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56-718: Karl August Wittfogel was born 6 September 1896 at Woltersdorf , in Lüchow , Province of Hanover to a Lutheran schoolteacher. Wittfogel left school in 1914. He studied philosophy, history, sociology, geography at Leipzig University and also in Munich, Berlin and Rostock and in 1919 again in Berlin. From 1921 he studied sinology in Leipzig. In between Wittfogel was drafted into a Signal Corps Unit ( Fernmeldeeinheit ) in 1917. In 1921 Wittfogel married Rose Schlesinger. Wittfogel's second wife

112-585: A harsh review of the plays, and "Red Soldiers", "The Man Who Has an Idea", "The Mother", "The Refugee", "The Skyscraper" and "Who is the Biggest Fool?", all of which were published by Malik . Wittfogel declined an offer to become the dramatic producer of the revolutionary Volksbühne (People's Stage) in Berlin, because he wanted to concentrate on his academic studies. He published Hegelian essays on aesthetics and literature in Die Linkskurve , journal of

168-621: A reprint of his 1929 essay on Political Geography, Wittfogel says he came out much stronger against the Nazis than the KPD and Komintern line wanted. Communist students at Jena invited him and Alfred Bäumler for a debate on the importance of Hegel for the Germany of today. Bäumler was a specialist on Kant, Nietzsche and Bachofen , who soon became a leading Nazi philosopher. When Hitler came to power in 1933, Wittfogel tried to escape to Switzerland, but

224-571: A state would inevitably be despotic, powerful, stable and wealthy. Wittfogel believed the hydraulic hypothesis to apply to Russia under the Soviet Union. The sinologist Frederick W. Mote , however, strongly disagreed with Wittfogel's analysis, as did John K. Fairbank . Others, such as Barrington Moore , George Lichtheim and especially Pierre Vidal-Naquet found the thesis stimulating. F. Tökei , Gianni Sofri , Maurice Godelier and Wittfogel's estranged pupil Lawrence Krader , concentrated on

280-693: Is Socialism". He joined the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). At the Meißnertag 1923, a large Youth Movement gathering, Wittfogel asked the members of the Freideutsche Jugend whether they knew the need of the age, its big idea and whether they had what it takes to die for their convictions. After expelling the Communist Workers' Party of Germany (KAPD) in the autumn of 1919,

336-909: Is also the university's official support association. Local, regional, national, European and international student initiatives have given rise to many parallel alumni networks that run in parallel and independently of each other. These include the alumni organisations of AIESEC , MTP - Marketing between Theory and Practice, European Law Students' Association , Erasmus Student Network and others. Student initiatives such as green finance consulting, Goethe Club, Goethe Gruppe or Night of Science, as well as political university groups, are further hybrids between student initiatives and alumni organisations. Independent alumni organisations are not recognised as official alumni organisations at Goethe University. According to

392-457: Is open to the public and welcomes visitors with a spacious, naturally lit foyer that leads to lecture halls, seminar rooms, and the information center, a 24-hour reference library. The ground floor also accommodates computer rooms and a café. The floors, walls and ceiling of the foyer are decorated with a grid design that is continued throughout the entire building. The flooring is inspired by Raphael's mural, The School of Athens . The emergence of

448-714: Is part of the IT cluster Rhine-Main-Neckar . The Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz , the Goethe University Frankfurt and the Technische Universität Darmstadt together form the Rhine-Main-Universities (RMU). The historical roots of the university can be traced back as far as 1484, when a City Council Library was established with a bequest from the patrician Ludwig von Marburg. Merged with other collections, it

504-738: Is the Frankfurter Wirtschaftswissenschaftliche Gesellschaft (fwwg), which was founded in 1988 and is open to the Department of Economics. The Association of Friends and Supporters of the Johann Wolfgang Goethe University Frankfurt am Main ( Vereinigung von Freunden und Förderern der Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main ) acts unofficially as an umbrella organisation for the university-related alumni organisations at Goethe University and

560-633: Is why there is hardly any transparency about university policy. There are official publications on the Goethe University website, which must be made in accordance with the Hessian Higher Education Act. These can also be found in the German National Library . Little can be said about the political significance of university politics due to the lack of transparency in university politics as a whole and

616-526: The Asiatic Mode of Production , Wittfogel came up with an analysis of Oriental despotism which emphasized the role of irrigation works, the bureaucratic structures needed to maintain them and the impact that they had on society. He coined the term " hydraulic empire " to describe the system. In his view, many societies, mainly in Asia, relied heavily on the building of large-scale irrigation works. To do so,

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672-691: The Goethe Business School offers an MBA program. Goethe University has established an international award for research in financial economics, the Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics . The university consists of 16 faculties. Ordered by their sorting number, these are: In addition, there are several co-located research institutes of the Max Planck Society : The university is involved in

728-700: The Hessian Center for Artificial Intelligence  [ de ] (hessian.AI). The university is located across four campuses in Frankfurt am Main: The Westend Campus is the main location with the Presidential Board based in the Presidential and Administration Building (PA). The campus includes the I. G. Farben Building and numerous new buildings, including the House of Finance and

784-531: The Nazi period, "almost one third of its academics and many of its students were dismissed for racial and/or political reasons—more than at any other German university" . The university also played a major part in the German student movement of 1968. The university also has been influential in the natural sciences and medicine, with Nobel Prize winners including Max von Laue and Max Born , and breakthroughs such as

840-598: The QS World University Rankings for 2024, the university holds a global position of 302 and ranks 18th nationally. In the 2024 edition of the Times Higher Education World University Rankings , it is positioned between 201 and 250 internationally, and 22 to 24 within the country. The university achieved its highest national ranking in the 2023 Academic Ranking of World Universities (ARWU), where it

896-648: The Stern–Gerlach experiment . In recent years, the university has focused in particular on law, history, and economics, creating new institutes, such as the Institute for Law and Finance (ILF) and the Center for Financial Studies (CFS) . One of the university's ambitions is to become Germany's leading university for finance and economics, given the school's proximity to one of Europe's financial centers. In cooperation with Duke University 's Fuqua School of Business ,

952-408: The 1920s Wittfogel had ideas of his own, e.g. on nature, which to him could never simply be a part of human history and pure object of thinking, an idea Lukacs did not like at all. With very few others he took Marx's idea of a genuine "asiatic" way of pre-capitalist development seriously. At a Leningrad conference in 1931, all those ideas of an "asiatic" "mode of production" were shot down and buried by

1008-573: The 1930s onslaught on Expressionism in the Moscow journal Das Wort . The debate was rekindled in the 1960s as the Brecht -Lukacs debate. At the time, Brecht had not really been able to publish his views. Wittfogel believed in the party at least until 1933 and still sometimes fiercely defended it until at least around 1939 (he broke with Paul Massing over the Ruth Fischer revelations), even in

1064-557: The Association of Proletarian Revolutionary Writers, and was a member of its editorial staff from April 1930. His conservative aesthetics put Wittfogel on Lukacs' side—not what might have been expected from his plays. With the earlier Dada and Proletkult debates, the Mehring -, documentary- and proletarian-literature feud, from 1928 on became part of the long and bitter debate on literary modernism and communism, which culminated in

1120-651: The Bockenheim district have been abandoned and partly demolished, partly put to other uses. The Goethe Business School is a graduate business school at the university, established in 2004, part of the House of Finance at the Westend Campus and the IKB building. It is a non-profit foundation under private law held by the university. Its board of directors is led by Rolf-Ernst Breuer , who was chairman of

1176-404: The Department of Medicine, with buildings and facilities that have grown historically since the 19th century as well as modern complexes. Sports. The university's relocation programme, which has been intensified since the mid-1990s, aims to create a de facto three-campus university in the future. To this end, the units currently located in the Bockenheim district are also to be relocated, but not

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1232-479: The Deutschlandstipendium programme. These initiatives are supported by the non-material support programme for the Deutschlandstipendium from the Presidential Board of Goethe University. Goethe University has its own non-exhaustive network of alumni organisations, a sponsors' association and its own e-mail distribution list for alumni. Alumni organisations require formal recognition and approval by

1288-649: The Federal Republic of Germany and the Basic Law ( Grundgesetz ) can be traced back to the Frankfurter Dokumente that were handed over in the I. G. Farben Building . The Bockenheim campus is the former centre of the university, which still houses various parts of the language and cultural sciences, the Department of Computer Science and Mathematics, the central building of the university library Johann Christian Senckenberg and some parts of

1344-1203: The KPD was significantly reduced in numbers, until a majority of USPD delegates decided to join it at their party convention in October 1920. Wittfogel was amongst the third of USPD members (ca. 300,000) who joined the 70,000-strong KPD. Wittfogel met Karl Korsch in 1920 and was invited to the 1923 conference that helped establish the Institute for Social Research . Felix Weil financed and Richard Sorge organized this Erste Marxistische Arbeitswoche (1st marxist workweek) with Karl Korsch and Hedda Korsch , Georg Lukács , Béla Fogarasi , his later wife Margarete Lissauer , Félix José Weil and Käthe Weil (they were married 1921-1929), Richard and Christiane Sorge, Friedrich Pollock , Julian Gumperz and his later wife Hede Massing , from 1919 to 1923 married to Gerhart Eisler , Konstantin Zetkin , Fukumoto Kazuo , Eduard Ludwig Alexander and Gertrud Alexander , their child, and others. Rose Wittfogel , born Schlesinger, also took part. They were married from 1921 (other sources say 1920) to 1929. She

1400-717: The Soviet Union was destroyed with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact , and he began to hate the totalitarian, "asiatic" nature of Soviet and Chinese Communism from Lenin to Mao. He turned against his former comrades and denounced American scholars such as Owen Lattimore and Moses I. Finley , at the McCarran Committee hearings in 1951. He came to believe that the state-owned economies of the Soviet bloc inevitably led to despotic governments even more oppressive than those of "traditional Asia" and that those regimes were

1456-475: The Stalinist majority. They resurfaced around 1960, but by then Wittfogel was of course a non-person in communist eyes. Wittfogel is best known for his monumental work Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power , first published in 1957. Starting from a Marxist analysis of the ideas of Max Weber on China and India's "hydraulic-bureaucratic official-state" and building on Marx's sceptical view of

1512-497: The University of Frankfurt 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 sociologist Norbert Elias . The University of Frankfurt has at times been considered liberal, or left-leaning, and has had a reputation for Jewish and Marxist (or even Jewish-Marxist) scholarship . During

1568-612: The administration in buildings dating from the 1950s to the 1970s. The Riedberg campus, with university buildings built from around 1970, is home to the Departments of Physics, Biochemistry, Chemistry and Pharmacy, Biosciences and (largely) Earth Sciences, the Science Garden and a lecture theatre centre with the natural sciences departmental library. The Niederrad campus is home to the University Hospital and

1624-567: The board of Deutsche Bank until 2006. The school has maintained a partnership in Executive Education with the Indian School of Business (ISB) since 2009. The word/image mark used from 1980 to 2002 was developed by Adrian Frutiger . There are different types of basically the same logo. As old university logos never really "expire", they remain valid. Since 2008, the university administration has made various changes to

1680-438: The central lecture theatre building. In addition to the central administration, most departments, with the exception of Medicine and Natural Sciences, are or have been located here since 2001. The Language and Art Building (SKW) (FB 09) is currently the new building on campus. This campus is of particular historical significance, as Goethe University has inherited history through the acquisition of real estate. "Campus Westend" of

1736-520: The city. The university celebrated its 100th anniversary in 2014. The first female president of the university, Birgitta Wolff , was sworn into office in 2015, and was succeeded by Enrico Schleiff in 2021. 20 Nobel Prize winners have been affiliated with the university, including Max von Laue and Max Born . The university is also affiliated with 18 winners of the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize . Goethe University

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1792-670: The concept. Two Berlin leaders of the SDS student movement, Rudi Dutschke and Bernd Rabehl , have published on these themes. Then East German dissident Rudolf Bahro later said that his Alternative in Eastern Europe was based on ideas of Wittfogel but because of the latter's later anticommunism , could not mention him by name. Bahro's later ecological ideas, recounted in From Red to Green and elsewhere were likewise inspired by Wittfogel's geographical determinism. The hydraulic thesis

1848-661: The district Lüchow-Dannenberg , in Lower Saxony , Germany . The municipality Woltersdorf includes the villages Woltersdorf, Klein Breese, Lichtenberg and Thurau . Famous sites around Woltersdorf are the Brautstein ("stone of the bride") and the Feldkirche ("church on the field"). Both of these can be seen in the coat of arms of Woltersdorf. The Brautstein is a formation of ancient boulders left behind by glaciers in

1904-574: The fields of finance and money and macroeconomics, and whose work has led to practical and policy-relevant results. It is awarded biannually, since 2005, by the Center for Financial Studies , in partnership with Goethe University Frankfurt. The award carries an endowment of €50,000, which is donated by the Stiftungsfonds Deutsche Bank im Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft. According to information from

1960-569: The foundation capital of the University of Frankfurt. The university has been best known historically for its Institute for Social Research (founded 1924), the institutional home of the Frankfurt School , a preeminent 20th-century school of philosophy and social thought. Some of the well-known scholars associated with this school include Theodor Adorno , Max Horkheimer , and Jürgen Habermas , as well as Herbert Marcuse , Erich Fromm , and Walter Benjamin . Other well-known scholars at

2016-628: The foundation contract for the "Königliche Universität zu Frankfurt am Main" (Royal University at Frankfurt on the Main) was signed at the Römer, Frankfurt's town hall. Royal permission for the university was granted on 10 June 1914, and the first enrollment of students began on 16 October 1914. Members of Frankfurt's Jewish community, including the Speyer family , Wilhelm Ralph Merton , and the industrialists Leo Gans and Arthur von Weinberg donated two thirds of

2072-623: The greatest threat to the future of all mankind. In the early 1920s, Wittfogel wrote a number of communist, but also somewhat expressionistic, plays: "The Cripple", performed with other short plays on October 14, 1920, at Erwin Piscator 's Berlin Proletarian Theatre. Piscator himself played the Cripple at the opening. John Heartfield managed a half-hour late delivery of the backdrop The KPD newspaper Die Rote Fahne published

2128-678: The ice age. The Feldkirchr has a little stone in its walls which was taken from the Slavic population and was built into the church. This Lüchow-Dannenberg location article is a stub . You can help Misplaced Pages by expanding it . Goethe University Frankfurt Goethe University Frankfurt (German: Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main ) is a public research university located in Frankfurt am Main , Germany . It

2184-455: The lack of interest in its activities. Students are not very interested in university politics due to a voter turnout of less than 15% in recent years and the incidents and judgements against the AStA. The university management and the departments support numerous private and university-affiliated student groups, initiatives and private alumni organisations. There are also networks between

2240-477: The practical name of the university and, accordingly, to the logo. On 26 September 2016, another logo was also registered at the German Patent and Trade Mark Office as an individual trade mark, consisting only of the words "GOETHE UNIVERSITY". However, this logo is not currently in use. The Deutsche Bank Prize in Financial Economics honors renowned researchers who have made influential contributions to

2296-715: The sports grounds. The public Botanical Garden Frankfurt am Main at the end of Siesmayerstraße, formerly associated with the biology campus (1956-2011), has been transferred to the City of Frankfurt am Main and the responsibility of the Palmengarten . Parts of the former Bockenheim campus, including the historic Jügelhaus, have been taken over by the Senckenberg Gesellschaft für Naturforschung , while other parts have been left to local urban development. The formerly numerous other scattered university buildings in

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2352-412: The state had to organize forced labor from the population at large. As only a centralized administration could organize the building and maintenance of large-scale systems of irrigation, the need for such systems made bureaucratic despotism inevitable in so-called Oriental lands. That structure was uniquely placed also to crush civil society and any other force capable of mobilizing against the state. Such

2408-517: The student university groups and initiatives via the departments and the Goethe University Network: The student councils at Goethe University are legally regulated by the Hessian Higher Education Act. They are therefore not student initiatives in the traditional sense, as they are legally binding institutions without their own legal personality. New student initiatives are regularly created at Goethe University as part of

2464-431: The university administration in order to be listed as official alumni associations. Without such recognition, it is not possible for the association to list itself as an official alumni organisation of Goethe University. Officers of these organisations are mostly current and former professors as well as people in leading positions at Goethe University. The largest university-related alumni organisation with over 1,300 members

2520-619: The university is dominated by the IG Farben Building by architect Hans Poelzig, an example of the modernist New Objectivity style. The style for the IG Farben Building was originally chosen as "a symbol for the scientific and mercantile German manpower, made out of iron and stone", as the IG Farben director at the time of construction, Baron von Schnitzler , stated in his opening speech in October 1930. After

2576-408: The university took over the complex in the 1990s, new buildings were added to the campus. On 30 May 2008, the House of Finance relocated to a new building designed by the architects Kleihues+Kleihues, following the style of the IG Farben Building. The upper floors of the House of Finance building have several separate offices as well as shared office space for researchers and students. The ground floor

2632-539: The university, the political university groups are as follows: There is little public information on the individual university groups and the work of the university committees, as there is usually only up-to-date information on university politics and/or university political actors on the respective websites of the General Students' Committee and the respective university parties, as well as representations in social networks. Further information and archives on university policy work at Goethe University do not exist, which

2688-410: Was Olga (Joffe) Lang , a Russian sociologist who traveled with him to China and collaborated with him on a project to analyze the Chinese family. Lang later published a monograph on the Chinese family and a biography of the anarchist writer, Ba Jin . The anthropologist Esther Schiff Goldfrank became Wittfogel's third wife in 1940. Wittfogel held academic positions at Columbia University from 1939 and

2744-418: Was On the Economical Importance of the Agrarian and Industrial Productive Forces in China , ( Die ökonomische Bedeutung der agrikolen und industriellen Produktivkräfte Chinas Kohlhammer Verlag , Stuttgart. 1930, which became the first chapter of Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Chinas , 1931. Wittfogel was an active member of the German communist party and a vocal critic of its enemies. In a short 1974 notice to

2800-423: Was a sculptor, later a librarian at the Frankfurt Institute. She emigrated to the Soviet Union and worked there (among other things?) as a translator at the VAGAAR, an Organisation for foreign workers. and from 1925 to 1933 was a member of the Institute. He received his Ph.D. from the Frankfurter Universität in 1928, where his supervisors were Wilhelm Gerloff , Richard Wilhelm and Franz Oppenheimer . His thesis

2856-414: Was also taken up by ecological anthropologists such as Marvin Harris . Further applications of the thesis included that to Mayan society, when aerial photographs revealed the network of canals in the Mayan areas of Yucatan . Critics have denied that Ceylon or Bali are truly hydraulic in the Wittfogel sense. Notes Further reading Woltersdorf, Lower Saxony Woltersdorf is a municipality in

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2912-429: Was arrested and interned in prisons and concentration camps . His second wife Olga Joffe Lang worked for his release and, with the help of right-wing revolutionary Friedrich Hielscher , the also radical right-wing geographer Karl Haushofer , and the London School of Economics historian R. H. Tawney , managed to get Wittfogel free in 1934. He left Germany for England and then the United States. Wittfogel's belief in

2968-487: Was founded in 1914 as a citizens' university, which means it was founded and funded by the wealthy and active liberal citizenry of Frankfurt. The original name in German was Universität Frankfurt am Main . In 1932, the university's name was extended in honour of one of the most famous native sons of Frankfurt, the poet, philosopher and writer/dramatist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe . The university currently has around 48,000 students, distributed across four major campuses within

3024-420: Was professor for Chinese history at the University of Washington from 1947 to 1966. In his 1949 revisionist history of the Liao dynasty (916–1125) he coined the term " conquest dynasty " referring to a Chinese dynasty established by non- Han ethnicities in China proper . He died of pneumonia on May 25, 1988, at St. Luke's-Roosevelt Hospital Center in Manhattan . Before the First World War , Wittfogel

3080-458: Was renamed City Library in 1668 and became the university library in 1914. Depending on the country, the date of foundation is recorded differently. According to Anglo-American calculations, the founding date of Goethe University would be 1484. In Germany, the date on which the right to award doctorates is granted is considered the founding year of a university. The modern history of the University of Frankfurt can be dated to 28 September 1912, when

3136-439: Was the leader of the Lüneburg Wandervogel group. In 1918, he set up the Lüneburg local. Many years later Wittfogel was to publish an account of these youth movements under the pseudonym "Jungmann" in Max Horkheimer 's compilation "Studies in Authority and the Family." He played a leading role in the Socialist Student Party after the German Revolution . He worked alongside Hans Reichenbach and ran an introductory course on "What

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