The University of Hamburg: Founding and Early Operations

Hamburg's parliament passed the provisional law founding the university on March 28, 1919, and an opening ceremony followed on May 10. Legislation, the ceremonial opening, and the teaching activities already under way were distinct stages. After the First World War, returning soldiers sought to begin or resume their studies, but Germany's existing universities could not accommodate all applicants. Hamburg therefore used the Colonial Institute and other institutions to offer provisional university courses.

The Prussian education authorities agreed to recognize credits from these courses, without thereby recognizing a permanent university in Hamburg. Many local students could not afford to leave immediately to study elsewhere and feared losing credits when transferring later. Senator Werner von Melle, a longstanding advocate of a university, advised students to hold a mass meeting and gather petition signatures. The founding thus both built on earlier academic development and responded to specific postwar pressures for access to education.

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Teaching space was prepared before the institution legally existed. Founded in 1907, the Hamburg Scientific Foundation originally intended to cover the university's additional costs with interest on raised capital, but fundraising fell short of initial expectations. Merchant Edmund Siemers subsequently offered to donate a lecture building to the city, subject to conditions including the provision of land in the western Moorweide and guaranteed permanent rent-free use by the foundation.

Designed by Hermann Distel and August Grubitz, the building was handed over to the city on May 13, 1911. To accommodate the Colonial Institute and additional seminar institutions, authorized construction expenditure rose from one million to 1.5 million gold marks. This was a building cost, not the university's annual budget in 1919. Combining lecture halls, seminar rooms, collections, and administrative space, the building became the university's central location from 1919.

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Article 1 of the provisional law expressly established the new university as a corporation under public law and guaranteed academic freedom in teaching and research. Until a permanent university law was enacted, it encompassed the scientific facilities and institutions participating in the winter university courses of 1919. This wording shows that founding the university initially meant placing existing teaching resources within a new legal framework, rather than creating every discipline from nothing.

The four initial faculties covered law and political sciences, medicine, philosophy, and mathematics and natural sciences. Economist Karl Rathgen became the first rector. Medicine depended particularly on Hamburg's existing hospitals, including Eppendorf General Hospital. The founding law added only two full professorships in medicine, in anatomy and pharmacology; other teaching was assigned to senior physicians in public hospitals. Ten of the initial twelve professors already held positions in the city-state's public service.

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The natural sciences similarly linked personnel and institutions. The botanical garden, observatory, and state laboratories for chemistry and physics existed before the university. After 1919, they long retained their status as independent state institutions while performing university functions through personnel links such as their directors' concurrent appointments. It would therefore be misleading to say that the university immediately absorbed every facility.

The founding law created two full professorships in mathematics for the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, along with four associate professorships covering mathematics, analytical chemistry, physical chemistry, and mineralogy and petrology. Supplementing chairs while using existing laboratories allowed comprehensive teaching to develop rapidly and created conditions for later concentrations of research. Otto Stern's physical-chemistry research in Hamburg from 1923 to 1933 arose during this continuing development of the disciplinary structure.

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Founding a university did not eliminate living-cost problems. Giles notes that although local tuition fees were low, accommodation was expensive, and many students sustained their studies by living with their parents. Early student organizations consequently emphasized welfare while also debating their place in university governance.

A student assembly adopted provisional organizational statutes on July 27, 1919, and subsequently worked toward permanent representative bodies. A proposal to give students four seats in the university senate was rejected by professors and also failed to win student support. Students instead demanded advisory committees with equal numbers of teachers and students at faculty and university levels. A student parliament existed by the winter semester of 1920–1921. These negotiations show the continuing distance between a parliament's establishment of a university and the democratization of authority within it.

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Early intellectual exchange extended beyond the university itself. The Warburg Library for Cultural Studies, with the participation of Ernst Cassirer and Erwin Panofsky, provided a meeting point for philosophy, art history, and cultural research. Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy arrived in Hamburg in 1920 and began building the Institute for Foreign Policy in 1923, promoting research on international relations and peace. Both institutions are important to understanding the city's academic networks, rather than merely entries in a university roll of honor.

This development depended on specific scholars, specialized collections, and stable cooperation, and it was vulnerable. After 1933, the exclusion and dismissal of Jewish scholars and political dissenters fractured research teams and scholarly traditions. Seen in this light, the significance of the 1919 founding lay in organizing the city's accumulated teaching, medical, and research resources into a university. That organization did not automatically ensure the continued protection of academic freedom.

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