An 1908, the first study of Germany’s ‘next generation of academics’ was published, written by the German economist Franz Eulenburg. After 200 pages of line graphs and tables, he concluded that they were neither young nor going anywhere. Although some who taught in Germany’s world-renowned universities enjoyed the freedom presumed to accompany an academic life, just as many merely endured. ‘Depressed and impoverished’, they waited for the ‘call’ – the Ruf as Germans termed it – to a permanent position they knew would never come. Stuck in precarious positions, excluded from faculty self-governance, without fixed salaries, these scholars, 38 years old on average, made up almost half the teaching staff in German universities.
