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October, 1946. Geoffrey Lawrence, Oxford graduate and presiding judge of the Nuremberg trials, has handed down a death sentence to Wilhelm Frick, Heidelberg graduate and Reich Minister of the Interior, for war crimes and crimes against humanity. It is a bookend of sorts to the great European civil war: two powerful men, both graduates from the crucibles of the elite in their respective countries, one a war criminal and one a representative of victorious Western liberal ideals.The temptation for historians ever since has been to work backwards from there. The answer is 4, therefore the expression must be 2+2. But does the conventional understanding of the generation of Lawrence and Frick tell the entire story? Were the 80% of German university students who took up arms in the First World War simply continuing the inexorable march to the Holocaust? And when 30% of Oxford students laid down their lives between 1914 and 1918, did they do so as the last sacrifice of the great clash of civilizations that they had been preparing for all their lives?As Thomas Weber argues quite compellingly in "Our Friend 'The Enemy'", the answer to these questions is a resounding "no." The book deconstructs the popular views of pre-WWI Germans as hyper-nationalistic, anti-Semitic bloodsport-lovers, and their English counterparts as progressive, racially tolerant peacekeepers, by comparing pre-war life in each country's most influential university: Oxford and Heidelberg.Both universities produced large numbers of educated elites within their respective countries: government officials, political power-brokers, judges, clergy, and academics. Both universities were treasured as national institutions and looked to for development of the future ruling class. But what is most illuminating about Weber's book is just how similar the two institutions were at the turn of the 20th century, in terms of university life, values, wider societal influence, and maybe most importantly, attitudes toward each other.While overt displays of patriotism were more common at Heidelberg, both institutions were fiercely loyal to their King/Kaiser and Country. And yet, as Weber shows conclusively, both tended to look towards the other Kaiser/King and Country not with universal distrust and animosity, but with a kind of shared Anglo-Saxon/Teutonic admiration. At Heidelberg in particular, the prevailing wish for a stronger Germany in the early 20th century was generally not as a means of replacing Britain, but standing shoulder-to-shoulder with her. Even in Britain, where Germany's rise was observed more warily, Oxonians past and present had romantic notions of cozy Heidelberg-on-the-Neckar, where Edward VII had courted Princess Alexandra of Denmark. Relationships between the universities thrived, Brits were proud to study in Germany (and vice-versa), and indeed enrollment of English students at Heidelberg was at a 20-year high in 1914. As recently as early summer 1914, as Weber recounts, students at Oxford found the idea of going to war with Germany quite literally laughable.Displays of anti-Semitism and misogyny were also more common at German universities in the early 1900s, but as Weber points out in the book, these were usually propagated by a fringe element of the typically chauvinistic German fraternity organizations, which themselves only accounted for a minority of university students. In fact there were many more Jewish students and academics at Heidelberg than at Oxford, and while this introduced its own tensions, they were mainly due to the mass influx of immigrants from Russia and Eastern Europe at the time rather than any result of deep-seated racial anti-Semitism. Even so, as Weber explains, Jewish opportunities within the corridors of the elite in pre-WWI Germany were not vastly inferior to those in "enlightened" Britain, which was still coming to terms with its own imperial subjects of non-Anglo persuasion turning up at places like Oxford. As for women, although German universities lagged behind their British counterparts in terms of allowing women to matriculate, they soon caught up, and by 1914 women made up a larger percentage of the student body at Heidelberg than at Oxford. More importantly, Heidelberg was granting degrees to women in 1914, which Oxford did not do until after the war.Weber makes other interesting comparative examinations of Oxford and Heidelberg in the book, including sexual expression as well as sport. The picture that ultimately emerges is one of two institutions, and by extension two nations, that were slowly but surely evolving into freer, more enlightened societies. Their people were not eagerly anticipating a cataclysmic world war with each other, but were more or less quite satisfied with the fragile but intact peace that existed on the continent. There was shared admiration for each others' institutions, and a regular transfusion of intellect and innovation between campuses. When war did come, both Oxonians and Heidelbergers did their patriotic duty and took up arms, and in extraordinary numbers. That they had more in common with each other than they had differences is one of war's universal tragedies. What was not universal was the magnitude of bloodshed that was to follow, eventually culminating in a second, more destructive war, as well as genocide. Working backward from those events has clouded the reality of Europe as it really was before the summer of 1914. With "Our Friend `The Enemy'", Thomas Weber has helped to make the picture decidedly less cloudy. This is a skillfully written and important piece of history.
