30
39 Beyerchen, ‘On the Stimulation of Excellence in Wilhelmian Science’, p 155 40 Paletschek, ‘The German University Idea’, p 40
society. The belief that true scientific objectivity was incompatible with politics allowed academia simultaneously to reject the new democratic regime and to see themselves as the only true representatives of the interests of the nation.42 The professoriate came to believe that they, the “bearers of culture”, were living through a “crisis of culture”43 which
threatened their status as a social and cultural elite and their hold over the major
administrative systems of the country. For one thing, their conviction of the superiority of German culture and the German Sonderweg44 had been shown to be very misplaced. Secondly, the hyperinflation of the early 1920s had increased the trend towards
egalitarianism by strengthening the new entrepreneurial, managerial and technical elites whilst concentrating its more destructive effects on the traditional middle class. This particularly affected those in the public sector such as higher officials and professors, whose social position demanded an expensive lifestyle but whose incomes lagged well behind the escalating cost of living.45 Thus, although the financial position of academics was no worse, and indeed, rather better than that of many other groups as the
hyperinflationary period ended, it had nevertheless weakened their material position and caused deep concern about the erosion of status differentials in society and the
maintenance of their position within it.46
Thirdly, in an economy which increasingly demanded technically trained manpower in order to translate technological transformation and booming industrial development into economic growth, those trained academically for traditional careers in the army and civil service found their employment opportunities narrowing and hence the rewards achievable from years of study receding, leaving many feeling “spiritually and physically exploited”.47 Fourthly, the pressure to fill the growing numbers of teaching and engineering positions resulted in the changing and lowering of university entry requirements and created fears of a “democratisation of the professions”.48 The result was disaffection from the new liberal society which the Weimar Convention was attempting to create and a retreat into “a kind
42 Paul Forman, ‘Scientific Internationalism and the Weimar Physicists’, p 152; Jeremy Leaman, The
Political Economy of West Germany 1945 – 85, (Basingstoke, The Macmillan Press Ltd., 1988), p 15
43 Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, p 3 44
Interpreted here as the German ‘special path’ to social reform in an authoritarian state, which avoided the weaknesses inherent in both the autocracy of Eastern European states, particularly Russia, and what were regarded as the decadent and ineffective democratic governments of the West typified by Great Britain and France. For a refutation of the Sonderweg theory see David Blackbourn and Geoff Eley, The Peculiarities of German History: bourgeois society and politics in nineteenth-century Germany, (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1984)
45 Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, pp 62 - 63
46 Bernd Weisbrod, ‘Bourgeois Society in Germany’, in Richard Bessel (ed.), Fascist Italy and Nazi
Germany: Comparisons and Contrasts, (Cambridge, CUP, 1996), p 31
47 David Schoenbaum, Hitler’s Social Revolution: Class and Status in Nazi Germany 1933 – 39, (New York,
WW Norton and Co. Inc. 1980), pp 9 – 10
of Peter Pan ideology for a society that didn’t want to grow up”.49 A further factor was the expansion and changing nature of the university population. Most historians highlight the radical change which took place in the student body with, by 1930, almost seventy percent of students coming from the middle and particularly the lower middle classes.50 Working class representation was still no higher than three percent, but the most significant change was that women constituted around sixteen percent of the student population. Given its previous adamant resistance to female participation, it seems highly ironic that the greatest proportion of these consisted of the daughters of the educated elite.51 The following table gives the number of students attending university and the Technische
Hochschulen during summer semester over the period 1913 – 1929:
Table 2.2
Student Numbers in Universities and Technische Hochschulen (selected years 1913 - 1929)
Year Universities Technische Hochschulen
Males Females
%
Females Total Males Females
% Females Total 1913 56 693 3 368 5.6 60 061 11 705 62 0.5 11 767 1924 60 654 7 460 11.0 68 114 21 460 357 1.6 21 817 1925 53 650 6 808 11.3 60 458 20 842 374 1.8 21 216 1926 57 170 7 851 12.1 65 021 21 315 368 1.7 21 683 1927 62 569 9 570 13.3 72 139 20 461 466 2.2 20 927 1929 78 167 14 923 16.0 93 090 22 024 657 2.9 22 681
Sources: Statistisches Jahrbuch für das deutsche Reich, 1928, pp 509 – 510; 1930, pp 456 – 457
The table demonstrates three things in particular. Most obvious is the steady increase in student numbers at both university and the Technische Hochschulen despite a blip in the year 1925. Secondly, the number of female students in higher education also rose consistently with history, and in particular ‘philological historical science’ followed by general medicine and mathematics and the natural sciences, by far the most popular choices. In the Technische Hochschulen the most favoured option for women was general science followed by architecture and, increasingly over the decade, chemistry, metallurgy and economics. Although 1913 saw the first women studying agricultural engineering,
49
Schoenbaum, Hitler’s Social Revolution, p 13; for a discussion on the political economy of this period see also Leaman, The Political Economy of West Germany 1945 – 85, pp 12 - 17
50 Paletschek, ‘The German University Idea’, p 40 51 Ringer, Education and Society in Modern Europe, p 98
mechanical engineering and electrotechnology, they were never numbered in more than threes and fours throughout the 1920s.52
Thirdly, the figures clearly show the supremacy in numbers of university students compared to those in Technische Hochschulen. Thus, by virtue of sheer size alone the contribution of the universities remained of crucial potential importance to the national economic effort and to technological growth. If, as has been argued, their structure and organisation was overly rigid, their focus was on the purely theoretical and their product was graduates whose education left them ill-equipped to take their place in the
employment market, this would inevitably have had an adverse effect on the country’s potential for growth. Moreover, it has been suggested that although Germany still ranked as a world leader scientifically until the early 1920s, most of that reputation for excellence was as a result of work done before WWI; thereafter the crown was being steadily lost to the USA. By the decade 1910 – 1920 the majority of the great German scientists were ageing, while in the US the organisation of scientific research was advancing with such rapidity that in 1930, for example, the US accounted for almost thirty percent of the total production of scientific papers in the chemistry field and over thirty percent in the field of physics as opposed to Germany’s six percent in both.53
The new republic was keen to effect reforms which would better integrate the institutions of higher education into the changing society; however, few of the reforms proposed were ever realised.54 Nevertheless, three new urban universities were founded in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Cologne which concentrated on practical research in new fields such as social and commercial science, politics, municipal and social administration as well as in older disciplines such as medicine. The idea of incorporating such innovations into all universities, however, again brought forceful and obdurate opposition from the
Corporation of German Universities.55 More opposition was incurred by the development of an enhanced status for the new and independently funded business schools
(Handelshochschulen). Developed from existing two-year business school programmes, their mission was to impart an “entrepreneurial way of thinking”.56 Their increasing popularity led to the expansion of the curriculum into “pragmatic disciplines” including business economics (as opposed to the traditional historically-oriented German
52 Statistisches Jahrbüch für das deutsche Reich, pp 509 – 510 (1928) and pp 456 – 457 (1930) 53
Ben David, OECD Fundamental Research and the Universities, pp 23 - 26
54 Paletschek, ‘The German University Idea’, p 41
55 Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, pp 69 - 77 56 Locke, The End of the Practical Man, p 209
economics), auditing, financial accounting and the development of modern management techniques.
These institutions ultimately gained the right to grant not only undergraduate degrees, but also doctorates in 1928. In the eyes of established academia, the status of these institutions was seriously compromised because, for the first time, students could enter higher
education without first having succeeded in passing the Abitur (although the majority of those entering had in fact done so). Moreover, most of the professors who taught there originally were men with undistinguished academic histories (though a great deal of practical experience and personal talent), many of whom had to be awarded honorary doctorates by the state in order to be legally able to teach at ‘university’ level. The business schools were, nevertheless, popular, well funded and rapidly became an
established feature of German higher education performing their own, practically oriented research.57 One effect appeared to be a much higher level of commercial awareness in German firms. By 1927, the Balfour Committee on Industry and Trade would draw an unfavourable comparison between the tens of students undergoing commercial education in Great Britain compared to the hundreds in Germany at a time when British export performance was suffering at the hands of well trained German export salesmen instructed in their customers’ languages and backed up by a commercially minded consular service.58
In contrast, post-war inflation and excessive reparation demands ensured that the state- funded universities were suffering from an increasing inability to pay for even the most basic of scholarly provisions, causing fears of permanent damage to German research and scholarship.59 In appeals for financial support, luminaries such as Max Planck, Adolf Harnack, Fritz Haber and the spokesmen for the Union of German Universities argued that “scientific and scholarly prestige [was] the sole great-power attribute remaining to the German nation…[acting]… as a surrogate for the other, lost attributes of a great power”.60 It was an argument which appeared to have resonance across the political spectrum with even the Social Democrats calling for billions to be struck from the military budget and re- employed in the service of culture and science.61 Forman has demonstrated, however, that the doctrine of science as a surrogate for military and economic might, when coupled with general academic disaffection, also led to a situation where the German researchers
57 Locke, The End of the Practical Man, pp 199 - 209
58 Stacey, cited in Locke, The End of the Practical Man, pp 203 – 204; Peter Pagnamenta and Richard Overy,
All our Working Lives, (London, BBC, 1984), p 272
59 Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins, pp 62 - 63
60 Max Planck, quoted in Paul Forman, ‘Scientific Internationalism and the Weimar Physicists’, p 163 61 Forman, ‘Scientific Internationalism and the Weimar Physicists’, p 164
withdrew their cooperation with major international scientific bodies such as the
International Research Council because they feared not being given due recognition as one of the leading nations of the world.62 Again, Forman argues that this conduct received enthusiastic approval right across the political spectrum. However, this academic self- isolation also meant withdrawal from multilateral international scientific competition and almost certainly contributed to the deficits in German science which were to be reinforced during the National Socialist era and would lead to the opening of large gaps in technology between Germany and the West.63
The situation was aggravated by the decline of the economy after 1923 which lasted right up until the Great Depression and the ultimate demise of the Weimar Republic. In
response, both industrialists and labour advocated the Rationalisierung (rationalisation) of industry in order to be able to undercut foreign competitors and earn the necessary foreign currency to pay the war reparations. However, while for labour this meant the adoption of the latest technologies in order to create economic well-being across society in an
“American-style consumer society”, industrialists interpreted it rather as the introduction of harder work for longer hours in an effort to cut costs. The encouragement of invention and the introduction of new technologies was also de-prioritised in favour of investment in new machinery to better exploit existing technologies. The result, predictably, was a period of technological stagnation. This gave rise to serious antagonism from engineers, inventors and industrial scientists who regarded innovation as the best means of
stimulating economic growth and the introduction of American-style efficiency to German industry.64