>Would this be typewritten or hand written?
At that time it would have been a real manuscript = written by hand = manu scriptum. Typewriters were used at that time by only very few authors, for instance by Nietzsche. For samples, also of paper size, see here:
http://www.stephan-guenzel.de/Texte/Guenzel_Nietzsche-SM.pdf
Marvellous to see the illustrations of Nietzsche's typewriter script.
With regard to the presentation of the thesis, I am not so sure that it could be presented in any of the ways proposed at the time of WW1. Certainly, in the 1930s, in America, at Columbia, a doctoral thesis was only considered presentable when printed in book form by, for example, no fooling, and entirely coincidentally, Columbia University Press. The expense entailed ($500? a small fortune in those days) delayed, sometimes for years, the awarding of doctorates to impecunious candidates, some well known to me. I would be surprised to learn that things were any less strict under the German system just a decade or two earlier. Certainly the American system was draconian to an extreme, and was gradually abandoned.
When my dad did his PhD at Ohio State in the 50s, they had a bound book produced. I think in early 20th century Europe it would have been not exorbitant to produce a letterpress piece of modest length for something so significant in a person's life (it's not like today where they hand out PhDs for money and some time invested - back then you had to invent something).
In any case, the important thing is that it be in blackletter.
hhp
Hmm... A chemistry PhD might not have been set in blackletter, Hrant (if it was typeset at all...). Didn't many in the sciences publish in serif typefaces? Before WWI, there were vigorous debates as to whether German should be set in Fraktur or serif typefaces. This implies to me that quite a lot of content was being printed in serif type. Otherwise, the discussion would not have been a big one.
Not a scientific poll but perhaps some evidence for Dan's point:
In a Google Books search for German books between 1900 and 1920 containing the word Chemie, 9 out of the 10 matches on the first page are in Roman type.
(These appear to be mostly textbooks and academic journals.)
I see two options that I have also seen examples of while working in a digitisation project at the local university library:
Which option was chosen might not only have been dependent from money issues, but also from the requirements the university needed you to fulfil. If you had to hand in several copies, it would have been easier and faster to type them or let them be typed by someone else because you could do carbon copies more easily than with handwritten things (still possible, but I have never seen a carbon copy of some 60 sheets of a dissertation in handwriting in any university library).
The number of formulae would also have played a role, so depending on which specific field and application your hypothetical chemistry doctoral candidate would chose her/his options with regard to several other factors (money, having a typewriter or having the possibility to use one in e.g. some relative’s office, number of copies requested by the local university administration, …).
On a serious note:
Stephan said: "...I am not very sure what lead you to the idea that those were liberals…"
Interesting question.
Not only the scientific community favoured roman letters.
Roman letters were frequently seen and meant as a statement in favour of Roman tradition and hence the Catholic church - which had a strong political party in Germany and of course kept allegiance to the Pope of Rome. The catchword is "ultramontan".
Captured from commoncrawl.org on 28 Apr 2015. original URL
