A Joyful Good-Bye to Wilhelm von Humboldt: The German University and the Humboldtian Ideals of “Einsamkeit and Freiheit”

Abstract

My thesis is that even at the time of Wilhelm von Humboldt’s concept of a reformed university, the German university was no longer a part of the public domain. It was becoming in a broad sense an apolitical area, sealing itself off from all influences of society There the scholar could realize his full potential in “isolation and freedom”— far beyond all politics. It is in my opinion no coincidence that the German university of the twentieth century did not prove to be the critical and functioning “institution for dealing with crisis within society” (Rothholz 1981, p. 67), for which it was funded and, what is worse, which it portrayed itself as. In 1933, the university was fertile soil for the political “Gleichschaltung”² and again in 1989 it was not the professors and students who actively helped in the implosion of the socialist regime.