Annette Freudling

© Schardt Verlag Oldenburg 2006

Bremen University is the exact opposite of a traditional university – it is the idea of reform made matter. At the beginning of the 1970’s the Hanseatic city set the utopia of a free exchange among equals in concrete. The utopia is gone, the concrete has survived. After more than three decades and well-intentioned attempts to hide the calamity behind glass facades, the institution still radiates the charm of a boiler room. Florian Weizenkamp looked like living proof, that particular architectures affect people’s spirits. His shoulders hunched forward as he walked across the campus lost in thought. Mostly he looked right through the concrete into the distance. Hair style, glasses and corduroy trousers (vintage: early 1980’s) underlined the impression that he was only to a limited extent aware of the life around him.

“The present is as fleeting as steam,” he said in his seminars. “When it’s cooled down, that’s where we come in. Our job is to immerse in the condensation of time.” For four years now he had held the chair of 20th Century History in Bremen.

In fact Weizenkamp wasn’t bothered by the campus and its dubious aesthetic. On the contrary – it fascinated him. To him the founding years of the factory of ideas, the spirit of its origin were still perceptible. Precisely where light and air had not yet been introduced by renovation, that’s where he found them: relics of the Revolution. He found them in the graffiti in the windowless corridors, in the burn holes in the carpets, which cried out to him: “No power to the professors!” And sometimes when he noticed particularly garish pullovers or shirts at the tables of the canteens, he imagined they had been inherited from members of the first student parliament. In a way Weizenkamp felt that he had arrived.

He had been a teenager when young people with long hair and beards had gathered by the Roland statue on the market place and demonstrated against the tightening of the exam regulations. Florian played truant, stood under the town hall arches and listened. Until his mother, the industrialist’s wife, turned up in front of him and pushed him to the tram stop. “Do you want to end up like these Communists? It’s a disgrace. That’s what happens when there’s no more order in the country.” Later he got a clip round the ears from his father, because he asked what the phrase “Springer-Fascism” was supposed to mean. “Don’t ever say words like that again.”

Given his family background, studying at the red university, as it was called, would have been inconceivable. Instead he followed his brother to a Berlin university. Twenty years later he was offered the chair at Bremen. He accepted immediately. It was clear to him that the professorship gratified him just as much as the belated triumph over his parents. Although the red label was so faded by now, that it no longer interested anyone.

That’s how the times changed: What counted today happened at the edge of the campus: in the Centre of Applied Space Technology, in the Max Planck Institute of Marine Microbiology, in the Centre of Human Genetics. There PhD students with EU funding researched differences between fish eggs and the time-saving content-analysis of dairy products. Over there, there were no burn holes in the carpets any more. The new buildings were of tasteful brick and high-grade steel. Whoever was allowed access there walked on stone floors and curving stairways. It was not least because of this development that in the coming year Bremen would be allowed to sport the title “City of Science”.