Lewis Stiles Gannett (Harvard A.B., 1913) was awarded a 1913-14 Robert Treat Paine Traveling Fellowship to pursue studies in social ethics in Berlin. He returned to Harvard as a graduate student in social science where his fellowship was continued and he went on to receive an A.M. degree in 1915.
Gannett was born in Rochester N.Y. in 1891. He was a journalist and editor at the New York World. Later he worked as an editor at Survey and The Nation. Beginning in 1930 he wrote a thrice-weekly, then daily review column “Books and Things” in the New York Herald Tribune. He retired from that paper in 1956. Lewis S. Gannett died in 1966.
For readers who find the following comparisons of interest, similar observations can be found in the earlier post “University Life in Germany“.
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A Harvard Man’s Impressions
of Berlin University
LEWIS S. GANNETT, ’13, Robert Treat Paine Travelling Fellow.
The first thing Professor Paszkowski (pronounce it if you can) says in his course in German for foreigners at the University of Berlin is, “Um Gottes willen, don’t go home and write about Germany. If you don’t know why, go over to the library and read what Germans have written about America.”
We Harvard men in particular ought to have learned the dangers of superficial observation. Yet it is the superficial differences that first impress one at another university. For instance, one has long known that women were admitted to the German universities, and perhaps one has wondered how the Germans solved the problem of co-education. There is no problem. The women do not sit in an isolated group in one corner. They sit here, there, one or two in every row. No one “fusses” with them, no one protests against their enervating influence. They are there to hear the lectures: they hear them, go away, and that is all there is to it. There is no complicating factor of student life. Altogether it is a rather pleasing contrast to the schoolboy self-consciousness of some of our American youth.
Indeed, they could not all sit together if they would — they could not get seats together. The first week of lectures each student goes about leaving his calling-card wherever he has secured a favorable seat. He writes upon it — if Schmoller be the lecturer — “Schmoller Di Fr 6-7,” and thereafter Tuesdays and Fridays, from six until seven, that place is his seat. Let an unwary American think a seat unclaimed because empty, and he soon learns the contrary. “Dieser Platz ist schon belegt,” he hears, and any thought of argument is soon drowned in a torrent of impossible German expostulation. The card may have been lost or be otherwise missing — but the German gets the seat.
“Akademische Freiheit” is the Veritas of the German university. It means many things — the right of the student to attend only when it fits his convenience (no record of attendance is kept), the right of the professor to begin lecturing when he sees fit. Lectures begin as a rule two weeks after the semester officially opens — sometimes not for a month. No professor would think of entering a class-room until fifteen or twenty minutes after the hour. Imagine Harvard’s students eagerly awaiting the professor — often until almost the half hour!
The German is perpetually hungry. One does not appreciate meal hours of eight, two and eight, until one learns the secrets of second breakfasts, afternoon coffee and the other opportunities that are not listed. Yet even after two months in Germany, it is somewhat of a surprise, on entering for the first time the main building of the University of Berlin, to find staring one in the face a large sign “Erfrischungs-Raum,” which, upon investigation, is found to offer beer, milk, sundry poor substitutes for ginger ale, excellent “kerchen” [sic, presumably a misprint of “kuchen”=”cake”] and execrable sandwiches. From a thoroughly Teutonic viewpoint, even eight minutes to Boston and a dozen new lunch-rooms cannot compensate for such a Bierhalle within the academic walls.
Almost equally astonishing are pocket-lunches. Between classes one is quite expected to promenade the hall munching a dingy brown sandwich of rye bread and ham, or a “brotchen mit leberwurst belegt” (which means a perfectly good roll spoiled by sausage) or if one prefers to sit in the lecture room, he will be in good company in satisfying his hunger there.
These all are superficial differences. So, too, are the eccentricities of costume, evidences of that German individualism so startling to one who has heard glib talk of German socialism. It is verboten to walk three abreast or to whistle too loudly on Unter den Linden, but to trot about with weirdly-cut hair undefiled by hat or cap, clad in Shelleyesque blouses and poetically short trousers — these are but evidences of genius. At home we are accustomed to sartorial individuality in musicians, but our students are often only too conspicuous for their unity of “taste.” The brightly-colored corps caps — often of absurd and always of conspicuous design — are almost the only evidences of student-life at Berlin. Between classes it is a common sight to see a group of purple, or red, or green-capped students, each with a cane upon his arm, one or two even daring a monocle, gathered together in as conspicuous a position as possible, to gaze upon the passing herd.
Berlin is a city university. The buildings are in the heart of the biggest city in Germany, on the Linden, flanked by the Guard-House and the Royal Library, opposite the Opera-House and Crown Prince’s Palace. There is no room for expansion. The pitiful little “Chestnut-wood” that used to cover the tiny space behind it, is now as desolate a mass of building material as was ever our library-site in the days when the grandeur that was Gore’s was gone, and Widener was not yet. The classrooms in the old building are fragrantly reminiscent of some of Sever’s time-honored halls, but the ventilation is even worse. The old library, now become a university building, is somewhat better, but the department seminars and many of the overflow class-rooms are to be found in various off-corners in the neighboring streets. It is as if we availed ourselves of rooms in College House and Little’s Block and the Abbott Building as class-rooms. If one wants to hear Professor Roethe, now the only German university professor who refuses to admit women into his class-room, one does well to start early, to allow time to hunt.
There are no dormitories in any of the German universities. The fifteen thousand Berlin students are scattered all over the big city and far out into the suburbs. Hence, partly, the absence of student life. The students meet in the class-rooms, greet each other, and go their separate ways. It is individualism carried to such an extreme that the university seems rather a great knowledge factory than a college organism.
There are more fundamental differences. The academic freedom is not a matter of lecture attendance alone — there is a significant difference of attitude toward the student. He is regarded as a grown man — somewhat as he was under President Eliot’s administration at Harvard — whereas in America today he is almost always treated as a boy. In Germany (where he is a year or two older), the opportunities are laid before him. If, as too often proves true, he is still a boy, he squanders his first semesters recklessly, and begins to work only when the day of reckoning approaches. It is not until the end of the eighth semester (there are two semesters in the year) that the German student is examined at all. Then comes such an examination as the American undergraduate never knows. He is then, indeed, two years beyond our A.B. stage, for as is well known, the first two years of our college work correspond roughly to the last two of the German “gymnasium.” The surprising thing-to an American — is the amount of work that is done. A great number of German students loaf as no American student would be allowed to, but it is doubtful if in America so many would work without any incentive of test or examination. The system of treating the student as a man perhaps sends more students to the bottom, but I think it sends the top men higher.
That was the old theory at Harvard — that it was a college for the exceptional man, that the average man, or the a-little-under-the-average man, if he lacked the spunk to make his own way, had no business to be there. That, it would seem, must be the justification of the endowed universities in the future to train leaders, not masses. The state universities are bound by the very nature of their position, to concentrate their attention upon the average man. It would seem that we would only enter a useless competition unless we set ourself a higher, or at least different task. Whether our present tendency away from the German system will succeed in lifting the bottom men to a higher average without degrading the top men toward that same average, remains to be seen. The attempt is at least worth the venture.
The title “professor” is perhaps a higher honor in Germany than in any other nation of the world. The students pick their courses somewhat at haphazard, but they select their professors with a deal of care. The theological students are few, but [Adolph von] Harnack’s course in Church History is one of the biggest in the university. Students who would otherwise never think again of Greek, flock to hear [Ulrich von] Wilamowitz[-Moellendorff]. One elects to hear [Georg] Simmel or [Adolf] Lasson or [Alois] Riehl lecture, instead of choosing Philosophy X or 47. Four or five men give parallel courses in general Economics — the student hears him whom he most respects. And as the best professors are concentrated in no one university, no German student thinks of remaining eight semesters at any one. He travels about, and when he is done, he has heard all the best men in his special subject. (Hence again the comparative lack of student life, and the utter lack of university loyalty.)
Berlin is one hundred and seventy three years younger than Harvard, but from the very beginning, hers has been an illustrious faculty. Fichte, Schleiermacher, Hegel, Humboldt, Helmholtz, Virchow, Mommsen, Treitschke, Eric Schmidt — it is hard to select.
No examination-schedule compels the lecturers to cover any given field — they may wander as they choose. Hence, often, such veritable culture-courses as that of [Ulrich von] Wilamowitz[-Moellendorff] of which a friend writes: “His words were hard to catch, but I found him a most wonderful old man, with the sweetest enthusiastic smile. I began to appreciate more than ever the fire of scholarship. This morning he was discussing lost manuscripts, what we would know if we only had certain now lost — e. g., Plutarch’s ‘Lives of the Emperors.’ I never before so felt the enthusiasm of the philologist or the archæologist. His smile was the delicate child-like smile of an old man. I felt as if he were telling us a fairy-tale, or rather letting us into some pretty secret — as indeed he was, the secrets of a life-time of scholarship.”
The large American colony, the small but enthusiastic Harvard Club, the Exchange Professor — especially if he be Professor [Archibald Cary] Coolidge all combine to make a Harvard man at home in Berlin. So, too, the appreciation of Harvard by the Berlin press. Let me close this pot-pourri of random impressions with a quotation from the Berliner Tageblatt, which, perhaps the most influential of the Berlin dailies, recently headed a contributed article upon its front page, as follows: “Professor B. [Hiram Bingham III, publicized the existence of the Machu Picchu Incan citadel in Peru] is professor of South American history at Yale University, which, next to Harvard, is the most distinguished in America.”
Source: The Harvard Illustrated Magazine. Vol. 15. No. 6 (March 1914), pp. 297-301.
Image Source: Professor Aloph von Harnack, ditto, p. 300.