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. In 1967, eight statues from the destroyed
Potsdam City Palace were placed on the side wings of the university building. Currently there is discussion about returning the statues to the Potsdam City Palace, which was rebuilt as the
Landtag of Brandenburg in 2013.
Early history in front of the main building by artist Paul Otto 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. 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 famous 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 outside Humboldt-Universität (
Reinhold Begas, 1883) 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. , 1900) 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. Friedrich Wilhelm University became an emulated model of a modern university in the 19th century.
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 one third of all of 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. From 1945 to 1948, 18 other students and teachers were arrested or abducted, many missing for weeks, and some were taken to the
Soviet Union and executed. Many of the students targeted by Soviet persecution were active in the liberal or social democratic resistance against the Soviet-imposed communist dictatorship. The German communist party had long regarded the social democrats as their main enemies, dating back to the early days of the Weimar Republic. During the
Berlin Blockade, the
Freie Universität Berlin was established as a de facto western successor in
West Berlin in 1948, with support from the United States, and retaining traditions and faculty members of the old Friedrich Wilhelm University. The name of the Free University refers to West Berlin's perceived status as part of the Western "
free world", in contrast to the "unfree" Communist world in general and the "unfree" communist-controlled university in
East Berlin in particular.
Modern Germany (shown here photographed in 2005) is one of the largest natural history museums in the world. Founded alongside the University of Berlin in 1810 it left the Humboldt University in 2009.After the
German reunification, the university was radically restructured under the Structure and Appointment Commissions, which were presided over by West German professors. For departments on social sciences and humanities, the faculty was subjected to a "liquidation" process, in which contracts of employees were terminated and positions were made open to new academics, mainly West Germans. Older professors were offered early retirement. The East German higher education system included a much larger number of permanent assistant professors, lecturers and other middle level academic positions. After reunification, these positions were abolished or converted to temporary posts for consistency with the West German system. As a result, only 10% of the mid-level academics in Humboldt-Universität still had a position in 1998. Through the transformations, the university's research and exchange links with Eastern European institutions were maintained and stabilized. Today, Humboldt University is a state university with a large number of students (36,986 in 2014, among them more than 4,662 foreign students) after the model of West German universities, and like its counterpart the
Freie Universität Berlin. The university consists of three different campuses, namely Campus Mitte, Campus Nord and Campus Adlershof. Its main building is located in the centre of Berlin at the boulevard
Unter den Linden and is the heart of Campus Mitte. The building was erected on order by King
Frederick II for his younger brother
Prince Henry of Prussia. All the institutes of humanities are located around the main building together with the Department of Law and the Department of Business and Economics. Campus Nord is located north of the main building close to
Berlin Hauptbahnhof and is the home of the life science departments including the university medical center
Charité. The natural sciences, together with computer science and mathematics, are located at Campus Adlershof in the south-east of Berlin. Furthermore, the university continues its tradition of a book sale at the university gates facing Bebelplatz. ==Organization==