German Reading & Time (Adams in Berlin)

[alice wellintown]

 His first lecture was his last. The young man was not very quick, and
he had almost religious respect for his guides and advisers; but he
needed no more than one hour to satisfy him that he had made another
failure in education, and this time a fatal one. That the language
would require at least three months’ hard work before he could touch
the Law was an annoying discovery; but the shock that upset him was
the discovery of the university itself. He had thought Harvard College
a torpid school, but it was instinct with life compared with all that
he could see of the University of Berlin. The German students were
strange animals, but their professors were beyond pay. The mental
attitude of the university was not of an American world. What sort of
instruction prevailed in other branches, or in science, Adams had no
occasion to ask, but in the Civil Law he found only the lecture system
in its deadliest form as it flourished in the thirteenth century. The
professor mumbled his comments; the students made, or seemed to make,
notes; they could have learned from books or discussion in a day more
than they could learn from him in a month, but they must pay his fees,
follow his course, and be his scholars, if they wanted a degree. To an
American the result was worthless. He could make no use of the Civil
Law without some previous notion of the Common Law; but the student
who knew enough of the Common Law to understand what he wanted, had
only to read the Pandects or the commentators at his ease in America,
and be his own professor. Neither the method nor the matter nor the
manner could profit an American education.
  This discovery seemed to shock none of the students. They went to
the lectures, made notes, and read text-books, but never pretended to
take their professor seriously. They were much more serious in reading
Heine. They knew no more than Heine what good they were getting,
beyond the Berlin accent,—which was bad; and the beer,—which was not
to compare with Munich; and the dancing—which was better at Vienna.
They enjoyed the beer and music, but they refused to be responsible
for the education. Anyway, as they defended themselves, they were
learning the language.    9
  So the young man fell back on the language, and being slow at
languages, he found himself falling behind all his friends, which
depressed his spirits, the more because the gloom of a Berlin winter
and of Berlin architecture seemed to him a particular sort of gloom
never attained elsewhere. One day on the Linden he caught sight of
Charles Sumner in a cab, and ran after him. Sumner was then recovering
from the blows of the South Carolinian cane or club, and he was
pleased to find a young worshipper in the remote Prussian wilderness.
They dined together and went to hear “William Tell” at the Opera.
Sumner tried to encourage his friend about his difficulties of
language:—“I came to Berlin,” or Rome, or whatever place it was, as he
said with his grand air of mastery;—“I came to Berlin, unable to say a
word in the language; and three months later when I went away, I
talked it to my cabman.” Adams felt himself quite unable to attain in
so short a time such social advantages, and one day complained of his
trials to Mr. Robert Apthorp, of Boston, who was passing the winter in
Berlin for the sake of its music. Mr. Apthorp told of his own similar
struggle, and how he had entered a public school and sat for months
with ten-year-old-boys, reciting their lessons and catching their
phrases. The idea suited Adams’s desperate frame of mind. At least it
ridded him of the university and the Civil Law and American
associations in beer-cellars. Mr. Apthorp took the trouble to
negotiate with the head-master of the Friedrichs-Wilhelm-Werdersches
Gymnasium for permission to Henry Adams to attend the school as a
member of the Ober-tertia, a class of boys twelve or thirteen years
old, and there Adams went for three months as though he had not always
avoided high schools with singular antipathy. He never did anything
else so foolish but he was given a bit of education which served him
some purpose in life.
  It was not merely the language, though three months passed in such
fashion would teach a poodle enough to talk with a cabman, and this
was all that foreign students could expect to do, for they never by
any chance would come in contact with German society, if German
society existed, about which they knew nothing. Adams never learned to
talk German well, but the same might be said of his English, if he
could believe Englishmen. He learned not to annoy himself on this
account. His difficulties with the language gradually ceased. He
thought himself quite Germanised in 1859. He even deluded himself with
the idea that he read it as though it were English, which proved that
he knew little about it; but whatever success he had in his own
experiment interested him less than his contact with German education.
  He had revolted at the American school and university; he had
instantly rejected the German university; and as his last experience
of education he tried the German high-school. The experiment was
hazardous. In 1858 Berlin was a poor, keen-witted, provincial town,
simple, dirty, uncivilised, and in most respects disgusting. Life was
primitive beyond what an American boy could have imagined. Overridden
by military methods and bureaucratic pettiness, Prussia was only
beginning to free her hands from internal bonds. Apart from
discipline, activity scarcely existed. The future Kaiser Wilhelm I.,
regent for his insane brother King Friedrich Wilhelm IV., seemed to
pass his time looking at the passers-by from the window of his modest
palace on the Linden. German manners, even at Court, were sometimes
brutal, and German thoroughness at school was apt to be routine.
Bismarck himself was then struggling to begin a career against the
inertia of the German system. The condition of Germany was a scandal
and nuisance to every earnest German, all whose energies were turned
to reforming it from top to bottom; and Adams walked into a great
public school to get educated, at precisely the time when the Germans
wanted most to get rid of the education they were forced to follow. As
an episode in the search for education, this adventure smacked of
Heine.
  The school-system has doubtless changed, and at all events the
schoolmasters are probably long ago dead; the story has no longer a
practical value, and had very little even at the time; one could at
least say in defence of the German school that it was neither very
brutal nor very immoral. The head-master was excellent in his Prussian
way, and the other instructors were not worse than in other schools;
it was their system that struck the system-less American with horror.
The arbitrary training given to the memory was stupefying; the strain
that the memory endured was a form of torture; and the feats that the
boys performed, without complaint, were pitiable. No other faculty
than the memory seemed to be recognised. Least of all was any use made
of reason, either analytic, synthetic, or dogmatic. The German
government did not encourage reasoning.
  All State-education is a sort of dynamo machine for polarizing the
popular mind; for turning and holding its lines of force in the
direction supposed to be most effective for State purposes. The German
machine was terribly efficient. Its effect on the children was
pathetic. The Friedrichs-Wilhelm-Werdersches Gymnasium was an old
building in the heart of Berlin which served the educational needs of
the small tradesmen or bourgeoisie of the neighborhood;—the children
were Berliner-kinder if ever there were such, and of a class suspected
of sympathy and concern in the troubles of 1848. None was noble or
connected with good society. Personally they were rather sympathetic
than not, but as the objects of education they were proofs of nearly
all the evils that a bad system could give. Apparently Adams, in his
rigidly illogical pursuit, had at last reached his ideal of a
viciously logical education. The boys’ physique showed it first, but
their physique could not be wholly charged to the school. German food
was bad at best, and a diet of sauerkraut, sausage, and beer could
never be good; but it was not the food alone that made their faces
white and their flesh flabby. They never breathed fresh air; they had
never heard of a playground; in all Berlin not a cubic inch of oxygen
was admitted in winter into an inhabited building; in the school every
room was tightly closed and had no ventilation; the air was foul
beyond all decency; but when the American opened a window in the five
minutes between hours, he violated the rules and was invariably
rebuked. As long as cold weather lasted, the windows were shut. If the
boys had a holiday, they were apt to be taken on long tramps in the
Thiergarten or elsewhere, always ending in over-fatigue,
tobacco-smoke, sausages, and beer. With this, they were required to
prepare daily lessons that would have quickly broken down strong men
of a healthy habit, and which they could learn only because their
minds were morbid. The German university had seemed a failure, but the
German high-school was something very near an indictable nuisance.
  Before the month of April arrived, the experiment of German
education had reached this point. Nothing was left of it except the
ghost of the Civil Law shut up in the darkest of closets, never to
gibber again before any one who could repeat the story. The derisive
Jew laughter of Heine ran through the university and everything else
in Berlin. Of course, when one is twenty years old, life is bound to
be full, if only of Berlin beer, although German student life was on
the whole the thinnest of beer, as an American looked on it, but
though nothing except small fragments remained of the education that
had been so promising,—or promised,—this is only what most often
happens in life, when by-products turn out to be more valuable than
staples. The German University and German Law were failures; German
society, in an American sense, did not exist, or if it existed, never
showed itself to an American; the German theatre, on the other hand,
was excellent, and German Opera, with the ballet, was almost worth a
journey to Berlin; but the curious and perplexing result of the total
failure of German education was that the student’s only clear
gain,—his single step to a higher life,—came from time wasted; studies
neglected; vices indulged; education reversed;—it came from the
despised beer-garden and music-hall; and it was accidental,
unintended, unforeseen.