A journey upriver from Worms to Heidelberg

Between the time the first Nobel Prize was awarded in 1901 and 1933, a total of 31 were awarded to German scientists and politicians. To name just a few, Wilhelm Röntgen (1901), Max Planck (1918), Albert Einstein (1921) and Werner Heisenberg (1932) for Physics, Emil Fischer (1902), Fritz Haber (1918), Walther Nernst (1920) and Hans Fischer (1930) for chemistry, Emil von Behring (1901), Robert Koch (1905) and Otto Warburg (1931) for medicine, Theodor Mommsen (1902), Gerhart Hauptmann (1912) and Thomas Mann (1929) for literature and Gustav Stresemann for peace. The UK and France received 17 and 15 respectively, whilst the US picked up just 6 during that same period.

How could German universities rise to such dominance during the 19^th and early 20^th century from very humble beginnings? That is what we will look at in this episode.

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Transcript

Hello and welcome to the History of the Germans: Episode 190 – A (very) brief History of the German Universities, which is also episode 6 of season 10: The Empire in the 15^th Century.

Between the time the first Nobel Prize was awarded in 1901 and 1933, a total of 31 were awarded to German scientists and politicians. To name just a few, Wilhelm Röntgen (1901), Max Planck (1918), Albert Einstein (1921) and Werner Heisenberg (1932) for Physics, Emil Fischer (1902), Fritz Haber (1918), Walther Nernst (1920) and Hans Fischer (1930) for chemistry, Emil von Behring (1901), Robert Koch (1905) and Otto Warburg (1931) for medicine, Theodor Mommsen (1902), Gerhart Hauptmann (1912) and Thomas Mann (1929) for literature and Gustav Stresemann for peace. The UK and France received 17 and 15 respectively, whilst the US picked up just 6 during that same period.

How could German universities rise to such dominance during the 19^th and early 20^th century from very humble beginnings? That is what we will look at in this episode.

But before we start, let me say that this is likely to be an episode that may ruffle some feathers. That is not intentional, I had planned this episode long before the events of last week (we are recording this on April 16^th, 2025). But it is one of the privileges of running a patron-sponsored podcast to be able to say whatever I believe to be factually correct, and for that I am extremely grateful to all of you, even if I cannot mention you all today. But I can mention Brock H., Mato Stun, Maurice S., Ian P., Edouard L., Daniel S, Colin B. and Martin L. who have committed to support the show on historyofthegermans.com/support.

And with that, back to the show

Last week we strolled through Heidelberg on our way to the Schloss and the history of the Counts Palatine on the Rhine. Just by the way, today someone kindly pointed out that the correct English term is Count Palatine not count palatinate. But then it is Elector Palatinate. Go figure, and thanks Peter K. for letting me know.

And on our way to the Schloss of the Count Palatine we passed the university square, and I promised to dive deeper into the history of German universities. I must say, I am not exactly regretting this, but I have to admit that I might have bitten off a bit more than I can chew.

To give you an idea, the most recent work on the topic, Peter Watson’s German Genius is a mere 850 pages excl. notes and references. The key reference book is “The history of the European University” edited by Hilde de Ridder-Symoens and Walter Ruegg, which comes in 4 volumes, each at 800 pages. Literally too heavy for me to take home from the ever-impressive London Library, let alone read it. And then I am aware that some of you work in academia and are much closer to the subject than I am.

We have only 40 minutes to cover all this, which means I will rush over important events, miss out crucial incidents and personalities and remorselessly simplify. And for that I beg your forgiveness. We will almost certainly come across Melanchthon, the brothers Grimm, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Winckelmann, Helmholtz, Ranke and all the others again and they will get the space on the show that they deserve. What I want to achieve here is to provide a story arch we can go back to later.

Enough on the preliminaries.

The first German university was founded in 1386 in Heidelberg by Ruprecht, at the time Elector Palatinate and later King of the Romans. Well, not exactly.

The university of Prague, as we know, had been founded in 1348 and there the German-speaking nations had the majority, so arguably the first German university opened there. And then there was the university of Erfurt that received its charter in 1379, 7 years before Heidelberg. But actual teaching started only in 1392. Vienna was even earlier in 1365, but that is Austria, so it does not count, or does it.

All these squabbles over which one is the oldest university is not only nitpicky but emanate the whiff of relegation battles. Because whether it was 1348, 1365, 1379 or 1386, it was shockingly late.

By that time the universities of Bologna, Paris and Oxford were already 300 years in operation. And by the time Heidelberg was founded, there were already 39 other universities in Europe, not just in Italy, France and England but also in Serbia, Spain, Portugal, Poland, Hungary and Albania.

Does that mean the German lands were an intellectual backwater. Not necessarily. Whilst there were no universities in the High Middle Ages, the monasteries and episcopal schools attracted eminent scholars, including Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas. We did hear about the great Franciscan intellectuals, William of Ockham, Marsilius of Padua and Michael of Cesena who lived and worked in Munich. (episode 151 if you are interested).

Part of the reason that it took so long for a university to be established in the German lands was that Paris and Italy weren’t that far away. And as anyone knows who attended university, degrees have a lot in common with luxury handbags. The label matters a lot more than the content. Therefore, opening a university in a mid-sized German town made no sense as long as students could go to Paris or Bologna and come back to a hero’s welcome.

So, why did we suddenly see a whole wave of university foundations in the late 14^th, early 15^th century, Heidelberg 1386, Cologne 1388, Erfurt 1392, Leipzig 1409, Rostock 1419, Greifswald 1457, Basel in 1460, Ingolstadt/Munich 1472, Trier in 1473, Tubingen 1477, Wittenberg 1502 and Frankfurt an der Oder in 1506.

One important factor was the Great Western Schism. Heidelberg’s first rector came from the university of Paris where the debates over ways to resolve the schism had shifted from the scholarly to the political. Moreover, France stuck with the Avignon popes whilst the empire in the main looked to the Roman pontiff. Professors and students who were either convinced one way or the other, or who were looking for careers at the princely courts needed alternatives to Paris, creating an opening for new universities.

Many had gone to Prague, lured by the size of the great city and its splendid court. But when in 1409 the Bohemians, including our friend Jan Hus agitated for the reorganization of the university, breaking the monopoly of the German speakers, many of the leading lights of Karl IV’s great creation left for Heidelberg, Leipzig, Erfurt or Cologne.

Despite these supportive events, these new schools could not stand alone. Which brings in one distinctive feature of German universities, they are in the main funded by the state.

The very first university, the one in Bologna, that received its charter from Frederick Barbarossa in 1158 had been a self-sufficient community of teachers and students.  The lecturers had established their own organization, usually with a rector, supported by deans of the faculties and the senate as the rule-making body. The whole structure was funded by the students, who often paid separately for each lecture.

These new universities could not attract enough students to pay for the lecturers. That is where the state came in. State in this context would be the local prince in the case of Heidelberg, Tubingen or Freiburg, or the city, in the case of Cologne, Leipzig and Erfurt.

Funding usually involved taking a monastery and giving the benefices of the monks to the lecturers. Hence a professor at the university in Tubingen would receive an income from the monastery of Sindelfingen that covered his expenses. And where did these monasteries come from? One case involves Mechthild of the Palatinate, granddaughter of the founder of Heidelberg University. She had a thing about higher learning and convinced her husband, Albrecht von Habsburg, to found the university in Freiburg. 20 years later she leant on her son, Eberhard im Barte, the duke of Württemberg, to found the university of Tübingen. One of her strongest arguments was that she would cover the costs, i.e., hand over the benefices of monasteries she controlled to pay the professors. Mechthild is therefore arguably godmother to two of Southern Germany’s most eminent universities. Do I need to mention that the official name of Freiburg University is Albrecht-Ludwigs Universität and the Tübingen one is named after Eberhard and Karl, no Mechthilds anywhere.

Despite being state funded, the universities nevertheless enjoyed far reaching autonomy in their organization and legal status. Like the medieval universities of Paris and Bologna, there were a senate, deans and a rector. The university was outside the jurisdiction of the city, same as in Oxford. When you come to Heidelberg and you do the full tourist tour, you will be shown the Karzer, the university prison, where unruly students were held at the Rector Magnificus pleasure, rather than in a police cell. This was presumably not something the princes and cities did voluntarily, but something they had to do in order to attract lecturers.

And why would these princes and Burgermeisters bear undergraduates spewing snakebite at the freshly painted walls of their palaces and town halls? One part is certainly bragging rights, but as we have seen last week with Friedrich der Siegreiche, the graduates, the law graduates in particular were extremely useful as civil servants, administrating outlying areas, organizing tax collection or swerving as ambassadors to other courts. Up until then this job had been done by clergymen who tended to blab to their bishop or archbishop. Having their own lawyers gave the temporal authorities the upper hand over the church.

To be a university, a studium generale, these new German universities had to be approved by the papacy. That in turn meant they had to follow a unified curriculum established by the church and applied all throughout Christendom.

Students would arrive very young, often just 15 or 16. They would spend the first two years learning the basics of what was called the trivium, i.e., grammar, rhetoric and logic, essentially learning to communicate in Latin. This was followed by an examination that awarded the title of bachelor. The next several years were dedicated to the Quadrivium, which comprised arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy, though it could also often include ethics, metaphysics, and philosophy. If one managed to pass this exam, one was advanced to the title of magister artium, a Master of Arts. Only then would the student be invited into the higher faculties, namely theology, law and medicine. Medicine was always the smallest faculty; theology was the most prestigious and law the most practical. The title awarded to a magister who passed this course was the title of doctor.

And because this curriculum was the same across the medieval universities, people could move between universities and previous examinations would be mutually recognized. Someone like Ulrich von Hutten, the 16^th century poet and knight, moved between Cologne, Erfurt, Frankfurt an der Oder, Greifswald, Wittenberg, Rostock, Vienna, Pavia and Bologna as he was completing his studies. This may sound bewildering for Anglo-Saxons, but switching universities is not unusual in the German system, in fact it is often regarded as de rigeur. So, I studied in Freiburg, Münster and Kiel, my father in Würzburg, Bonn, Münster and Tübingen, my grandmother in Freiburg, Danzig, Innsbruck and somewhere else I cannot remember exactly.

Back in the 15^th century, a university was first and foremost a vehicle to disseminate knowledge. And that knowledge was derived from authorities, from Aristotle, the commentators like Averroes, the church fathers, St. Augustine, St. Jerome, St. Ambrose and Gregory the Great and the great scholastics, Thomas Aquinas, Abaelard, Albertis Magnus. That does not mean that there was no debate. In fact, it was the exact opposite. A medieval university was built on debate. The disputation was at its core. These were almost gladiatorial fights between two scholars over a set topic, each fiercely defending their case. A bit like the Oxford debating society today.

But where the medieval university differed was in the weighing of arguments. Being able to reference an authority, ideally the Holy Scripture itself would in principle override factual evidence. I say – in principle – because there were medieval scholars, Albertus Magnus and the members of the court of Frederick II who engaged in experimentation and observation of nature. Just look at Frederick II’s book on falconry (episode 84 if you are interested). But when it came to examinations and progression inside the university, these skills were not regarded as important. The point of it was to be able to argue points of theology or law with reference to established truths, not to discover new truths.

As you can imagine, these new universities in the German lands had a bit of a slow start. They were new, the greatest lecturers and most admired theologians were teaching elsewhere. So, these were what the brits call red brick universities, places where you get a solid degree, but not a label you wear on your t-shirt 20 years after leaving. Sometimes the prince had to ban his subjects from going to universities abroad to fill the places.

That changed fundamentally with the reformation. Students from all over europe flocked to Wittenberg to hear Martin Luther speak. And not only students, but some of the great minds of the time wanted to be there too. Most famous amongst them is Philipp Melanchthon. Melanchthon would teach in Wittenberg until his death in 1560. In this time, he reformed the system of education in much of Germany. He helped setting up secondary schools where students were to learn Latin, not by rote, but by speaking and formulating their own sentences. He invented forms, i.e., separated students by their level of attainment, meaning one could only move from one level to the next by achieving certain academic milestones. For our German listeners, he invented sitzenbleiben.

At the university he replaced the medieval church Latin with classic Latin and Greek, opened up the rigid curriculum of trivium and quadrivium and placed more and more emphasis on philosophy, including natural sciences. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the Reformation, which correlated with a lot of ideas he already had before Luther made his public.

Melanchthon, the Praeceptor Germaniae, Germany’s teacher was not only the high point of the early history of German universities, but also its end point. When he died in 1560, the movement to reform the church that Luther had kicked off had turned into permanent religious divisions. Universities became separated by confession. Where the local ruler was catholic, they became catholic universities, where he was protestant, they became either Lutheran or Calvinist. Many more schools were established, but Melanchthon’s push towards openness and natural sciences was forgotten and the organizations atrophied. There was no exchange of scholars between these confessional blocks. And even within the blocks mobility dwindled. Universities became local places of higher learning. In Heidelberg and elsewhere whole dynasties emerged where the professorship was passed from father to son. Students became more and more of a nuisance, the curriculum was simplified and rigidly tied to whichever was the prevailing religious orthodoxy. Examinations were lax and university degrees were no longer seen as a ticket to higher office.

This decline of the university may have been more severe in Germany due to the confessional fragmentation of the country, the minuscule size of some of these universities and the economic devastation following the 30-years war as well as the near incessant conflicts that followed. But it was something that happened all throughout europe. Universities simply weren’t where progress was happening. But progress did happen in the 17^th, 18^th and 19^th century, in particular in France and England.

In France king Louis XIII and his chief minister, the cardinal Richelieu had established the Academie Francaise in 1635 to protect and preserve the French language. Over the next 50 years a number of Academies were established looking after painting and sculpture, dance, literature, humanities in general, opera, architecture and of course science.  These were established deliberately as research institutes. For instance, the Academy of Sciences publishes an annual document showcasing its latest discoveries. Being a member of an academy is and was a great honor that comes with a generous salary and a lot freedom to pursue enquiries in their respective field. Famous members include d’Alembert, Laplace, Lavoisier and Condorcet.

In England, intellectual and scientific progress happened outside the universities too. The Royal Society of London for Improving Natural Knowledge, otherwise known as the Royal Society, was founded in 1660. Other than the French Academies, this was a private initiative endorsed by a royal warrant but not controlled by the government. It is here that people like Isaac Newton, Hans Sloane, Charles Babbage, Sir Joseph Banks, Stephen Maturin, Michael Faraday, Charles Darwin, Lord Kelvin, Joseph Lister and so forth presented their ideas and published their research,

The German princely courts copied the academy model along French lines. For instance, the Preussische Academie der Wissenschaften was founded in 1700. Bavaria had one since 1759 and the Leopoldina, founded in 1652 in Schweinfurt and today the German Academy of the Sciences can claim to be the oldest continuously operating academy of science in the world.

Then and now these academies and societies are fantastic organizations, its members are often awe-inspiring scholars and researchers. But they also have their flaws.

Take the Royal Society and the list of eminent scholars I just recited. Many of them had to fund their research themselves. The Royal Society did not have the means to support actual research. That meant most of these men were independently wealthy. For instance, Charles Darwin’s voyage on the Beagle was funded by his father and his cousin Josiah Wedgwood II. Many made their living as country parsons, like William Stukeley who rescued Stonehenge and the chemist Joseph Priestly, who discovered oxygen.

The French Academicians did not have that problem. Academicians receive a generous salary and support for their research. But on the flipside, there are only very few of them. The French Academy of Sciences had always less than a 100 members, and it did not help that members were appointed for life, leaving young researchers high and dry.

But the really fundamental flaw was that to become a member of an Academie or a Royal Society, one had to already be a highly recognized scholar. What about all these 19-year-olds with dreams of great discoveries, where were they supposed to learn the methods and techniques of research?

That is where the German university model came in.

But I am jumping ahead.

The story starts with the foundation of four new universities, Halle in 1694, Breslau in 1702, Goettingen in 1737 and Erlangen in 1743. Why on god’s wide earth would anyone open up another university in Germany in the 18^th century? There were already 50 of them around and some, like Rostock with barely 500 and Paderborn, a shocking 45 students. Moreover, these last 100 years tertiary education had migrated from universities to Ritterakademien, knightly High Schools where the sons of minor aristocrats were trained in practical things like fencing, riding, mathematics, military tactics, law, administration and French conversation. Sensible stuff, useful for managing an absolutists state.

Still, a man I honesty have never heard of before, Gerlach Adolph von Münchhausen. No, not that Munchausen, another one. He was a lawyer who had made his career in the service of the Elector of Hannover. Well educated people that you all are, you will know that since 1714 the Elector of Hannover was also the king of England, Scotland and Ireland.

So Gerlach von Munchhausen rose up through the ranks and when King George II ascended both the English and the Hannover thrones, he found himself elevated into the Inner council, effectively the government of Hannover. He would later rise to be prime minister of the Electorate.

Munchhausen had studied in Halle and Utrecht before going on a Grand Tour to gain the polish necessary for a career as a courtier. When he came back, he was convinced that Germany deserved better. He lobbied Georg II and the estates of Hannover to let him open a university. But not one like the atrophied husks that were littering the academic landscape, but a new model.

One where theology was no longer the most desirable and most influential faculty. In particular he removed the right of censorship the theologians enjoyed in most German universities at the time. He expanded the faculty of philosophy to include the laws of nature, physics, politics, natural history, pure and applied mathematics, history, geography, art and modern languages. To make his new establishment at Göttingen even more attractive for ambitious young man keen to make their way in the world, university education included fencing, dancing, drawing, riding, music and French conversation.

He insisted that instead of conveying static knowledge, the purpose of study was to equip students with taste, judgement and intellect. I love the aspiration, in particular the idea of teaching 19-year-olds taste.

But Munhchausen, who did chair the university of Goettingen for 40 years did not just pronounce lofty aspirations. He also developed the vehicle to facilitate this change, the seminar. The seminar, as opposed to a lecture and a disputation, was a more intimate, smaller setting. Moreover, it did away with the Aristotelian, scholastic idea that there was one right way to think about something. Up until then universities taught students that they could understand and resolve any question if they only applied the correct logical sequence of arguments.

In Göttingen, they did away with that. Instead, they encouraged students to come up with new ideas, and new approaches to questions and to experiment. The role of the professor became to encourage and guide the student’s thinking rather than make him regurgitate a “correct” answer. Seminars quickly developed their own processes and structures. Students were asked to send in their essays a week beforehand, giving the lecturer and the other students time to come up with questions and challenges. Essays in the seminars were graded not on regurgitating the existing orthodoxy, but were rewarded for novelty, for breaking new ground. Outstanding contributions were rewarded with prizes and then published. Publications were reviewed and criticized by scholars at other universities. From that developed scientific journals overseen and edited by eminent researchers. And finally emerged the PhD that was more than an erudite reflection of all existing knowledge on a subject, but contained a thesis, a piece of research that led to a hypothesis.

And as we progress through time, more and more of that concept of a unified Aristotelian logic crumbled into dust. Different subjects required different approaches, different techniques and their unique way of presenting and debating results. As a consequence, the university faculties began to separate out into their specializations.

Whilst Göttingen flourished and many of Münchhausen’s ideas spread around the other German universities, to arrive at a new system of higher learning that would sweep the world, one more push was needed.

And that push came from the all towering figure of the 19^th century, Napoleon Bonaparte. Thomas Nipperdey opened his magistral history of 19^th century Germany with the words “And at the beginning there was Napoleon”.

The catastrophic defeat at Jena-Auerstedt and the subsequent rearranging of the German lands to suit French Imperial requirements had a profoundly shocking effect on all aspects of German life.  And it opened the way for reforms that had been otherwise unthinkable.

And one of these was the reform of education, associated with the name of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Humboldt himself had never attended university but had become an accomplished linguist. He was also the brother of the explorer Alexander von Humboldt, he of the famous penguins

Wilhem von Humboldt was asked in 1809 to put together a fundamental reform of the Prussian education system. The defeat had shown that the existing system of knightly academies and military schools had failed to produce the kind of abilities required to defeat a revolutionary army.

At the heart of Humboldt’s concept lay the understanding that the world is constantly changing. Hence to be successful, be it as a carpenter or as philosopher, one needs not just the technical knowledge but also the ability to learn new things and adapt. He said that students should learn how to learn.

Further he believed that to be able to learn how to learn, one needed to have a certain degree of freedom, freedom to choose what to learn and from whom.

He devised the German education system that in much adapted form still exists today. And to understand it, one has to start at the top, the university level.

Humboldt, with support from King Friedrich Wilhelm III, founded the university of Berlin, today called the Humboldt university in his and his brother’s honour. As one would expect for a new establishment in the capital, he brought in all the greatest academics in Prussia. He even plundered the state academies and Prussia’s leading university at the time, the university of Halle.

And then he lets the academics shape the new university. These men, Fichte, Schelling, Schleiermacher and lots more had grown up in the system of seminars, of rating new ideas over ancient authorities.

And so, they flipped the script. The faculties that had held sway over the medieval university, Theology, Law and Medicine were relegated, to be on par with Philosophy. Philosophy, which included the natural sciences, philology, politics, physics, mathematics etc. were all subjects where the mind could roam free, experiment, develop new ideas and approaches unfettered from ancient authorities. Law and Theology on the other hand were subjects that dealt with ancient texts and authorities. They were Brotstudien, degrees that led to employment as vicars, surgeons, lawyers, judges and civil servants, whilst philosophy boldly goes where no man has gone before.

And this distinction is still in place. The degrees in Law, Theology and Medicine are awarded not by the university, but by the state. They are seen closer to vocational qualifications than true academic degrees. Which may also explain the relative leniency when it comes to awarding PhDs like the rather embarrassing slim tome that bears my name and is covering dust in the library of congress.

But pure research – unconnected to practical use – happened only in the philosophical faculty where PhD’s take years and years to complete, followed by the Habilitation, the German speciality of a second PhD that awards the right to teach as a full professor.

But despite the emphasis on research, Humboldt and his advisers are aware that this new university cannot be just another academy of science, that it needs to teach young men and later on women as well.

The question is now what to teach the students. If the ethos of the German university was to seek new knowledge, rather than disseminate old knowledge, how can that be reflected in teaching. The concept they came up with was Lehrfreiheit, which means the freedom to teach. Rather than delivering pre-determined content as had been the case in the past, the professor could choose to teach on topics that he was particularly interested in. And guess what, the things professors are most interested in are the things they are researching at the time. Students were hence not only given access to the very latest in academic research during lectures, but through the seminars they were also involved in testing and challenging the lecturer’s thesis whilst developing their own ideas.

The risk that comes with Lehrfreiheit, is that it grants the professors the right to drone on and on about whatever takes their fancy, boring their students to death. To avoid that, and hence to balance out Lehrfreiheit, the academic freedom to teach, they granted the students Lernfreiheit, i.e, the academic freedom to choose their lecturers. That meant the professor who set up a 12-part lecture series about his research into the nocturnal habits of the Hypogeomys Antimena, the Malagasy giant jumping rat, might find himself confronted with empty benches and pitying looks from his colleagues. And therefore, next term he may discover his inner David Attenborough to fill the auditorium.

Ok, that sounds great. The perfect power balance between academics wanting to teach something they like and students forcing content they want to hear about. But granting such a degree of freedom to students could also backfire. I can think of scenarios where literally no students would show up for lectures at all, even if they are interesting. For this system to work we need students that display a certain degree of maturity and have prior knowledge to be able to follow a lecture on the frontier of contemporary science. So, students needed to already have a grounding in a range of subjects before they show up at Uni and must have learned to learn.

Which is where the Gymnasium comes in. In Humboldt’s concept the Gymnasium was the place where the student gains the hard knowledge required to follow the lectures and develops the ability and desire to learn, to become a scholar. It is these two things the Gymnasium is to foster, curiosity and understanding.

If that is the objective than the teacher at the gymnasium has to be more than a disseminator of knowledge, but someone who can convey the basic techniques needed to develop a thesis, to test it and to defend it. And hence a teacher must have attended university himself to be able to impart these skills. Hence Humboldt established the requirement for schoolteachers to have a university degree and to have passed a state examination. That was in 1809, the UK introduced the graduate teacher requirement in 1972.

One thing Humboldt did not need to introduce was compulsory schooling, that had already happened in Prussia in 1763. Both Girls and Boys were supposed to go to school from age 5 to 13. And Prussia was by no means the first of the princely states in the empire to do that. The tiny principality of Pfalz-Zweibrücken, can claim to be the very first place in the world to introduce compulsory schooling for boys and girls in 1592. The UK waited until 1880 to make sure everybody in the country could read and write, whilst the US states introduced it between 1852 and 1918.

The next important point to make is that schools, gymnasium and university were state funded, meaning access to them was and by and large still is free. That created a huge funnel for talent. During the 19^th century, more children of underprivileged backgrounds were able to go to school, to Gymnasium and to university than in any other country in Europe.

And there were a lot more universities. Germany had about fifty in 1809, whilst England had two. Students had a choice, and because they had a choice, universities began to compete ferociously, by having the best libraries, laboratories, range of faculties, research output, eminent academics, scientific journals etc. That brought in the lecturers and students, who should the university administrators drop the ball, could move to another university halfway through their degrees without losing pace.

And it wasn’t that each state had its own elite university, Prussia for example had Berlin, Halle and then built out Breslau and created the huge university of Bonn from scratch. All of these competed then with Goettingen, Munich, Heidelberg, Freiburg, Tübingen and so forth and so forth.

Ok, now let me put on my banker’s hat. Where does all the money come from? This is expensive.

Sure, King Friedrich Wilhem III supported Humboldt and saw his project as a crucial stepping stone to rebuild Prussia. But he did not live forever, Napoleon disappeared to St. Helena, but the University revolution kept motoring along at ever higher revs.

Part of it was certainly its success. In 1892 the eminent French historian and educator Ferdinand Lot wrote quote; “The scientific leadership of Germany in all fields without exception is now acknowledged by all nations. It is a settled fact that Germany alone produces more than all the rest of the world put together; her supremacy in science forms the pendant to England’s supremacy in commerce and on the sea; and it is perhaps even greater.” End quote.

But it also spoke to German culture in the 19^th century. I think many nations have an aspirational avatar, a sort of personality they would like to be seen as. The most clearly discernible avatar is the English gentleman. If you have seen the first Kingsman film, you may remember Colin Firth playing the ultimate English gentleman. His catchphrase is “manners maketh man”. In the film he takes a young man, Eggsy, from a lower-class background and of modest education and turns him into a gentleman, a male sort of Eliza Doolittle story. And what makes Eggsy into a gentleman is not just the exquisitely tailored suits and upgrade in table manners, but the moral fibre, physical strength, and willingness to self-sacrifice for the greater good.

The German ideal, in particular in the 19^th century is “der gebildete Mensch”, someone who has Bildung. And Bildung is not just education in the sense of knowing lots of stuff, but being able to truly appreciate art, architecture, music, to constantly strive to improve oneself through reading philosophy and high literature aiming for a higher moral plane.

Where the gentleman is all about the interaction with the outside world, which explains the prevalence of team sports and debating in the traditional English education, Bildung is very much internal. It is not about improving society through action but about elevating the individual which then makes the world a better place. Bildung is such a vast subject that we will almost certainly get back to it at some point, most likely the point when I have found a way to better express it than I have just done.

But for the purposes of explaining why Germans were happy to see so much of their taxes being spent on education, Bildung is not a bad place to start. In the same way that British middle class families cough up tens of thousands of pounds in the hope the private school education would turn their kids into true gentlemen and ladies, 19^th century Germans saw their universities and general education system as a manifestation of their culture, giving Bildung to their children.

The German education system reached its high point just before the first World War. It was copied all over the world and today’s universities that combine research and teaching, that invention of Humboldt became the standard from Cape Town to Tromso and from Tokyo to CalTech.

Today, the German education system is however no longer the envy of the world. The place that “produces more than all the rest of the world put together” is the United States. Reasons are many, but one was seminal.

In the first two years the Nazis were in power, 1,600 scholars, about 32% of the total of 5,000 university teachers were dismissed. That rose to 39% after the Anschluss of Austria.

In 1936 the University of Heidelberg was 550 years old. At the celebrations Philipp Lenard, Nobel prize winner and party members since before 1933, unveiled Aryan Physics, which was set against Jewish Physics, the latter being marked by excessive theorising and relying on abstract mathematical constructions, like the theory of relativity.

By then Albert Einstein who had been a professor in Berlin and director of the Kaiser Wilhelm institute for Physics, today the Max Planck institute, had already fled to the United States. I initially wanted to recite a list of the most eminent German emigrees to the US that Peter Watson had put together, but it is too long and does not work well in a podcast format. If I have time later on, I will write it up and add it to the show notes.

That is now almost to the day 80 years ago. Sure, Aryan physics have long ago collapsed under its own weight – that is actual physic. And German scientists are again winning Nobel prizes (109 since 1945) and make important breakthroughs, like the mRNA based Covid vaccine. But it took Germany decades to climb out of the hole the wanton destruction of its’ universities has dug. Because a university is not just libraries, laboratories, faculties and journals. It is the people, the passing on, not just of knowledge, but of the joy of learning, the encouragement that a good teacher can bring. The common saying is that most great discoveries are made by people standing on the shoulders of giants, but the more appropriate metaphor is that they are holding the baton in an eternal relay race where every runner has made gains and passed them on to the next, encouraged by those who have run before and encouraging those that will run after them.  Once the baton has been dropped it takes a very long time before that team comes back into contention.

When I went to university, there were hardly any foreign students felt attracted to come there. By 1998/99 that had improved to 9.2% foreigners, i.e. people without German passport, and that number has now risen to 16.4%, which is very reassuring, but still a long way from the UK, where 30% of the student body has come from abroad to get an education they presumably do not get at home.

In March 1945, the US 44^th infantry division received orders to shell the city of Heidelberg in order to dislodge German forces.  The artillery commander, Brigadier general William A. Beiderlinden and his commanding officer major general William F. Dean took the decision to spare the city if they could. They contacted the city mayor, Dr. Karl Neinhaus, who, at significant risk for his own life, negotiated the withdrawal of the German troops in exchange for sparing them the bombardment.

When I lived in Heidelberg the story was that Beiderlinden and Dean had studied in Heidelberg, but that is not accurate. But still the name of the city and the fame of its university was so far reaching even amongst Americans who had not studied there, that they defied an explicit order to avoid its destruction.

That is it, our run through of the history of the German universities. Even though this is the longest episode to date, it is also the one that left me with more questions than answers. Next week we are back to our usual fare and continue the trip, going up the Rhine to Freiburg, cross the Black Forest and then turn north again to Tubingen and Stuttgart. I hope you will join us again.

And in the meantime, if you are so inclined, check out historyofthegermans.com/support to lend the show a hand.