The Johann Wolfgang Goethe University of Frankfurt am Main (commonly called the University of Frankfurt) was founded in 1914 as a Citizens' University, which means that while it was a State university of Prussia, it had been founded and financed by the wealthy and active liberal citizenry of Frankfurt am Main, a unique feature in German university history. It was named in 1932 after the most famous native Frankfurtian, the greatest German poet and writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (who would have hated being denied his title in the name). Today, the university has some 36,000 students and is one of Germany's largest universities.

The University of Frankfurt has always been considered liberal, or left-leaning, and has had a reputation for Jewish and Marxist scholarship (or even Jewish-Marxist). Thus, during Nazi times, "almost one third of its academics and many of its students were dismissed for racist and/or political reasons - more than at any other German university." (University homepage) It also played a major part of the German student riots of 1968.

AfE-Tower at Johann Wolfgang Goethe-University

The University of Frankfurt is best known for the Institute for Social Research (founded 1924), institutional home of the Frankfurt School, one of the most important 20th century schools of philosophy and social thought at all. The most famous University of Frankfurt scholars are associated with this school, including Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Jürgen Habermas, as well as Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, and Walter Benjamin. Others include the sociologist Karl Mannheim, the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer, the philosophers of religion Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Paul Tillich, the psychologist Max Wertheimer, and the anthropologist Norbert Elias.

External link

• University homepage