Education: How to Kill a University

“The victory cannot be far,” sang the somber chorus. “The world then becomes a Red star.” The tumid cantata swelled across the famed campus; Communist Germany’s goat-bearded Party Boss Walter Ulbricht smiled. It was the 550th anniversary of his home-town university, and what he had done to it made him proud. Since 1953, Leipzig University has been called Karl-Marx University, “model of the socialist type of university.” Last week Leipzig, which took six centuries to build, was a model of how to kill a great institution in six years.

Founded in 1409 by Germans who felt themselves discriminated against at Prague’s Charles University, Leipzig became Germany’s fourth oldest university (after Heidelberg, Cologne and the now-defunct Erfurt). It survived the struggle between Catholicism and the Reformation (Martin Luther had a memorable disputation there with Johann Eck in 1519). By the 18th century it was sternly Protestant in name and happily tolerant in fact. Student Johann Wolfgang Goethe spent much of his time impressing girls in local wine cellars, called the place “Little Paris.” “It was a delightfully individualistic school,” recalls a West German professor who studied there in the early 1930s, when it boasted many a towering scholar. “We studied hard. We enjoyed Leipzig and its charms—the wonderful Gewandhaus orchestra, the Friday night Bach concerts in the Thomaskirche and the fine restaurants.

Coal and Foxholes. Today the ancient school, which the Nazis corrupted and the Allies bombed, is a moral as well as a physical ruin. Across the burned-out front of its baroque main building (on Karl Marx-Square) are red banners blazing dubious slogans. Sample: “Friendship with the Soviet Union insures peace, protects freedom and provides a better life for all.” For 185 teachers and 13,800 students, contrast with the vibrant past is painful. Leipzig is the largest East German University—and the saddest. It is an outright Communist trade school.

Except for physical sciences, headed by Nuclear Physicist Gustav Hertz, almost every Leipzig department has been destroyed academically. Compulsory courses (Marxism, Russian) help to keep a student in school as long as 13 hours a day. Homework is often an evening spent proselytizing citizens about Marxism. “Vacation” is an assignment in the coal mines or harvesting crops. While prune-faced female lecturers drone on about the miracles of collectivization, the student “sport” society dutifully digs foxholes and practices with carbines. As paid employees of the state, students have little trouble passing as long as they remain politically reliable. The school must fulfill its “production plan” and turn out so many graduates per year. Every graduate must pledge to work in whatever job the state assigns.

Go West. Protest is unlikely; Big Brother is watching through a network of one informer for every 20 students. But escape is fashionable: in the last 19 months “model” Leipzig lost 108 teachers and more than 700 students who fled to West Germany. “You get to a certain point,” says one girl refugee. “Then you can’t stand the constant ‘You must! You must!’ any longer.”

Last week the rectors of West Germany’s universities, which still recognize East German degrees, gave notice that soon they may give up. Sternly, the rectors rejected invitations to join Leipzig’s birthday celebration, which to them seemed only a wake. Leipzig’s rector, a complaisant agriculturist named Georg Mayer who took over in 1948, seemed undismayed by the widening gap between his institution and those of West Germany. Further widening, said he as Party Boss Ulbricht beamed, “is an objective necessity.”