University of Giessen

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The University of Giessen (Gießen), officially called Justus Liebig-Universität Gießen after its most famous member, the founder of modern agricultural chemistry and inventor of artificial fertiliser.

The University of Giessen was founded in 1607 as a Lutheran university in the city of Giessen in Hesse-Darmstadt because the all-Hessian Landesuniversität (the nearby University of Marburg (Philipps-Universität Marburg) in Marburg, Hesse-Kassel) had become Reformed (that is, Calvinist). It was then called "Ludoviciana" and only renamed after World War II. Belonging to a very small and poor German state, Giessen was always a minor and poor German university, a "stepping-stone university" where professors had their very first chair but moved on as soon as they could (with the exception of the strong agricultural and veterinary fields). Its academic heyday was the mid-19th century.

After the different Hessian states were (re-)united in 1929, both universities became public universities of that German state. The University of Giessen now has almost 22,000 students and 8,500 employees. With its Fachhochschule, it makes Giessen the most student-dominated German city, although it feels much less like an "academical village" than the classical German universities of Göttingen, Tübingen, Heidelberg or Marburg.

Next to Liebig, famous Giessen professors included the theologian Adolf von Harnack, the lawyer Rudolf von Jhering, the economist and statistician Etienne Laspeyres, the physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, the gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka, the philologist and archaeologist Friedrich Gottlieb Welcker, and the orientalist Eberhard Schrader. It is indicative that all the most famous students of Giessen were locals, born in Hesse-Darmstadt. They include the German romantic dramatist and revolutionary Georg Büchner, the literary and political historian Georg Gottfried Gervinus and the botanist Johann Jacob Dillenius.