This article describes the results of a 6-month tour of universities in West Germany and Austria. Using a variety of informal data gathering techniques to implement a survey of one semester's course catalogs, the authors studied the content and style of psychology instruction in 15 German-speaking institutions. The results of the survey indicated that, in general, the instructors are making a deliberate effort to extract psychology from American influence and to establish a unique "image" or focus for their school. Also it was revealed that there are currently some common factors that interfere with successful teaching procedures at these institutions, e.g., very large departments in schools with inflated student populations, lack of communication between faculty members within a school and between schools, inadequate budgets, especially for research, and a peculiarly adversarial relationship between faculty and students. An anecdote concerning one course is presented to illustrate the authors' conclusion that an outsider can be easily misled by course descriptions in official publications, since instructors often have a secret agenda which provides "hidden" content.
