The Nineteenth-Century German University and German Idealism

Abstract

Ziolkowski offers two provisos to the view that the academic ideal of American universities was represented by the University of Berlin as founded by Wilhelm von Humboldt in 1810. First, that ideal was actually created at the University of Jena during the preceding two decades in lectures by Schiller, Fichte, and Schelling—lectures that inspired Humboldt: the university as an institution embodying the unity of all knowledge. Second, the ideal was fulfilled only briefly in Berlin before the university was undermined by political intrigues during the Napoleonic Wars and by the repressive measures imposed by the Metternich regime. Not until 1877 could Hermann von Helmholtz, rector of the University of Berlin, reintroduce those ideals to the German universities to which American scholars flocked.