History of the University

The future beckons to us all, but only very few universities can build on a grand, century-old tradition. This stern figure from the 19th century is the Heidelberg historian Georg Gottfried Gervinus, who elaborated his visions of federalist democracy here.

The University became a veritable well-spring of new ideas and intellectual currents. Martin Luther's disputation in April 1518 made a lasting impact and his adherents among the masters and scholars soon became leading Reformationists in Southwest Germany. Notably after the Palatinate's turn to the Reformed faith, reforms in the spirit of humanism had immense influence on the intellectual climate of the day. The Heidelberg Catechism drawn up by professors from Heidelberg is famed throughout the world as the seminal document of the Reformed Church. The University represented a haven of undogmatic thinking, attracting professors and students from all over Europe.

The humanist poetess Olympia Fulvia Morata (1526-1555) from Ferrara was famed for her erudition. She spent the last year of her short life in close contact with the University of Heidelberg and lies buried in the cemetery of St. Peter's Church.

Reorientation and modernisation

But the renown bound up with the glorious flowering of humanism came to an end with the Thirty Years' War and was not to be restored until the early 19th century. In the meantime, the University had lapsed into a profound crisis, due not least to the Napoleonic wars. It owed its revival in 1803 to the advent of Prince Karl-Friedrich, then Elector and later Grand Duke of Baden. In its full title (Ruprecht-Karl University of Heidelberg), the university commemorates both its founder Ruprecht I and its later champion and political reformer.

The schoolmaster's rod is a symbol of grammar as part of the liberal arts, a central pillar of the University in the Middle Ages. This miniature is taken from the Codex Manesse, one of Heidelberg University Library's most precious manuscripts.

Heidelberg quickly developed into a productive scholarly republic. This revival ran parallel to the discovery of the city by poets, artists and intellectuals like Friedrich Hölderlin, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Joseph von Eichendorff and Robert Schumann. The circle of outstanding university scholars such as Friedrich Creuzer and Joseph Görres was joined in the early 19th century by the writers Clemens von Brentano and Achim von Arnim.

The depiction of the "High School at Heidelberg" comes from the "Cosmographia" by the geographer and Hebrew scholar Sebastian Münster (1488-1552), a professor at the University of Heidelberg from 1524 to 1527.

Heidelberg jurist Anton Justus Friedrich Thibaut was the prime mover behind the creation of a new German Civil Code, while historical and philological research also played its part in enhancing the fast-growing fame of the University. It was here that Johann Heinrich Voß produced his epoch-making translation of Homer and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel published his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline. Georg Gottfried Gervinus was a co-founder of the liberal-minded Deutsche Zeitung journal, while Heinrich Treitschke wrote his History of Germany in the crucial years prior to the establishment of the German Empire.

Surgeon Vinzenz Czerny (1842-1916) initiated the great Heidelberg tradition of cancer research (right). Today systematic attempts are made to interest young people in studying medicine while they are still at school (above).

In science and medicine Robert Wilhelm Bunsen, Hermann von Helmholtz and Gustav Robert Kirchhoff made Heidelberg a major centre of scientific research in Germany. These names have lost none of their epoch-making significance: Helmholtz was the first to investigate the physiology of sight and sound, Kirchhoff and Bunsen discovered spectral analysis. Somewhat later, Vinzenz Czerny's institute for "experimental cancer research" paved the way for the great tradition of ground-breaking cancer research still associated with Heidelberg.

Hermann von Helmholtz (1821-1894) was appointed to the chair of physiology in 1858. With chemist Robert Wilhelm Bunsen and physicist Gustav Robert Kirchhoff he was one of the legendary figures of 19th century scientific research in Heidelberg.

Embodying the life of the mind

In the early 20th century, the image of German university and student life entertained in the world at large was very much an image of Heidelberg. The name stood for the "embodiment of the life of the mind", a phrase coined by philosopher Karl Jaspers, who taught here until 1948. One of its outstanding features was a tradition of interdisciplinary dialogue cultivated in a variety of forums and other circles, chief among them the one presided over by Max Weber, the founder of the modern social sciences.

Philosopher Karl Jaspers after being forced into retirement by the National Socialists in 1937. In 1945 he joined the surgeon Karl Heinrich Bauer and other professors to mastermind a new lease of life for the University as an institution dedicated to the service of truth and humanity.

But the much-vaunted "spirit of Heidelberg" suffered an abrupt demise when the National Socialists seized power. The "leader principle" invaded civil society and like other universities Heidelberg was forced to toe the party line. Before 1933 anti-Semitism had had very little influence on the appointment of professors in Heidelberg, so the proportion of Jewish scholars and scientists teaching here was especially high. This was reflected in the aftermath by the large number of professors ousted from university life and hounded out of Germany. In 1936 the National Socialists altered the inscription above the entrance to the New University. Instead of "To the Living Spirit" it now read "To the German Spirit". At the same time they replaced the sculpture of Pallas Athene with the eagle of the Reich - a dual act of supreme symbolic significance that has lost none of its enormity to this day.

The reopening of the University after 1945 was fraught with all the birth pangs attendant upon a process of thoroughgoing internal and external renewal. Among the leading figures engineering this arduous restoration were Gustav Radbruch and Alfred Weber, who had both been divested of their professorships during the Third Reich, the theologian Martin Dibelius and the chemist Karl Freudenberg. The University finally opened its doors again in 1946. The first Rector after the War was the surgeon Karl Heinrich Bauer.