I believe I can rightly claim that I have given a new impetus to education in this state and that, although I have only been in office for a year, many traces of my administration will remain. Something that is even more peculiar to me personally than anything else is the establishment of a new university here in Berlin.
Politician, educational reformer, linguist
Potsdam in the summer of 1767: Frederick II, King of Prussia and Elector of Brandenburg, is transforming the city from a garrison base into a residence: the City Palace has already been remodelled, the Old Market has been transformed into an Italian piazza, Sanssouci has been completed, now the New Palace is to follow, and there are also new developments at the address Neuer Markt 1. It was only in 1765 that the king had his nephew and crown prince Frederick William II and his wife move into the building in the typical Frederician Baroque style - that summer it was "half a building site", says Thomas Wernicke, Head of Exhibitions and Project Planning at the Brandenburg Society for Culture and History. Two floors, a mezzanine, all "relatively stately furnishings, but overall modest", says Wernicke during his tour of the rooms, of which little original remains today, most notably the steep winding oak staircase and the first floor.
Distanced relationship with parents
Wilhelm von Humboldt was born at this time and in this place - and, according to historian Wernicke, "most likely" in this house - on 22 June 1767. After his father Alexander Georg retired from the army due to injury, he was responsible for the personal affairs of Frederick William II as chamberlain from 1765 - "a high court office that was only reserved for the nobility. Alexander Georg was the central confidant," explains Wernicke.
Wilhelm's mother, the widowed Marie-Elisabeth von Holwede, née Colomb, had married him the previous year. Little is known about everyday life in the young family. What traditions and rituals were there? To what extent did his father's military background and his mother's Huguenot roots in the south of France have an impact? Did Wilhelm's half-brother Heinrich Friedrich Ludwig Ferdinand von Holwede also live here? These questions remain unanswered. What we do know, however, is that his mother was considered strict, brittle and sickly, while his father was considered cheerful and life-affirming. "It was a distant relationship with the parents, partly because Alexander Georg died early," summarises Wernicke. And: "If you like, the father brought the title - his father in turn had been raised to the nobility in 1738 - and the mother, who was wealthy through inheritance, brought the money into the marriage.
Actual childhood takes place in Tegel
William's infant years in Potsdam came to an end in 1769. The crown prince's marriage is divorced, the chamberlain loses his job and moves with his family to the estate in Tegel. In winter, they lived at J?gerstra?e 22 in Berlin, where the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities is located today. As Stefan Fr?hling and Andreas Reu? explain in their volume "The Humboldts. Lifelines of a Learned Family", the estate was originally an electoral hunting lodge from the 16th century, and the city residence is a three-hour carriage ride away. After Frederick William II became king in 1786 and moved to the city palace, the Potsdam birthplace became the seat of the Royal Academy of Engineers and later, among other things, the royal cabinet, hence the current name Kabinetthaus.
In 2017, Neuer Markt 1 houses the offices of Tourismus-Marketing Brandenburg GmbH with around 40 employees - and a memorial plaque to the left of the entrance. Wilhelm von Humboldt's actual childhood and youth took place in Tegel. His brother Alexander was born in 1769 and the two had a friendly, but not close, relationship, write Fr?hling and Reu?. Above all, they would complement each other in an almost complementary way: Wilhelm would become the educational reformer, linguist, literary and cultural scholar and diplomat, Alexander the naturalist and geographer.
Wilhelm, the "youthful intellectual aristocrat"
As Jan-Hendrik Olbertz, Professor of Educational Science at Humboldt-Universit?t, explains, the brothers were "symbiotic, a pairing that is almost unimaginable individually, even though they were not twins". Alexander repeatedly "grounded" Wilhelm and broadened Alexander's view of relevance and philosophical depth - which he could put to good use when analysing his worldwide expeditions. However, the Humboldts initially acquired their knowledge from numerous renowned tutors such as Joachim Heinrich Campe and Gottlob Johann Christian Kunth, who coordinated their private lessons in subjects such as natural law, economics, statistics and, of course, foreign languages from 1777. Also because Wilhelm spoke fluent Latin, French and Greek at the age of 13, his biographer Otto Harnack calls him a "youthful intellectual aristocrat". "As experts in their field," summarise Fr?hling and Reu?, "the Humboldt brothers also familiarised themselves with the trends of the time."
Unconventional marriage between Wilhelm and Caroline
The predominant trend in Berlin was the Enlightenment, which was promoted in literary salons and so-called virtue societies, in which Jews and women played an important and, above all, equal role in contrast to social reality. The brothers socialised here from 1785, and it was here that Wilhelm met Caroline von Dacher?den in 1788, whom he married in 1791. The two lead an unusual marriage, not only by the standards of the time: harmonious, with mutual freedoms, separated several times, not least as a long-distance relationship due to his professional stations.
What personalities came together in this constellation? "Two very self-confident people who met on an intellectual level," explains Prof Olbertz. "Their concept of life was supposed to involve more than cosy togetherness - as enlightened spirits, that wouldn't have suited them at all." Caroline and Wilhelm would have eight children, three of whom died young. At this time, after a disappointing semester at the Brandenburg University in Frankfurt - Prussian universities were still mainly used to train state and church servants - Wilhelm studied philosophy, history and ancient languages at the Georg August University in G?ttingen.
Friendship with Goethe and Schiller
According to Fr?hling and Reu?, he is cosmopolitan, curious, thirsty for knowledge and hard-working. Harnack speaks of the "interest of a young man seriously endeavouring to form his own world view". He travelled to Paris, Spain and Weimar, where he became friends with Goethe and especially Schiller. He entered the civil service as a judge and diplomat, his first professional post being that of Prussian envoy in Rome in the spring of 1803, which he observed with particular interest due to his enthusiasm for antiquity. He would later work in K?nigsberg, London and Vienna and thus become a modern European before Europe existed in today's political sense, because, according to Olbertz, "he never thought in terms of national boundaries".
Ordered back to Berlin, Wilhelm von Humboldt, as Privy State Councillor and Director of the Section for Culture and Education in the Ministry of the Interior from 1809, initiated an urgently needed, rapid and prudent reform of the Prussian education system; the humanistic grammar school, standardised school curricula and school-leaving examinations as well as the founding of Berlin University can all be traced back to him, who never attended a public school and never worked as a teacher.
According to Jan-Hendrik Olbertz, this is not a contradiction in terms. "Humboldt institutionally reproduced his own classically educated bourgeois biography, which is rather an interesting consistency." Above all, his reform was based on the idea of general and character-based self-education, because education is always self-education, "strictly speaking, you can't educate anyone, you can only create the conditions for them to do it themselves," says the educationalist.
Work edition comprises 17 volumes
Since the 1780s, Humboldt has written dozens of works, for example on politics, history, philosophy and aesthetics or translations from Greek. The edition of his works comprises 17 volumes, plus correspondence with Alexander and Caroline, the latter alone comprising seven volumes, which raises the question of which one should be read. Olbertz ponders. "It depends on what you're interested in." The founding documents of the HU are close to his heart, especially Humboldt's writings on the higher scientific institutions in Berlin.
The linguistic and philosophical texts occupy a special position, as both brothers recognised "that language and thought are inextricably linked", says the professor. "From the compositional nature of Latin, for example, you can derive disciplined and structured thinking." And understanding foreign cultures is also based on first familiarising oneself with their language. Based on this thesis, Wilhelm learnt other languages such as Basque, Hungarian and Lithuanian, and linguistically explored Hawaiian, Burmese and Japanese. This work characterised the last years of the scholar's life, which he spent from 1820 onwards at Tegeler Gut, which he had Karl Friedrich Schinkel convert into a small palace.
"Humboldt a metaphor, a principle and a mindset"
Hard hit by the death of his wife in 1829, he aged rapidly, his body showing symptoms of Parkinson's disease. On 8 April 1835, Wilhelm died in Tegel at the age of 67, as reported by Fr?hling and Reuss in the presence of his brother. What remains with regard to the university is above all a myth. "It is astonishing," Olbertz states, "that the noble ideals of the unity of teaching and research or education through science cannot be found at all in his writings in this choice of words - but they can be inferred, the texts provide them intellectually." The Humboldtian university idea, as we understand it today, is largely borrowed from the history of reception - "and in this respect an invention, albeit with a high degree of factuality in its effect".
The historical person and their work are thus deliberately exaggerated. Why is this narrative being perpetuated? Olbertz: "Because Humboldt is like an incubator for the ongoing development of ideas, and that is extremely productive." He is a metaphor, a principle, a way of thinking, and the fact that this university is allowed to bear the brothers' names is a "huge stroke of luck".
// Text: Michael Thiele
