On July 1, 1969, the state parliament of North Rhine-Westphalia passed the law on the Rhenish-Westphalian Academy of Sciences. The Working Group for Research (AGF), founded in 1950, also nominally received the status of a learned society based on the model of the academies of Göttingen, Munich and Heidelberg. As early as 1960, the FDP had submitted an application for an increase in rank, but the state governments blocked themselves for a long time because they saw the prosaic name of the working group as a kind of delivery guarantee for political advice. Prime Minister Heinz Kühn, who had to break off his studies in political science in Cologne when he went into exile in 1933, admitted that the pre-academic constitution had provided no guarantee of useful research results.In 1958, for example, in the AGF series of publications, a study of the Homeric ship catalog was printed - for Kühn a topic "whose current and tangible meaning is not yet apparent to me even at second glance". The AGF emerged from the transport research community of the war-torn new country. "Science," as Kühn justified the law, "needs a space in which it can be active, unaffected by considerations of usefulness."can be active unaffected by considerations of usefulness. "can be active unaffected by considerations of usefulness. "
Patrick Bahners
Features correspondent in Cologne and responsible for “humanities”.
Follow I follow
Ten years before the academy was founded, it was given such a room in the state capital: in the form of the House of Science designed by Hans Schwippert. Until then, the AGF had met in the cabinet room of the State Chancellery. In the commemorative publication “50 Years of Academic Conversation” published by Schöningh in 2020, Wolfgang Pehnt cites the description of the academic building task by Schwippert, the master builder of the Bonn parliament building: The house should express “the strict spirit with restraint” because there “ not essentially about celebration or joy, but about work ”. And while the Berlin Academy, for example, has long been committed to making its contribution to festival culture,According to the classical philologist Wolfgang Dieter Lebek, the Düsseldorf community workers still see their union “as a kind of counter-draft to a monetary and strongly hedonistic public values”.