This article is from the magazine Les Indispensables de Sciences et Avenir n°212 dated January/March 2023.
Röntgen, Heisenberg, Planck, Einstein, or even Hertz… From 1901 to 1932, a third of the winners of the Nobel Prize in physics were German, and the list of illustrious researchers was even longer. How to explain such productivity?
Many universities
When in 1870 Chancellor Bismarck partially unified the Germanic world under the tutelage of the Prussian crown, the Empire inherited a mosaic of nearly 300 small kingdoms, principalities and independent towns, all endowed with their own university, and the young researchers go from one to the other.
Twenty years later, support for scientific research – to catch up with Germany’s two competitors, pioneers of the industrial revolution, France and above all England – is embodied in an energetic minister: Friedrich Althoff, nicknamed the ” Bismarck of the universities”.
Growing budgets
Althoff will impose on the academic authorities the hiring of professors and researchers that he chooses himself, sometimes by circulating incognito across the country to identify the best talents! By increasing the number of students, the university operating budget, the research budget, the number of teaching staff… Germany invented the modern university. A golden age that would end with the Nazi catastrophe of the 1930s and the departure of many scholars.
By René Cuillierier