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"Light of the North" – Between University of the Hansa and Mecklenburg State University
Although not clearly attested even today, Otto von Bismarck is nonetheless frequently quoted as having declared that Mecklenburg is at least 50 years behind the times. As far as the University of Rostock is concerned, we would be quite justified in turning this statement on its head, for the Alma Mater Rostochiensis was founded as early as 1419, a mere fifty years after the very first German universities. Hence it was not only one of the oldest German universities, but at the same time the oldest in the entire Baltic Sea region and – except for the British Isles – in all of northern Europe. Documents from around the time of its founding, not least its establishment by papal privilege of Pope Martin V ., described the university's most important duty to be to drive off the darkness with the light of the Christian faith, as well as knowledge and wisdom.
The image of the light which, as was said in the sixteenth century, was to illuminate the lands of the "benighted" North, continued to accompany the University of Rostock in its further history, as well. Peter Linde(n)berg, son of a Rostock alderman and a highly honored poet at the time, stylized this image shortly before his death (1596) in the late humanistic sense into a paean to his home town on the phrase "lumen Vandaliae", which gained fame in its disputed German translation as "Leuchte des Nordens" ("Light of the North"). However broadly or narrowly the term "North" may be conceived, from Mecklenburg by way of the Wendenland – analogous to the Wendish circle of the Hanseatic League – up to northern Europe, Linde(n)berg's phrase in any case did justice to the actual significance of the University of Rostock at that time. This not only applies to the pioneering role of the University of Rostock in that region of Europe, whether broadly or narrowly conceived, but also and even more to its area of influence, in which not only Mecklenburg and its neighboring territories in northern Germany with their Hanseatic cities occupy a place of importance, but also the Scandinavian kingdoms. Hence, the decades just before and after 1600 were later referred to – certainly rather euphorically – as the "Golden Age" of the history of the University of Rostock.
In this sense, although the development of the university since 1419 up to this point showed an upward tendency – in reference to the frequency of attendance and its influence – yet it also suffered a few severe crises. Along with several waves of plague, these were primarily caused by conflicts between the founders or benefactors of the university and its patrons, the dukes of Mecklenburg and the city of Rostock. Added to this were differences between the university itself and the town, which latter was shaken by frequent outbreaks of tensions between the council and the citizenry. The university even left the town twice: moving to Greifswald from 1437 to 1443 – one of the roots for the founding of the university there in 1456 – and to Wismar and Lübeck from 1487 to 1488. Not until a compromise, the Formula Concordiae of 1563, was able to create de facto an equal status between the territorial lords and the city with regard to the patronage of the university did the halcyon days mentioned above begin.
They ended in the mid-seventeenth century, when the institution, which was gradually becoming a state university, underwent yet more crises. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries its very existence was threatened – a clear parallel to the "university extinction" besetting other German territories. This was due to a plethora of causes, in which the devastating effects of the great European wars of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the demise of the Hanseatic League, the great Rostock city fire of 1677 and the incipient backwardness of Mecklenburg all played a large part. Moreover, the conflicts between the lords of the land and the city once again flared up, culminating the creation of a rival university by the dukes in Bützow between 1760 and 1789. In 1788 the compromise of a ducal-municipal university was resurrected, before the city finally relinquished its responsibility for the university in 1827. The second half of the nineteenth century saw the university once again recover under the distinct improvements made by the grand dukes, as outwardly witnessed by the new main university building of 1870 as well as many other new buildings (especially hospitals), and internally by the institutionalization of many and new scientific disciplines.
While Rostock, then one of the smallest German universities, rather kept its distance to the conditions prevailing in the Weimar Republic owing to its traditionally strong relationship with the Dukes of Mecklenburg, it adapted relatively rapidly to the general political framework in the Nazi era and to that of the German Democratic Republic under Soviet occupation. Open political resistance remained an exception to the rule. However, both periods – similar to the period before and after 1900 – were marked by the construction of new buildings and the establishment of new faculties or institutes (in particular in the areas of agriculture and engineering sciences). From 1976 to 1990 the university bore the name of Wilhelm Pieck. Since the reunification of Germany in 1989, the university has been attempting to achieve the necessary modernization by concentrating on its interdisciplinary profile. Its 15,000 students still make it the largest university in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
Angela Hartwig, Ernst Münch
published in: Die Universität Rostock. Geschichte der "Leuchte des Nordens" in Bildern. Erfurt: Sutton Verlag 2008, S. 9 f. order the book here
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