On 12 July 1920, several hundred people gathered in the auditorium of the Bedford College for Women in central London to attend the opening of the International Federation of University Women's (IFUW) inaugural conference. The organisation had been founded by a handful of American and British female college professors not even a year prior to this event, and now, the Anglo-American IFUW board and thirty-two official delegates from fifteen countries presented the new organisation, joined by numerous individual participants of the IFUW's member associations in Britain, Canada, Denmark, France, Norway, Sweden and the United States.Footnote 1 It was an illustrious gathering. The guest list included prominent representatives of British liberalism and conservative members of the British government, selected protagonists of the British women's and suffragist movement, high-ranking university figures, renowned literary personalities and official representatives of the new League of Nations.Footnote 2 In short it comprised the colourful spectrum of those British and transatlantic ‘internationalists’ of the post-war period who had taken up a resolute position against Germany and the Central Powers during the war and who now placed their hopes in the achievement, through the League of Nations and similar institutions, of a peaceful global order based on mutual understanding and carried forward by an educated cosmopolitan elite.Footnote 3 Before this audience, Caroline Spurgeon, Professor for English Literature at Bedford College, and co-founder and first president of the IFUW, explained the aims and objectives of the new transatlantic federation. The affiliation of university- and college-trained women, she claimed, would re-establish academic internationalism as a binding ethical maxim. The new organisation would call on its members to commit to the values of a ‘world community’ forming around the League of Nations, to act for world peace and, at the same time, to ensure women's access to science and higher education worldwide. To these ends, the international association was to establish a dense web of personal friendships among female academics across national and disciplinary boundaries, promote international exchange between women students, teachers and researchers and support women's advancement in the academic sphere.Footnote 4
The Anglo-American initiative met considerable enthusiasm across Europe. Except for in the United States and Britain, nationally organised communities of all women academics irrespective of their disciplines or professions had not existed in any country. But two years after its first convention in London, the IFUW's coverage had grown from eight to twenty-two national member associations. By 1930 the IFUW united 24,000 academic women from thirty – mainly European – countries. It is tempting to brand the IFUW as a sweeping success of post First World War internationalism, treating the organisation's first decade, or even more so its quite literally life- and career-saving responses to Nazism after 1933, as the benchmark of its success. With its three large international halls of residence in Washington, Paris and London, and its network of hotels, clubs and guesthouses in those countries where the establishment of an IFUW residence was not feasible, the IFUW could, from the mid-1920s onward, build on permanent structures that enabled and nurtured exchange and encounter among its members. In addition, the IFUW became uniquely relevant for women scholars. That relevance increased in direct proportion to the Federation's success in complementing its halls of residence and hospitality program with its genuine promotion of women's research. The federation's creation of an international fellowship program for research abroad added considerably to the IFUW's high degree of credibility as an institution of non-partisan internationalism.Footnote 5
What can and, in many respects, must be interpreted as a narrative of international achievement, however, should indeed also be cast in a more critical light. One way to draw out this sense of nuance is to consider how the IFUW sought to reconcile its own mission of fostering internationalism with the interests and agendas of its various national member organisations. The IFUW only accepted one representative body from each nation. This rule meant that in order to join the international federation, national associations had to be formed in each country, creating an intimate connection between the development of the international network and the establishment of individual, national organisations with their own biases. And hardly anywhere was the challenge to the IFUW's internationalist ethos greater than with regard to post–First World War Germany. Only in 1926, after years of protracted disputes among the European member organisations as well as within Germany on the question of whether, and when, German women academics should take part in the new international network, did German women form their own federation, the German Federation of University Women (Deutscher Akademikerinnenbund, DAB), and join the IFUW. Being anything but quiet joiners, they immediately set out to attain their own ‘international’ objectives. The German delegation promptly submitted a request for German to be used as the third conference language of the IFUW, alongside English and French; it was a demand that would preoccupy the Council and conferences until 1932 and contribute to considerable tension within the IFUW. For the Germans, the confrontations over the ‘language question’ in the IFUW became the pivotal issue of their international engagement to regain full recognition, and a focal point that crystallised their notions of how German academic women should represent the political interests of their country on an international level in light of the Versailles Treaty and the attainment of women's suffrage. For the IFUW, in turn, the increasingly vehement German demands became a difficult diplomatic challenge necessitating mediation between the national interests of its mainly European member countries and its own objectives.
In this paper, I will contextualise this struggle more broadly within the contested practices of post-First World War internationalism. Historians have recently argued that in order to gain a deeper historical understanding of such practices, it is important to weave the strands of twentieth-century internationalism back to narratives of nationalism and national interests.Footnote 6 The conflicts within the IFUW concerning the language question provide a prime example to demonstrate how intimately intertwined international and national concerns often were. My case study strengthens related claims made with regard to the international women's movement: the ‘new and unprecedented surge’ of international activism among academically educated women during the interwar period has been attributed to a similarly intense interplay between the national and the international level.Footnote 7 Tracing the frictions that evolved from the IFUW's liberal, nation-embracing vision of academic internationalism on the one hand and national members’ aspirations to reconcile this notion with their own interests on the other, this paper shows how interwar internationalism ‘worked’ in balancing conflicting stands. In what follows I will first turn to the reservations expressed against Germany's admission to the IFUW and then build on this discussion to explain why the Germans insisted so vigorously on their language request, and on what terms they agreed in 1932 to accept the Anglo-American and French dominance in the IFUW and the new hegemony of two world languages.
Coming to Terms with Internationalism
It is important to bear in mind just how deeply divided Europe was at the end of the First World War and thereafter. For many, internationalism was anything but popular. Just like the League of Nations itself, most initiatives in the post-war internationalist arena originated from alliances among the powers of the Entente, which outlasted their victory in November 1918. This was true for the IFUW as well.Footnote 8 The organisation originated in an Anglo-American education alliance directed against Germany and the Central Powers, and there was no question of admitting the former enemy into the new federation in the immediate aftermath of the world's first global conflict. In steering clear of the Central Powers the IFUW did not differ from official Western diplomacy or international scientific and professional associations. Germany was not only barred from the League of Nations, it was also excluded when the new International Research Council (IRC) was formed, under American leadership, between October 1918 and spring 1919, with the task of intensifying the inter-Allied scientific cooperation that had begun during the war. Early on in this founding phase, the IRC passed a resolution ruling out both official and personal contacts with the Central Powers. Before these countries could be readmitted into the international academic community, said the IRC, ‘the Central Powers must renounce the political methods which have led to the atrocities that have shocked the civilised world’.Footnote 9
The response of German academics and their organisations was to dig in their heels and present a counterclaim of their own: they would only be prepared to join the international community if they received an unconditional invitation. Taking a nationalistic stance of self-imposed isolation was particularly wide-spread among German professors, leading most universities and research institutes to squander their chances of academic internationalism during the Weimar period.Footnote 10
Compared with the majority of male-led academic associations, the IFUW was earlier in moving away from the policy of categorically excluding the former enemy nations. That said, however, it is also clear that the IFUW's internationalist stance remained clearly tuned to the sensibilities of the former wartime allies. It was mainly out of respect for their French and Belgium members that IFUW president Caroline Spurgeon repelled a German petition to join the IFUW at the Paris meeting in 1922, emphasising in a letter to a French member that ‘none of us would wish to have them (the Germans, C.O.) unless their presence was likely to contribute to international good feelings rather than the reverse’.Footnote 11 Officially, and after exhaustive debates in Paris, the IFUW's Council issued a restrained statement claiming that ‘the German university women . . . shall ultimately be admitted to the International Federation, probably at the time when Germany has been admitted to the League of Nations, if not sooner’.Footnote 12
The German women interpreted the Paris resolution as an insulting affront, discrediting the internationalism propagated by the IFUW.Footnote 13 Gertrud Bäumer and Helene Lange, the most high-profile representatives of the bourgeois women's movement in Germany, were outraged that such a position could even be contemplated ‘in an association of women who epitomise the highest educational standard of their countries, an association that, moreover, claims to represent the ideals of international peace’.Footnote 14 The IFUW's Paris resolution reinforced the view, widespread also among German academic women, that Germany could do without international links – indeed, that its national interest demanded they be forgone.Footnote 15 Internationalism had been invalidated by Versailles and must therefore be rejected, not only by male office-bearers and dignitaries, but also by their female counterparts – all the more so given that women now had the right to vote and, with it, adult political responsibility. For Bäumer, gaining the vote in 1919 cast serious doubts on the previous practice of nurturing international relationships between women. She argued that since women had begun to bear responsibility for political processes to the same degree as men, it was no longer possible to sustain the previous division of the world into a political sphere, defined as male, and the feminine idealism that had been ‘peace, international understanding, human community, and . . . the source of cordial sympathies’. The ‘irresponsibility’ with which, before they attained political adulthood, women had been able to create networks ‘in areas where politics had interests to preserve’ was now, in view of the hated peace treaty that had been forced on Germany, nothing less than ‘wicked superficiality’. If women wanted to be taken seriously as actors in the international arena, they would have to abandon the ‘play of sweet feelings’ and pursue ‘the politics of peace’.Footnote 16 Bäumer was not alone in believing that rebutting international relationships was the only political act appropriate to the situation: for large segments of the German population, the hostility to foreign triumphalism that had marked the immediate post-war years hardened into an isolationist ideology as the Weimar Republic slowly gained its footing.Footnote 17
However, it was typical of the Weimar period's dynamism that the defensive attitude toward international work soon softened somewhat, at least for some liberal members of the women's movement. This was due to the markedly more conciliatory attitude toward Germany displayed by the international women's organisations. Overwhelmed by the warm reception of the International Council of Women's (ICW) 1921 convention in The Hague,Footnote 18 Bäumer noted with obvious emotion that the will of all women to join together in overcoming the war's catastrophic consequences was stronger than wartime hostility itself. Through this encounter with women from other nations, a generally shared ‘sense of the female destiny’ had emerged that, in turn, vividly reminded Bäumer of ‘the active task of women’, also beyond the political sphere – something that ‘had a very profoundly uniting effect’.Footnote 19 Against such a positive backdrop, the outrage was all the greater when the IFUW's 1922 resolution was made public. Admittedly, the IFUW was a new body; it was looking to position itself on the international map of academic organisations and moulded its attitude to Germany to match theirs. But in Germany, the IFUW was regarded primarily as an organisation of women, and accordingly was measured against other women's organisations in terms of its will to achieve political reconciliation.
Given this rift, how did the IFUW and the Germans nevertheless manage to grow closer, a process culminating in the foundation of a German federation of university women and its admission in 1926 into the international umbrella organisation? Personal networks between the IFUW and the international women's movements’ congresses proved critical. They offered neutral ground for first encounters between academic women from Germany and the former Entente. As Gertrud Bäumer had noted in 1921, participants at the international women's conferences included significantly more academically educated women than had been the case before the war, and many were also members of the IFUW. Footnote 20 There are strong indications that Gertrud Bäumer, who held a degree in economy in addition to being a Liberal Democrat member of the German Reichstag, a newly appointed ministerial official and doyenne of the bourgeois women's movement in Germany, was tentatively approached by IFUW members in the Hague in 1921 regarding a German federation to join the international network. In spring 1923 Bäumer became the first woman in Germany to speak out publicly in favour of founding an association of this kind.Footnote 21 The women who endorsed that idea and forwarded its progress in the subsequent years had also attended the international women's congresses of the post-war period, along with Bäumer or at her behest. Within the IFUW, it was the much-admired Margery Corbett Ashby – a 1901 graduate in Classics from Newham College, Cambridge, but best known as a high-profile British suffragist and as president of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance – who managed to persuade the 1924 IFUW conference at Kristiania (Oslo) in Norway to set an encouraging signal to Germany by inviting them and several other countries to join.Footnote 22 The IFUW's official note, which explicitly welcomed the founding of the German association and expressed the hope that ‘we may expect it to join the international federation in the near future’, met with a gratified response. Footnote 23 Within the German women's organisations and among women students, the IFUW greeting was regarded as the hoped for unequivocal invitation, and as a basis upon which German women could now officially seek admission to the IFUW without losing face.
Politics of Internationalism
It seems unlikely that the German delegates could have imagined a more dignified form for the official admission of the DAB at the fourth IFUW convention in Amsterdam in 1926. The German group joined the IFUW along with Poland, Hungary and Estonia, as the twenty-sixth national association. Virginia Gildersleeve, Dean of Barnard College in New York and president-elect of the IFUW to succeed Caroline Spurgeon, addressed cordial greetings to all the new member associations. The opening words by Estelle Simons, a lawyer from Utrecht and president of the Dutch association, were both far-reaching and personal; they were directed only at the German women and were, moreover, read out not in the federation's official languages of English and French, but in German. It was only with the admission of ‘the academic women from a country so important in the sphere of knowledge’, said Simons, that the IFUW had truly fulfilled its claim to be international.Footnote 24
If the Anglo-American founders of the IFUW and the Dutch hosts had expected gratitude, they were in for a rude awakening. With its almost 4,000 members, the DAB was the second-largest national group in the IFUW, after the American association.Footnote 25 As the Germans observed, they not only had as many members as the British and French associations put together, but also boasted by far the highest proportion of women with doctorates.Footnote 26 The Germans felt that neither the status of their association nor the importance of their country was being appropriately acknowledged within the international federation, despite the cordial welcome in Amsterdam.Footnote 27 The German delegation promptly submitted a request for German to be used as the third conference language of the IFUW, alongside English and French. When the IFUW Council met in Vienna in 1927, the German academic women – supported by their Austrian colleagues – made sure that the language issue took a prominent place on the agenda.Footnote 28 Together with the Austrians, they succeeded, after lengthy discussions, in persuading the other nineteen Council members present in Vienna to approve a resolution that ‘English, French and German may be spoken at the Conference’. But the Council insisted on adding that translations should only be given in French and English, since these were the languages spoken and understood by more than two-thirds of the present members. Likewise, all secretarial work of the Conference should be conducted as hitherto.
It became clear from the outset that complete equality between German and the other two conference languages was impossible to achieve. Moreover, the Council, which united women from twenty-one countries with no less than thirteen different mother tongues, added that the resolution was by no means final, and that its practicability must be first tested during the next meeting, in Geneva in 1929. The majority of the Council members would only accept a third conference language under the condition that this did not cause any added obstacles to day-to-day business.Footnote 29 In Geneva, the president of the German federation, Agnes von Zahn-Harnack, took advantage of the Vienna agreement to use her native language for her twenty-minute plenary lecture on the IFUW's relationship with the women's movement. A short English summary was circulated among those present, based on the printed version.Footnote 30
However, this did not draw a line under discussion of the appropriate status of German vis-à-vis English and French – far from it, as the debate took up substantial space in Geneva as well. The German women were hoping for a specification or revision of the Viennese declaration, especially with respect to the question of whether or not German contributions must be officially translated into the other two conference languages and, if so, whether the IFUW would bear the cost of such translations. For the Germans, the logic of equal status between all three languages seemed to indicate that translations were not necessary at all. This intervention caused considerable annoyance in Geneva and revived the emotionally charged debate over the principle of which languages to admit as conference languages. The rule applied by the League of Nations, allowing representatives of each nation to use their own official language as long as they offered English or French translations, was rejected as too costly and time-consuming. The appeal by the British professor Edith Morley ‘for a little more lightness and less solemnity in the discussion of a question which was really only concerned with getting through business quickly and avoiding the tiresome process of double translation’, failed to convince the assembly.Footnote 31 What was at stake here, and which for that very reason encountered resistance on so many levels, was not in fact a practical problem calling for pragmatic solutions, but a fundamental question of cultural politics. It became all the more explosive when, after an emergency session discussing various possible revisions of the Vienna resolution, a clear majority of the delegates in Geneva voted for a version that – while expressly confirming the status of German as a third conference language – made it secondary to English and French more decisively than the Vienna declaration had done.Footnote 32 German delegates took particular umbrage at the sentence which stated, ‘in view of the fact that English and French are the languages understood by the greater number of members present, it is understood that wherever possible the business meetings will be carried on in these two languages’. They called this an ‘extraordinary surprise’ and a ‘substantial and unacceptable change for the worse’ in comparison with the resolution approved in Vienna.Footnote 33
The conflicts around the language question, both within the DAB and between the DAB and the IFUW, escalated in the wake of the Geneva resolution. In Germany the Association of German Women Philologists (Deutscher Philologinnenverband) was most forceful in its claim for equal status for the German language within the IFUW. With its 2,150 members, this was by far the DAB's largest member association and, as such, could exert considerable influence on its stance.Footnote 34 However, the call for German to receive equal status was not simply a hobbyhorse of the philologists, it was also supported by the broad majority of DAB members. In June 1930 Frieda Kundt, a high-school principal in Berlin, proposed a motion to the DAB's board in the name of the women philologists’ association asking for the IFUW to be required to ‘place the German language on an equal basis with English and French in every respect at all events organised by the federation’. This was passed by thirty-three votes to seven.Footnote 35 For the philologists, this result logically implied a further demand: if the next conference of the IFUW, to be held in 1932 in Edinburgh, did not prove willing to accept the German women's request, the DAB must cease its work within the IFUW until a satisfactory solution had been found.Footnote 36
In 1930 and 1931 Agnes von Zahn-Harnack used the IFUW's Council meetings in Prague and at Wellesley College near Boston to stress the urgency of the German concern over languages in personal conversations. Finally, the British professor of medicine Winifred Cullis, who had been elected president of the IFUW in Geneva in 1929, agreed to visit Berlin in autumn 1931, in order to engage the German women personally and to seek a joint solution to the language question. Talks between the DAB's board and the IFUW president took place in Berlin on 31 October 1931. They were held in German, as the board had agreed at a preparatory meeting held just before its guest arrived.Footnote 37 Only Zahn-Harnacks successor, DAB president Marie-Elisabeth Lüders, ignored the agreement on her own initiative, using English in her welcoming address to Cullis.
Lüders put forward that the IFUW's guiding motivation and the dominant content of its work consisted in ‘cultural policy objectives’. These shared cultural goals could only benefit ‘from the intellectual and scientific specificity of such a large and many-faceted cultural sphere as the German one’, whose language predominated ‘throughout all of central and eastern Europe’. The DAB's desire to see the German language accepted in the discussions of the IFUW was considered by Lüders to be supported by the fact that in the largest international women's organisations, such as the ICW, the IAW and the International Federation of Medical Women, ‘all three languages coexist on an equal basis, and this arrangement has so far not resulted in any difficulties for their daily business’. In her response, Winifred Cullis set out the Anglo-American view: the only inequitable aspect of the treatment of German compared with the two other languages was that ‘it is not possible to require a translation into German’. She justified this in financial terms related to improved efficiency but did concede to her hosts that it meant asking a sacrifice of the German women. The German language, she said, was certainly acknowledged as a language of culture and of science. However, because the IFUW was not a purely scientific association, this fact could not be taken into account at the cost of carrying out business as efficiently as possible. Among the other national member associations, she added, there was little sympathy for the German women's appeal, and if German were recognised as a third and equal language, it could be anticipated that the Spanish and the Italian associations would immediately put forward identical demands. In fact, she said, at the Viennese meeting in 1927 the Italian women had threatened to make a claim of this kind if the Germans’ petition succeeded, and if the federation rejected an Italian request there was a danger that the Italian leader Benito Mussolini himself might pressurise the association to leave the IFUW.Footnote 38 Although personally sympathetic to the German women's concerns, Cullis thought the ‘mood in the other national associations’ to be unfavourable.Footnote 39
In the course of the lengthy and heated discussion that followed, the offended German women rejected the comparison with their Italian and Spanish counterparts, citing the size of their association and the global reach of the German language. They emphasised that worldwide intellectual developments made promoting the German language a ‘cultural task’ in terms of both science and internationalism. Eventually, the women present drew up an alternative to the Geneva decision on the spot. It did not include the hoped for general principle of unconditional equality between German and the other two conference languages; Cullis had been able to convince the meeting that such a demand had no chance of success. To be sure, this new Berlin draft differed from the Geneva resolution at most in shades of meaning.Footnote 40 The only real distinction was that the appeal to reduce the necessity of translation was now directed less specifically at the German language, and instead, at least in theory, now applied to all members, irrespective of which of the three languages they preferred to use. For the DAB members gathered in Berlin, this sufficed for the new text to be pronounced a success – providing, of course, that the Edinburgh conference of the IFUW was willing to pass the resolution unchanged. Cullis could not promise that, but she did undertake to do her best.
In a slightly altered form, the Berlin version of the resolution was presented for approval to the 1932 conference in Edinburgh.Footnote 41 Fearing that the resolution could still fail at the last minute, the German federation had only sent three delegates who had orders to walk out of the congress immediately if the resolution was rejected.Footnote 42 But it did not come to that; their proposal was advocated so persuasively by Winifred Cullis, the Dutch botanist Johanna Westerdijk and BFUW president Ida Smedley MacLean that, as the German women noted with satisfaction, it was ‘supported by all sorts of different nations and then approved unanimously, with Italy abstaining’.Footnote 43
At the IFUW conference one of the three German delegates, Berlin high-school principal Anna Schönborn, gave a lecture in German on the question of whether girls attending higher schools were overworked – an issue much debated in educational policy at the time – and attracted an audience of more than two hundred women. This pleased her greatly, as did the fact that she had ‘never been addressed so often in German’ at an IFUW conference. Her impression of Edinburgh was that
compared with Geneva . . . the atmosphere had changed completely, something that the wider circumstances would hardly have permitted us to expect. In fact, an international spirit prevailed, free of all other, political, influences. I experienced a great amount of cordiality and at the last plenary session, when the president made her farewells, I was asked to express thanks in the name of the whole assembly. I must say that I have never gone to a congress as unwillingly as I went to this one, but I have never come back so satisfied.Footnote 44
Schönborn's personal impressions may be taken as a reliable barometer of the DAB's growing rapprochement with the international community of women academics, given that she had been present at all five international conferences and Council meetings of the IFUW since 1926. Six years after the DAB joined the IFUW, the ice had finally been broken between the Germans and their international sisters, at least with regard to the leadership elites of the associations. The process was consummated by an invitation to Berlin, where the next international convention open to all members was to be held in 1936.
The German delight at the outcome of the Edinburgh conference requires some explanation, given that the oft-repeated goal of equal status between German, English and French as conference languages had still not been achieved. Their demands regarding the ‘language question’ had cast the Germans as awkward and obstreperous newcomers, yet in the end they bowed to the Anglo-American dominance in the IFUW and the new hegemony of two world languages, behind which German was compelled, unlike during the pre-war period, to accept an important but subordinate position.
The language debate reveals that it was not just the German academic women who had adopted a new approach to politics on an international level, as Gertrud Bäumer had demanded in the early 1920s. The hair-splitting negotiations over nuances of wording in the various versions of the language arrangements may be read as an object lesson in the diplomatic pursuit of respective national and international interests, a calling that many IFUW members felt was their obligation now that women had been granted the vote in almost all over Europe and the United States. As for the Germans, the language question became the core stipulation of their international policy in analogy to and close association with Germany's wider cultural policy abroad.Footnote 45 Reinstating the international standing and influence that Germany had lost through the war was a task that encompassed claims to linguistic hegemony, as was reflected in the 1925 establishment of the German Academy (Deutsche Akademie) and its numerous, publicly funded German language courses abroad.Footnote 46
An important role was also played by a specific dynamic inside Germany. The founding of the DAB and its admission to the IFUW had initially been advocated and driven only by a few liberal feminists. However, in the mid-1920s interest in international links began to grow among university women outside the liberal leadership of the women's movement. This facilitated the formation of the DAB, but it also created new problems since the international political activity of many of the new association's officers was by no means always motivated by a belief in internationalism. In fact, the liberal representatives of the Weimar Republic's women's movement also played their part in this nationalist turn within international engagement: they advised those members who continued to oppose internationalism to act internationally but ‘starting from a strictly national standpoint’, so as to ‘carry a German outlook into the sphere of international work’.Footnote 47 Nevertheless, some liberal figures were worried about their conservative colleagues’ desire to participate in life outside German borders, feeling that a carefully considered balance between preserving German interests and reaching international understanding was more important than simply ‘representing Germanness abroad’.Footnote 48
One thing, though, did unite the liberal and conservative-nationalist academic women (as well as men) far beyond the DAB: their repudiation of Germany's sole war guilt and a radical rejection of the Versailles Treaty. As a result, the desire to restore the sovereignty of what they called the ‘high-ranking German cultural nation’ – expressed among other things in their espousal of the ‘language question’ – became a central feature of the international policy pursued by the German university women's organisation. Liberal members such as the economist and German Democratic Party deputy Rosa KempfFootnote 49 supported this policy just as strongly as sports physician Edith Lölhöffel, an early follower of National Socialism, and her protégée Ilse Szagunn, who played an active part in the IFUW as the deputy president of the DAB.Footnote 50 For the majority of the DAB board's members, the aim of ‘safeguarding German interests’ was the highest priority. The conflicts over the language question do, however, indicate that the DAB's representatives in the IFUW were pursuing their national interests with a strong sense of what was politically feasible.
For its part, the IFUW emerged from these debates as remarkably unaccommodating in its reaction to the Germans’ requests when compared with the other international women's organisations. Its founding members were, almost without exception, academics from the Entente countries. Like most of their male colleagues, these women had carried out war work with particular enthusiasm during the First World War, and had conceived of the IFUW as an Anglo-American competitor to the Central Powers.Footnote 51 If the ‘war of the academies’Footnote 52 survived the First World War less stubbornly in the IFUW than in the other academic organisations, it smouldered longer there than within the other international women's organisations. To be sure, from 1922 onward the IFUW gradually abandoned the boycott against Germany. But when the Germans brought up the ‘language question’ immediately after being admitted to the federation, the IFUW's Council faced the challenge of disengaging from the organisation's original conception, which also had a linguistic component. In its earliest days, the future IFUW had been intended as an international exchange program for female graduates in the ‘English-speaking’ world, as a way of strengthening the networks between those women.Footnote 53 The internationalisation of the IFUW initially took shape in English; French was added as a concession to its most important continental allies. Early experiments to make more use of Esperanto as an international language were quietly dropped in 1926.Footnote 54
The appeal to all members to take a pragmatic attitude to the language question, put forward especially by the British women, must be interpreted at least in part as a rhetorical move that concealed a reluctance to undermine the linguistic hegemony of English (and French) in the IFUW.Footnote 55 If the vote in favour of German ultimately passed off so smoothly in Edinburgh, this should probably be attributed to a changed attitude to the language question in the inner circle of the IFUW's Council, a shift most likely prompted by Winifred Cullis's visit to Germany in autumn 1931. All sides moved closer together in a process of political negotiation during which particular national interests were weighed up against the principle of internationalism on the Anglo-American model, and were calibrated anew.Footnote 56
Conclusion
Despite the efforts on all sides, the rapprochement forged in Scottish Edinburgh proved brief. Germany's descent into National Socialism turned the agreements reached at the 1932 Edinburgh meeting into waste paper before even a year had passed – they were never again put into practice, setting in stone the prominence of English and French as communicative means of internationalism within the IFUW. Likewise, the planned convention in Berlin came to nothing. The sixth international assembly of the IFUW scheduled to be held in the German capital in 1936, the year of the now-infamous summer Olympics hosted by the Nazis, was instead conducted by the Polish federation in the university city of Cracow. However, this did not mean that the notion of internationalism promoted by the IFUW collapsed when confronted with the new, racist challenges brought forward by the Germans – quite the contrary. As DAB members disempowered their liberal representatives and voted to line up with the Nazi state in May 1933, the systematic expulsion of their Jewish members became the point at issue as to whether the Germans should remain in the IFUW or not. Fierce debates raged over how to proceed, especially between the American and British women. The US delegates made the case for maintaining links with academic women in the fascist regime for as long as possible, while the British women argued for the Germans to be expelled.Footnote 57 The latter succeeded in convincing the IFUW Council to add an amendment to the federation's constitution: in future, no national organisation that refused membership to university women for racial, religious or political reasons would be allowed to join or remain within the IFUW.Footnote 58 In 1936, the German association, now fully Nazified, formally jettisoned the IFUW. Reinforced by Germany's reluctance to comply with the IFUW's internationalist agenda, the organisation found a dramatically different response to the question, ‘whose world?’, one that was courageously framed to save lives and help rebuild careers in exile. Between 1933 and 1945 the academic networks of the female international community functioned remarkably efficiently to assist persecuted members in escaping the Nazis’ racial dystopia.Footnote 59
