The university exists because a British king wanted one. George II, who was also Elector of Hanover, instructed his Hanoverian first minister Gerlach Adolph von Muenchhausen to found a university at Goettingen in 1734 that would spread the ideas of the Enlightenment; teaching began in 1737. The physical plant was thin to the point of comedy. The new institution owned a riding hall and a fencing house, and lectures were held in the Paulinerkirche, in a former Dominican monastery, or in professors' front rooms. No proper lecture hall was built until the nineteenth century. What it had instead was licence. Georg Christoph Lichtenberg held one of the first German chairs in experimental physics from 1769 to 1799, and by 1812 the library had passed 200,000 volumes, which mattered more than any building.

For its first century Goettingen was a law school with a university attached. Johann Stephan Puetter taught public law here for fifty years, and among the young men taking notes were Metternich, the future Austrian chancellor, and Wilhelm von Humboldt, who would later build the university in Berlin. Heinrich Heine took his doctorate in law here in 1825. Bismarck arrived to study law in 1833 and lived in a small house out on the rampart - tradition holds that his rowdiness had got him barred from lodging inside the walls. By the centenary in 1837, law students were often more than half the enrolment. That was also the year the university broke. King Ernest Augustus revoked Hanover's liberal constitution of 1833, seven professors protested, and all seven were expelled: Albrecht, Dahlmann, Ewald, Gervinus, the physicist Wilhelm Eduard Weber, and Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, who were in the middle of compiling the first dictionary of the German language.

Carl Friedrich Gauss, called the Prince of Mathematicians, studied at Goettingen and spent his working life there, and the chair passed after him to Dirichlet and then to Bernhard Riemann. By 1900 David Hilbert and Felix Klein had turned the place into a destination: if you wanted to do serious mathematics you went to Goettingen, and much of the world did. In 1903 the university had 121 teaching staff and 1,529 students, a village-sized institution with global gravity. Ludwig Prandtl arrived in 1904, worked out the boundary layer and made Goettingen the centre of the new science of aerodynamics. Edmund Husserl taught philosophy here. Max Born ran the theoretical physics group from 1921 to 1933 and was one of the three discoverers of non-relativistic quantum mechanics. Americans had been making the pilgrimage for a century - Edward Everett, George Ticknor, George Bancroft, John Lothrop Motley - and Robert Oppenheimer took his doctorate here under Born.

In 1933 the campaign against what the regime called Jewish physics reached Goettingen, and the faculty was taken apart within months. Max Born, James Franck, Victor Goldschmidt, Eugene Wigner, Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, Edmund Landau, Emmy Noether and Richard Courant were dismissed or left before they could be. Behind each name is a household broken up and a life restarted in a language its owner had not expected to need. Emmy Noether, whose work reshaped modern algebra, sailed for the United States; James Franck, already a Nobel laureate in physics, went too. Most went to America, Canada and Britain, where several of them - Szilard, Wigner, Teller, and Born's student Oppenheimer - went on to build the atomic bomb for the countries that took them in. Hilbert's remark to the minister was not bitter wit. It was an accurate report.

Goettingen was the first university in the western occupation zones to reopen, under British control, in 1945, and it rebuilt into something substantial rather than something legendary. Jurgen Habermas studied here; so did Richard von Weizsaecker, later President of Germany, and Gerhard Schroeder, later Chancellor, and Ursula von der Leyen, who read economics and met her husband in the town. Today there are thirteen faculties and around 22,500 students, plus a dense ring of Max Planck and Leibniz institutes that makes the whole town function as one campus. The State and University Library holds roughly nine million items. The university counts 47 Nobel laureates among its affiliates. And when a new doctor is made, they are still pulled through the streets in a flower-covered cart to kiss the Gaenseliesel in the market square, beneath a Latin motto inscribed at the entrance to the town hall cellar: there is no life outside Goettingen, and if there is life, it is not life like this.