Humboldt University of Berlin

• 1. Introduction

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  Humboldt University of Berlin stands on the Unter den Linden boulevard in the historic heart of a city that has witnessed more than two centuries of revolution, war, division, and reunion. On the 6th of October 1810, the first students walked through the doors of a palace that had been home to Prince Henry of Prussia, brother of Frederick the Great. There were 256 of them, alongside 52 lecturers, studying law, medicine, theology, and philosophy. What they were entering was not just a new institution but a new idea of what a university could be. That idea would ripple outward to reshape higher education across Europe and the Western world. The questions worth asking are how a single university produced so many minds that changed the shape of modern knowledge, how it survived Nazi terror and Cold War division, and how the institution founded by a man who resigned in frustration before its doors even opened became one of the most influential places of learning in history.

• 2. A New Idea of the University

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  Wilhelm von Humboldt, a liberal Prussian philosopher and linguist, pushed King Friedrich Wilhelm III to found the University of Berlin on the 16th of August 1809, during the period of the Prussian Reform Movement. His central principle was the union of teaching and research in the work of the individual scholar or scientist. That sounds obvious today, but before Humboldt, universities largely transmitted established knowledge rather than generating new knowledge. Humboldt faced fierce resistance to his vision. He submitted his resignation to the King in April 1810 and was not present when the school opened that fall. The structure of German research-intensive universities he helped conceive went on to serve as a model for institutions like Johns Hopkins University. A student named Ludwig Feuerbach observed the atmosphere in 1826: "There is no question here of drinking, duelling and pleasant communal outings; in no other university can you find such a passion for work, such an interest for things that are not petty student intrigues, such an inclination for the sciences, such calm and such silence." Feuerbach called it "a temple of work" and said other universities appeared by comparison like public houses. One concrete expression of Humboldt's priorities came at the very moment of opening: in 1810, the university established the first academic chair in the field of history anywhere in the world.

• 3. A Gathering of Giants

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  Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels attended the university, as did poet Heinrich Heine, novelist Alfred Doblin, and Ferdinand de Saussure, founder of structuralism. Otto von Bismarck studied there, as did Karl Liebknecht, who founded the Communist Party of Germany, and Robert Schuman, who later became a European unifier. W. E. B. Du Bois, the African American Pan-Africanist, passed through its halls, alongside Arthur Schopenhauer, G. W. F. Hegel, and Walter Benjamin. Albert Einstein and Max Planck worked there as professors. The university counts 57 Nobel Prize laureates among its past and present faculty and alumni, the most of any German university. The physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, the physicians Johannes Peter Muller, Emil du Bois-Reymond, Rudolf Virchow, and Robert Koch all contributed to the institution's scientific reputation during its period of expansion. Alexander von Humboldt, brother of the founder Wilhelm, actively promoted the new learning as research facilities were constructed in the second half of the 19th century. In August 1870, Emil du Bois-Reymond delivered a speech on the eve of war with France and described the University of Berlin as "the intellectual bodyguard of the House of Hohenzollern." The university was by then regarded as the world's preeminent institution for the natural sciences.

• 4. Books Burned at Bebelplatz

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  On the 10th of May 1933, some 20,000 books taken from the university's library were carried to the Opernplatz square, now called Bebelplatz, and burned in a demonstration protected by the SA. Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels delivered a speech at the event. The rector of the university during the Nazi period was Eugen Fischer. The Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service resulted in 250 Jewish professors and employees being fired from the university in the years 1933-1934, and numerous doctoral degrees were withdrawn. Students, scholars, and political opponents of the Nazis were ejected and often deported. By the end of this purge, nearly one third of all staff had been removed. A monument now stands at the center of Bebelplatz: a glass panel embedded in the pavement reveals a large subterranean white room with empty shelf space for 20,000 volumes. A plaque carries an epigraph from an 1820 work by Heinrich Heine, the same poet who once studied at the university: "Das war ein Vorspiel nur, dort wo man Bucher verbrennt, verbrennt man am Ende auch Menschen." Translated: "This was but a prelude; where they burn books, they ultimately burn people." The Oriental Seminary, which chancellor Otto Bismarck had established in 1887 to train colonial administrators, also suffered. Its director in the 1920s-1930s, renowned Jewish orientalist Eugen Mittwoch, was forced to emigrate to London after Kristallnacht in 1938.

• 5. Divided by the Cold War

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  When the university reopened in 1946, it found itself on the eastern side of a divided city. Soviet occupiers required that lectures be submitted in advance for approval by Socialist Unity Party officials, and piped Soviet propaganda into the cafeteria. NKVD secret police arrested a number of students in March 1947. The Soviet Military Tribunal in Berlin-Lichtenberg ruled those students guilty of forming a resistance movement and engaging in espionage; they were sentenced to 25 years of forced labor. Between 1945 and 1948-18 other students and teachers were arrested or abducted, some taken to the Soviet Union and executed. The response was the establishment of the Freie Universitat Berlin in West Berlin in 1948, with support from the United States. The name "Free University" was a direct ideological counter to what the western community saw as the unfree communist-controlled institution to the east. Because the university's historical name carried monarchic associations, university leaders navigated a negotiation with Soviet authorities who preferred naming it after a communist leader. The outcome, announced in 1949, was a compromise: the school would be called the Humboldt-Universitat zu Berlin, honoring both Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt, names that carried prestige in the West and controversy for neither side.

• 6. Reunification and Rebuilding

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  After German reunification, Humboldt University underwent a radical restructuring overseen by West German professors appointed to the Structure and Appointment Commissions. In departments of social sciences and humanities, existing contracts were terminated and positions opened to new candidates, primarily from West Germany. The East German system had supported a much larger share of permanent assistant professors and lecturers; after reunification, those positions were abolished or converted to temporary posts. By 1998, only 10% of mid-level academics at the university still held a position. The institution's research connections with Eastern European institutions were maintained through the transition. Today the university enrolls students across three campuses: Campus Mitte at the historic Unter den Linden main building, Campus Nord near Berlin Hauptbahnhof where the life sciences and the Charite medical center are located, and Campus Adlershof in the south-east, home to the natural sciences, computer science, and mathematics. In 2014, student enrollment stood at 36,986, including more than 4,662 foreign students. The Jacob und Wilhelm Grimm-Zentrum library, named for the Brothers Grimm who were themselves alumni and faculty, opened in 2009, and the university's total library holdings run to about 6.5 million volumes.