Produced by Charles Bowen, from page scans provided by the Web Archive
Transcriber's Note:
1. Page scan source:
http://www.archive.org/details/studentlifegerm02corngoog
2. The diphthong oe is represented by [oe].
THE
STUDENT-LIFE OF GERMANY.
THE
STUDENT-LIFE OF GERMANY:
BY WILLIAM HOWITT.
AUTHOR OF "THE RURAL LIFE OF ENGLAND," "BOOK OF THE SEASONS," ETC.
FROM THE UNPUBLISHED MS. OF DR. CORNELIUS.
CONTAINING NEARLY FORTY OF THE
MOST FAMOUS STUDENT SONGS.
[Illustration]
THINK OFT, YE BRETHREN;
THINK OF THE GLADNESS OF OUR YOUTHFUL PRIME,--
IT COMETH NOT AGAIN,--THAT GOLDEN TIME!
The Commers Book.
PHILADELPHIA:
CAREY AND HART.
MDCCCXLII.
C. Sherman &, Co. Printers, 19 St. James Street
"How shall I call thee, thou high, thou rough, thou noble, thou
barbaric, thou loveable, unharmonious, song-full, repelling, yet
refreshing life of the Burschen years? How shall I describe you, ye
golden hours, ye choral-songs of brotherly love? What tone shall
I give to you to make myself understood? What colours to thee, thou
never-comprehended chaos? I shall describe thee? Never! Thy ludicrous
outside lies open; the layman sees that; one can describe that to him;
but thy inner and lovely ore, the miner only knows who goes singing
with his brethren into the deep shaft. He brings up gold; pure, solid
gold; be it much or little, it is still of high value. But this is not
his whole booty. What he sees there, he may not describe to the layman:
it were all too strange, and too precious for his ear. There are
spirits in the deep that no other ear can comprehend; no other eye
perceive. Music floats through those halls, which to every uninitiated
ear sounds empty and unmeaning. But to him who has felt with it and
sung with it, it gives a peculiar consecration; when he, moreover,
smiles over the hole in his cap which he has brought back with him as a
symbol.
"Old Grandfather! now know I what thou undertook when thou held thy
annual, solitary, intercalary day! Thou too hadst thy companions in the
days of thy youth, and the water stood in thy gray eyelashes when thou
marked one in thy stambook as entombed."
_Hauff's Rathskeller in Bremen_.
PREFACE.
We have had various peeps and snatches of the Student-life of Germany,
from time to time, in our periodicals, but we have nothing like a
complete, and faithful account of it. Some of those accounts too, are
by English writers, who had at best but a partial and passing view of
this singular state of existence, and could not, however much they
might have seen of it, enter into it and comprehend it with the fulness
of apprehension and feeling which a native possesses. When I,
therefore, was thrown, on my first visit to Germany, into the midst of
its students, I began to inquire for a volume written by a German,
which should lay open the whole interior of that, whose surface was so
strange and so picturesque. I was told that no such thing, of any value
or completeness existed, and that, indeed, the students themselves were
jealous of the laws and customs of their ancient Burschendom being laid
open to the public. Yet, finding myself amongst those whose knowledge
and talents most entirely qualified them for making this exposition, I
did not cease till I had prevailed on one of the most gifted to
undertake the task, assisted by the experience of friends, who, like
himself, had passed through the mysteries of this singular life. The
present volume is the result; and I present it to the public with the
confident assurance, that whatever they may think of the portraiture,
they may depend upon its faithfulness. Spite of what that young and
popular writer, Hauff, has left on record in the extract which
immediately precedes these remarks, we have now penetrated the depths
of the Burschen-life; we have traversed its chaos, which he terms a
never-comprehended one; and have made the music of its most hidden
halls, audible and intelligible to all ears. I do not hesitate for a
moment to assert, that, taken as a whole, this volume will be found to
contain more that is entirely new and curious, than any one which has
issued from the press for years. The institutions and customs which it
describes, form the most singular state of social existence to be found
in the bosom of civilized Europe; and what renders them the more
curious and worthy of investigation is, that they are no recent and
evanescent frolic of eccentricity, but are as fast rooted into the
antiquity of German mind and manners as the universities themselves.
They have been modified and softened by time and advancing refinement,
but are not a whit nearer being rooted out, apparently, than they were
three hundred years ago. This state of things is here depicted by a
German himself, who has passed through it; and with that peculiar
feeling and appreciation which a German only can possess. It is in this
light that they are to be regarded. I do not here present myself as an
advocate or a caviller at this scheme of things, but merely as a
spectator, who, beholding something strange and curious, brings it to
the observation of his countrymen, in all truthfulness and simplicity
of representation, that they may judge of it for themselves. It has
been translated under the author's own eye, as it was written, and as
he is also acquainted with the English language, it may be reasonably
presumed to give a faithful transcript of his thoughts.
The two features of this Student-life which will meet with the most
repugnance in the English mind, are the Beer-duel, and the Sword-duel.
I have no desire to defend, far less to recommend either. I am, though
no advocate of a watery suction, miscalled Temperance, neither a
violent wine-bibber, nor "a fighting character." I do not even, like
our worthy friend Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, while planning Niger
expeditions of civilization, brew XXX in London; nor, like many of my
countrymen, while attending church, or chapel in England, insist on
bombarding the Chinese because they wont be poisoned with my opium. I
merely let the worthy and learned author tell his own tale; and he, in
telling it as a German and fellow-countryman of those concerned,
assures us that these features are daily becoming more diminished by
the progress of refinement.
It is to be hoped that the publication of this volume may even hasten
this desirable end, for no people are so much alive to the opinion of
other nations as the Germans. One thing, however, as an Englishman, I
may say, which the author could not say--and that is, that when reading
of the beer and sword duels of these students, we must take into
account what are the weapons and the perils in both cases. We are not
to suppose then, that their beer is any thing like the XXX just spoken
of, or their wine like sherry or port, three-fourths brandy. No; they
who know German wine, know that it is a very gentle and innocent,
rather acidulous, and rather cooling fluid, and that their beer is far
more mighty of the hop than of the malt. It is a well-bittered and
amiable table-beer, which even Father Mathew might take as a healthy
stomachic, and which one might rather expect, in Sam Welter's phrase,
to make its swallowers "swell wisibly before our wery eyes," than grow
riotous under its influence. When to this we add, that the sword-duel
is rather a trial of skill in fencing than any thing dangerous, and
that a scratch across the cheek, or prick into a stuffed jerkin, is in
ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the worst of its accidents, fears on
the subject diminish at a rapid rate. If, however, any one thinks these
youths had better be at their books than crossing swords or swallowing
choppins, I assure him I am quite of the same opinion; and I here
exhort the students, as soon as they get this volume, which they
speedily will, to forsake the Hirschgasse and the Kneip, and follow the
advice, but not the _example_ of the English. Shall I advise them to
imitate the students of Cambridge? Let any one read "The Student-Life
of Cambridge" in a late number of the _Westminster Review_, and say
whether that would be reasonable. Shall I advise them to practise the
vice and the mockeries which are practised there, by those who give the
most public and prominent character to the social student-life of
England--for it is not meant to assert that the generality of the
Oxford and Cambridge students are of such a class? Why, Kneips and the
Hirschgasse are heaven and innocence to them. Shall I advise them to
quit their songs for the grossnesses sung by the wild portion of
the students at Cambridge and Oxford? No! the songs of the German
students, even when on no higher a theme than wine, and with the bold
free-spokenness which is startling to our modes of thinking, are the
effusions of the first spirits of their nation, and are sung to some of
the finest melodies which ever emanated from that most musical of
people. It is here that the tables must be turned, and that we must
call on the English to imitate the Germans, and not the Germans the
English. If the English will drink, let them drink wine as cooling, and
beer as thin and bitter, as the Germans; if they will fight duels, let
them abandon bullets that fly through a man and let the soul out after
them, and be content with a scratched nose or punctured padding. If
they will sing over their wine, let them not sing the vile trash that
is heard in the haunts of our students, but the spiritual effusions of
such writers as Schiller, Goethe, Koerner, Arndt, Claudius, Hauff,
Follen, Uhland, etc. No, one cannot read of English students--of their
guzzlings and their songs--without feeling a sense of commonplaceness,
a something low, gross, unimaginative and vulgar.[1] On the
contrary, amid all the follies and mad frolics and nonsense of German
student-life--of which God knows there is plenty--he must be destitute
of poetry himself who does not feel it there. If there be a man who can
read through this volume and not feel its poetry, and not perceive the
high and beautiful sentiment which pervades it; the profound love of
nature, and the glorious love of country,--let that man march off to
Cambridge or Oxford; let him give his suppers or his breakfasts; let
him hurry in his nightgown to morning prayers; let him become a
first-rower, or a senior-wrangler if he will; but that man is no more
fit to take his stand by the student revellers of Germany, than Caliban
is by Hyperion. No, in the student-life, which is entered into as a
brief season of youthful hilarity, which in this world can come but
once; a season in which knowledge is not only to be gathered, but life
to be enjoyed--friendships for life to be knit up--love, perhaps for
life, to be kindled--and the spirit of patriotism to be cherished to a
degree which no after-chills and oppressions of ordinary life shall
ever be able utterly to extinguish; in this life there is a feeling and
a sentiment to which our student-life is a stranger. It is from the
bosom of this life that some of the noblest poets, the profoundest
philosophers, and the most devoted patriots which the world ever saw,
have gone forth. It was from the heart of this life that Theodore
Koerner sprung, for the cause of his country and mankind, and sung and
fought and died; it was from this that Goethe and Schiller, Hauff and
Tieck, and a thousand others, have issued to glorify valour, or
consecrate patriotism, or beautify the regions of the human soul by
their songs and their imaginative prose. It was from this that the
whole body of ardent youth arose, and quitting their Kneips and their
Chores, called all their country to reassert its liberty, to drive out
its foes, and at the people's head, fought with the spirit of the
ancient heroes, and chased from their soil for ever, the tyrant and
overrunner of humbled Europe.
And yet there are those who are continually forgetting these things;
asserting that all the student songs, and student clanship, and student
freedom, end in smoke and vapour, and without any permanent result, and
that they depart at the termination of their academical career their
several ways, and sink into obscurity and insignificance. What! would
they not have them become good citizens, sober judges, domestic men?
But they who say that no high effects remain, know nothing of the youth
of Germany. They cannot have seen how the new Rhine-song went through
the whole country like an electric flash when France threatened to
march to the banks of that noble river, and how every German student
vowed if such a deed were perpetrated, they would go forth and fight to
a man. They cannot know, as I do, that the loves and friendships formed
by these youths are more permanent and indissoluble than any class of
men with whom I have yet become acquainted; nor that in private
society, where, and in my own house, I have seen much of them,
they are amongst the most accomplished, gentlemanly, temperate,
correctly-mannered, cordial-hearted, and intellectual men that European
society possesses. But all such persons I willingly turn over to the
perusal of this volume, the work of a young but learned author, who has
recently passed, by a splendid examination, out of this student-life
itself without having ever fought a single duel, or very probably got
half or even quarter seas over. If the perusal of this volume should
have the good effect of lessening amongst the German youth the tendency
to the beer or the sword duel, and of inspiring our English youth with
a more intellectual and poetical taste in their pleasures, certainly we
may say, in the style of all good old prefaces, "that it will not have
been written in vain."
_Heidelberg, April 6th_, 1841.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
General Plan, Officers, and Courts, of a German University--Charm of
this life to those who have passed through it--Explanation of
the term _Bursche_, or Student--Right to found or dissolve
Universities, retained by the Sovereign Princes--Offices and mode
of government--The Curatorium--Rector, Prorector--Senate, greater
and less--Different orders of Professors and Teachers--mode of
their remuneration--University Board of Finance--its Court of
Justice--Academical freedom, and mode of matriculation--Inferior
officers, and penalties for offences against the Academical
laws--College terms--mode of Lecturing, and duties of Lecturers--
necessary Examinations of the Students, and consequent
Certificates--Sciences taught--Privileges and endowments to enable
young men without property to enjoy all the advantages of the
Universities--the great extent to which this is made available,
and great advantages to the State derived from it--Opinion of
Goethe on this head--Great Men that this has produced--no German,
however exalted in rank, can hold a high position in society,
without making himself master of the knowledge thus opened to the
people