Humboldt University of Berlin

The Humboldt University of Berlin (, abbreviated HU Berlin) is a public research university in the central borough of Mitte in Berlin, Germany.

The university was established by Frederick William III on the initiative of Wilhelm von Humboldt, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher as the University of Berlin () in 1809, and opened in 1810. From 1828 until its closure in 1945, it was named the (Royal) Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin (FWU Berlin; ).During that period, it was also unofficially called after its location in the former palace of Prince Henry of Prussia which his brother, King Frederick II, had built for him between 1748 and 1753 on the avenue . During the Cold War, the university found itself in East Berlin and was de facto split in two when the Free University of Berlin opened in West Berlin. The university received its current name in honour of Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1949.

The university is divided into nine faculties, including its medical school shared with the Free University of Berlin. The university has a student enrollment of around 35,000 students, and offers degree programs in some 171 disciplines from undergraduate to post-doctorate level. Its main campus is located on the boulevard in central Berlin. The university is known worldwide for pioneering the Humboldtian model of higher education, which has strongly influenced other European and Western universities.Connell Helen, University Research Management Meeting the Institutional Challenge: Meeting the Institutional Challenge, p. 137, OECD, 2005,

It is generally regarded as having been the world's preeminent university for the natural sciences during the 19th and early 20th centuries; it is linked to major breakthroughs in physics and other sciences by its professors, such as Albert Einstein.Hans C. Ohanian, Einstein's Mistakes: The Human Failings of Genius, p. 156, W. W. Norton & Company, 2009, Past and present faculty and notable alumni include 57 Nobel Prize laureates (the most of any German university), as well as scholars and academics including Johannes Müller, Theodor Schwann, Rudolf Virchow, Hermann von Helmholtz, Emil du Bois-Reymond, Robert Koch, Theodor Mommsen, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, Otto von Bismarck, W. E. B. Du Bois, Arthur Schopenhauer, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Jacob Burckhardt, Walter Benjamin, Max Weber, Georg Simmel, Karl Liebknecht, Ernst Cassirer, Heinrich Heine, Ivan Turgenev, Eduard Fraenkel, Max Planck, Wernher von Braun and the Brothers Grimm.

History

Main building The main building of Humboldt-Universität is the Prinz-Heinrich-Palais (English: Prince Henry's Palace) on Unter den Linden boulevard in the historic centre of Berlin. It was erected from 1748 to 1753 for Prince Henry of Prussia, the brother of Frederick the Great, according to plans by Johann Boumann in Baroque style. In 1809, the former Royal Prussian residence was converted into a university building. Damaged during the Allied bombing in World War II, it was rebuilt from 1949 to 1962.Humboldt-Universität (in German) Landesdenkmalamt Berlin

In 1967, eight statues from the destroyed Potsdam City Palace were placed on the side wings of the university building. Currently, there is a discussion about returning the statues to the Potsdam City Palace, which was rebuilt as the Landtag of Brandenburg in 2013.

Early history

Similarly to the University of Bonn, the University of Berlin was established by King Friedrich Wilhelm III on 16 August 1809, during the period of the Prussian Reform Movement, on the initiative of the liberal Prussian philosopher and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt. The university was located in a palace constructed from 1748 to 1766 for the late Prince Henry, the younger brother of Frederick the Great. After his widow and her ninety-member staff moved out, the first unofficial lectures were given in the building in the winter of 1809. Humboldt faced great resistance to his ideas as he set up the university. He submitted his resignation to the King in April 1810, and was not present when the school opened that fall.

The first students were admitted on 6 October 1810, and the first semester started on 10 October 1810, with 256 students and 52 lecturers in faculties of law, medicine, theology and philosophy under rector Theodor Schmalz. The university celebrates 15 October 1810 as the date of its opening. In 1810, at the time of the opening, the university established the first academic chair in the field of history in the world. From 1828 to 1945, the school was named the "Royal Friedrich Wilhelm University of Berlin", in honor of its founder. Ludwig Feuerbach, then one of the students, made a comment about the university in 1826:

The university has been home to many of Germany's greatest thinkers of the past two centuries, among them subjective idealist philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, absolute idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, Romantic legal theorist Friedrich Carl von Savigny, anti-optimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, objective idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling, cultural critic Walter Benjamin, and leading physicists Albert Einstein and Max Planck.

The founders of Marxist theory Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels attended the university, as did poet Heinrich Heine, novelist Alfred Döblin, founder of structuralism Ferdinand de Saussure, German unifier Otto von Bismarck, Communist Party of Germany founder Karl Liebknecht, African American Pan-Africanist W. E. B. Du Bois, and European unifier Robert Schuman, as well as influential surgeon Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach in the early half of the 1800s.

The structure of German research-intensive universities served as a model for institutions like Johns Hopkins University. Further, it has been claimed that "the 'Humboldtian' university became a model for the rest of Europe [...] with its central principle being the union of teaching and research in the work of the individual scholar or scientist."

Enlargement

In addition to the strong anchoring of traditional subjects, such as science, law, philosophy, history, theology and medicine, the university developed to encompass numerous new scientific disciplines. Alexander von Humboldt, brother of the founder William, promoted the new learning. The construction of modern research facilities in the second half of the 19th century aided the teaching of the natural sciences. Famous researchers, such as the chemist August Wilhelm Hofmann, the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, the mathematicians Ernst Eduard Kummer, Leopold Kronecker, Karl Weierstrass, the physicians Johannes Peter Müller, Emil du Bois-Reymond, Albrecht von Graefe, Rudolf Virchow, and Robert Koch, contributed to Berlin University's scientific fame.

During this period of enlargement, the university gradually expanded to incorporate other previously separate colleges in Berlin. An example would be the Charité, the Pépinière and the Collegium Medico-chirurgicum. In 1710, King Friedrich I had built a quarantine house for Plague at the city gates, which in 1727 was rechristened by the "soldier king" Friedrich Wilhelm: "Es soll das Haus die Charité heißen" (called Charité [French for charity]). By 1829, the site became Friedrich Wilhelm University's medical campus and remained so until 1927, when the more modern University Hospital was constructed.

The university began a natural history collection in 1810, which by 1889 required a separate building and became the Museum für Naturkunde. The preexisting Tierarznei School, founded in 1790 and absorbed by the university, in 1934 formed the basis of the Veterinary Medicine Facility (Grundstock der Veterinärmedizinischen Fakultät). Also, the Landwirtschaftliche Hochschule Berlin (Agricultural University of Berlin), founded in 1881, was affiliated with the Agricultural Faculties of the university.

In August 1870, in a speech delivered on the eve of war with France, Emil du Bois-Reymond proclaimed that "the University of Berlin, quartered opposite the King's palace, is, by the deed of our foundation, the intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern (das geistige Leibregiment des Hauses Hohenzollern)."

In 1887, chancellor Otto Bismarck established the (SOS), (usually known in English as the Oriental Seminary) to prepare public servants for posting to Kamerun (later Cameroon), then part of the German colonial empire. Various Asian languages were taught there, and in 1890, there were 115 students, which belonged to various faculties, including law; philosophy, medicine and physical sciences; and theology (as part of their training to be missionaries). Teachers included (1909–1915) and Heinrich Vieter. In the 1920s to 1930s, renowned Jewish orientalist Eugen Mittwoch was director of the school, before being forced to emigrate to London after Kristallnacht in 1938.

Friedrich Wilhelm University became an emulated model of a modern university in the 19th century.Rüegg 2004, pp. 4–6

Nazi regime

After 1933, like all German universities, Friedrich Wilhelm University was impacted by the Nazi regime. The rector during this period was Eugen Fischer. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service (German "Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums") resulted in 250 Jewish professors and employees being fired from the university during 1933–1934, as well as numerous doctorates being withdrawn. Students and scholars, and other political opponents of Nazis, were ejected from the university and often deported. During this time, nearly a third of all the staff were fired by the Nazis.

It was from the university's library that some 20,000 books by "degenerates" and opponents of the regime were taken to be burned on 10 May of that year in the Opernplatz square (now called the Bebelplatz) for a demonstration that was protected by the SA and featured a speech by Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels. A monument to this tragic event called The Empty Library can now be found in the center of the square. It consists of a glass panel embedded in the pavement that looks into a large, subterranean white room with empty shelf space for 20,000 volumes, along with a plaque bearing an epigraph taken from an 1820 work by the great German-Jewish writer Heinrich Heine:

Cold War

During the Cold War, the university was located in East Berlin. It reopened in 1946 as the University of Berlin, but faced repression from the Soviet Military Administration in Germany, including the persecution of liberal and social democrat students. Almost immediately, the Soviet occupiers started persecuting non-communists and suppressing academic freedom at the university, requiring lectures to be submitted for approval by Socialist Unity Party officials, and piped Soviet propaganda into the cafeteria. This led to strong protests within the student body and faculty. NKVD secret police arrested a number of students in March 1947 as a response. The Soviet Military Tribunal in Berlin-Lichtenberg ruled the students were involved in the formation of a "resistance movement at the University of Berlin", as well as espionage, and were sentenced to 25 years of forced labor.