Goethe University Frankfurt
Goethe University Frankfurt is a public research university located in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. It was founded in 1914 as a citizens' university, which means it was founded and funded by the wealthy and active liberal citizenry of Frankfurt. The original name in German was Universität Frankfurt am Main. In 1932, the university's name was extended in honour of one of the most famous native sons of Frankfurt, the poet, philosopher and writer/dramatist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The university currently has around 48,000 students, distributed across four major campuses within the city.
The university celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2014. The first female president of the university, Birgitta Wolff, was sworn into office in 2015, and was succeeded by Enrico Schleiff in 2021. 20 Nobel Prize winners have been affiliated with the university, including Max von Laue and Max Born. The university is also affiliated with 18 winners of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize.
Goethe University is part of the IT cluster Rhine-Main-Neckar. The Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz, the Goethe University Frankfurt and the Technische Universität Darmstadt together form the Rhine-Main-Universities.
History
The historical roots of the university can be traced back as far as 1484, when a City Council Library was established with a bequest from the patrician Ludwig von Marburg. Merged with other collections, it was renamed City Library in 1668 and became the university library in 1914. Depending on the country, the date of foundation is recorded differently. According to Anglo-American calculations, the founding date of Goethe University would be 1484. In Germany, the date on which the right to award doctorates is granted is considered the founding year of a university.The modern history of the University of Frankfurt can be dated to 28 September 1912, when the foundation contract for the "Königliche Universität zu Frankfurt am Main" was signed at the Römer, Frankfurt's town hall. Royal permission for the university was granted on 10 June 1914, and the first enrollment of students began on 16 October 1914. Members of Frankfurt's Jewish community, including the Speyer family, Wilhelm Ralph Merton, and the industrialists Leo Gans and Arthur von Weinberg donated two thirds of the foundation capital of the University of Frankfurt.
The university has been best known historically for its Institute for Social Research, the institutional home of the Frankfurt School, a preeminent 20th-century school of philosophy and social thought. Some of the well-known scholars associated with this school include Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jürgen Habermas, as well as Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Walter Benjamin. Other well-known scholars at the University of Frankfurt include the sociologist Karl Mannheim, the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, the philosophers of religion Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich, the psychologist Max Wertheimer, and the sociologist Norbert Elias.
The University of Frankfurt has at times been considered liberal, or left-leaning, and has had a reputation for Jewish and Marxist scholarship. During the Nazi period, "almost one third of its academics and many of its students were dismissed for racial and/or political reasons—more than at any other German university". The university also played a major part in the German student movement of 1968.
The university also has been influential in the natural sciences and medicine, with Nobel Prize winners including Max von Laue and Max Born, and breakthroughs such as the Stern–Gerlach experiment.
In recent years, the university has focused in particular on law, history, and economics, creating new institutes, such as the Institute for Law and Finance and the Center for Financial Studies. One of the university's ambitions is to become Germany's leading university for finance and economics, given the school's proximity to one of Europe's financial centers. In cooperation with Duke University's Fuqua School of Business, the Goethe Business School offers an MBA program. Goethe University has established an international award for research in financial economics, the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics.
Organization
The university consists of 16 faculties. Ordered by their sorting number, these are:- 01. Rechtswissenschaft
- 02. Wirtschaftswissenschaften
- 03. Gesellschaftswissenschaften
- 04. Erziehungswissenschaften
- 05. Psychologie und Sportwissenschaften
- 06. Evangelische Theologie
- 07. Katholische Theologie
- 08. Philosophie und Geschichtswissenschaften
- 09. Sprach- und Kulturwissenschaften
- 10. Neuere Philologien
- 11. Geowissenschaften/Geographie
- 12. Informatik und Mathematik
- 13. Physik
- 14. Biochemie, Chemie und Pharmazie
- 15. Biowissenschaften
- 16. Medizin
- Max Planck Institute of Biophysics
- Max Planck Institute for Brain Research
- Max Planck Institute for European Legal History
Campuses
The university is located across four campuses in Frankfurt am Main:Campus Westend
The Westend Campus is the main location with the Presidential Board based in the Presidential and Administration Building. The campus includes the I. G. Farben Building and numerous new buildings, including the House of Finance and the central lecture theatre building. In addition to the central administration, most departments, with the exception of Medicine and Natural Sciences, are or have been located here since 2001. The Language and Art Building is currently the new building on campus. This campus is of particular historical significance, as Goethe University has inherited history through the acquisition of real estate."Campus Westend" of the university is dominated by the IG Farben Building by architect Hans Poelzig, an example of the modernist New Objectivity style. The style for the IG Farben Building was originally chosen as "a symbol for the scientific and mercantile German manpower, made out of iron and stone", as the IG Farben director at the time of construction, Baron von Schnitzler, stated in his opening speech in October 1930.
After the university took over the complex in the 1990s, new buildings were added to the campus. On 30 May 2008, the House of Finance relocated to a new building designed by the architects Kleihues+Kleihues, following the style of the IG Farben Building. The upper floors of the House of Finance building have several separate offices as well as shared office space for researchers and students. The ground floor is open to the public and welcomes visitors with a spacious, naturally lit foyer that leads to lecture halls, seminar rooms, and the information center, a 24-hour reference library. The ground floor also accommodates computer rooms and a café. The floors, walls and ceiling of the foyer are decorated with a grid design that is continued throughout the entire building. The flooring is inspired by Raphael's mural, The School of Athens.
The emergence of the Federal Republic of Germany and the Basic Law can be traced back to the Frankfurter Dokumente that were handed over in the I. G. Farben Building.
Campus Bockenheim
The Bockenheim campus is the former centre of the university, which still houses various parts of the language and cultural sciences, the Department of Computer Science and Mathematics, the central building of the university library Johann Christian Senckenberg and some parts of the administration in buildings dating from the 1950s to the 1970s.Campus Riedberg
The Riedberg campus, with university buildings built from around 1970, is home to the Departments of Physics, Biochemistry, Chemistry and Pharmacy, Biosciences and Earth Sciences, the Science Garden and a lecture theatre centre with the natural sciences departmental library.Campus Niederrad
The Niederrad campus is home to the University Hospital and the Department of Medicine, with buildings and facilities that have grown historically since the 19th century as well as modern complexes.Campus Ginnheim
Campus Ginnheim is the location of the athletics grounds, multiple tennis and volleyball courts, the sports halls, and the University Sports Centre. Ginnheim also houses many of the lecture halls for classes in physical education, sport psychology, and social sciences in sport.General information
The university's relocation programme, which has been intensified since the mid-1990s, aims to create a de facto three-campus university in the future. To this end, the units currently located in the Bockenheim district are also to be relocated, but not the sports grounds.The public Botanical Garden Frankfurt am Main at the end of Siesmayerstraße, formerly associated with the biology campus, has been transferred to the City of Frankfurt am Main and the responsibility of the Palmengarten. Parts of the former Bockenheim campus, including the historic Jügelhaus, have been taken over by the Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung, while other parts have been left to local urban development. The formerly numerous other scattered university buildings in the Bockenheim district have been abandoned and partly demolished, partly put to other uses.