Arab Students in Weimar Germany – Politics and Thought Beyond Borders

Abstract

At the beginning of the twentieth century, Arab students showed an increasing interest in studying abroad. Such interest in extended travels to Europe was not self-evident. The longing for an authentic national culture was central to the rising Arab nationalist currents of the 1920s and 1930s. Foreign education, from this perspective, appeared as ‘the stumbling stone of the nation’, as one contemporary Syrian educator put it. The experience of Arab students in interwar Europe, and in Germany in particular, was different; pursuing studies at German universities in law, medicine, literature or history, these students were placed in a peculiar position. Focusing on the writings of Egyptian and Syrian students in Germany, this chapter reconstructs their experiences as going beyond established notions of encounter and exchange. Given the various political and intellectual activities in which these students were engaged, their accounts provide an insight into concepts of culture and national identity that aimed at balancing potentially contradictory claims.