Bonn's university works out of a prince-elector's baroque palace
The University of Bonn has no single campus. Its main building is the palace of Cologne's former prince-electors, its mineral collection fills another palace, and its alumni range from Karl Marx and Friedrich Nietzsche to Konrad Adenauer and Pope Benedict XVI. Prussia's princes studied there so often it was nicknamed the Princes' University.
Its roots lie in an academy founded in 1777 by Maximilian Frederick, prince-elector of Cologne and one of Beethoven's first employers. In the spirit of the Enlightenment it admitted students regardless of denomination and won the right to award degrees in 1784, but it shut in 1798 when France occupied the left bank of the Rhine. After the Rhineland passed to Prussia, King Frederick William III founded the Rhine University on 18 October 1818, choosing Bonn over Cologne and Duisburg partly because of its nonsectarian tradition. It opened with 35 professors and schools of Catholic and Protestant theology, medicine, law and philosophy.
A constitution of 1827 followed Wilhelm von Humboldt's model of academic self-rule and unity of teaching and research. The political climate was harsher: under the Carlsbad Decrees of 1819 the poet Ernst Moritz Arndt was barred from teaching until 1840, and the institution went without an official name for years. Women could attend as guest auditors from 1896, and the university became fully coeducational in 1908.
The Nazi era gutted it. After 1933 self-government gave way to a military-style chain of command. Karl Barth, the theologian, would not swear loyalty to Hitler and was pushed out to Switzerland; Felix Hausdorff, a Jewish mathematician, lost his post in 1935 and took his own life in 1942 facing deportation; Thomas Mann lost his honorary doctorate in 1937, regaining it in 1946. Bombs fell on 18 October 1944, wrecking the palace and an estimated 180,000 books. Reopening on 17 November 1945, it faced more than 10,000 applicants for 2,500 places.
Postwar growth brought Nobel prizes to Wolfgang Paul in 1989 and Reinhard Selten three years later, and when the federal capital moved to Berlin, compensation funded new research institutes. Today Bonn holds eight Clusters of Excellence, more than any other German university, from mathematics at the Hausdorff Center to crop research, with 544 professors and 371 buildings spread across the city.
Source: University of Bonn
