Unter den Linden 6
Tel. 20930
Subway: Friedrichstrasse
Bus: 100, 200, 348
Originally the former royal palace that houses
Humboldt University (Humboldt Universitat) was designated as a
private residence for Prince Heinrich of Prussia, the brother of
Frederick the Great. It was erected in 1753 and in 1810 university
was found here upon initiative of Wilhelm von Humboldt (brother of
famous naturalist Alexander Humboldt). Originally it was known as a
Berlin University, but in 1949 it was renamed as a Humboldt
University.
Today it is the second largest university in
Berlin and has its headquarters in the palace of Prince Heinrich on
the street Unter den Linden in Berlin-Mitte.
The HU Berlin is
one of the 20 largest universities in Germany and is regarded as a
world-renowned university, which, among other things, trained 29
Nobel laureates.
The Humboldt University was included in the
third funding line within the framework of the Excellence Initiative
of the Federal Government and Länder, making it one of the so-called
elite universities in Germany.
Founded as Friedrich Wilhelm University in 1809
The university was
founded on August 16, 1809 by King Friedrich Wilhelm III on the
initiative of the liberal Prussian education politician Wilhelm von
Humboldt. Founded in the course of the Prussian reforms and began
operating in 1810 as the University of Berlin (Latin: Alma Mater
Berolinensis). From 1828 to 1945 it bore the name
Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin in honor of its founder. The
founding of the Berlin University was intended to replace the Friedrichs
University in Halle, which Napoleon had ordered to be abolished after
the victory over Prussia in 1806.[9] Significant impulses for the
founding of the university came from important scientists of the time,
above all from the philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte, who also became
rector of the University of Berlin in 1811/12, and the theologian
Friedrich Schleiermacher.
Under the impression of
Schleiermacher's reform ideas, the diplomat and linguist Wilhelm von
Humboldt developed his university concept (Humboldt's ideal of
education). From February 1809 Humboldt was head of the section for
culture and education in the Ministry of the Interior for a year. His
primary goal was to introduce a new educational system in Prussia. The
main pillars of his concept were the close connection between research
and teaching, free science for its own sake and personality formation.
As early as August 16, 1809, the foundation deed was ceremoniously drawn
up in Königsberg.
Among the first professors appointed by Wilhelm
von Humboldt were August Boeckh (philology), Albrecht Thaer
(agriculture), Friedrich Carl von Savigny (law), Christoph Wilhelm
Hufeland (medicine) and Carl Ritter (geography). They supported
Humboldt's concept. According to the scholar and statesman, the pursuit
of science requires that academies, universities and relatively
independent research institutions be brought together. Humboldt's
concepts, such as the memorandum "On the internal and external
organization of the higher scientific institutions in Berlin", which
only became famous later, influenced the idea of the modern university.
At that time the university did not have its own building, many
scientists came from the dissolved University of Halle or were just at
the beginning of their careers. The modern ideal of education was
initially not able to develop its full potential. "Above all, it was not
a break with the traditions of other universities."
Everything
that was suitable for the education of the students was attached to the
university or could be used by the students. She was given the palace of
Prince Heinrich, which had been built in Dorotheenstadt from 1748 to
1766 and had not been used since the death of Princess Heinrich the
previous year (1808). Rebuilt several times and extended by additions
between 1913 and 1920, it is the main building of the university and has
officially belonged to Unter den Linden since 1937. The king also
granted the new university an annual subsidy of 57,000 thalers.
After Theodor von Schmalz had been appointed as the first rector on
September 28, 1810 and the first students had enrolled on October 6,
1810 official teaching could begin on October 10, 1810. In the winter
semester of 1810/11, the Alma Mater Berolinensis had a teaching staff of
54 lecturers, five language teachers and 458 enrolled students. The
subjects were divided into the faculties of law, medicine, philosophy
and theology. At that time, the natural sciences were part of the
philosophical faculty, so that the doctoral students for the Dr. phil.
(not Dr. rer. nat.) The fact that the university was able to develop its
effectiveness so quickly was also due to the fact that scientific life
in Berlin did not have to be built from scratch. The Royal Library,
founded in 1661 by the Great Elector and which achieved great
importance, and the Charité, founded by Friedrich I in 1710 and expanded
in 1785, already existed. The Royal Academy of Sciences in Berlin,
although not a university, already held the undisputed leadership of
intellectual life in the Prussian state.
The wars of liberation
from 1813 to 1815 also had an impact on the university. When it was
founded, Humboldt had already designated it as a "castle and bulwark and
a place of arms for resistance against Napoleon". In 1813, while Berlin
was still under French occupation, lists of volunteers were already in
the Senate room and both teachers and students flocked to arms,
especially to the Lützower Freikorps. The remaining professors were
trained at home in the Landsturm. In 1813 only 15 lectures were given to
28 students. Something similar happened in 1815 during the Seventh
Coalition. In 1818 the fraternity was formed, later called the Berlin
fraternity. Since 1821 all student corporations were forbidden at the
Berlin university.
Nevertheless, the Berlin University prospered,
had become the most visited university in Germany in 1830 with a
teaching staff of 121 lecturers and 1100 students and had surpassed the
much older large universities of Munich, Leipzig and Vienna. The
government of Friedrich Wilhelm IV brought further support for teaching
materials and institutions. After Friedrich Eichhorn took over the
Ministry of Education in 1840, the pressure from the persecution of
national liberal scientists decreased in the following years and the
Grimm brothers, the lawyers Puchta, Gneist and Beseler, the physicians
Langenbeck, Virchow, Graefe and du Boys-Reymond were appointed , as well
as the historians Ranke, Treitschke and Mommsen.
In 1838 the
Corps Marchia Berlin was reconstituted, in the same year the Neoborussia
was founded, in 1842 the Normannia and in 1845 the Guestphalia.
Nevertheless, in Berlin, more than at other German universities, the
free student body, which wanted a “contemporary” reform of student life
and an abolition of corporate forms, flourished.
The
revolutionary year 1848 caused a tremendous excitement in the student
body. A student corps of 400 to 700 men formed under the leadership of
Professor Hecker and was part of the armed Berlin militia. Already in
the winter semester 1848/49 the armed students disappeared and the
earlier conditions returned.
Extensions 1821
In addition to
the strong anchoring of traditional subjects such as classical studies,
law, philology and history, medicine and theology, the Berlin University
has developed into a pioneer for numerous new scientific disciplines.
She owed this in particular to the support of the natural scientist
Alexander von Humboldt, brother of the founder Wilhelm. In 1821, Georg
Ludwig Hartig set up a chair in forestry at the university, which later
became the Eberswalde Forestry College. Construction of the most modern
research and teaching facilities for the natural sciences began around
1850. Famous researchers, such as the chemist August Wilhelm von
Hofmann, the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz, the mathematicians Ernst
Eduard Kummer, Leopold Kronecker, Karl Weierstraß, the physicians
Johannes Peter Müller, Albrecht von Graefe, Rudolf Virchow and Robert
Koch, carried the scientific fame of the Berlin University across
national borders.
As the university expanded, other facilities
already in the city were gradually incorporated. Examples of this are
the Charité, the Pépinière and the Collegium medico-chirurgicum. The
Collegium medico-chirurgicum was dissolved in 1809, the library was
taken over by the Pépinière, and the medical and surgical university
clinic was established in 1810, first in two apartments at
Friedrichstraße 101, until after several moves in 1818 a building
complex built as a lead sugar and starch factory at Ziegelstraße 5/ 6
was acquired. The maternity hospital was established in 1816 on
Oranienburger Strasse and was the forerunner of the first university
women's clinic that opened in 1882 on Artilleriestrasse
(Tucholskystrasse since 1951). In 1829 the medical faculty of the
university moved into this location, and it was not until 1927 that the
surgical university clinic was the last clinic to be relocated to the
Charité.
The number of students had risen to 2,155 in the winter
semester of 1870/71, and that of lecturers to 168. At the turn of the
century, there were 350 lecturers and almost 4,500 students, plus about
300 members of the Kaiser Wilhelm Academy for military medical
education.
A separate building was erected in 1889 for the
natural history collections that have belonged to the university since
1810, today's Museum of Natural History. A veterinary school that had
existed since 1790 formed the basis of the veterinary medical faculty in
1934, and the Berlin Agricultural College, founded in 1881, was
affiliated with the university as the agricultural faculty.
Women
at the University 1908
The liberal social reformer of the German
women's movement Alice Salomon was one of the few women who were allowed
to study at the beginning of the 20th century. For decades, dedicated
women fought to be able to take part in scientific life. However, it was
not until 1908 that women in Prussia were granted the right to
matriculate. Of the four faculties, the philosophical faculty had the
largest number of female students. Even before the right to matriculate,
there were female students at Berlin University, but only as doctoral
students with special permission. The physicist Elsa Neumann was the
first woman to receive her doctorate in 1899.
The first woman to
be appointed a professor in Berlin was the microbiologist Lydia
Rabinowitsch-Kempner, who was awarded the title in 1912. However, she
did not get a job at the university. In 1926, Lise Meitner was the first
female physicist to be appointed associate professor at a Prussian
university. For other talented scientists, such as the Jewish historian
Hedwig Hintze, the academic path ended after 1933 with the withdrawal of
their license to teach and emigration. In 1947, Liselotte Richter went
down in the annals of the university as the first German female
professor of philosophy and theology. Between 1919 and 1945, Berlin
University was the German university with the most female lecturers.
National Socialism 1933
With the seizure of power by the National
Socialists, the defamation of Jewish scientists and students began at
Berlin University. Lectures by Jewish lecturers were boycotted and
listeners physically attacked. Politically unpopular lecturers were
persecuted. University students and lecturers took part in the book
burning on May 10, 1933.
After the seizure of power, the National
Socialists expelled 280 members of the teaching staff. This corresponded
to a layoff rate of 35%. More than 90% of the dismissals were for
anti-Semitic reasons. Other scientists preferred to leave Berlin
University voluntarily. Many students, including some non-Jewish, also
left their former alma mater, once considered the home of humanistic
thought, forever. Numerous doctoral degrees were revoked.
The
expulsion and murder of Jewish scholars and students, as well as
political opponents of National Socialism, did serious damage to the
university and intellectual life in Germany. Resistance from the
university remained rather rare.
Reestablishment and division in 1945
Shortly after the end of
hostilities, on May 20, 1945, there was a first meeting of professors
regarding the steps necessary to reopen the university, in which the
newly formed Berlin magistrate and the Soviet military administration
were involved. Above all, the preparatory group had to solve the
question of spatial accommodation, since all university buildings were
badly damaged. As part of the denazification process, the Allied
military administration demanded that no people actively involved in
National Socialist organizations be admitted to the university. A budget
also had to be drawn up, provisional curricula, new university
regulations and a timetable for reopening. Although the university was
initially under four-power control, in September 1945 the Soviet
Military Administration (SMAD) declared itself unilaterally responsible
for controlling the university in the Soviet sector and subordinated it
to the East Zone German Central Administration for Public Education
(DVV) it had created. The university was reopened on January 29, 1946.
Teaching was initially resumed in seven faculties in buildings that
were partly destroyed in the war. Many teachers were dead, missing or
could not be taken on due to their involvement in National Socialism.
The first post-war semester began with 2,800 students. But as early as
the winter semester of 1946, an economics and a pedagogical faculty were
opened.
The East-West conflict in post-war Germany led to
increasing communist influence on the university. This was not without
controversy and resulted in strong protests within the student body and
from parts of the teaching staff. The first complaints from students
were heard as early as May 1, 1946, when the emblem of the SED was
attached to the main building of the university and red flags were hung
there. One response to this was, among other things, the arrest of
several students by the Soviet secret police MWD in March 1947. The
sentences of the Soviet military tribunal were each 25 years of forced
labor. As a result, at the end of 1947, demands for a “free” university
were made. 18 other students and lecturers were arrested by 1948. Some
university members were sentenced to death by Red Army military
tribunals and executed.
A particular point of criticism at the
Berlin University was the admissions procedure for studies, at least
since 1946: in the job interviews, questions were asked about political
views, applicants from the working class and members of communist
organizations were apparently given preference, and middle-class and
SED-critical students were excluded. The university was accused of
becoming an “SED party university”. In 1948, opposition students
demanded a free university, which was founded in the American sector in
Dahlem with support primarily from the USA, the newspaper Der
Tagesspiegel and the governing mayor Ernst Reuter. As they understood
it, the students thus preserved Humboldt's ideal of freedom in teaching
and research. The decades-long division of the city into East Berlin and
West Berlin cemented the split into two independent universities.
Humboldt University 1949
Between 1946 and 1949 the university was
called – as in the early years up to 1828 – Berliner Universität or
Universität Berlin. In 1949 it was given the name Humboldt University of
Berlin. The main building, which was partly destroyed in the war, had
been reconstructed by then. Course content, course of study and research
conditions were based on the political foundations of the GDR, which was
founded in 1949. In 1960 the university seal, which is still largely
valid today, was established with the characteristic double portrait of
the brothers Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt.
With the
beginning relaxation of tension in Europe in the mid-1970s, the Humboldt
University was able to reestablish international connections in some
scientific areas and strengthen them through worldwide cooperation. The
long-standing and intensive research and exchange relationships with
universities in Central and Eastern Europe, especially with institutions
in the Soviet Union, should be emphasized. During this time there was
intensive cooperation with universities in Japan and the USA, as well as
with developing countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America.
Up
until 1990, almost 150,000 students were educated at Humboldt
University, the largest university in the GDR. Internationally
recognized researchers taught at the university. Many were able to
maintain their place in academia after reunification.
Renewal and
elite status in 1990
The renewal after German reunification resulted
in a significant change in personnel. From 1989 to 1994, almost 3,000
scientists left the university sector, partly for reasons of age, mostly
for political, technical or structural reasons. In particular, as a
result of Wilhelm Krelle's efforts, 170 people working in the Economics
Section lost their jobs. The student body became more critical in the
course of this opening, so UnAufgeoft, the independent student newspaper
of the HU, was founded in 1989.
The Humboldt University gave
itself a new scientific structure: research and teaching content was
evaluated, changed and redefined. In 1990, Heinrich Fink was elected
freely appointed rector of the HUB for the first time.
Since
German reunification, Berlin has had four universities trying to
coordinate their curricula. Traditional courses of study were
restructured as part of the study reform and the range of courses was
placed on a modern and internationally comparable basis and research was
realigned and strengthened.
The renovation enabled Humboldt
University to regain its reputation and attractiveness in research and
teaching. This development is also documented by the considerable
funding from the German Research Foundation, which flows to the Humboldt
University and is considered an indicator of scientific success. Close
contacts and cooperation with business strengthen the anchoring of the
university in society.
Since 1994, the university has eleven
faculties and several interdisciplinary centers and central institutes.
With over 300 properties in Berlin and Brandenburg, it is one of the
most important location factors in the region. In 1992/1993, 20,425
people studied at the university. In 2004/2005 there were 40,828
students (including the Charité). Since then, almost all courses have
been subject to admission restrictions. Also because of the attractive
location in the cultural metropolis of Berlin for young people, a total
of 25,750 high school graduates applied for only 3,455 university places
in 2007. 5791 (14.1 percent) foreign students from more than 100
countries studied and researched at Humboldt University.
bureau
The Presidential Board of Humboldt-Universität consists of
the President Julia von Blumenthal, who assumed this office on October
1, 2022, the Vice President for Teaching and Studies (VPL) Niels
Pinkwart, the Vice President for Research (VPF) Christoph Schneider and
the Vice President for Budget, Human Resources and Technology (VPH)
Niels Helle-Meyer.
faculties
Since April 2014, the Humboldt
University has been divided into nine faculties, each of which includes
several institutes. There are also various central and interdisciplinary
institutions.
Law Faculty
Faculty of Life Sciences
Institute of
Biology
Albrecht Daniel Thaer Institute for Agricultural and
Horticultural Sciences
Institute of Psychology
Faculty of
Mathematics and Natural Sciences
Institute of Chemistry
Institute
of Physics
Geographic Institute
Institute for Computer Science
Institute of Mathematics
Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin (joint
medical faculty of Freie Universität Berlin and HU)
Faculty of
Philosophy
Institute of Philosophy
Institute for Historical
Studies
Library and Information Science
Institute for European
Ethnology
Faculty of Linguistics and Literature
Institute for
German Literature
German language and linguistics
Northern Europe
Institute
Institute for Romance Studies
Institute for Slavic
Studies
Institute of English and American Studies
Institute for
Classical Philology
Faculty of Cultural, Social and Educational
Sciences
Institute of Archeology
Institute for Asian and African
Studies
Institute for Cultural Studies
Institute for Art and
Visual History
Institute for Musicology and Media Studies
Institute for Social Sciences
Gender Studies/ZtG
Institute for
Educational Sciences
Institute for Rehabilitation Sciences
Institute for Sports Science
Quality development in education
Berlin Institute for Empirical Integration and Migration Research
Faculty of Theology
Old Testament Seminary
New Testament Seminary
Church History Seminar
Seminar on Systematic Theology
Seminar in
Practical Theology
Seminar for religious studies, missiology and
ecumenics
Institute for Christianity and Antiquity
Institute for
Church and Judaism
Institute for Sociology of Religion and Church
Building
(The Institutes for Islamic and Catholic Theology are
central institutes)
Faculty of Business and Economics
Interdisciplinary centers and institutions
Center for Biophysics and
Bioinformatics
Humboldt ProMINT College
August Boeckh Antiquity
Center
College Mathematics Physics Berlin
Interdisciplinary center
for educational research
Border Crossings—Crossing Borders. Berlin
Center for Transnational Border Research
Interdisciplinary Center for
Computational Neuroscience
Georg Simmel Center for Metropolitan
Research
Central facilities
Computer and media service
Humboldt Graduate School
college sports
university library
Language Center (UNIcert)
Central institutes
Professional
School of Education
UK center
Hermann von Helmholtz Center for
Cultural Techniques (HZK)
Berlin Institute for Islamic Theology (BIT)
Central Institute for Catholic Theology (IKT)