HUMBOLDT UNIVERSITY

The Humboldt University of Berlin is Berlin's oldest university  founded in 1810 as
the university of Berlin by the liberal Prussian educational reformer and linguist 
Wilhelm von Humboldt, whose university model has strongly influenced other
European and Western universities. From 1828 it was known as the Fredrick 
William University. Later(unofficially) also as the universitat under den Linden after its
location.

In 1949, it changed its name  to Humboldt University   in honour of both  its 
Wilhelm and his brother, naturalist Alexander von Humboldt.    
The first semester at the newly founded Berlin university occurred in 1810  with 256
students and 52 lecturers in faculties of law, medicine,technology and philosophy under
rector Theodor schmalz. The university has been home to many of Germany's greatest
thinkers of the past two centuries,among them the subjective idealist philospher Johann   
Gottileb Fitchte ,the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, the absolute idealist philosopher
 G.W.F. Hegel the romantic legal theorist Savigny ,the pessimist philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, the objective idealist philosopher Friedrich Schelling, cultural critic Walter Benjamin, and famous physicists Albert Einstein and Max Planck. Founders of Marxist theory Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels attended the university, as did poet Heinrich Heine, founder of structuralism Ferdinand de Saussure, German unifier Otto von Bismarck, Communist Party of Germany founder Karl Liebknecht, African American Pan Africanist W. E. B. Du Bois and European unifier Robert Schuman, as well as the influential surgeon Johann Friedrich Dieffenbach in the early half of the 1800s. The university is home to 29 Nobel Prize winners.