Wilhelm von Humboldt

The foundation of Berlin University

Plans to set up a university in Berlin had already existed since the beginning of the Prussian reform era

(See Fichte’s ‘Deduced Plan for a Higher Educational Establishment to be Set Up in Berlin’, 1807, and

Schleiermacher’s ‘Occasional Thoughts on Universities in the German Sense, with an Annex Dealing

with a New University Establishment’, 1808), but we owe their implementation to Wilhelm von

Humboldt. His university model is characterized by the unity of teaching and research. It was to be ‘a

special feature of the higher scientific establishments that they treated science as a problem which is

never completely solved and therefore engaged in constant research’ (GS, X, p. 251).

The university was also to be an establishment of general education, an alma mater that taught

all the sciences and did not concentrate on occupational training. A visit to the Hohe Karlsschule in

Stuttgart in 1789 on his return journey from Paris had already consolidated his distaste for an early

vocational orientation of education. He had not yet met Schiller who had spent seven years of torment

in that establishment when he wrote in his diary that this type of education seemed not only ‘flawed,

but altogether harmful’ to him. He wondered: ‘What bias must be the consequence of such regulated

education forced on to pupils from tender childhood to mature youth?’ (Letters, p. 98). After he took

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over responsibility for the educational department, these impressions led him to decide on the closure

of the Prussian cadet corps, another reason being the caste spirit that prevailed in it.

University education must in his view continue and complete the general education imparted in

the previous school years. University education must, however, differ from teaching in elementary and

secondary schools and have a special nature of its own. Without teachers there can be no elementary

education but their role is not central in university training: ‘The university teacher is therefore no

longer a teacher and the student no longer someone merely engaged in the learning process but a

person who undertakes his own research, while the professor directs his research and supports him in

it’ (GS, XIII, p. 261). Close contact with their teachers should enable students to undertake their own

independent scientific work.

The freedom of science and autonomy of the teaching staff are the premisses on which

Humboldt’s university model is based. From our modern vantage point, it may be thought that this

model tended to be too remote from politics, but Humboldt himself had reservations on this matter and

did not want to allow science to be misused by politics. Neither should his idea that the university must

grant ‘solitude’ to the scholar be interpreted as an attempt to lock science away in an ivory tower.

Heinrich Deiter, for many years Dean of the Pedagogical Faculty at the Humboldt University in

Berlin, refutes the idea that Humboldt’s university model is historically outmoded because of the

tendency of universities nowadays to become establishments of mass academic training with a strong

professional orientation. On the contrary, he points out that ‘Humboldt’s thinking may well be a

starting point to facilitate a more profound analysis of the problems of the university’ (Deiters, 1960,

p. 39).

Humboldt organized the foundation of Berlin University; he found the necessary resources and

a building, the former palace of Prince Heinrich, in which it is still housed today on Unter den Linden.

He himself attended lectures by the newly appointed professors and in particular those of the first

rector, Johann Gottlieb Fichte. On 10 February 1810, he wrote to Goethe: ‘Here everything proceeds

at a quiet pace which I am trying to the best of my ability to accelerate. The lectures by Wolf and

Fichte are warmly applauded, and I attend both whenever I can [...]’ (Letters, p. 638).

On either side of the entrance to the main building of Berlin University, which is now named

after Wilhelm von Humboldt, monuments to the Humboldt brothers still stand today. Each in his own

right, they represent the moral and natural sciences in nineteenth century Germany.

Wilhelm von Humboldt’s educational policy concept failed to gain general acceptance, but then

neither did the Prussian reforms associated with the names of Stein and Hardenberg, Scharnhost and

Gneisenau. Not even the reform of the grammar schools, which Humboldt saw as part of a uniform

education system, was implemented. Philological courses were separated from theological training and

a body of grammar school-teachers constituted, but the grammar school itself became an elitist

educational establishment bearing the stamp of the Prussian State. At the lower educational level,

Humboldt’s colleague Süvern did continue his efforts to enact a law on education, but following many

drafts the last attempt foundered in 1819 after the Karlsbad decisions.

A young Prussian diplomat, Varnhagen von Ense, who accompanied the Prussian Minister of

State von Hardenberg to the Vienna Congress, gives us a telling personal character portrait of

Humboldt: ‘He is inspired by elevated ideas of world education, but their effective implementation is

ruled out by the condition of our States and the world as it is today. Therefore, his qualities as a thinker

are of little use to him as a statesman’ (Letters, p. 740).

During his period as a representative of the Prussian government to the Congress of Vienna

and later at the Aachen Congress, Wilhelm von Humboldt always had in mind the interest of the

German people and was never content to pursue a strictly Prussian policy. In 1819, he was appointed

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Minister of Estates in the Prussian government, but resigned again after only a few months because he

wanted no part in the increasingly harsh persecution of ‘demagogues’ following the attack on

Kotzebue. Humboldt described the Karlsbad decisions as ‘shameful, unnational and unworthy of a

thinking people’ (quoted in Spranger, 1910, p. 38).

He went on to live mostly in Tegel near Berlin and busied himself with scientific work; only

once, in 1829, did he play any further role in public affairs as Chairman of the Commission on the

Foundation and Interior Design of the new Berlin Museum.