Qualla: German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina

German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina: Introduction

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Otmar von Steuber, CC0. For its first two hundred and twenty-six years, the oldest scientific academy in Germany had no building. It had no city either. The Leopoldina conducted its affairs by letter, and its headquarters was wherever the current president happened to keep his consulting rooms - so the institution migrated from Schweinfurt to Nuremberg to Augsburg to Altdorf to Erfurt, then to Halle, back to Nuremberg, on to Erlangen, Bonn, Breslau, Jena, Dresden, and at last, in 1878, to Halle for good. An academy that existed as a correspondence network rather than a place turned out to be remarkably hard to kill, which mattered more than anyone founding it could have foreseen.

Image: Otmar von Steuber | CC0

German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina: Four Physicians and an Emperor's Vanity

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wolfgang Michel, Public domain. It began on 1 January 1652 in the imperial city of Schweinfurt, where four local doctors - Johann Laurentius Bausch, Johann Michael Fehr, Georg Balthasar Metzger and Georg Balthasar Wohlfarth - agreed to constitute themselves the Academia Naturae Curiosorum, the Academy of Those ...

Image: Wolfgang Michel | Public domain

German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina: Curtain

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Catatine, CC BY-SA 4.0. The academy's worst chapter is also its most ambiguous. From 1933 the Leopoldina began removing its Jewish members; Albert Einstein was the first, excluded under public pressure. By 1938 its officers were assuring the Nazi government that every Jewish member had been expelled. Th...

Image: Catatine | CC BY-SA 4.0

German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina: An Academy on the Wrong Side of the Wall

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Joseph Karl Stieler, Public domain. Halle ended the war in the Soviet zone, and the German Democratic Republic dissolved societies as a matter of policy, so members met privately for several years. The academy pushed back the way a scholarly body can: an edition of Goethe's scientific writings began appearing under...

Image: Joseph Karl Stieler | Public domain

German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina: Becoming the National Academy

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit A.Savin, FAL. After reunification the Leopoldina became a non-profit body funded jointly by the federal government and the state of Saxony-Anhalt. Then, in November 2007, the science minister Annette Schavan announced its elevation, and in February 2008 it was formally declared Germany's Natio...

Image: A.Savin | FAL

German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina: The Register of Names

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Bettenburg, CC BY-SA 2.0 de. The membership roll is the real artefact. Goethe is on it - the poet was a serious enough naturalist to be elected, and the academy later edited his scientific works. So are Ernst Haeckel, Max Planck, Otto Hahn, Carl Friedrich von Weizsacker, and Einstein, whose name went back on...

Image: Bettenburg | CC BY-SA 2.0 de