Universities: Rebirth at Gottingen

“Heidelberg’s famous for wine, women and song; Göttingen’s famous for wine, women and nuclear physics,” says an American student at Germany’s most notably nuclear university. Before Hitler, George August University in Goötingen harbored some of the world’s great nuclear names—Born. Hahn, Heisenberg—and hatched a Who’s Who of U.S. science —Fermi, Compton, Teller, Oppenheimer. After the war, as one of Germany’s few relatively unbombed universities, Göttingen got quickly to work restoring its reputation, but its greatest days probably lie ahead. Last week surveyors slogged through spring mud to measure Göttingen for a mammoth expansion, at an eventual cost of $250 million, which will make the university four times as big in area as the Lower Saxony town (pop. 80,000) that gives the school its popular name.

Nine miles west of the Iron Curtain, and soberly aware of it. Göttingen is more a graduate school than a college; its 9,000 coed students study under seven faculties, from law to medicine to theology. Typical of its traditions was the 1957 “Göttingen Manifesto”—a high-level protest by 18 nuclear scientists against arming West German forces with atomic weapons. To this spirit of dissent, Göttingen adds West Germany’s best mathematics institute, its biggest university library and largest agricultural faculty. So many Afro-Asian students now go there that the town’s toy shops stock Negro dolls.

Sausages & Scholars. Göttingen’s grandeur goes back to 1736. when Hannover’s Elector George August, who also happened to be Britain’s King George II, launched the university in a hamlet then so obscure that his courtiers at first thought he meant Gothenburg in Sweden. To publicize the place. George put the school in charge of an imaginative baron named Von Münchausen—a cousin of the famous liar. By 1770 it was Germany’s most important university.

Göttingen bounced Poet Heinrich Heine, who thought more of the town’s sausages than of the university’s scholars, but welcomed Prince Otto von Bismarck, until debts drove him away. In 1787 it turned out Germany’s first female Ph.D. —sloe-eyed Dorothea Schlozer, who at 17 overpowered her examiners while decked out in roses and white muslin. By drawing a variety of young Americans, including Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Göttingen put a German academic stamp on many U.S. universities.

Schöne Jahren. Gttingen’s scientific star shone in the early 19th century under Astronomer Carl Gauss, one of the key founders of modern mathematical analysis and hence of modern physics. In the 1920s Physicists Max Born and James Franck taught on Gottingen’s Bunsenstrasse. named after Alumnus Robert Bunsen, inventor of the burner.

In those schöne jahren (beautiful years), brilliant minds and crackling chalk-talks lured young scholars like Werner Heisenberg. a future Nobelman who wandered about in lederhosen, and Italy’s Enrico Fermi, future U.S. father of the Abomb. U.S. Physicist Robert Oppenheimer, winner last week of the AEC’s Fermi Award (see PEOPLE), got his Ph.D. at Göttingen in 1927. Another Göttingen recruit: Hungary’s Edward Teller, future U.S. father of the H-bomb.

The Nazis deprived themselves of all this when they fired Physicist Born for something called “Jewish physics.” Franck quit, and others scattered. Gottingen did not remotely recover until after World War II, when it took in a wave of avid students in tattered Wehrmacht uniforms —”the best generation we ever had.” recalls one veteran professor. It also welcomed a new source of research renown: the independent Max Planck Institute for Physics, named for the late pioneer of the quantum theory, and headed by Physicist Heisenberg, discoverer of the “uncertainty principle.”* Though Heisenberg moved his staff to Munich in 1958, Göttingen remains headquarters of the Max Planck Society for the Advancement of Science—a chain of Planck research institutes all over West Germany.

Fraternity Foolery. Göttingen’s students are today sometimes less satisfying than the Wehrmacht veterans. One-third of the men belong to Korporationen (fraternities), and despite vigorous faculty disapproval, they have an irrepressible yen for Germany’s most adolescent atavism —dueling. Göttingen is also a notable Arbeitsuniversität (grind school), meaning that its relatively unprosperous students work extra-hard and pile up Teutonic tensions. Yet all is not blades and blood; the duelers are equally enamored of progressive jazz, hikes on picturesque “Stallion Hill,” and lipstickless coeds with hair the color of sunlit beer. “There are human beings among the students too,” says one hopeful official.

All the fraternity foolery may look outdated when the state of Lower Saxony finishes its prodigious revamping of Gottingen. While aiming to keep enrollment steady, the planners hope to rebuild 92% of the university. On the boards are hundreds of new buildings, including a twelve-story hospital. Science and medicine will dominate, with more than ten times the space allotted to “sciences of the spirit.” Theology gets short shrift, says one architect, because “they’ll never discover anything world-shaking.” Beams Nobel-winning Chemist Otto Hahn: “Now the university will start to grow again.”

* The disturbing discovery, based on Heisenberg’s work with electrons, that the very act of observing a phenomenon changes the nature of the phenomenon.