Yank at Bonn

In the great hall of the University of Bonn one day last week, retiring Rector Ernst Friesenhahn stood before 1,000 students, professors and guests to say a few words about himself and his successor. "It seems symbolic to me," said he, "that a rector who was refused a teaching position by the Nazis in 1933 is succeeded by a rector who was dismissed by the Nazis in 1933." Thereupon, anti-Nazi Ernst Friesenhahn, who will return to teaching law, took off his crimson cap and gown, handed the symbols of his office to anti-Nazi Werner Richter.

First in Germany. The change of command at Bonn last week was symbolic in more ways than one. For Werner Richter, 63, is not only a longtime anti-Nazi, he is also a U.S. citizen--the first ever to be elected head of a major German university.* A onetime full professor at the University of Berlin, he was driven out of Germany by the Nazis, took out citizenship papers in the U.S., has been teaching on U.S. campuses (Elmhurst College in Illinois, Muhlenberg College in Pennsylvania) since 1938. It was only on a temporary basis that he returned to Germany after the war--in the hope that he might help to build up her universities again.

But when he began teaching at Bonn in 1948, the university soon found that it liked what he had learned about U.S. ways of education. Students flocked to his seminars, crowded into his lectures, and Richter himself rose to the rank of dean of the philosophy faculty. Said one student: "He is the only professor with a universal approach. The others keep their eyes glued to their specialty."

U.S. Imports. As rector, Werner Richter hopes to spread his "universal approach." The university he heads was once one of Germany's greatest--a place that boasted such great names as Historian von Treitschke and Physicist von Helmholtz, such alumni as Nietzsche and Carl Schurz. But like other German institutions, it had fallen into rigid habits --a narrow scholarship for narrow specialists.

Richter hopes to introduce a studium generale--a sort of core curriculum which all students will have to take. He also wants to introduce the idea of a U.S. college, setting up a model house for 150 students who will live and study together. And he is planning on one other import from his adopted homeland. "This university has more than 6,000 students," says he, "and only eight are Americans. This must be changed at once."

* Last week, Germany got a second: Jewish Sociologist Max Horkheimer, who was elected rector of Frankfurt's Johann Wolfgang Goethe University. In 1933 the Nazis drove Horkheimer from the country, closed the famed Institute for Social Research which he had founded. This week, Rector Horkheimer, now a U.S. citizen, will have the pleasure of seeing his institute opened again.

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