Essays/

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  • von Charles McClelland

    The “Flexner Report” (originally published in 1910) recently passed its hundredth anniversary. It was the culmination of a study commissioned by the new Carnegie Foundation and carried out by a German-American educational reformer (and former student at Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Berlin Universities), Abraham Flexner. Not only did it ring the death knell of apprentice-like, unscientific and private medical education in the USA; Flexner’s fame led him into a position with the Rockefeller Foundation to channel funding into the reforms he advocated and ultimately to found the Princeton Institute for Advanced Study, thanking German-speaking scholars who inspired him – such as Einstein – by recruiting them and saving them from Nazi persecution. His report may be regarded partly as a cultural manifesto, since it proposed to revolutionize higher education and the ancient “art” of healing. It still makes compelling reading and retains a number of unique features. [...]

  • von Riccardo Bavaj

    “The West” was in crisis – yet again. And Richard Löwenthal was deeply worried. The socio-political order of the Federal Republic had been challenged by the student revolt, and its impact was felt particularly strongly at the Free University Berlin where Löwenthal, born in 1908, had been professor of International Relations since the early 1960s. West Germany’s intellectual foundation had been attacked, and for someone like Löwenthal who had experienced the demise of Germany’s first experiment in liberal democracy, it seemed as though Weimar’s shadows were hanging over the Federal Republic deeper than ever before. The fateful tradition of German romanticism, “anti-liberal and anti-Western” as he put it, appeared to have resurfaced once again. This time, however, it was not outright authoritarianism, but a leftist renaissance of romantic-utopian thought that haunted the “second republic”. [...]

  • von Hans Manfred Bock

    Im Jahre 1928 lancierte die Redaktion der „Deutsch-Französischen Rundschau“ eine Enquête, in der bekannte und einschlägig ausgewiesene Wissenschaftler und Schriftsteller dazu befragt wurden, wie sich aus ihrer Sicht die deutsch-französischen Beziehungen praktisch verbessern ließen. Die Initiative ging von den Berliner Gründern der Deutsch-Französischen Gesellschaft (DFG) aus, die Ende 1927 ins Leben gerufen wurde.[...]