Education: Steadfast in Berlin

Surging toward the 100-day-old barrier one combustible night last week, thousands of young West Berliners roared in unison: “The Wall must go!” Set against the doom-crying argument that West Berlin is a good place for youth to get out of, it was a notable show of spirit—and much of it came from a notably spirited school: the Free University of Berlin. When the Communists put up the Wall in August, pessimists predicted a mass exodus of students and teachers from West Berlin. In fact, the reverse has happened. When it began its winter semester this month, the Free University was jammed to overflowing with a record enrollment of 13,000. “Afraid?” says one young professor. “Of course we’re afraid, all of us. But this is Berlin, so we simply don’t show it.”

Free & Fallen. Thirteen years old next week, the Free University has grown from nothing to a solid symbol of academic liberty and the second biggest (after Munich) university in West Germany. It is the Western opposite of the fallen University of Berlin, which the Russians plucked when the Allies sliced Berlin four ways. The old university—founded in 1810 by Wilhelm von Humboldt and once among Europe’s greatest—had a history rich with the influence of Hegel, Fichte, Kant, Goethe and Leibnitz. The Nazis killed all that; the Russians buried it. The East Berlin plant survives as Humboldt University, a dreary institution with about 10,000 students. Humboldt nearly exploded during the Hungarian revolt in 1956; scores of its students and professors have vanished into East German jails, and many have been executed. Ordered to sign up for the East German army or be expelled, Humboldt’s students recently wrote to Free University students: “Help us! We are sons and daughters of one people! We do not want to shoot at you!”

Build, Build, Build. Free University was founded in 1948, when a group of Humboldt students and professors appealed to U.S. General Lucius Clay for a new school, got money and help from the U.S. and West Berlin’s late Mayor Ernst Reuter. Organized on the same day that the Berlin blockade began, Free University started out with candlelit classes in a few shoddy houses and the remains of ths-Kaiser Wilhelm Institute, its campus the city’s streets and its study halls any handy park bench.

Shaky as it seemed, the Free University thrived.* Regularly supported until 1954 by the U.S. Government, which has given $7.8 million so far, the university got more hefty aid from the Ford Foundation. Today, it has 82 buildings (17 new) in suburban Dahlem, 180 fulltime professors, top schools of law and Eastern European studies, an annual budget of $7,500,000. As their part, West Berlin taxpayers cough up 2½ times more per student than West Germans contribute to their own universities. Free University students (one-third girls) pay about $50 tuition per semester, and 30% of them have full scholarships. They are a happy lot, inclined toward U.S. jazz and blue jeans, and their main need is for more housing. Says one official: “We must build, build, build.”

Exhilarating Danger. From the beginning, the Free University has differed sharply from other German universities. Free of traditional government ties, it is self-governed by faculty and students through a university senate. Besieged in the early 1950s by unprepared foreign applicants, it pioneered among German schools in setting up entrance exams and counseling aid. It scorns such artificial excitement as dueling societies. The Free University is an island in a sea so dangerous that it exhilarates the inhabitants.

One-third of the university’s students used to come from the Soviet Zone, some of them commuting each day. When the Wall went up, about 1,000 students still lived in East Berlin. A “large number,” as one official warily puts it, have hurdled the Wall “by the most adventurous ways conceivable.” What they find is a profound change since August. “Everybody has become much more serious,” says one teacher. “The students seem to be braver, or perhaps just less nervous. The Wall has unified us.”

* West Berlin’s other top school: The Technical University (enrollment: 8,500).