W.E.B. Du Bois in Germany, 1892-1894
Introduction
W.E.B. Du Bois describes his experiences as a student in Berlin quite vividly in his Autobiography.[1] The tenth chapter is largely based on diaries and notes he kept as a student, and they make for much more lively reading than the book’s rather didactic opening chapters. Their interest only increases when one consults Du Bois’ unpublished papers at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst). They provide an intriguing perspective on this period in his life, for they include his diaries in their original, unedited form. In what follows, I will draw on both his correspondence and Autobiography as well as documents I found in Berlin.
Du Bois first studied German at Fisk University in Nashville, which he attended from 1885-1888. There he took beginning German and read excerpts from Schiller’s play Wilhelm Tell. His commencement speech was on Bismarck. Then at Harvard (1888-1890) he read Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason with George Santayana, who himself had studied in Göttingen and Berlin shortly beforehand.[2] For his course on political economy, he wrote a paper on the German railway system (he got an “A”). For his commencement address, he spoke on Jefferson Davis as a representative of Teutonic civilization.
Upon receiving his B.A. from Harvard, Du Bois applied for a stipend from a fund for graduate study abroad, and eventually – after a protracted correspondence with former President Rutherford Hayes, the fund’s director – he was awarded the prize. It is no exaggeration to say that in making this decision, Hayes “may here have performed the greatest service of his career.”[3] Du Bois set sail for Europe armed with a good education in philosophy, history, and the German railroads, an adequate knowledge of the German language, intense curiosity and little idea of where he was going to study. He was 24 years old.
After landing in Holland (“an extremely neat and well-ordered mud-puddle” – Autobiography 157), he took a boat trip up the Rhine before going over to Eisenach in central Germany, where he took a room with the Marbach family. With their help he improved his knowledge of the language – and also fell a bit in love with the eldest daughter, Dora. (I shall have more to say on their relationship later in this essay – see the section “Private Matters” below.) Once he determined that the best university was in Berlin, he set out for the German capital in the fall of 1892.
Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin
At the time, the University of Berlin was one of the most modern in the world. Just before his arrival, electric lights had replaced gas lights in the library. There was a new, centralized clock system with bells that rang every quarter hour. The first toilets had been installed, along with central heating and ventilation. It certainly must have seemed a highly developed establishment to a young man who, not so long beforehand, had been looking for a summer teaching job by wandering on foot over the hot and dusty roads of rural Tennessee.
The main university building, located then as now on the tree-lined Unter den Linden boulevard, had thirty-six lecture halls distributed over three floors. The Karzer, a room with two cells, was set aside for the detention of miscreant students, who were subjection to incarceration for infractions such as dueling, gambling, or drunkenness. The catalogue room in the library was open to students daily, but only from noon until 2 p.m. As far as I was able to determine, Du Bois checked out only two books during his three semesters.[4]
(The main building of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität, on Unter den Linden)
The winter semester of 1892, Du Bois’ first, ran from mid-October until mid-March. The student body of the time was made up of approximately 4,700 young men (no coeds), of whom anywhere from 8-11% were foreign. Over 150 American students were enrolled, of whom 59 were taking courses in philosophy, philology, and history. Among the German students was Karl Liebknecht, later to become a co-founder of the Communist Party of Germany.
Of all the German-language universities, only Vienna had a larger faculty. But among the professors in Berlin were some of the most famous names anywhere in the academic world: the philosopher Wilhelm Dilthey, the economist Gustav Schmoller, the historian Heinrich von Treitschke (“the most instructing and interesting especially for the modern point of view”), Erich Schmidt (one of the founders of the field of Germanistik), the sociologist Max Weber, classical philologist Theodor Mommsen, and the scientists Helmholtz, Max Planck and Rudolf Virchow.
(Treitschke in the lecture hall)
Students lived in apartments they sublet for a semester and frequently moved, seldom staying long enough in one place to be registered in the official city address book. This was also the case for Du Bois, as he moved some three or four times during his stay.[5] As he wrote in an unpublished essay, “Harvard in Berlin” (ca. 1893), “The correct Berlin method is to hire a nook in a flat, from three to five stories up. There with pipe and bier, coffee and black bread, he lives not like a king, but as a free and easy Viking bound to the student world by his kneipes (drinking bouts) his societies, and – possibly – his lectures.”
To provide some context, we should recall that Germany had been a unified state for only some 21 years upon Du Bois’ arrival. The Franco-Prussian war of 1870-1871 had seen the triumph of German armies led by Prussia over the French of Napoleon III at Sedan and the later fall of the Paris Commune. The King of Prussia, William I, had reluctantly let himself be persuaded by his chancellor Bismarck to accept the crown as Kaiser. The coronation ceremony took place in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles.
By the time Du Bois appeared, the first Kaiser had been succeeded by William II, the man we think of as the Kaiser, who had forced Bismarck into retirement.
(Tenniel’s famous cartoon from 1890, “Dropping the Pilot,” shows Bismarck leaving the ship of state as the Kaiser nonchalantly looks on)
With his departure, the intricate system of alliances he had maintained began to fall apart. Rapid industrialization, the acquisition of colonies, the creation of a fleet to rival that of the British, and a powerful army all led Germany’s leaders to demand their place in the sun. The consequence of this bellicose behavior was the formation of a Franco-Russian military convention in 1892, the year of Du Bois’ arrival. An essential component of the coming World War was thus in place.
But that lay more than two decades in the future. Germany was at peace during his stay, celebrating national holidays such as the 27th of January: the Kaiser’s birthday. All the newspapers reported in great detail the celebrations of 1893, when Wilhelm turned 34. Ceremonies began at 3 a.m. with martial music, a reception, church service, speeches, and other events lasting the entire day. Huge crowds lined Unter den Linden, and boys climbed trees to get a better view of the parades. A guard of honor fired their guns in salute. There was a festive meeting at the Academy of Sciences, which Du Bois was to become a member of 65 years later. The university convened a ceremonial gathering in the main hall, and the audience listened to a speech on the history of the university, with stress on the role played therein by the royal family. Other speeches focused on riveting topics such as the Kaiser’s voyages to Scandinavian countries, and plays were staged with titles such as “The Guardian Angel of the Hohenzollern.” In the evening a banquet was held, followed by a gala opera.
Political Activities
In the summer of that year, an election also took place, and Du Bois was an eager student of the campaign as he saw it unfold. By American standards, it was a rather quiet affair, with the Social Democrats the only party to engage actively in electioneering. In an unpublished manuscript entitled “The Present Condition of German Politics” (Reel 87, frame 391ff), Du Bois records his observations, though his definition of left-wing and right-wing takes some getting used to. Perhaps he could best be described in contemporary terms as something of a libertarian. He lumped the German Social Democrats together with the anti-Semites on the right wing, on the grounds that they both favored a strong centralized state.
It surprised Du Bois to learn that workers identified themselves with the Social Democrats. He seems to have thought that a socialist was an intellectual, that socialism was a theoretical, philosophical matter best represented by some of his professors. Thus he was amazed when he attended what was billed as a reunion of 200 working-men’s choirs, only to find himself “in the midst of 10,000 socialists!” Evidently he was unaware that these groups often were in fact camouflage organizations for political clubs during the time when Bismarck’s anti-socialist laws were in effect.
In addition to choirs (which performed the “Marseillaise” and other tunes from the official party songbook), there were dance clubs, athletic clubs, zither clubs, and a volunteer fire brigade. These organizations provided entertainment for working-class families, for example by setting up photographic exhibitions and displaying items – such as a barrel filled with workers’ sweat.[6] At the gathering of socialist glee clubs, Du Bois noted: “I asked a neatly dressed and harmless-looking little maiden with whom I danced: ‘Are you too a socialist?’ – ‘O yes!’ she replied; ‘And why?’ She looked a bit puzzled and then answered half-timidly: ‘Because my father is.’ I danced with her again.”
But there was also a more overtly political dimension to these clubs’ activities. They would invite prominent speakers such as the revered party founder August Bebel, who lectured in smoky halls in sessions that lasted from 8 pm to midnight. Or the clubs would engage in debates on topics such as the right to strike. Everyone was expected to participate, as these were used as rehearsals for debates with other political parties.
(A poster for the Social Democratic Party of Germany featuring August Bebel)
Du Bois was interested in the Social Democrats not necessarily because he agreed at this time with their policies, but because they were a political movement for the disenfranchised and underprivileged, and so he saw in them a possible model for what could happen someday for his own race in America. His interest in them was in line with his attraction to Bismarck, in whom he saw primarily the unifier of a previously disparate and fractious nation, a Moses figure.
Near the end of his long life (he lived to be 95), Du Bois was to become a member of the Communist Party of the USA, and GDR accounts of his Berlin student days frequently mention the allegedly lasting impression made by August Bebel. This is, however, a self-serving reinterpretation of the historical record by the East Germans, who wanted to claim both Bebel and Du Bois as their own. The documents tell a different story. Du Bois was probably including himself when he said that most Americans would side with the German Democratic Party, which in his eyes was left wing, though it would not be considered so today. The party opposed state intervention and promoted the rights of the individual over and against any centralized authority. Particularly they supported free trade and deregulation.
The result of the 1893 election was that 14 parties were represented in the brand new parliament building, the Reichstag. The voting laws favored certain groups and discriminated against others, so that the strength of a party in the parliament was not always a reflection of their support among the voters. The largest party was the Roman Catholic Center party, who got 96 seats, about a quarter of the total, even though they had the support of only 19% of the voters. The Social Democrats, despite receiving a larger percentage of votes, nonetheless had fewer than half as many seats. The anti-Semites, who had had zero representation in 1884 and six in 1890, shot up to 16 in this election.
Anti-Semitism
In the 1890s, anti-Semitism was present not just in politics but also in the university. One of the professors, the economist Gustav Schmoller, could be heard saying: “We see that where large estates are the rule, the little Jew represents the middle class but by no means completely replaces it, we see above all that in these regions small towns, small markets with healthy life are missing.”[7] The most prominent antagonists were the historian Treitschke and the economist Wagner, who – along with Schmoller – were professors of Du Bois.
Students, too, had their anti-Semitic organizations, for example the quite active Clubs of German Students (Vereine deutscher Studenten), founded in the 1880s under the guidance of the influential Court Preacher and notorious anti-Semite Adolf Stoecker. In 1893 they invited the historian Adolf Brecher, an extreme anti-Semite, to become an honorary member of their fraternity. The rector of the university, the famous public health reformer Rudolf Virchow, tried to keep Brecher from receiving this dubious honor – unsuccessfully.[8]
(Rudolf Virchow in his study)
This led to scathing denunciations of Virchow in the anti-Semitic press as being “philo-semitic” (judenfreundlich), as though that were a term of opprobrium. The university, with its high percentage of Jewish professors, was called a bastion of Judaism.[9] One paper commented that Virchow, in his ivory tower, had lost contact with the people, who were (allegedly) suffering under the increasing influence of Judaism.[10] We Germans, according to another paper, still have reason to be proud of our higher education, but if Jewish materialism takes hold, then it will be in danger.[11] One could without difficulty list many more such commentaries – this is merely a representative sample.
At the same time, the liberal press – influential though small in number – stoutly defended Virchow, maintaining that the fame of the university was suffering under the onslaught of anti-Semitic students and professors. Rector Virchow fought back in his annual address to the faculty, saying that although no professorship of anti-Semitism had yet been demanded, anti-Semitic professors had been called for – a highly unusual and courageous reference to current events in a speech in which only agreeable sentiments and vague words were expected.
Du Bois was not entirely untouched by the anti-Semitic views that, with some exceptions, predominated at the time. I believe it is fair to say that at this stage in his life, he was fundamentally ambivalent in his attitude toward the Jews. In his unpublished essay on German politics he noted, “It may surprise one at first to see a recrudescence of anti-Jewish feeling in a civilized state at this late day. One must learn however that the basis of the neo-antisemitism is economic and its end socialism. Only its present motive force is racial hatred,” a fateful but at the time widespread misreading of the phenomenon. He goes on to say, however, “It must be ever remembered that the great capitalists of Germany, the great leaders of industry are Jews; moreover, they work for each other…. [T]hey have forced citadel after citadel, until now they practically control the stock-market, own the press, fill the bar and bench, are crowding the professions, – indeed there seems to be no limit to the increase of their power.”
A year later, on his voyage back to New York, Du Bois noted in his diary the attributes of some of his fellow passengers. In a passage he later omitted from his Autobiography, he wrote: “In spite of all I have seen the Jew remains a half veiled mystery to me. I should be the last to join in any prejudice against him both from principle & from the acquaintance I’ve had with noble individuals in his race. Yet there seems to fail so far as I’ve seen that strong middle class which in every nation holds the brunt of culture. I have seen the noble aristocracy of the race and the low mean cheating Pöbel [rabble] – but seldom the ordinary good hearted good intentioned man. I suppose this is of course the result of their curious history…. On board we have various specimens but none of a very inviting character…. There is in them all that slyness that lack of straightforward openheartedness which goes straight against me…” He concludes, “I have great hopes & great admiration for the Jew people only I see that their national development is over widely different obstacles than those of my nation.”
This ambivalence can also be detected in Souls of Black Folk, where – as is well-known – he also used the word “veil” so prominently when discussing his own race. Most readers of this book are unaware of passages that could be read as anti-Semitic, since Du Bois himself replaced pejorative references to Jews with words such as “immigrants” and “foreigners.” As he wrote much later, in 1953, “the case but illustrates how easy it is, especially in race relations, inadvertently to give a totally wrong impression.”[12] It is clear that especially during and after World War II, Du Bois came to advocate “Negro-Jewish Unity.” Before then, his position was less well-defined. One unpublished and undated jotting has the revealing lines, “Let Jews & women remember black folk,” followed by, “Suddenly came the thought – are Jews black? do they know, have they suffered?”[13] One could go on and on discussing this topic. Suffice it to say that at the very least, Du Bois’ experiences in Europe did nothing to lessen his ambivalence.
Student Life
Hostility towards the Jews was by no means the most prominent facet of academic life in the 1890s. Let us look more closely at some other aspects of that existence. First, it should be noted that there were no required classes, and attendance was never taken. Students typically spent a semester at one university, then transferred to a second and often a third to complete their education. To get a degree, it was only necessary to pass a final examination, and students often simply crammed for this after doing little or no studying for years.
The problems lay not with the majority of students, but (even then) with certain fraternities. According to the “Berlin Newspaper,” membership in certain organizations meant that students were taken care of for the rest of their lives, their careers as administrators or judges guaranteed. And yet, the paper commented, these were the laziest drudges imaginable.[14] They spent their two to three years at the university drinking, dueling, and debating the finer points of drinking customs. At a university in western Germany, one fraternity was said to have forbidden attendance at classes as improper behavior.
“Voss’s Newspaper” cautioned that these problems actually used to be worse. And whoever looked at the courses posted on the bulletin boards could also find numerous announcements of student associations inviting participation in their meetings. At these, students would give lectures on topics they had researched themselves. Others invited professors from their own and other institutions to address issues of current concern.[15] Du Bois noted that there were clubs “for all purposes, from philosophy to chess, and from converting the Jews to Alp-climbing.” (Autobiography, 167) Students shared with faculty members the conviction that the answer to any social problem lay in education.
Gustav Schmoller and the Club for Social Policy
What was it that brought on this outpouring of commentary about student life in August of 1893? The stimulus appears to have been a complaint by Professor Schmoller, delivered at the end of his course on national economy. Schmoller’s lectures were typically attended by over 100 students, guests, and dignitaries both from home and abroad. At the end of this semester, he thanked the students but specifically addressed his remarks only to those who had actually done the work, not those who had skipped the entire semester and turned up on the final day to pick up their certificate of attendance, a practice that, as he pointed out, was to be found nowhere else on earth and in no other system of education. Schmoller was concerned not just for the future civil service but for the welfare of the nation, which he saw largely resting in the hands of these graduates. Somewhat hyperbolically, he compared the situation to that of France before the revolution.
It is hard to imagine any comments on student behavior today attracting such widespread attention and controversy. The uproar he caused illustrates the esteem with which the views of distinguished professors were held in German society of the time. One paper took the opportunity to urge Schmoller to use his influence to ban fraternities, which encouraged overindulgence, rowdyism, and idleness among their members.[16]
Schmoller had been one of the founders of the “Club for Social Policy” (Verein für Sozialpolitik), the primary vehicle for reform of its day.[17] The fast pace of industrialization after the victory over France had led to increasing class conflict in Germany and the prospect of worse confrontations to come. The state sought to head off these clashes by means of intervention in the private sector. There were widespread calls for a third path, one between communism and capitalism, one that would avoid the twin dangers of revolution and reaction.[18]
Schmoller’s Club brought together economists, government officials, scientists and academicians for discussions that should lead to reforms. In the early 1870s, there had been radical calls for the abolition of private property. In the years that followed, though, the Club retreated from the front lines somewhat and became more of an academic publishing society. Among the representative titles of the Publications of the Club for Social Policy under Schmoller’s editorship are: The Conditions of Farm Workers in Germany (3 vols., 1892; the final volume edited by Max Weber); and New Investigations on the Housing Question in Germany and Abroad (4 vols., 1901).
A central tenet of the Club was that it should fall to the educated classes, the talented tenth – to borrow a phrase from Du Bois – to moderate between the propertied classes and the proletariat. As Schmoller himself said, “Science can and should not be impartial and colorless, but, while standing above the minor squabbles and controversies of the day, should deal with the large political questions of the age.” (Ritschl, 235)
Another fundamental principle was that the state was responsible for all its subjects and for their welfare. After careful study of a problem, the government must be prepared to take appropriate action.[19] A prerequisite for reform was a detailed history of how a problem (such as child and female labor) had arisen, followed by a statistical description of the current state of affairs. Reform should be scientific, based on observation and quantification. Only then could the arguments be made for limiting work hours, improving hygiene and safety, reforming the tax code, and seeing to the education of workers.
Schmoller, who became chairman of the club in 1890, was one of the most prominent members of a group known, at first pejoratively, as Socialist Professors (Kathedersozialisten). Under his leadership, the Club concentrated on labor conditions. Questionnaires were distributed, students in his seminars went out into the suburbs and conducted interviews with workers.
Very likely it was with Schmoller’s encouragement that Du Bois became a member of the Club. His student notebooks include the following sentence, written in a mixture of German and English: “My [i.e., Schmoller’s] school tries as far as possible to leave the ‘sollen’ [that which should be] for a later stage and study on[ly] the ‘geschehen’ [that which actually happens] as other sciences have done.”[20]
And Du Bois’ memory of his professor did not fade with the years. Half a century later, when he came to East Berlin to accept an honorary degree from his old alma mater, Du Bois was welcomed by Dean Mohrmann. When I interviewed him in 1992, the Dean recalled that the first thing Du Bois did when they met in 1958 was to pull out of his pocket a calling card of Gustav Schmoller’s, and say that when he was a student, the professor had given him that card and invited him to attend one of his upper division courses. Du Bois never forgot that kind gesture.
(A bust of Schmoller from 1907)
A Matter of Degree
The Humboldt University archives shed some light on the question why Du Bois did not take a degree at Berlin. The minutes of the faculty senate meetings show that in the 1890s committee members discussed the usual topics: Who was to be granted tenure? Which members of the faculty were leaving for jobs elsewhere? There was also the occasional case of plagiarism. One question that exited tempers was: Should students with no knowledge of Latin be handed diplomas written in a language they could not interpret? Professor Helmholtz called the awarding of these degrees a “deception of the nation.” (Faculty Minutes of July 6, 1893)
Du Bois, like a number of other students, requested permission to take his degree early, and so the faculty took up his petition. The official minutes do not record the pro and contra, only the final decision:
“The student of national economics du Bois from America, who spent 4 semesters at the Harward [sic] University and is now enrolled in his 4th semester at the Berlin University, requests the faculty to recommend to the ministry [the functional equivalent of the trustees] that he be dispensed from taking the triennium and be admitted now to the final exam. The faculty is of the opinion that in the case of foreigners, whose education is significantly different from that usually to be found at German schools, a dispensation from proof of having fulfilled the triennium should be granted only in quite special and exceptional cases and even then only when it is a matter of the final semester, and therefore rejects the petition of the student du Bois.” (Faculty Minutes of January 18, 1894)
Later, in his many accounts of this incident, Du Bois attributed the denial to the head of the Chemistry Department, who was afraid of the precedent that would be set for other foreign students. In the official statement, however, the issue was adjudicated on the basis of differing educational systems, and no mention is made of any specific department. It may well be that Du Bois’ information is correct. One can well imagine that Schmoller, who was present at the meeting, was later kind enough to tell him what the real situation was. In that case, the official statement by the university administration was a smokescreen for something quite different, something I am told happens even today. In the end, though disappointed, Du Bois packed his bags and returned to the US, where he became the first African-American to receive a Ph.D. from Harvard.
Lessons Learned
What did Du Bois learn from his years in Germany? Why was his time there of importance in his life?
The first change occurred on an intimate and personal level. Du Bois was so taken with some aspects of German behavior that he acquired habits there that he retained for the rest of his days. Prussian social customs gave, or at least reinforced, a distinguished appearance and bearing on his part, an attitude – not uncommon among shy people – that could be mistaken for aloofness. Indeed, in later years he would often be characterized as reserved, distant, even haughty.
When it comes to physical appearance, Du Bois – described as a mandarin by those who knew him later – forever after followed the fashion set by the Kaiser, the style of trimming his hair and moustache, as well as his habitual use of a cane and gloves. “A photo of Du Bois and other Berlin students ca. 1894 shows that he adopted a Kaiser Wilhelm moustache, a common affectation of that period, which he confirmed in his autobiography.” (Kenneth Barkin, “W. E. B. Du Boisʼ Love Affair with Imperial Germany,” in: German Studies Review, May 2005, vol. 28, No. 2 [May], pg. 294)
Kaiser Wilhelm II
Consider also Du Bois’s account of his 25th birthday celebration (February 23, 1893), which he describes in detail in his Autobiography. This document has attracted attention because it closes with his famous resolve to “work for the rise of the Negro people, taking for granted that their best development means the best development of the world.” (Autobiography, 171) In editing his diary for later publication, however Du Bois omitted one curious part: the title page, a virtual program sheet that he drew up, listing every activity for the evening before and the big day itself. A month earlier, in January 1893, Du Bois and everyone else had celebrated the Kaiser’s birthday. Then in February, Du Bois turned his own anniversary into a miniature imitation of the royal one, replete with its own ceremony, ritual, and court reporting. It comes as little surprise that later that evening he wrote in his diary, “the world spirit … makes me feel that I am royal and that beneath my scepter a world of kings shall bow.”[21]
It was in Germany that he says he learned how to drink beer and wine.[22] One of the most amusing souvenirs of this is a slip of paper he saved and which has the following text printed on it: “I have been out drinking this evening and cannot find my way home. My address is ………………. Please put me in a cab home. The fare is in my vest pocket.” This was to be affixed to one’s buttonhole when the occasion warranted. It should be noted that the address is not filled in, and Du Bois saved it only as a curiosity, not because he ever thought he would need to use it.
On a more serious note, when Du Bois returned to the U.S., he set about doing some research, the first fruit of which was The Suppression of the African Slave-Trade (1896). In the Preface he thanks the “trustees of the John F. Slater Fund, whose appointment made it possible to test the conclusions of this study by the general principles laid down in German universities.”[23] Later, Du Bois was named assistant lecturer in sociology at the University of Pennsylvania, where he began a major work, The Philadelphia Negro: A Social Study (1899). Of this work he would later write: “The Negro problem was in my mind a matter of systematic investigation and intelligent understanding. The world was thinking wrong about race, because it did not know. The ultimate evil was stupidity. The cure for it was knowledge based on scientific investigation.” (Autobiography, 197)
In other words, Du Bois had a similar attitude toward racial discrimination in America as Schmoller had toward class conflict in Germany. Major social problems could be solved by scientific study, carried out by an educated elite, followed by government intervention to avoid the potential for violent upheaval or civil strife.
This was the impetus behind works that Du Bois churned out over the next 17 years at the rate of one volume per year, with titles ranging from Social and Physical Condition of Negroes in Cities (1897) to The College-Bred Negro (1900) to Morals and Manners Among American Negroes (1915). What is this but Du Bois’ effort to create on his own the entire program of Schmoller’s Publications of the Club for Social Policy? Saying this is not to denigrate his achievement but to recognize it for the accomplishment that it was. To affirm that Beethoven learned from his teacher Haydn, or that Du Bois stood on the shoulders of Schmoller, does not lessen their stature. Indeed, the amazing thing is that Du Bois worked virtually alone, unlike his mentor who was supported by a staff and engaged a different author for each of his volumes. Du Bois, in contrast, carried on his operation in Philadelphia year after year with minimal assistance and on a shoe-string budget, yet somehow did not utterly exhaust himself in the process.
Private Matters
It was in Berlin, I believe, that Du Bois had his first significant – and tragic – love affair. The details are a sketchy, but apparently he lived with – or at least had an affair with – a German shop girl, whose name may have been Amalie Lebenfeldt. Since the city address books do not list anyone under that name, she likely lived the kind of transient existence in Berlin that Du Bois himself did. Or perhaps she lived in one of the suburbs not covered in the address books. We simply do not know. All that Du Bois says of her in the Autobiography (pg. 171) is that he felt remorse for having caused her “(perhaps) life-ruin.” What can this mean? Did she become a social outcast for having a relationship with a man outside of wedlock? And a foreigner? And a “Neger,” as the Germans of the time would have said? Did she become pregnant? Did she have an illegitimate child? One can continue with such speculative questions, but answers will be difficult to come by.
Whatever the problems were with Amalie, I suspect they involved something more than American-style racism. Recall the incipient love affair that took place when Du Bois was staying with his host family in Eisenach. The chief hindrance to any marriage with Dora Marbach was Du Bois’ own realization that he could not take her back to America with him and have her suffer the social ostracism that most certainly would have awaited them.[24] Dora Marbach apparently would have been happy to marry him and her family would have been pleased as well. But if he needed any reminding of what would happen to them back home, it was provided by a professor from Colorado and his wife, who stayed briefly with the Marbachs and who thought it incumbent upon them to explain to their hosts the truth about “American Negroes.” In any event, if the Marbachs in Eisenach were open-minded enough to accept Du Bois as a member of their family, there is no reason to think that the big city of Berlin was likely to be less tolerant of an interracial relationship. If he had been Jewish or Slavic, that might well have been a different matter, but Du Bois in Berlin was what is called in German a bird from paradise, an almost unique creature. Most importantly, he was cultured and well-mannered, and obviously a member of the intellectual elite.
Du Bois and Goethe
When Du Bois renounced Dora Marbach, he was sacrificing his personal happiness for the sake of a great good, a higher goal – or at least this is the way he preferred to think about the matter. In his mind, what gave his life meaning was his dedication to the mission of working for the betterment of his race in America. Sacrifice and renunciation. Concepts that would have been quite familiar to anyone familiar with the cultural atmosphere in Germany at the time. The language has a word that neatly includes both meanings, and it was given its most pregnant formulation by, of course, Goethe in Faust (verse 1, 549): “Thou shalt forgo, shalt do without” (Entbehren sollst du! sollst entbehren) – a line Du Bois quotes twice in his Autobiography. (212 and 404)
Goethe had been the single most important cultural icon in Germany long before Du Bois arrived. Testimony to this can be found in the letters of a professor who greatly influenced him at Harvard, William James. In a letter from Dresden in 1867, the young James wrote to his family: “I went to the theatre again two nights ago to see Goethe’s Faust!!! which was acted with hardly anything omitted, and was, naturally, a great failure, though the audience, who knew the poem by heart, seemed greatly delighted.”[25] The play (over 12,000 verses long) was performed frequently, familiar quotations from it were recited regularly, and there can be little doubt it achieved the status of cultural reference point.
The yearnings and preoccupations that Du Bois brought with him to Germany were given a framework, a vocabulary in Berlin which allowed him to understand himself better and be able to express himself in a new idiom, and part of this idiom came from Goethe. Not just Faust – henceforth he regarded his years in Berlin as the culmination of his Lehrjahre, his years of apprenticeship (a reference to the title of Goethe’s novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre), just as his return to America was to be the beginning of his Meisterjahre. (See Autobiography, 184) When he wrote on this 25th birthday that “I am striving to make my life all that life may be,” he was drawing on the tradition of Faust, one of the quintessential figures of the Western tradition. (Autobiography, 171)
Another quotation from Faust is, in fact, part of the inspiration for the title of Du Bois’ most famous work. How often is this misquoted as “The Soul of Black Folk” or “The Souls of Black Folks”? The correct title is The Souls of Black Folk, because Black Folk according to this book have more than one soul: “One ever feels his twoness, – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body…” (Chapter 1, “Of our Spiritual Strivings”) This passage and this title paraphrases one of the most famous lines from Faust: “Two souls, alas, reside within my breast / And each withdraws from, and repels, its brother” – a quotation familiar to everyone whose native tongue is German.[26] Researchers trying to explain the title have looked into what doctrines of the soul were taught in the psychology classes Du Bois took at Harvard. Such speculation completely misses the point – Du Bois was claiming for his race and also himself the dilemma and the status of Faust, the one who risks his soul in search of knowledge regarding the ultimate secrets of the universe.
Conclusion
What was the most important thing Du Bois learned from his time in Europe? There it was that he had his first experience as an adult of whites who did not discriminate against him. There it was that he overcame what he termed his own narrow and provincial view of race relations. He realized that it was not an innate trait of whites to be prejudiced against people of his race, for he was treated as an equal and with human warmth by some of the first people he met in Europe, a Dutch family on the ship going up the Rhine. It became clear to Du Bois, as it was later to become clear to Malcolm X, that racial prejudice of the kind he was familiar with was a peculiarly American institution. As he wrote in an unpublished note on his birthday in 1894: “I have finally proved to my entire satisfaction that my race forms but slight impediment between me and kindred souls – that in spite of vexatious curiosity, I am here free from most of those iron bands that bound me at home. Therefore I have gained for my life-work new hope and zeal – the Negro people shall yet stand among the honored of the world.”[27]
[1] A Soliloquy on Viewing My Life from the Last Decade of Its First Century (New York: International, 1968), 154-182. Hereafter referred to as Autobiography.
[2] George Santayana: Persons and Places. Fragments of Autobiography. Critical Edition. Ed. William G. Holzberger, Herman J. Saatkamp, Jr. (Cambridge, Mass. and London: MIT Press, 1986), 253-265.
[3] Herbert Aptheker in Du Bois Correspondence. (I, 16) Later, the renewal of this stipend enabled Du Bois to extend his stay in Europe .
[4] These were: Charles K. Kingsley, Hypatia: or, New Foes with an Old Face, two vols. in one (Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1857), checked out on May 16, 1893, and Wilhelm Dilthey, Einleitung in die Geisteswissenschaft, Vol. I (1883), checked out January 20, 1894, returned February 21. A fictional version of the life of an ancient philosopher, Hypatia was quite popular in its day (first published 1853).
[5] The Amtliches Verzeichnis des Personals und der Studierenden der Königlichen Friedrich Wilhelms Universität zu Berlin for the years 1892-1894 lists the following addresses for Du Bois, which I visited in 1992:
1892-92 Winter Semester: Oranienstraße 130 in Kreuzberg. See Oliver Lubrich, ” ʼEntlang der Farbenlinieʼ – W. E. B. Du Bois in Nazi-Deutschland” in: Kulturwissenschaftliche Zeitschrift 6, 2021 Heft 3, pg. 36.
1893 Summer Semester – Mauerstraße 45 and 46 (Du Bois apparently was in fact living on the Schöneberger Ufer this semester, according to his letters; the site is now a public park)
1893-94 Winter Semester – Oranienburger Straße 66 (only the back part of this address still stands; during the existence of the GDR and for some years after, it was part of the Henschel publishing house)
[6] See Paul Göhre: Drei Monate Fabrikarbeiter und Handwerksbursche. Eine praktische Studie. (Leipzig: Friedrich Wilhelm Grunow, 1892), 101. Du Bois recommends this “excellent little book” in his unpublished ms.
[7] “Korreferat über innere Kolonisation mit Rücksicht auf die Erhaltung und Vermehrung des mittleren und kleinen ländlichen Grundbesitzes.” Schriften des Vereins für Sozialpolitik 33 (Leipzig 1887), 91.
[8] While the real reason was undoubtedly Brecher’s anti-Semitism, Virchow made a tactical mistake in trying to exclude him on procedural grounds, saying that since he was not a member of the university faculty he was ineligible. The problem was that this was not even technically true, as there were many counter-examples of other, less controversial professors. Thus in early August, 1893, the minister of culture, Julius Robert Bosse, was compelled to overturn Virchow’s decision, which he justified on the grounds of academic freedom.
[9] Dresdner Nachrichten, No. 208, August 6, 1893.
[10] Pommersche Reichspost, Stettin, No. 187, August 11, 1893.
[11] Neue Preußische [Kreuz-] Zeitung, No. 399, August 26, 1893.
[12] See Herbert Aptheker’s Introduction to Souls of Black Folk, 43.
[13] See reel 89, frame 888.
[14] “Die verbummelten Studenten,” Berliner Zeitung, Nr. 186, August 10, 1893.
[15] “Der Unfleiß der Studenten,” Vossische Zeitung, Nr. 311, August 10, 1893.
[16] Volks-Zeitung, Nr. 185, August 9, 1893.
[17] The following is indebted to Rüdiger vom Bruch: Weder Kommunismus noch Kapitalismus. Bürgerliche Sozialreform in Deutschland vom Vormärz bis zur Ära Adenauer (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1985), 61ff.
[18] Apart from Werner Sombart, there was little interest among academics in the principles of socialism and communism in the last quarter of the 19th century. Marx was regarded as passé. The Club for Social Policy placed more emphasis on Christian concern for one’s neighbor than on Das Kapital, and was primarily interested in practical questions of influencing public opinion and reforming the process of making and administering laws. (See vom Bruch, 64)
[19] This marked a significant shift in social philosophy from the Bismarck to the Wilhelminian epochs. Now the accent was less on creating the greatest productivity in the economic sector than on distributing wealth equitably. This shift in emphasis involved a redefinition of the whole field of economics to include cultural and historical dimensions. Departing from the classical school, the new economists emphasized social considerations such as the role of the state, law, and customs. (See vom Bruch, 62)
[20] Du Bois Economics Notebook 1893/94 (reel 87).
[21] See “Celebration of My Twenty-fifth Birthday,” Du Bois papers at Univ. Mass. at Amherst.
[22] Historical background: A bottle of beer cost about seven pfennigs, and the recent invention of the bottle cap made it easily transportable, thus leading to an increase in beer consumption – and a corresponding decrease in sales of brandy. (See Göhre, 30)
[23] W.E.B. Du Bois, Writings, ed. Nathan Huggins (New York: Library of America, 1986), 3.
[24] David Levering Lewis observes that “his own racial pride was as much a bar to intermarriage as the prejudices of the departed Americans.” W.E.B. Du Bois, 1868-1919: Biography of a Race (NY: Holt, 1994), 130.
[25] Ralph Barton Perry, The Thought and Character of William James, Vol. 1 (Boston: Little, Brown, 1935), 239.
[26] Translation by Bayard Taylor. The link has also been pointed out by Lewis in W.E.B. Du Bois, 1868-1919: Biography of a Race.
[27] Du Bois Papers, Reel 87, frame 491. A version of this essay has appeared in Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad (Fall 1996, Vol. 2, Nr. 1). I would like to express my thanks to Linda Seidman of the special collections at the library of Univ. of Massachusetts at Amherst, and Prof. William Strickland, head of the Du Bois Papers project there.
© Hamilton Beck
See also my other publications on this topic:
“Rewritten Autobiography: W.E.B. Du Bois’ Soliloquy on Viewing My Life in the German Democratic Republic,” in: Lebende Sprachen 64-1 (2019).
“Censoring Your Ally: W.E.B. Du Bois in the German Democratic Republic” In: Crosscurrents: African-Americans, Africa and Germany in the Modern World. (Studies in German Literature, Linguistics and Culture, 1). Camden House, 1998, pp. 197-232
“Die Autobiographie von W. E. B. du Bois in der DDR-Übersetzung”, In: Zeitschrift der Germanisten Rumäniens 6 (1997), S. 169-173
Elsewhere at this site see my review of: Amy Bass: Those About Him Remained Silent. The Battle over W. E. B. du Bois. (Filed by WordPress under “A” for Amy.)
See also Ellwood Wiggins, “The Transatlantic Origins of Double Consciousness: W. E. B. Du Bois in Germany,” in: Transatlantic Literary History. https://medium.com/transatlanticism-wwu/the-transatlantic-origins-of-double-consciousness-w-e-b-du-bois-in-germany-93ceb656c222
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