Wilhelm von Humboldt quit before his Berlin university even opened its doors
Wilhelm von Humboldt designed a university that fused teaching with research, an idea later copied across Europe and by Johns Hopkins. Yet opposition to his plans was so fierce that he resigned in April 1810 and missed the opening that October. The school now carries his name and his brother's.
King Friedrich Wilhelm III founded the University of Berlin on 16 August 1809, during the Prussian reform era, at the urging of Humboldt along with the philosophers Fichte and Schleiermacher. It moved into a Baroque palace on Unter den Linden built for Prince Henry, Frederick the Great's younger brother; unofficial lectures started there in winter 1809 once his widow and her ninety servants had left. Teaching formally started on 10 October 1810, when 52 lecturers faced 256 students in law, medicine, theology and philosophy. That year it created the world's first academic chair in history.
Students noticed the difference. In 1826 Ludwig Feuerbach wrote that nobody there drank, duelled or went on jolly outings, and that beside this temple of work other universities looked like pubs. The school, renamed for its royal founder in 1828, absorbed Berlin's older medical institutions, including the Charité, originally a plague quarantine house of 1710. Its natural history collection, begun in 1810, outgrew the university and became the Museum für Naturkunde by 1889. Hegel, Schopenhauer, Helmholtz, Virchow, Koch, Planck and Einstein all taught there, and students included Marx, Bismarck and W. E. B. Du Bois. It counts 57 Nobel laureates, more than any other German university.
The Nazi years brought ruin. Between 1933 and 1934 some 250 Jewish professors and employees were dismissed, and nearly a third of all staff lost their posts. On 10 May 1933 about 20,000 books from its library were burned on the square opposite. A memorial there now shows an underground white room of empty shelves with space for 20,000 volumes, beside a line from Heine warning that burning books leads in the end to burning people.
After the war the university sat in the Soviet sector. Communist control over lectures provoked protests, some students received 25-year labour sentences in 1947, and the Free University opened in West Berlin as a rival. In 1949 the eastern school took the name of Wilhelm and his naturalist brother Alexander. It now enrols around 35,000 students.
Source: Humboldt University of Berlin
