Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Stigma and Structure in German Memory
- 2 The Languages of Republicanism and West German Political Generations
- 3 The Forty-fivers: A Generation between Fascism and Democracy
- 4 The German German: The Integrative Republicanism of Wilhelm Hennis
- 5 The Non-German German: The Redemptive Republicanism of Jürgen Habermas
- 6 Theory and Practice: Science, Technology, and the Republican University
- 7 The Crisis of the Republic, 1960–1967
- 8 1968 and Its Aftermath
- 9 The Structure of Discourse in the 1980s and 1990s
- 10 History, Multiculturalism, and the Non-German German
- 11 German Germans and the Old Nation
- 12 Political Theology and the Dissolution of the Underlying Structure
- Index
6 - Theory and Practice: Science, Technology, and the Republican University
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 August 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- 1 Stigma and Structure in German Memory
- 2 The Languages of Republicanism and West German Political Generations
- 3 The Forty-fivers: A Generation between Fascism and Democracy
- 4 The German German: The Integrative Republicanism of Wilhelm Hennis
- 5 The Non-German German: The Redemptive Republicanism of Jürgen Habermas
- 6 Theory and Practice: Science, Technology, and the Republican University
- 7 The Crisis of the Republic, 1960–1967
- 8 1968 and Its Aftermath
- 9 The Structure of Discourse in the 1980s and 1990s
- 10 History, Multiculturalism, and the Non-German German
- 11 German Germans and the Old Nation
- 12 Political Theology and the Dissolution of the Underlying Structure
- Index
Summary
“The German university is at core healthy [im Kern gesund],” declared the historian and head of the German Rektorenkonferenz (Council of University Presidents) Hermann Heimpel at the education reform conference in Bad Honnef in 1955. The Prussian minister of culture in the Weimar Republic Carl Heinrich Becker had made the same claim in 1919 after the catastrophe of the First World War. The invocation of the German university tradition at times of national trauma had obvious appeal. This tradition had produced internationally famous scientists and thinkers, and served as a model for the world until 1914. Moreover, it was a tradition whose origins lay in the celebrated Prussian revival in the early nineteenth century after Napoleonic armies had vanquished the Prussians in Jena in 1806 and divided much of the kingdom with Russia. One of the few flourishing universities of the Enlightenment, in Halle, was lost, and the king charged the diplomat Wilhelm von Humboldt with renewing education in his shattered realm. Under the sign of German idealistic philosophy, he and his colleagues, the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher and the philosopher Gottlieb Fichte, produced a model of university education that was incarnated in the Humboldt University in Berlin in 1809.
Its potency as a moral source lay in its institutionalization of a neohumanist anthropology that idealized the classical Greek vision of beauty and the unity of knowledge and culture.
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- German Intellectuals and the Nazi Past , pp. 131 - 159Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007
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