"Fraulein Doktor": Literary Images of the First Female University Students in Fin-de-Siecle Germany.

The admission of women to higher education in Germany caused considerable debate from 1865 to 1910 and beyond. By examining fictional representations of women students before their admission to university study became official policy, this essay shows the Studentin as a contested cultural symbol. She epitomizes both women's emancipatory strivings and male anxieties about social change and modernity. Imagining women as intellectual equivalents to men generated responses ranging from male authors' satires or dark visions of modernity to female authors' sentimental or radical plotlines. (PMM)

In Vicki Baum's popular 1928 novel stud. chem. Helene Willfuer, the main focus of the story is not the protagonist's decision to study chemistry but rather the numerous adventures she embarks on afterwards, including her affair with a fellow student who commits suicide, her own near-suicide, and her decision to keep the baby from her liaison with the student. The simpler question, namely whether Helene will complete her studies, is resolved in the novel's first few pages. This relative neglect of educational options is striking when Baum's novel is compared with similar works of a prior generation. Only thirty years earlier, popular authors thematizing the Studentin, or German woman student, had been obsessed with her novelty. Thus the very decision by a woman to obtain an education would take them the entire length of the novel or drama to explore. The shift in literary depictions of the Studentin discernible in Baum marked German society's grudging acceptance of women at universities after decades of controversy.

From about 1865 until well after women had gained the right to study at German universities between 1900 and 1909, academics, state officials, and feminists hotly debated the admission of women to institutions of higher learning. The few hundred women seeking to enroll generated a lively discussion in a variety of media: university and state records, newspaper articles, scientific and polemical writings, memoirs, and fiction.(1) The emergence of the Frauenstudium as a public issue was intimately linked to the middle-class women's movement in Germany and its fight to widen the range of female occupations. Female reformers, such as the members of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein, founded by Louise Otto-Peters in 1865, saw higher education for women as a partial solution to the "woman question"(2) that preoccupied late nineteenth-century Europe. Feminists were concerned that the supposed statistical surplus of marriageable women, particularly in the middle classes, would leave these women with no means of support. In order to create employment opportunities appropriate for the unwed daughters of the bourgeoisie, women's groups advocated opening universities to women seeking training in socially engaged vocations such as medicine and teaching. Thus the early 1870s witnessed lively debate, exemplified by the famous exchange between the liberal feminist writer Hedwig Dohm and the Munich anatomist Theodor von Bischoff. Partially as a result of such arguments, small numbers of women gained permission to audit courses, but not to enroll, at several German universities. The first wave of auditors forced universities to take a formal position on the matter, which resulted in a ban on women at almost all German universities by 1879. Only in 1887 did several women's groups take up the issue again with a petition campaign. A long public discussion ensued, stoked by the efforts of Helene Lange and the Bund Deutscher Frauenvereine (founded in 1894). By the late 1890s, many German universities again accepted women as auditors, and some women were even allowed to earn doctorates without enrolling. Finally, between 1900 and 1909, the various German states, one after another, permitted women to attend university as regular students.(3)

Despite the official approval, the admission of women to German universities turned out to be a difficult process. Through countless policy changes, university and state officials struggled to define and control which women would be allowed to audit and, later, to enroll. Final admission rested on an institutional compromise that favored German and all but banned foreign women. Significantly, the restrictive policies that applied mostly to Polish and Russian Jewish women were never imposed on their male counterparts. The official admission policies for women students bore the imprint of the growing antisemitism at German universities at the end of the nineteenth century (Mazon, Academic Citizenship).

Once admitted, female students doubtlessly experienced what today would qualify as discrimination. However, the educational historian Edith Glaser, who interviewed early female students at Tubingen, was surprised to find that her subjects did not view themselves as objects of discrimination, even when, from our perspective, they would have had ample reason to do so. In their autobiographies, written many years later, most women emphasized their studies as a fulfilling and exciting time in their lives. The incidents of discrimination they do describe are embedded in a larger story about what it meant to be among the first women at the university.

The manner in which women were admitted to the university and the kind of women who eventually gained entrance worked itself out between 1890 and 1910 in a process of trial and error. In a similar fashion, writers of serious fiction and light entertainment during the same period experimented with the figure of the Studentin. Even before the woman student assumed definite contours in everyday life, she had become a familiar figure in numerous novels and plays. The depiction of the female student in literature was no mere ancillary aspect of the debate over women's higher education but played a crucial role. In works that ranged from carefully weighted naturalist dramas to light rhyming satires and sentimental girls' stories, fiction writers were able to try out different scenarios and suggestions that had surfaced in the decades-long discussion. What is more, these ostensibly fictional writings show the concrete ways in which the Studentin challenged the cultural assumptions and social order of late Wilhelmine society.

While American and British literature of this sort has been studied extensively,(4) few scholars have examined the Studentin as a character in German literature, probably because this figure tended to appear in non-canonical, "popular" writings that long escaped scholarly notice. Moreover, the profusion of depictions of female students at the beginning of the twentieth century notwithstanding, the picture of university life that continued to prevail in the German popular imagination was that of the male university student. Studentenromane,(5) such as Walter Bloem's Der krasse Fuchs (1906), depicted the travails of a first-year university student: joining a fraternity, drinking, and, most importantly, dueling. In this way, these works drew upon the long-established, and heavily masculine, German tradition of academic citizenship. Highly exclusionary and corporatist in nature, this complex discourse permeated all facets of academic life into the early twentieth century, defining the purposes of higher learning as well as the student's privileges and duties within society at large.(6) While academic citizenship waned institutionally in the course of the twentieth century, its popular resonance continued. Thus the same tradition of academic citizenship that rendered the female student almost unimaginable in late nineteenth-century Germany helped ensure that her male counterpart would continue to overshadow her in German culture and society even after she became a reality.