The Kingdom of Saxony and Its University

At the time Kolbe was called to the University of Leipzig, Saxony was a prosperous kingdom of 2.4 million inhabitants. Of all the German states, it had by far the highest population density and had industrialized the earliest. Exactly half the population was engaged in industrial occupations of various kinds (compared to forty-one percent in the Rhineland, its nearest competitor, and seventeen percent in Prussia), especially in textiles, coal, iron, nonferrous mining, and heavy machinery.^[1] Nowhere else in the German Confederation could be found such a concentration of industrialized cities as the likes of Leipzig, Dresden, Chemnitz, and Zwickau.

The country had come a long way during the previous two generations. At the beginning of the century, Saxony had been the last German state to turn against Napoleon, a policy that cost a good deal of its territory at the Congress of Vienna. As happened in many of the other German states during the Vormärz, the insurrections of 1830 ended a particularly reactionary period and resulted in a liberalized constitution the following year, along with emancipation of the serfs. The ensuing decades saw agricultural reforms and a gradual liberalization of the state, punctuated by the revolution of 1848-1849.

Economically, Saxony greatly benefited from entry in 1834 into the Prussian customs unions, tightly interconnected as she was with the surrounding much larger state of Prussia. Guided by the economic out-

look of Friedrich List, the Saxon state built the first railroad line in Germany, between Dresden, Leipzig, and Magdeburg (1837-1840).^[2] Thereafter, Saxony developed its railroad system more aggressively than any other German state, and this assisted the accelerating process of industrialization. King Johann (reigned 1854-1873), a Dante scholar and the most learned of all the nineteenth-century German princes, guided his country toward further liberalization and economic modernization, a process that continued to be encouraged by his successor, Albert. Johann's prime minister tilted increasingly toward Austria, and Saxony was its ally in the Austro-Prussian war. After Königgrätz, Prussia compelled Saxony to join the North German Confederation, but without engendering any significant anti-Prussian sentiment. The kingdom became a pliant member state of the German Empire in 1871.

A leading role in interior affairs was taken by Paul yon Falkenstein (1801-1882), a member of an old aristocratic family.^[3] As minister in charge of the Leipzig district during the late 1830s, it was Falkenstein who championed the first railroad. About the same time, he also succeeded in having the eminent legal scholar Wilhelm Albrecht called to the university, despite his sovereign's disapproval of this member of the "radical" Göttingen Seven group. For two decades following 1851, Falkenstein as Minister of Culture worked with remarkable effectiveness to raise the status of the University of Leipzig from a provincial to a nationally and even internationally respected institution.

Since its founding in the year 1409, the University of Leipzig had been one of the premier universities of Germany—the largest of them all during most of the seventeenth century, enrolling as many as sixteen percent of all German students.^[4] However, during the Vormärz Leipzig was overtaken not only by the urban institutions at Berlin, Breslau, and Munich but also by Bonn as Well. When Falkenstein became director of the Saxon ministry of culture ("Königliches Ministerium des Cultus und öffentlichen Unterrichts"), Leipzig University had reached its nadir, an enrollment of only 800 or about seven percent of German students (still far larger than the universities of most Klein-staaten such as Kurhessen). Falkenstein's efforts produced an improvement in the university's fortunes that can only be described as spectacular. In 1865 there were a thousand students; six years later two thousand were enrolled, and by 1873 almost three thousand. During the mid- and late 1870s, Leipzig had half again as many students as its closest rival, Berlin, and one of every six German university students was enrolled there. Although the boom leveled off in the 1880s, the university maintained and even slowly increased its absolute numbers thereafter.

The two areas where Falkenstein's efforts bore the most dramatic

fruit were in the percentage of foreign students (in both senses of the term "foreign," non-Saxon Germans and non-Germans), and in the number of science students. As far as the first category is concerned, for generations the university had maintained a ratio of about three-fourths Saxon and one-fourth non-Saxon German students. In contrast, during the 1870s well over half the Leipzig students came from outside the kingdom and one in seven came from outside the member states of the empire. Foreigners included especially Austrians, Russians, Swiss, Americans, and Britons; French students were notably absent.

As for science students, although in the early 1860s an average of about 50 per year matriculated, the number had jumped to over 200 by the early 1870s and to about 300 per year in the late 1870s. Regarding the intersection set of our two categories, the average number of non-Saxon science matriculations was only 18 per year in the early 1860s. This had mushroomed a decade later to 150 and by the late 1870s to over 200 per year. In this latter period, more than two-thirds of the science students came from outside Saxony.

Clearly the university had dramatically increased its attractiveness both inside and outside Germany. Part of this story has to do with the general expansion of German university enrollment. After decades of stagnation, the universities slowly began to expand in the 1860s, then exploded after the founding of the Reich. In the fifteen years after 1872, the empire's student population more than doubled.^[5] However, Leipzig's boom began even before this national trend and exceeded it in magnitude.

Some of the attraction of Leipzig was undoubtedly due to local factors: the presence there of the Imperial Court of Justice; its reputation as a large, vital, and attractive city; and industrial and geographic factors as well. However, Leipzig could not compare with Berlin for political importance or with Munich for general ambience. A large part of this great success must therefore be ascribed to the work of the Saxon ministry of culture, with the cooperation of the sovereign and his legislature (the Ständesversammlung).

In the late 1850s, Falkenstein began self-consciously to dramatically expand the Leipzig science facilities. His first move was to locate a new observatory on a small hillock on the southeast edge of town, some distance from the main university district in the heart of the city. The hillock adjoined the so-called "Johannisthal," a city-owned garden district where townspeople could (and still do) rent small plots and summer houses. The university, one of the wealthiest in Germany, owned a good deal of rental property in and around Leipzig and was able to trade with the city for the real estate in this yet undeveloped district

(there stood on the district's main Waisenhausstrasse only an institute for the deaf and the city orphanage).^[6]

The observatory, outfitted by 1862, was only the first step in Falkenstein's elaborate and ambitious scheme; it formed the nucleus for what would be an extensive academic science and medical district. By locating the new campus in the suburbs, Falkenstein's architects could plan properly for optimal use of light and fresh air, and the buildings could be designed from the ground up with their dedicated end uses in mind. Moreover, the land was cheap and the streets were quiet, with none of the rumbling traffic that often interfered with precision measurements in the old laboratories on Universitätsstrasse.

Falkenstein's next opportunity came with the death of the professor of theoretical and pharmaceutical chemistry in the medical faculty, Otto B. Kühn (1800-1863). Kühn, a chemically inclined physician and the son of a professor of anatomy at Leipzig, had habilitated the same year (1825) as a fellow Saxon of about the same age named Otto Linné Erdmann (1804-1869). When in 1830 the professor of chemistry in the Medical Faculty, C. G. Eschenbach, retired, the faculty was not able to decide between the two young chemists. They compromised by awarding Eschenbach's lab and nominal successorship to Erdmann with the field of technical chemistry, now transferred to the Philosophical Faculty. Kühn got the position of general and theoretical chemistry in the Medical Faculty, initially without facilities. In 1842 Kühn inherited Erdmann's lab in the Pleissenburg on Universitätsstrasse, when Erdmann traded up for a new and superior facility in the Friedericianum, a couple hundred yards south of the main university buildings. Each of the two new ordentlicher professors was appointed at the paltry salary of 200 thalers.^[7]

Neither of the Medical Faculty chemists, Eschenbach or Kühn, was ever able to achieve any real reputation beyond Leipzig during the eighty years of their combined careers. Falkenstein now had an opportunity to change this, all the more so since Kühn's death happened to coincide with a plan Falkenstein had developed to split physiology from anatomy by creating a new Ordinarius in the former field. To anticipate events related in the next section, he succeeded in calling Kolbe as Kühn's successor and Carl Ludwig as the new Ordinarius in physiology, both in the year 1865; each man was to get an elaborate new institute building in the Waisenhausstrasse. They were located right next door to each other, and both facilities were complete by 1869. Falkenstein did not even pause to catch his breath. The professor of mineralogy Ferdinand Zirkel had a new institute by 1872, likewise for the physicist Wilhelm Hankel by 1873, and for the anatomist Ernst L. Wagner by 1875.

Meanwhile Erdmann had died. At Kolbe's urging, the Philosophical Faculty proposed Rudolf Schmitt (Kolbe's former student, then at the Dresden Polytechnikum), Rudolf Fittig, or Hermann Wichelhaus for the position. Kolbe intentionally suggested only second-rank chemists, for he was convinced that a first-rate chemist would not accept a position that included Erdmann's old and poor laboratory. Someone (perhaps Carl Ludwig) convinced Falkenstein that it would be far better to hire a first-rank physical chemist, and Lothar Meyer and Carl Neumann came under consideration. Kolbe "protested energetically" against hiring such "superficial chatterers," especially since he understood that Kopp might be won for Leipzig. Falkenstein responded to Kolbe's complaint by calling Kopp, but Kopp declined; he merely wanted the call to improve his position in Heidelberg. Finally, Gustav Wiedemann was proposed (probably by Ludwig), and Falkenstein accepted the suggestion. The Faculty protested that Wiedemann was a physicist, not a chemist, but Falkenstein was adamant, and called him for the position—an Ordinarius for physical chemistry, the first such in Germany. Kolbe only asked that Wiedemann share the teaching of inorganic chemistry and that he conduct a chemical as well as a physical-chemical practicum, because by then Kolbe had far more students than he could handle. These conditions were granted.^[8]

Wiedemann was in place by 1871 and soon took charge of his own new building—despite Kolbe's pessimistic assumption. Other institutes followed, especially in medical fields. Falkenstein actually stepped down in 1871 (or rather up, as he became Minister of the Royal House), but his plans were continued, albeit in a less grandiose manner, by his successor C. F. von Gerber. By the turn of the century, there were well over a dozen large scientific and medical institutes in the new university district near the Johannisthal. Shortly after Liebig's death in 1873, the Waisenhausstrasse was renamed Liebigstrasse, on Kolbe's urging.^[9]

The vast expansion in the Leipzig science enrollments now can be seen at least partially as an understandable market response on the part of the German and non-German student clienteles. In the 1870s and 1880s, Leipzig could offer perhaps the largest and most modern scientific and medical facilities in the world. But how did Falkenstein come to command the large amounts of money required to build all of these institutes and pay the generous salaries necessary to acquire these academic stars?

First, Falkenstein was highly respected and extraordinarily persuasive in Saxon governing circles. He always believed that economic and bureaucratic modernization and continued industrialization offered political prestige, prosperity, and social stability for Saxony in the long

term, and he regarded university reform as an element of this larger goal. Second, he happened to have an enlightened sovereign and a relatively cooperative Ständesversammlung, who normally provided whatever he could make a persuasive case for. Saxony was sufficiently prosperous to bear such financial costs. A third more contextual factor was the academic entrepreneurial fever that caught hold in many of the German states in the 1860s and 1870s. As Joseph Ben-David and others have emphasized, the competitiveness of the decentralized German academic marketplace goes some good distance in explaining the phenomenal rise of the German universities in the nineteenth century.^[10]

Finally, it has been mentioned that Leipzig was already one of the wealthiest universities in Germany, with an income during the 1860s of over 100,000 thalers per year. The state had always had to supplement this income, of course, but when Falkenstein's expansion plan got going, the state subsidy increased dramatically, until by 1888 it was over a million marks per year (the currency conversion upon the founding of the Empire established 3 marks to the thaler). Nonetheless, the "academic-mercantilist" case could be (and was) made that this was an investment that yielded immediate dividends, for it was estimated that every non-Saxon student spent about 300 thalers per year attending university, and the non-Saxon contingent mushroomed as a direct result of the investment program. One observer thought that this meant that the home boys were educated essentially for free, subsidized (in effect) by foreigners. Moreover, the indirect and long-term benefits from heightened academic prestige were by no means negligible.^[11]