Boas arrived at the Ruprecht Karl University of Heidelberg in April 1877. He wrote his mother about attending the lecture by Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, the great chemist whose name came to be affixed to his invention, the Bunsen burner, “When I went to him for the first time, I had a very strange feeling. He was the first great scientist I had ever seen, and to sit at the feet of such a master and listen to his words is an even more beautiful feeling.” Boas continued, “There is always a tremendous stamping of feet when he enters and when he leaves.” In a letter to Toni, Boas wondered if he would ever be greeted in such a way. “But,” he reflected, “that is a long way off.” After two months in Bunsen’s class, Boas wrote his parents that “the longer I’ve been listening to Bunsen the better I like him.” Boas added, “He’s especially good when he does a dangerous experiment. He then gives a friendly smile and says, ‘You see, gentlemen, this experiment is very dangerous, but now I’m doing this and that so it’s completely safe,’ and usually this is followed by a big smashing explosion.” In a recent lecture, Boas had taken five pages of notes: “At the end I could hardly keep up.”1
Boas had elected to go for one semester to Heidelberg, “the dream city of so many students” in the nineteenth century. He wanted to “spend occasional Sundays and holidays with Toni,” who was studying piano at the Lebert and Stark Conservatory of Music in Stuttgart. “I’ve now arrived safely in Heidelberg,” Boas wrote Toni. He spent his first days acquainting himself with the city, buying supplies and finding lodging in a house in the old city that had about a dozen student lodgers.2 Boas found Heidelberg “a pretty city” and remarked on the ancient walls, “where once walked princes; the trees rooted in the cracked walls make the ragged shape of the torn walls appear wild and give the dead ruins a new life.” On his climb up to the castle, Boas became melancholy and homesick: “I thought of all my loved ones that I’ve left back home, of the many years I’ve lived in my parents’ home, and how we always shared good and bad times. I also thought that everyone must go his own way, that we ought to find jobs, one here, the other there, and as I had this thought, I firmly concluded that the friendship that we’ve always had with each other should never die and that you should continue to be confidant of my joys and pains as always.” The following day Boas hiked the Philosopher Trail up to the mountain called Heiligenberg and marveled at the view: “You can’t imagine how beautiful it is up there. Today it was so still and quiet, only the birds sang; below lay the old-town Heidelberg, across from the castle.” On his second of many visits to the castle, he watched as a plaque was set in the ground. It read, “At this place Goethe sat, musing in the autumn days in 1814 and 1815.” To his friend Reinhard Krüer, he wrote, “I tell you this is a glorious region, in the Neckar valley, surrounded by mountains, and at the beginning of the Rhine plain. And then the lovely ruined castle, which in itself is wonderful. . . . I am already sorry that I shall not stay here for longer than half a year, but that can’t be helped so I will make full use of this one semester.”3
Boas described his living space in a letter to his mother and included a sketch of its layout: “It is a long, narrow room with a small sleeping room.” He had rented a brand-new piano, which arrived on his return from his visit to the castle. He immediately sat down to play some variations of Felix Mendelssohn, as well as everything else he could remember by heart. He anxiously awaited “the arrival of his books from home” so that he could have the rest of his music. Of the location of his lodging, Boas wrote, “I live almost exactly opposite the University,” with only a ten-minute walk to the science laboratories.4
Boas went to the university on Friday of his first week in Heidelberg to register for his classes. He signed up for Moritz Cantor’s analytic geometry and Immanuel Fuchs’s differential calculus, both of which met twice a week; Bunsen’s chemistry, which met five times a week; and, after being urged by Fuchs, he enrolled in a mathematics seminar that met six times a week. Boas’s academic schedule went from Monday to Saturday, with seventeen classes per week. Fuchs had taken a special interest in Boas, with his obvious mathematical gifts. “I was with Fuchs,” Boas wrote his mother, “who teaches differential and integral calculus. The man was very friendly, offered me a chair and talked to me about my previous experience, advised me to attend the seminar, which I will do.” He also suggested that Boas join the mathematics club, where Boas happily met other students who shared his interest in mathematics. Boas also signed up for kettledrum lessons on “Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 11 o’clock”; but by June, due to the heat, he found no pleasure in playing the kettledrum. He also began taking Russian. “I can pretty much read it,” he told Toni, “and I hope that I’ll have learned this language in a year. You will surely think, ‘Gosh, what nonsense. He should rather learn something else.’ But it’s no nonsense but a long-cherished plan that I now execute.”5 In a letter to Reinhard Krüer, who was completing his last year at the Minden Gymnasium, Boas wrote, “Yesterday afternoon I matriculated. Just think I had to wait my turn for four hours, there was such a crowd there. Then I listened to a beautiful speech and had to inscribe my name in a huge book, after which I received my registration card.” He also told about going to see Bunsen to register for his course: “I had imagined him quite different. He is blind in one eye and quite deaf, but runs upstairs like a youth.”6
Boas had found his way around Heidelberg, settled into his rooms, and lined up his courses, but he was missing his friends. “I only wish I had some acquaintances,” Boas wrote Reinhard, “for I am so very much alone.” At the castle, some students had approached Boas about joining their fraternity but despite his loneliness he would not choose to affiliate with them because they were “very common persons.” Members of the fraternity Burschenschaft Alemannia zu Heidelberg again approached Boas, as he told his mother, “to win me over.” Passing a few hours with them, Boas decided that they were a “quite coarse society” and that he would have nothing to do with them. “I asked them straight out if they were men of principle,” he told his mother, “which they negated, smiling coldly. That’s when I thought, ‘You won’t get me then.’” He had two reasons for not joining a fraternity: he intended to stay in Heidelberg for only one semester, and he had promised Uncle Jacobi that he would not join during the first semester. He added in his letter to his mother that he was “pretty desperate” to make some friends.7
Boas was finding no one he liked, and those he had met did “not seem particularly nice.” He told his mother about meeting “Steinfeld from Rinteln and a certain Levi—you see, noisy Jews,” and a boy from Berlin, who was a chemist. He met a student with whom he would play four-hand piano, since he had not yet found anyone who played violin or cello. Boas remarked, “I did not get his name, but I am sure he is a Jew.” He had also made friends with Neisser, a neighbor who was in his math class and “with whom I am learning to cram.” Boas had begun a friendship with another neighbor, Alfred Polis, about whom he wrote, “Now I associate mostly with Polis, a chemistry student, with whom I spend most evenings. In the evening he knocks on the ceiling of his room, which is my floor, that I should come down, and in the morning I must wake him up by stomping my boots on the floor. . . . To show that he is awake, he then knocks on the ceiling.”8 Boas was trying to distance himself from Levi, who, though “quite a decent man,” had taken up with, as Boas noted, “a very unbearable Jewish society.” He continued to play piano with the young man, Heimann, whose last name he had finally learned. One month later, Boas was still lamenting that he could not find “a nice circle of friends.” He liked Polis very much, but the latter studied so much that Boas saw little of him. He reflected ruefully to his parents, “Truly, if I had not promised you not to affiliate [with a fraternity] in the first semester, I would now certainly join.”9
Boas’s attempts to distance himself from other Jews—from the “lauten Juden,” the loud-mouthed Jews as Douglas Cole translates it, or “the noisy Jews”; and from the “intolerable Jewish Society”—was nested within what John Cuddihy calls The Ordeal of Civility. “The secularizing Jewish intellectual,” Cuddihy observes, had as “the focus of his concern . . . the public behavior of his fellow Jews.” Cuddihy continues, “The anguish of acculturated Jews” lay in the “loud” and unrefined manners of other Jews. Leonard Glick observes, “Most German Jews were profoundly ambivalent and at times overtly antagonistic toward the new Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe. Gerson Cohen remarks, “Whatever else German Jews sought to be as Jews, they passionately sought to be urbane Jews and urbane Germans, loyal and dignified citizens with a distinct identity as Jews.” The Eastern European Jews ran smack up against “this passionate quest” of the German Jews and found it unintelligible and irritating. “German Jews, for their part,” Cohen continues, “had their own bill of grievances against East European Jews, whom they often found to be uncouth, uncultured and offensive.10
Thus, for Franz Boas at nineteen, fresh from his sheltered home in Minden, his encounter with Jews steeped in Jewish culture, in Yiddishkeit, was a shock. In sum, he was repulsed. At the same time, he undoubtedly felt threatened that non-Jews would elide him, Franz Boas, who they would know to be a Jew, with the bunch of “noisy,” “intolerable” Jews. Lionel Trilling expressed the split between German Jews and East European Jews as follows: “The German Jews . . . were likely to be envied and resented by East European Jews for what would have been called their refinement.” It wasn’t that Boas denied his Jewishness. After all, the first sentence of his curriculum vitae prepared for his exit from the Gymnasium read, “My name is Franz Boas and I am the son of the merchant M. Boas and his wife Sophie Boas, née Meyer, of Hebrew religion.” Of Hebrew religion, yes, but of secular Judaism, Franz Boas was from a refined, acculturated, and intellectual family.11
Boas was attending lectures regularly, though his parents were concerned that he was “slacking off.” He assured them that he was working hard, going over his work for each class, and fulfilling his obligations each day. He wrote his mother about his classes, “You ask me if I liked the mathematics lectures; I must confess, until now, I haven’t liked differential calculus, it is to die for boring by this teacher. The material in and of itself is interesting but Fuchs is horrible so far. Cantor, however, pleases me well, he makes it a bit fresher and more interesting than Fuchs, but he cannot compete with Bunsen, because Bunsen has the best presentation of all the teachers that I have heard so far, so calmly and clearly he speaks.” Boas concluded his overview of his professors: “Fuchs also speaks quietly, but so quietly that you fall asleep.” After Pfingstferien, or Pentecost vacation, he purchased a differential calculus book and “suddenly understands what it is all about.” He also had begun to attend Kuno Fischer’s lectures on aesthetics. He wrote his parents of Fischer as “a very famous lecturer, so clear and concise!” Boas admitted that it was hard for him to take notes because he had difficulty “with such abstract things” in separating “the essential from the nonessential.”12
Boas’s parents frequently asked their son if he was happy with his choice of study or if he regretted having given up the chance of studying medicine. Boas responded, “You always ask if I like my studies, whether I would not rather become a doctor. I will never go back on this; my studies are the most beautiful thing I can imagine.” What was better, he asked, than “to explore . . . the laws of all phenomena, the cause of all things?” Then he added, “If I can only learn enough.” Daily he became more and more aware that the field of study he had selected was enormous. Boas travelled to Stuttgart to visit with Toni and to hear her play, and she came frequently to visit her brother in Heidelberg. He wrote his parents, “What she has learned of the piano is simply colossal; she plays like a true artist.” At the end of May Boas had received a night letter, signed by Uncle Mons, asking Boas to meet him at the station at 10:30 p.m., “I went to the station, to pick up uncle and . . . there stood Papa! I think I could utter only a word in amazement.” He added, “Since I’ve left home, I haven’t been as happy as I was that evening when he arrived.” Together, father and son travelled to Stuttgart to visit Toni.13
Through these visits with his sister and father and the frequent exchange of letters with his parents, Boas let his family know about the aspects of his life at the university about which they would approve, but he sought to shield them from other areas. While he had assured his parents of his punctilious study habits, to his friend Reinhard he candidly related, “You have no idea what a loafer I have become and how much time I spend in cafés. . . . When the weather is bad I stretch out on the sofa for an hour or two and read.” In another letter to Reinhard, Boas playfully remarked, “Don’t imagine I spend my whole time grinding at my studies. I believe that Bacchus and Venus can be well satisfied with me.” Then, in perhaps a more honest appraisal of his feats, Boas observed, “We sacrifice to Bacchus more than enough here. Venus has turned away from me completely.”14 While his parents might not have approved, they certainly could understand their son’s behavior with respect to frequenting cafés, stretching out on the sofa to read novels, and drinking—even to excess—with his friends. However, Boas’s participation in another aspect of German student university culture would come to horrify them: Mensur, student dueling, also known as academic fencing. As an independent, Boas was accommodated in his dueling by fraternal organizations that allowed two unaffiliated duelists to borrow the weapons and armor swathing and to fight following the completion of all other scheduled duels of the fraternal organizations.
Samuel Clemens visited Heidelberg during the summer of 1878. Writing under the pen name of Mark Twain, he described a duel that was similar to those in which Boas had participated. Two “strange-looking figures were led in from another room,” he wrote. “They were students panoplied for the duel. They were bareheaded; their eyes were protected by iron goggles which projected an inch or more, the leather straps of which bound their ears flat against their heads; their necks were wound around and around with thick wrappings which a sword could not cut through; from chin to ankle they were padded thoroughly against injury; their arms were bandaged and rebandaged, layer upon layer, until they looked like solid black logs.” The goal of the duel was to inflict greater and more serious wounds on the face of one’s opponent than one received. The two participants were “placed face to face,” with their seconds swathed and ready for dueling near their sides. With a student as umpire, another student with a “watch and a memorandum-book to keep record of the time and the number and nature of the wounds; a gray-haired surgeon was present with his lint, his bandages, and his instruments,” the duel would begin. In their fencing, the duelists, heavily swathed and unable to move, stood in place, face-to-face.
The instant the word was given, the two apparitions sprang forward and began to rain blows down upon each other with such lightning rapidity that I could not quite tell whether I saw the swords or only flashes they made in the air; the rattling din of these blows as they struck steel or paddings was something wonderfully stirring, and they were struck with such terrific force that I could not understand why the opposing sword was not beaten down under the assault. Presently, in the midst of the sword-flashes, I saw a handful of hair skip into the air as if it had lain loose on the victim’s head and a breath of wind had puffed it suddenly away.
And so the duel would proceed until one duelist inflicted serious damage on the other, or until a draw was called and the duel rescheduled so that the insult precipitating the duel could be rectified and honor restored. The surgeon stood by with supplies to patch, bandage, or sew the wounds as necessary. Clemens observed the results of one such duel: “A good part of his face was covered with patches and bandages, and all the rest of his head was covered and concealed by them.” Students, Clemens said, liked to be seen in the street with fresh scars and bandages covering their faces and heads. Indeed, Clemens remarked, “newly bandaged students are a very common spectacle in the public gardens of Heidelberg.” Students particularly prized wounds on their faces “because the scars they leave will show so well there.”15
Boas wrote Reinhard about the encounter that lead to a challenge to a duel: “Yesterday I received a double challenge and have accepted, and it will happen in three weeks, and the horrible part is my opponent is an old skilled fencer. This is how it happened.” Boas described how he shared the rental of his piano with another student who practiced “études at least two hours a day.” The residents of the house complained to the landlord and “suggested that he practice at another time when it would not disturb them so much.” Boas said that he “would have been glad to be rid of him, but he would not go, for he had paid his share for this month and would not take it back.” Boas continued, “Yesterday when he began to play there began a terrible racket in the court before my window. . . . I became furious and yelled at them out of the window that they should come to my room and play their children’s symphony. . . . They immediately sent me a challenger who demanded that I take it back. I declared my willingness provided they would tell me that the caterwauling was not meant as an affront to me. They answered I could take that as I would, i.e. it was meant for me, whereupon I accepted their cards.” He concluded, “I shall certainly be wounded.” To insure secrecy, Boas did not send this letter until Reinhard had left Minden, since Boas was afraid that his friend “might accidentally” give him away to his family. Following the duel, Boas told Reinhard, “I shall write a few words, because I may not do more. You probably read the postcard with difficulty in which I told you I had had a wound in my scalp.” Boas continued, “A piece four cm. long and one and one-half cm. wide was cut out of my scalp but I gave my opponent three cuts from ear to nose that required eight stitches.” Boas said that he would be coming home on August 4th and would probably be bandaged “because the cut heals slowly.” Reinhard wrote Boas in elation about the outcome of the duel. Boas replied, “What the devil is the matter. I write that I have dueled and been cut, and you rejoice that I have cut someone else. It is true my opponent is still in bed, while I was able to go out the day after the duel, but nevertheless I was cut.”16
While recovering from his wound, Boas was visited by his mother’s best friend from childhood, Betty Lehmann, and her son, Rudolf, who was three years older than Boas and who would years later become his brother-in-law, when Rudolf married Hedwig in 1885. In her account of her brother’s younger years, Hedwig Lehmann told the story she had heard of Franz’s visit to the hotel where Betty and Rudolf Lehmann were staying: “Franz did not take his hat off when he visited them, and Rudolf told Franz how rude he was. He then confessed that he had a scar on his head and he was afraid that his parents would learn about it!” From this initial encounter, Franz and Rudolf began “a great friendship that lasted a lifetime.” The two shared interest in philosophy and spent holidays together on walking tours in the Weser Mountains or at the Boas home in Minden.17
Having begun the semester at Heidelberg in such a lonely fashion, Boas ended with good friends. He wanted to treat them to “a Westphalian-Pumpernickel dinner,” consisting of pumpernickel rye bread, Westphalian ham, other condiments, and Korn liquor. As he prepared to leave Heidelberg for home, Boas gave his friend Reinhard Krüer advice about his time ahead at university:
My dear boy,
Enjoy yourself when and how you can, what then will you do at the university? Enjoy things when you can, and be sad when you must, but not too long. How long can you enjoy your youth before the duties bear down on you? Therefore, be happy when you can, enjoy the beauties that Hamburg offers and particularly our mountains and forests.
Boas reflected in an expansive and slightly boastful fashion, “I tasted Heidelberg to the very bottom and am now very happy to return to Minden although I am almost sorry to leave Heidelberg. . . . Truly in my first semester I have learned student life into its deepest depths—duel, the jug, etc.” He concluded, “I would never have believed that of myself when I left Minden.” As if to prove his point, Boas said that he would have to spend three days in the student jail because “one morning at three o’clock, when not quite sober, I put out a lantern.”18
To his parents he wrote about this frolicsome and drunken evening. At the meeting of the mathematics society, of which Boas was a member, they “had a huge and lively debate about everything.” He explained, “There is always a 12 o’clock curfew, so we moved to the cellar and there . . . drank until about two o’clock. Of course, we all were, as we climbed up from the cellar, no longer quite sober, and tottered dreadfully but very happily through the streets. When we got to the park, we suddenly got the idea to put out the lanterns.” Boas continued, “This went very well, but eventually I was unlucky and got caught.” Likely, he said, he would have to spend time in “the detention room.” He concluded by asking them not to be angry with him, even though they hadn’t expected “such tricks from your Franz.” Boas reassured his parents, “You need not be afraid that I will come home with a beer belly. . . . I’ve not become a souse.”19 At the end of the semester, Boas appeared before the university police and was sentenced to three days in the Karzer, the student jail. University students were regarded as among the elite and therefore were “endowed with a special judicial code of honor” that set them above the public authorities. Very accommodating, the constable worked with the student to arrange a convenient time. Boas left Heidelberg without having met his obligation for detention, and with “his scalp wound unhealed, on August 3, 1877.”20
With fear and dread, Boas finally told his parents about the Mensur and his resulting wound. Addressed “Dear Parents and to you only,” the letter began, “For a long time I’ve had a secret like a stone on the heart, that I had to hide from you until now. Namely I have fought a Mensur.” Hoping to minimize their alarm, he minimized his injury: “I’ve not been cut in the face.” He begged them “not to lose your confidence in me for I am still just as good and you may therefore trust me just as well as before.” In a tumble of words, Boas told of his first duel in which he suffered a cut to the head that “will probably not yet be healed by the time I come home.” He assured his parents that he had done “everything to avoid Mensur,” but “I was really too proud,” and the students who were taunting him from the street refused to apologize. Ending his missive, Boas wrote, “Thank God that the heavy burden on my soul is lifted, . . . do not be grieved about it, I could not act otherwise. . . . Please, please write me right away that you are not angry with me, and if you can, that my actions were justified, but write me.” Boas’s father responded immediately: “First we are worried that you have a wound on your head, which will not yet be healed when you come home. That must be bad indeed. I am asking you immediately to give us a complete and truthful account.” His father said that he would talk personally with his son about the whole episode. He continued that, while one cannot acquiesce to “an injury to one’s honor,” clearly Franz did not grasp the concept of honor. Meier queried, “And have you now saved your honor by having been struck by your offender?! [I’ll have more to say to you] in person.” Assuring Franz that their love for him had not diminished, he leveled, “But we follow your life and your deeds now with much greater concern than we thought was necessary.” He concluded, “Write us immediately, how it is with the injury.”21
The homecoming from Heidelberg was unhappy for Boas. He had to face the serious displeasure of his parents, but an even greater sadness awaited him. His dearest friend Reinhard Krüer drowned while swimming in the Weser River three weeks after Franz’s return to Minden. Franz joined in the search for the body. Along with others, he plied the waters of the Weser for four days when at last they found the body of Reinhard, which had floated far downstream. At the memorial service, Krüer was eulogized as “‘the best student of his class, full of freshness and life, a respected youth, enthusiastic about all that was good and beautiful.’ The funeral was on August 29, and the entire Gymnasium and many from the city walked behind the bier to the cemetery.” In the hope of diffusing their son’s deep sadness over the loss of his friend, Meier and Sophie Boas quickly made plans for him to be bundled off to Berlin by train the very evening of the funeral. Uncle Mons met him and “took him on a holiday to Denmark and kept him busy in a whirl of visits to friends, relations, and the sights of the city.”22
Boas returned to Minden from his trip to Denmark on September 20 and left one month later for the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität in Bonn, where he would stay for four semesters. At the end of the semester in Heidelberg, Boas had written his mother that he was going to shift his emphasis from chemistry to physics: “I intend to go to Bonn all right,” but mostly for the professors. He said he didn’t want to attend lectures in physics at Heidelberg because “I can hardly do better anywhere than in Bonn with Clausius.” He would also take organic chemistry that was boring as it was taught at Heidelberg. He wrote his parents, “If only physics and organic chemistry would be better here [in Heidelberg], then I would stay and work with Bunsen in the winter.” Boas reflected, “The only thing I missed this semester with lectures, is that I have not taken the history of mathematics, but it over-lapped with Fischer’s [philosophy of aesthetics], so I did not do it.” He continued, “I have learned enough now to see what subject I want specifically to choose.” While interested in physiology, he settled on physics.23
Boas’s coursework over the two years at Bonn was recorded in the Leaving Certificate of October 25, 1879, signed by Rector Johannes von Hanstein, University Judge Brinkhoff, and Dean Gerhard vom Rath. For the winter term of 1877–78, Boas took experimental physics, a seminar in physics, and theory of electricity with Rudolph Clausius; organic chemistry laboratory with August Kekulé; integral calculus with Hermann Kortum; and geography of America and Asia with Theobald Fischer. In the summer term of 1878 he studied elements of algebra and took a seminar in mathematics with Rudolph Lipschitz and continued in the theory of electricity and a seminar in physics with Clausius. In his second year at the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms Universität in Bonn for the winter term of 1878–79, Boas took a new course with Clausius on the mechanical theory of heat; a course with Lipschitz on the theory of energy; a course with Kortum on differential and integral calculus; a seminar in physics and a seminar in botany from vom Rath; history of modern philosophy from Jürgen Bona Meyer; and microscopic botany from von Hanstein. In the summer term of 1879 Boas took a course in comparative anatomy with Franz von Leydig. Appended to the list of courses was the following note, “Of the student no incriminating matter is known with respect to civil and academic matters.”24
During his first term, Boas served his three-day sentence in the student jail in Bonn for having extinguished the streetlights in Heidelberg. His father had written him with the news that “‘the nemesis for your Heidelberg student pranks had come knocking’ in the form of a police enquiry.” On Friday, November 30, 1877, Boas reported to the student jail to serve his time. When he was released, he wrote his parents:
It is truly fortunate that I did not need to sit there any longer, because then I would surely have gotten ill because there is such a horrible stench in the air . . . and it is terrible, to be so alone for three days, to sit spellbound. . . . Willy is really a good guy, he . . . visited me three times, though actually no one is allowed [to visit] in the Karzer, but the keeper is not inhuman. In addition, I could not sleep at night in the bed because of the stench, so I was happy as I came out again.
He spent Monday “walking around all day outside.” With the time spent in detention, Boas’s record was cleared.25
Determined not to find himself alone again and without friends, Boas joined the Burschenschaft Alemannia zu Bonn. Founded in 1844, this was the same fraternal organization to which his cousin Willy Meyer belonged and to which others from Westphalia were recruited. Explaining his decision to join the fraternity, Boas wrote Toni, “‘I cannot be alone. If I were, I would think too much about the past, about what cannot be altered.’” Years later, his sister, Hedwig Lehmann, reflected on this time in her brother’s life: “These were wild and happy years for Franz. Every vacation he came home with new ‘Schmisse’ [dueling scars] and our mother was especially unhappy that his handsome face was being marred. He also made debts, but my father allowed him to have his way.” Lehmann continued, “I do not believe Franz studied much during his first year in Bonn. The fraternity took all of his time.”26
Boas’s letters home were replete with accounts of his activities with “the Burschenschaft, his initiation . . . , the annual founding celebration with Old Boys . . . , the weekly Kneipe nights and fencing practice . . . and business meetings.” In February 1878 Boas told his parents about the Commers, the Burschenschaft ritual, involving ninety participants, all singing and pledging oaths of solidarity, with drinking prohibited until after midnight. Once midnight had passed and the students were no longer bound by the prohibition against drinking at the Commers, everyone copiously imbibed. “I stayed until two o’clock and went home relatively sound,” Boas wrote. At nine o’clock in the morning, he got up, shaved, went for a little walk with two of his friends, and then returned to the tavern again for the official morning pint.27
Boas described his “wild” behavior during Fastnacht, a celebration preceding Ash Wednesday, similar to Carnival, that was marked by excess of drink and bawdy behavior. “You really mustn’t be cross with me,” Boas wrote his mother, “but I have been horribly raucous these days, in a way I never thought I could. But I’m happy that it’s now over; I could not have lasted one more day.” He described the rollicking Fastnacht-fun he had had with his fraternity brothers that involved heavy drinking and flirtatious encounters with young women. In the evening they gathered in a large pub, moved all the tables together, and spent the night drinking, talking, and singing. Boas described Fastnacht as “really the one and only fraternity celebration among all students.” Gathered with students they didn’t know at all, they drank Brüderschaft (brotherhood) whereby the participants toasted each other, linked arms, and drained their glasses, all the while looking into each other’s eyes. They then shifted from the formal address of either Sie, or the last name preceded by Herr, to the informal Du, or by using the first name. “That evening I got home at three o’clock; you can imagine that I wasn’t all that sober anymore.” On the following day, Boas and his friends went to Cologne, where the festivities dwarfed the razzle-dazzle in Bonn. On Tuesday, the day preceding Ash Wednesday, Boas “rollicked the most.” He began the day with heavy drinking, went home to sleep because he had drunk too much, “but, instead of my room, I ended up in the living room of my landlords with whom I had planned to go to the costume ball.” Eventually he made it to the costume ball, and “danced until two,” then went to the pub, and drank until Wednesday morning. Forthrightly, Boas admitted “that was a horrible night, one over which I have a terrible moral hangover. . . . Now, I’ve come to my senses, I was rather crazy these days and celebrated Fastnacht wilder than anyone; it’s good that that happens only once.” He added, “But I had great fun.”28
At Bonn, instead of hiding the results of his duels from his parents, he wrote home about them. During the Christmas vacation of 1877 Boas’s mother had begged him to give up dueling. However, by January 1878 he told of “an ‘elenden Blutigen’—a miserable cut—which required him to stay home for a day.” In February he wrote his mother of his inability to forego the Mensur because of his attachment to the Couleur, a term that referred specifically to the headgear and ribbons worn by the members of his fraternal organization, but more generally to the sense of camaraderie:
Dear Mama,
We have already talked a lot about the dueling over Christmas, and you know what I think of it, but I cannot give up the whole wonderful life here in the Couleur just because of this one thing that I maybe don’t like.
In a postscript, he added, “I’m very well again. . . . After some time, one won’t even be able to see anything of my scar.”29
Boas told his parents about his visit to the Bonn synagogue that had been erected to replace the old, eighteenth-century structure. On the previous Friday evening and on Saturday, the Reform synagogue was dedicated with all due ceremony through services, a banquet, and a ball. “I was invited,” Boas wrote, “but politely declined for various reasons, because first I saw no reason for me to celebrate and then I thought that I would not know anyone there.” Boas related, “On Saturday morning I was met by einer von uns [one of us], Springerum who wanted to go to the synagogue, but didn’t want to go alone, and we went together”—thus, Boas had explicitly identified himself as being Jewish (admittedly, solely in a letter to his parents). Boas described the synagogue: “The building is truly stunning—beautiful and tasteful up to the smallest details.” The entrance was from the Judengasse, the Jewish Lane, through a front structure supported by “magnificent red sandstone pillars.” The expansive interior space was divided into three sections by “beautiful columns of red sandstone”; an aisle down the center separated the women’s section and the men’s. Located at the back was a gallery with space for the choir and the future organ. Always an aficionado of good music, Boas remarked that the choir sang fairly well. “The cantor,” Boas wrote, “also has a beautiful voice.” Particularly appreciative of Rabbi Dr. Emanuel Schreiber, Boas observed that he “is a very liberal man and his sermon I liked fairly well. I might go back again.” He was annoyed with himself, he admitted, “not to have accepted the invitation, because I saw what I had partially considered—that one of the girls from our dance circle of last winter, [Fräulein] Hirth, was a Jewess, and surely enough had come that evening. If I had known that, I would certainly have gone.”30
By July Boas wrote his parents about the real reason he had attended the dedication of the Bonn synagogue: “I confess, back then I did not go to the Synagogue to attend the ceremony, but in order to see her.” He missed his opportunity to be able to see Fräulein Hirth socially at the ball because of “foolish pride and fear.” He recounted how he went out one day with Springerum, crossed the street, and they encountered her, “Of course, I blushed up to my ears. . . . Furthermore, I was so frightened that I almost fell, and I then realized . . . how much I was looking forward to the moment when I saw her.” He admitted to his parents that he was tormented by emotion: “I have days when I’m half-crazy and will not tolerate being at home, and I search for as loud a society as possible, while [on other days] I prefer to be quiet.” And then, in exasperation, he exclaimed, “Oh, what good are all the words, when I cannot describe my heart to you.” All for naught was his raging emotion: Miss Hirth was to go to England, and Boas to Kiel.31
In his fourth semester at Bonn, Boas asked his parents about Toni: “Has she come home, or must she stay longer in the abominable Kiel?” By August 1879 he had learned of her renewed health crisis. Toni had been under the care of Dr. Johannes Friedrich August von Esmarch, director of the surgery unit at Kiel. He wrote his parents, “Poor Toni has truly too much misfortune, first this, then that. I certainly knew about the misfortune of winter, but surely hoped that the evil would not return. All the more was I frightened and stunned by the news of her new disease.” He was consumed with worry “that she has to sit so alone in the far distance without having someone with her.” But he was “pleased that she has nice, amiable people there who take care of her.”32 One month later, after finishing his semester at Bonn, Boas told his mother, “I will probably not go back to Bonn” for the next semester, but rather go to Kiel where, as he said, he could “learn enough.” The caveat—that he “could learn enough” at Kiel—was telling. Instead of going to the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität of Berlin, as he had earlier planned, to study with the eminent Professor of Physics Hermann Ludwig Ferdinand von Helmholtz and to do “research in the best laboratory in the country,” he went to Kiel, “a small, undistinguished university with inadequate and rudimentary laboratories and whose single physicist had no great reputation.” Boas wrote his parents from Kiel as soon as he had joined Toni, “I happily arrived here last night at 12 o’clock and first went to the university this morning at 8 o’clock to check everything out, then off to Toni with whom I stayed until 11 o’clock.” He continued, “She had a very bad day after the change of dressing yesterday—the changing takes hours,” and she was running a high fever. With all her discomfort, still he found her “to have improved greatly since the last time, dear Mama, you were here.” The fainting spells and nausea had passed, and she wasn’t suffering from severe headaches.33
Boas would study physics with Professor Gustav Karsten, physicist and mineralogist, in his “dark and ancient” physics institute. Cole notes, “Kiel was remote from the centers of German physics, and it suffered neglect by a Prussian ministry whose main attention was devoted to Berlin.” The discipline of physics failed to flourish during Karsten’s forty-three-year tenure at Kiel, and the courses he offered attracted very few students. While less than happy in his work with Karsten, Boas had been pulled back to his passion for study by Theobald Fischer and Benno Erdmann. Fischer had moved from Bonn in 1879, when he received a call to the Christian-Albrecht Universität in Kiel to serve as professor of geography. Erdmann, a specialist in Kant, had also been called to Kiel, though he from Berlin, to occupy the chair of philosophy. Boas remarked to his parents that Fischer was “‘very friendly,’ offering support in every way.” In addition, Boas worked with Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy Georg Daniel Eduard Weyer, Professor of Mineralogy Arnold von Lausalx, and zoologist Karl Augustus Möbius on the “Geographic Distribution of Sea Mammals.”34 Karsten was interested in the practical applications of physics for work he was doing with another of Boas’s professors at Kiel, Möbius. Together they served on the Kiel Commission that “established a chain of permanent observation stations along the German Baltic and North Sea coasts . . . to examine Baltic fisheries” and to make observation on “weather, currents, and properties of the water and plankton.” With his interest in the properties of water, Karsten assigned Boas his dissertation research on just this topic, the optical properties of water. Boas had hoped to study a mathematical and theoretical problem, “the ‘Fehlergesetz,’ C. F. Gauss’s law of the normal distribution of errors,” but he resigned himself to follow the guidance of his professor.35
Boas’s frustration at having to work on a topic not of his own choosing was intensified by the numerous problems he encountered with the equipment for his experiments and the questionable results of his research. He suffered ill health from exposure to the “abominable frost and snowy weather” when gathering his data. As Cole recounts, Boas had “to spend time in a boat on Kiel’s harbor, sinking zinc tubes with attached mirrors or porcelain plates into the sea.” He also spent a great deal of time “in Karsten’s laboratory, passing both sunlight and artificial light through tubes of distilled water.” Apologizing for not having written earlier, Boas told his parents of his frustrations: “My work hasn’t made any progress in recent days since I had to bury myself with experiments on the creation of a suitable blue light. Yesterday, I fortunately found the right arrangement.” He struggled to keep his water samples pure and uncontaminated, since impurity would change “‘the transparency of water.’” Always at the point of exhaustion, he was working hard on his “observations and calculations.” He wrote, “You can’t imagine how happy I’d be if I were to reach a conclusion . . . since my work would be then fairly valuable if nothing else, at least I could be rather pleased.” Boas discarded two photometers that did not work before finally solving the problem by fixing one himself that would be sensitive enough to measure the intensity of light.36
Hedwig Lehmann observed that Boas “had more peace to work away from fraternity life,” when he had moved to Kiel. “I remember,” Lehmann wrote, “that he made many unsuccessful experiments and that our father grew very impatient.” Boas, himself, was impatient: “I wish the horrible dissertation were finally finished. I have no desire to work on it any more!” To his parents, Boas described the problems he was having with the equipment to measure light: “I see myself forced to give up my dissertation entirely and to start anew. Why you ask? Well, because no true Photometer exists. After I have plagued myself all these months as to how I shall get to the heart of my light measures (Photomate, light measurements) finally I see the light, namely that the principle is entirely wrong.” He continued, “However, I can take solace that Helmholtz and other people have made the same mistake, but the method still remains incorrect. I then thought of a new one which had been used earlier in similar form, but on the same day a work was published proving the inaccuracy of this method.” He resolved not to worry but to start “a new work with fresh courage.” Up to this point, his research had demonstrated “the inaccuracy of this method.” He exclaimed with a German proverbial expression, “Mein Latein ist ganz zu Ende!” (My Latin is all at an end—I am at my wits end) and concluded that, after a whole day, he could not solve his problems in spite of “a thorough review of photometric methods.” He hoped it would go better: “My results so far, I will write now and publish in Poppendorfs annals.” Boas did indeed publish “Ein Beweis des Talbot’schen Satzes und Bemerkungen zu einigen aus demselben gezogenen Folgerungen” (A proof of Talbot Principles and remarks on some conclusions drawn from it) in Poggendorff’s Annalen der Physik und Chemie (1882).37
Ten days later Boas wrote his parents, “There is no more unpleasant situation than to find oneself in such a dilemma as I was in, and besides to have so much work during the whole thing. I had no real desire to do anything. I have practically completely arranged my new instruments.” Not wanting his student to waste time in starting his research anew, Karsten advised Boas to append his research concerning the photometer to the research regarding the color of water. With this approach to his dissertation difficulties, Boas said, he would finish his research that semester. In a letter to Toni in which he was telling her of a celebration for one of his instructors, Boas wrote, “Just now I hit upon an equation for my calculations. I shall quickly make a note of it before I forget.” Seemingly, he had written down the equation before beginning the next sentence: “Thank heaven, now because of this equation I am in a position to solve my problem. I still must see if the final equation permits a solution. If that is the case, I shall jump over the table three times. Then I can finish my observations any time I wish and shall have a fine dissertation. May I succeed!” In a postscript he noted, “Now I must compulsively calculate until I know whether the equation is solvable.” By March he was encouraged by the progress of his calculations; he had “approached the question from another angle in order to give the equations a better form.” Clearly pleased, Boas noted, “Undoubtedly, I shall get a result on the reflection of light against colored bodies which will be of some interest after all, even though I won’t manage to find a solution to the entire question. I have to admit that I’m downright sick of all the counting and will thoroughly regenerate when I’m with you.” In anticipation of his visit home after an absence of over six months, he added, “I have so little time to see you, alas. You can’t imagine how much I long to see you.”38
During the work on his dissertation, Boas had developed an interest in psychophysics, but he had not had time to pursue it. He had encountered “certain photometric difficulties” that led him to “psychological questions” about perception. Erdmann encouraged Boas “to execute the work at once and to bring it to him.” Thus, Boas wrote a short paper on the interpretation of sensations that was published as “Über eine neue Form des Gesetzes der Unterschiedsschwelle” (A new form of the law of the difference threshold) in Pflüger’s Archiv (1881).39
While Boas’s parents shared their son’s concerns about his academic work, their worry focused intensely on the Mensur. Meier Boas counseled his son on the dangers of dueling in response to insults from anti-Semites. In November 1880 he wrote, “‘I know that you are very sensitive on this point, and it is easy for an attack to be made on you that you think you cannot avoid. I warn you, my dear son, to avoid such things. Ignore provocation; do not believe that you can improve the position of the Jews through your personal intervention. Always remember that we have only one son and do not let yourself into anything whose outcome you cannot foresee.’” Boas’s father was aware that “the Jewish question was so much discussed in the capital and elsewhere and . . . he had read about student provocations leading to duels.” Meier Boas was referring to the anti-Semitic movement headed by Adolf Stoecker, known as the “Berlin movement.” Stoecker, a Lutheran pastor who became Imperial Court Chaplain in 1874, declared himself “‘the founder of the anti-Semitic movement,’” and reached the apogee of his political suasion in the 1880s.40
Boas assured his father in a way that was likely only to cause him further concern: “‘I remain unmolested since every student here knows that I would not be shy to defend my affairs with the sword.’” He wrote,
Dear Papa!
To allay your fears, I hurry to respond promptly to your letter I’ve just received. Since I only socialize a little and only meet close acquaintances you do not need to worry that I’d ever find myself in situations of such kind to which you refer. Giesbrecht and another one of my acquaintances and I are of the same opinion on such things, and I can talk with them candidly. With friends, on principle, I avoid any conversation that could lead to heated discussions, be it politics, religion or whatever.
Boas concluded his letter, “I promise you once again always to stay far away from all occasions in which I as a Jew would be exposed to insults.”41
Boas could not restrain himself. In January 1881 he wrote to his parents that “a splendid anti-Semitic action happened to me.” Boas and his friend Wilhelm Giesbrecht had gone to a tavern where “several close and not-so-close friends had seated themselves with us.” The topic of anti-Semitism had come up, and they were making fun of some anti-Semitic men they knew. Boas continued, “The door opened and in comes one of the ‘Führer’ who knew one of us very slightly. He asked permission to sit at our table. One good-hearted freshman stammered something like, ‘Fine,’ and he sat down. Of course, I immediately took my beer and sat at a nearby table saying that I could not sit at the same table with this man. What happened? All but this dunce got up with comments of cold adieus and let him sit there. I have never enjoyed myself so much.” The fact that the tavern had been crowded added to the embarrassment for the individual and the amusement for Boas and his friends. “This good young man,” Boas remarked, “will be careful not to become Führer of a political movement anytime soon.” He only regretted “that this person was not another ‘Führer’ with whom I was once quite well acquainted,” and who continued to greet Boas in a warm fashion while Boas intentionally ignored him. These young men were connected with the right-wing student organization the Vereine Deutscher Studenten, Union of German Students, that was circulating an anti-Semitic League petition. Boas said that he had eschewed confrontation with them but rather had “his friend, Giesbrecht, circulate ‘a stinging declaration’ . . . that had garnered forty signatures” against the Judenhetzer, the Jew baiters.42
Müller-Wille notes in a personal communication, “The Vereine deutscher Studenten (VDS) was a consolidation or union of student associations which were on the right, anti-Semitic, and nationalistic. They were founded by associations in Berlin, Halle, Leipzig, Breslau, and Kiel on August 6, 1881, at the time at which Boas finished his doctorate.” Norbert Kampe remarks on the “new student anti-Semitism” that was especially manifest in Protestant northern Germany. Against such a backdrop, Boas’s promises to his parents to avoid conflict were for naught. “Unfortunately I am bringing this time for the last time again a few cuts,” he wrote, “one even on the nose!” Wanting to avoid a fuss, Boas emphasized that the duel was unavoidable: “I hope you will not say too much about it, because with the damned Jew baiters this winter one could not survive without quarrel and fighting.” He concluded, “So until the day after tomorrow. I am happy as a fish to come to you. I can hardly stand it here.”43
Boas returned to Kiel after Pfingstferien and reassured his parents that he was living a “secluded” life with “regular hours.” He had one friend from the previous semester, he said: “I am not entirely alone. It would otherwise have been boring this summer.” By July his mother was still worrying that her son was dueling. Boas wrote her, “Dear Mama, your fear that I have again dueled is not founded. I am no longer a student and have really had enough of it.” Boas spent his time preparing for his doctoral examinations. He exclaimed, “You can’t believe how very afraid I am of the exam. I only wish it were over!” He confessed, “You can imagine that even though it may be of no use, I am reviewing until the last instant.” Still, his work progressed “lustily.” He told of his plan of study, “Today I reviewed 1/3 of the general geography, 1/5 of the history of Philosophy, about 1/4 of the Physics, and 1/3 of the special earth science.” He added, “I do not expect to flunk, but whether I shall get a decent rating is another matter.”44
In mid-July Boas told his parents that he expected to “be invited to the exam” by the middle of the following week. “At last! Thursday evening at eight o’clock latest (as it seems now) you may expect my telegram. . . . Because of all this, I feel so stupid, as though a mill wheel were turning in my head.” He said that “the entire faculty will be invited to the exam.” On Friday, July 22, 1881, Boas made his “official visits” to the dean and to his examiners. As he explained to his father, on Saturday, July 23, he went “with fear and trembling to the university.” His oral examination, presided over by Dean and Professor of Chemistry Albert Ladenburg, was held between six to eight thirty p.m. He continued, “You cannot imagine what fear I had before the beginning of the exam. Gradually a certain balance came back to my feelings. I was finally finished at 8:30 and it was high time since I began to suffer from amnesia, i.e. I could not find the words that I wanted to use.” His dissertation advisor Gustav Karsten asked him “some very unpleasant and very specific things” regarding the “transmission of water waves,” a comparison between “the old and the new electro-dynamic machines,” and the “different phenomena of the polarization of light in the atmosphere.” Boas confessed, “At first I was very frightened and could hardly get a word out, but it went better later on.” Theobald Fischer examined him on “different kinds of terrain configuration” and on “the facts about the ebb and flow of the sea and about the theory surrounding it.” Fischer also asked Boas to discuss the “general geography of islands,” “the geography of New Zealand,” “the most noted farm states of North America and China,” and “the conditions for a cultural development of Siberia.” Fischer concluded with questions about “the ethnography of Northern Asia.” Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy Weyer examined Boas in mathematics, specifically in “mathematical geography” with a focus on “the art of projection.” With relief Boas wrote, “Finally Erdmann finished off with philosophy. He asked first about psycho-physics, then went into logic and let me give a short development of materialism. With that I was released and after ten minutes was told that I had passed the exam.” Then everyone gathered for wine and cake.45
Boas was hoping for “a decent middle grade.” Later the same day Boas wrote his father, “Dear Papa! I just found out that I received the ‘best’ for my dissertation and second best for my exam.” As Ludger Müller-Wille conveyed to me, Boas received summa cum laude for the dissertation and magna cum laude for the oral examinations. With the latter weighted more heavily, he was awarded the overall distinction of magna cum laude. Before he could be promoted to doctor, Boas had to have two hundred copies of his dissertation published for distribution to all universities in German-speaking countries. On August 9, 1881, with all the professors assembled, Dean Ladenburg presented Boas with his diploma, with the notation in Latin that the dissertation was “a specimen diligentiae et acuminis valde laudatur” (a specimen of acumen and diligence greatly praised). Boas then gave a talk on “Evolution and Structure of Coral Islands.”46
As he told his parents, his dissertation was complete, “and though it isn’t anything special, it is at least tolerable”; or as he wrote in another letter, his dissertation was “ein mäßiges Opus,” a moderate piece of work. He dedicated this 1881 “Inaugural Dissertation,” Beiträge zur Erkenntniss der Farbe des Wassers (Contributions to the knowledge of the color of water), to his “dear parents.” On the frontispiece, he began, “In July 1858, I, Franz Boas, of Mosaic Confession, was born in Minden i./W,” and he continued with a brief summation of his educational background, the universities he had attended, and a listing of the professors under whom he had studied. In gratitude to his professors, he concluded: “To all of them, I express herewith my heartfelt thanks.” In the introduction to the dissertation, Boas began: “Observation shows us that in layers of small thickness seemingly completely colorless and transparent water often assumes a very intense color at greater depths, which, however, is by no means similar in different waters.” He scribed the different nuances, “from the deepest indigo blue to sky blue and green- to yellowish-brown and dark brown. Who has not heard of the beauty of Lake Geneva, the color of which competes with the blue of the sky!” He continued with references to the “bright blue” of the Central Asian salt sea, of the indigo blue of the sea off Sumatra, of the aqua blue of “the lake Yoyoa in Nicaragua, the hot springs of Reykir in Iceland, as well as those in Yellowstone Park and the sparkling [hot springs of] Te Tarata in New Zealand.” Concluding his introduction, Boas focused on the two themes for investigation: the absorption of light in water, as discussed in chapter 3, and the polarization of light reflected from the water, discussed in chapter 4.47
Boas was candid in his dissertation about the shortcomings of his investigations and the limitations placed on his research by the inadequacy of the equipment. He ended chapter 3, “Investigation of the Absorption of Light in Water,” with the following assessment: “A drawback to my method of observation was that, aside from sodium light I could get no homogenous light source intense enough to allow a comparison of shades of intensity.” With lithium light, it had worked, but “the flame’s greater brightness is all too short-lasting” to be useful. He continued, “It was therefore necessary to resort to an expedient for the other colors.” Boas drew “an ordinary gas lamp” close to his eyes and placed “an absorbent medium” in front of it, “which ideally would let homogeneous light through.” In similar fashion, he indicated at the end of chapter 4, “The Polarization of the Reflected Light from Water,” that “probably the degree of polarization is also dependent on the depth of the blue color of the sky, so it is all the greater, the bluer the sky.” He concluded, “About this I did not arrive at a definite decision, since the number of bright days was quite low.” Similarly, Boas explained the shortcomings in the tables presented in the appendix. At the bottom of table 1, he noted that a single asterisk marked an observation that did “not fit into the series,” because, while recording the data, “a small, white cloud passed before the sun,” and two asterisks marked an observation that “gave erroneous results because the water suddenly moved strongly.”48
Boas had written his parents in May 1881, “‘If someone had told me a few semesters ago that I would submit such a dissertation, I would have laughed at him. But one learns to be content.’” On the cusp of the festivities, Boas wrote his mother, “Dear Mama, I have just now happily passed my promotion and am really now doctor, Magna cum Laude. . . . Tonight, we tipple.” Totally dependent as he was on his parents for all funds, he admitted to his father, “I want to submit the work as soon as possible. That will cost some awful coins! All at once, I have to put 200 Mark on the table.” Meier Boas sent his son a draft for more than 267 marks to cover expenses.49
The university years for Boas and for other students were a rite of passage into the manhood of the educated elite, and manhood it definitely was, since women were not admitted to German universities in the nineteenth century. According to Arnold van Gennep, the rite of passage marked a change from one cosmic or social state to another with those undergoing the transition set apart from ordinary life in a liminal period, garbed in special costuming—such as the special-colored caps and sashes of the fraternal organizations—subject to ritualized conduct, members of an age grade, and with elders overseeing the imparting of esoteric knowledge. For the university student, this was a passage from the social status of Abiturienten (gymnasium school-leavers) to that of Akademiker (university graduates). Indeed, even the Latin meaning of Abitur conveys this change of status: “about to depart,” “one who is going to depart.” In the liminal period the university students reveled in “the social freedom of student life,” and the “escape from parental authority”; they enjoyed to the fullest their “Burschenzeit [rowdy youth].” In this burst of release from the strictures of Gymnasium study, the university student signed up for classes but was not required to attend, purchased texts but was not required to read them, and completed courses but was not required to take examinations. Away from the demanding eyes of the Gymnasium instructors and the watchful eyes of parents, the students loafed through “the first few semesters,” and apart from “drinking and dueling,” might occupy their time with “an avid browsing in contemporary literature and . . . a sampling of different lectures by famous professors.” Certainly Boas followed this pattern of loafing, as he wrote to his Gymnasium friend Krüer, “You have no idea what a loafer I have become and how much time I spend in cafés. . . . When the weather is bad I stretch out on the sofa for an hour or two and read.”50
Integral to student culture, the university student duel flowered most fully during the period of the Second Empire of Wilhelm II (1888–1918), but certainly was in full swing earlier in 1877–81, when Boas was a university student. Paired with excessive drinking, the Mensur, a carefully choreographed ritual of violence, provided the training grounds for German manhood. As McAleer notes, “The Germans were Europe’s most tenacious and serious duelist—serious, because the most striking aspect of the German duel was its deadliness.” In the postuniversity Mensur, the combatants, with their dueling pistols in hand, shot to kill. Firmly grounded on the principle of Standesehre (professional or caste honor), the duel guarded “the collective honor of German society’s upper strata” and maintained “group solidarity over and against the lower orders.” In every Ehrenhandel (affair of honor, duel), “the participants were representing not only their own interests but those of their class.” The fraternal organizations with their ritualized duels set apart, as Hobsbawm elucidates, “the ‘old boy,’ ‘alumnus’ or ‘Alte Herren,’” members of the social elites, from the influx of middle-class students that flowed into the German universities from the mid-1870s to the mid-1880s.51
In the university student duel, the intent was not to kill the opponent in order to expunge the insult as it was in the postuniversity duel, but to stand one’s ground, to wield the sword, and to slice the opponent’s face more severely than one’s own face was sliced in a ritual of facial scarification. Many scars would last a lifetime as marks of passage into German manhood. McAleer maintains, “The Mensur was a discipline in which there was neither winner nor loser.” However, from Boas’s accounts as a participant, the number and length of the slices on the face were crucial in determining who left the Mensur dueling ground with honor restored. Boas included the measurements of his wounds in his letter to Reinhard Krüer (a cut in his scalp “four cm. long and one and one-half cm. wide”) and the facial cuts he inflicted on his opponent (“three cuts from ear to nose that required eight stitches”). To his parents, he included a description of his wound as “an ‘elenden Blutigen,’ a miserable cut.” Additionally, Boas engaged in a rematch because his honor had been insulted: the members of the opposing corps had ruled the initial match unsatisfactory. With echoes of the student code of honor, he emphasized to his parents, “If you knew student relationships better, you would understand how severe this insult is.” Thus, there were those who prevailed in the Mensur. Their performance was evaluated by those in attendance, by the members of their group, by those of the other group, by the student umpire, and by the student keeping a record of the number of cuts and the time of the duel in the memorandum book.52
The blood flowed, the wounds healed, the scars remained, and those in the brotherhood celebrated with drinking bouts of astounding excess: “Rabelaisian quantities were consumed in single sittings on command and in unison with the group, improvised vomatoriums and pissoirs at close ready, while rollicking challenges to ‘beer-duels’ flew about the table.” The affiliated university students were members of one of three dueling associations: “the Landsmannschaften, the oldest; the Burschenschaften, the least conservative; and the Corpsstudenten, the most elite.” Belonging to the least conservative in Bonn, the Burschenschaften, Boas was steeped in the collective nature of the organization. He wrote to his parents in February 1878, “‘I would never have thought such close ties between the whole group were at all possible. We are 21, constantly together. You would think there would be cliques formed, and certainly one is closer to some than to others, but we stand all for one and one for all.’” Whether as the rallying cry of The Three Musketeers, “All for one, one for all,” or as the purest expression of Émile Durkheim’s collective effervescence, where the individual becomes subsumed in the frenzied excitement of the group, Boas’s identity was merged for a time with his Alemannia. As an example of the immediacy of the brotherhood, Boas explained to his parents how the etiquette of address showed emotional closeness: “Our relationship with the old boys is a really nice one. Here comes a man to us, all foreign to me, and he calls me by my first name right away, and we have a bond, drawing us close and closer.”53
The time came for the serious university student to ease out of the debauchery of his initial years. After three or four semesters of heavy drinking and frequent dueling, the student could declare his status as “honorary” in the fraternal organization. The timing of such honorary and inactive status coincided with the impending examinations—indeed the only examinations the students took—and then these were optional, “administered at the end of the three-year college term.” These comprehensive and demanding examinations called for disciplined preparation. In a conveniently timed move, Boas departed Bonn for Kiel, where he was freed from the activities of his fraternity and where he could return concertedly to his studies. While Boas left his raucous fraternity activities behind in Bonn, he did not leave behind the engagement in the Mensur. The rituals of manhood that he had played out in Heidelberg had become for Boas more serious in Bonn and Kiel. From a duel over insults about piano études, the engagements escalated to fights over insults about his Jewish heritage. From Heidelberg, where Boas expressed his own anti-Semitic views about the “lauten Juden,” the noisy Jews, and “intolerable Jewish societies,” to Kiel, where he was fighting duels in response to “Jew-baiters,” the circuit illustrated Boas’s own journey into the Jewish self—in large measure, and necessarily so for a minority group, a self as defined by others. In Minden Boas was viewed as an acculturated Jew from an upper-middle-class family; in the anti-Semitic climate of Kiel in 1879, he was viewed simply and stereotypically as a Jew.54
The upswing in anti-Semitism and the insults to which Boas was subjected coincided with the rise of economic challenges in Germany. Undergoing a rapid process of industrialization with the growth of the naval and shipbuilding industries, Kiel was “strongly Protestant and nationalistic.” While pervasive in Kiel, anti-Semitism was not limited to this northern seaport city but was present elsewhere as well. For university students there was an added lever to anti-Semitism that entailed the rise in the number of Jewish students from 1870 to 1885, with a slight dip in 1890 and a rise again in 1895. The educated middle-class Protestants reacted to the increasing numbers of Jewish students “with overt and covert anti-Semitism,” and, among other actions, founded the nationalistic and anti-Semitic Vereine Deutscher Studenten, Union of German Students, in the 1880s.55
Frederick the Great and Wilhelm von Humboldt had prepared the ground for the German Enlightenment and Jewish emancipation at the turn of the nineteenth century. They saw “the price to be paid by the Jews for admission into German society [as] the repudiation of their Jewish identity.” With a shared goal, the German liberals and German Jews of the nineteenth century aimed for complete assimilation of Jews into German society, but the two sides had different interpretations as to what this assimilation meant. For the Jews it meant retaining their Jewish identity and merging with the German nation; for the liberals it meant absorption of the Jews into German society with no trace of their Jewishness remaining. The majority of the German people shifted from the ideals of the German Enlightenment, from the quest for “shared humanity toward which Bildung must strive,” to a concept of a shared soul of the German people, a Volksgeist, a folk or national spirit, that excluded all that was not purely German. As Glick emphasizes, “The German Volk were envisioned as rooted in soil, culture, and tradition, and the connections between racial ancestry, land, and cultural inheritance were perceived not as abstraction or metaphor, but as a literal and absolute bond that could not and must not ever be dissolved.” Certainly, Boas and his family were among those German Jews who had assimilated to German culture but who had retained their identity as Jews, though for Franz this remained a vexed and problematic identity. The shared soul of the German people would not include the Boases, or other German-Jewish families like them.56
The citadel of German Enlightenment was the university. Upon entering the embrace of the German university, a young man became part of the “central cultural institution of nineteenth-century Germany,” an institution that maintained its power by controlling “entry into the professions” through authority over state examinations. Set apart from the noble classes and from the commercial middle classes “by their cultivation,” those educated at the university formed “a more cohesive and self-conscious group than other college graduates of Western Europe.” Indeed, the Prussian Educational Code of 1794 manifested just such a separation by designating the university class as Eximierte, citizens exempt “from the draft, freed from any taxes, endowed with a special judicial code of honor, and permitted marriage with the aristocracy.” Of course, the latter privilege, allowance of marriage with aristocracy, would not apply to Boas or to other Jewish students who comprised the 9.58 percent of the academic body. In Germany as a whole, the Jews were “never much more than 1 percent of the total population.” As Julia Liss and Kampe point out, they were overrepresented in the university student body. While access to an aristocratic wife was of no consequence to Boas, access to the professions was of dear consequence, and, as a Jew, he was in a precarious position. Konrad Jarausch observes, “Because of greater formal and informal discrimination in other areas, the Jewish minority viewed higher education as an important avenue of emancipation from the ghetto toward the free professions of law and medicine, which were not officially barred, like the Officer Corps.”57
Boas had elected not to pursue a career in medicine, and he had never considered law, nor had he any desire to be part of the elite Officer Corps. He was, however, keen on pursuing university teaching and research. For a Jew, “the price for admission” into the profession of teaching in secondary and higher education “was cultural assimilation into academic Germany, and the cost of professional success (obtaining a full professorship) often was as high as complete amalgamation by conversion.” Boas’s mentor Theobald Fischer made reference in a letter of December 21, 1884, to a discussion they had had in Kiel about Boas’s converting to Christianity, “and I told you that I would consider such a move quite superfluous.”58
With all the dueling and drinking, blood and beer, there was nonetheless a crucial intellectual core to the university training that “served as the stage in the formation of an individual Weltanschauung [worldview], a basic outlook on society and polity.” Grounded in the classical study of the Gymnasium and continued in the university, this intellectual core combined “the cultivation of reason and aesthetic taste” and derived from a fulfillment of the inherent capabilities of the individual flowering to its fullest in spirit and intellect. Franz Boas’s sense of self was grounded in Bildung and was steeped in a wide-ranging intelligence that quested for a fulfillment of that which was innate within him, whether as the young child collecting lichen and mosses or as the young man collecting sea water samples.59
Years later, in his letter of acknowledgment on the presentation of the Festschrift marking his twenty-fifth anniversary of the receipt of his doctorate, Boas wrote, “The honor that you have bestowed upon me leads me to look back, and to think to what I may owe the success that has seemed to you to warrant the expression of such high appreciation. I believe I am not mistaken if I see one of its sources in the early training to independent thought and action that I owe to the German universities.” Boas noted the danger for some students in “the sudden transition from strict school discipline to the freedom of the university”; there were those who succumbed “to the temptations of an uncontrolled life.” He continued, “Many others—and I count myself among them—are intoxicated by the new life, and require time and increasing maturity to find their place; but when they find it, they stand on firmer ground, better able to cope with the problems of life and of learning than those who have never left the guiding hand of the master.”60
After having completed his Gymnasium examinations and on the threshold of university life, Boas had written to his sister Toni, “Now in truth, the school years are finished. The ideas that moved me up to now have been completed and new ones will pull me through life. . . . What does the future hold for me . . . ? At least I do not worry. I have no wishes for all my wishes are met. The exam is happily over. I can become what I want; my heart, what more do you want?” Franz signed the letter “Your Brother, who floats in seventh heaven.” In becoming “what I want,” Boas was fulfilling the essence of Bildung, an efflorescence from within, a fulfillment of the inner being.61