Institutions

Research and teaching in Germany, as elsewhere, receive support from enterprises and private individuals that commit themselves to promoting science and the humanities on a non-profit or philanthropic basis. The donors have joined forces in the Donors' Association for the Promotion of Sciences and Humanities in Germany. This organisation also has an influential voice in the public domain and in the political arena.

Exemplary reformed faculties or even reformed universities in Germany, exemplary bachelors and masters degree courses, and the aliens authority that is the most welcoming to students between the Rivers Rhine and Oder – they all have to thank the Donors' Association for the Promotion of Sciences and Humanities for their commendation and for the accompanying cash prizes. The Donors' Association is one of the driving forces of university renewal in the country of Humboldt. In the process, the Association supports vital dialogue between academia and society, for example in its annual "academic summer", a programme for young and old that aims to present research in a hands-on way.

The Donors' Association, a non-profit making funding body providing funding in particular for research-intensive German business, has recently started to operate in the common educational area of the European Union and its bordering countries. Thus, the Association is one of the founders of the Euroscience Open Forum (ESOF), in which scholars engage in interdisciplinary international exchange. ESOF was consciously conceived as a European counterweight to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Its first Congress was held in the Swedish capital of Stockholm in 2004, and the second will take place in Munich in 2006.

The Donors' Association has some four thousand members, including companies, industrial associations and individuals. It earmarks more than EUR 100 million for research and teaching each year. Its so-called "Donors' Professorships" for a temporary period, for example five years, are one distinctive instrument of funding. They are intended to open up paths into new research areas, which are then pursued and developed by the university concerned from its own funds.

The proceeds from some 350 individuals endowments, with a total value of EUR 1.4 billion, are the main source of funding. The Donors' Association administers the Foundation capital entrusted to it by companies and individuals and also collects large donations. 

A long history

The Donors' Association has already been in existence since 1920. At that time, it was set up as the "Donors' Association of the Emergency Association of German Science", enabling private donors to provide financial support for ailing top research in the wake of World War I. Its first chairman was the industrialist Carl Friedrich von Siemens, whose enterprise is now one of the world's market leaders in electrotechnology. One of its first research scholarships went to Werner Heisenberg, who later won the Nobel Prize in Physics. Under Nazi rule (1933-1945), the Association's effectiveness was reduced to practically zero. In 1949, it was revived and developed to become an important private team-mate and sometimes rival of the state-run funding bodies. The main such organisations are the German Research Foundation, the German Academic Exchange Association and the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation.

In the last ten years, the work of the Association has been influenced by its Secretary-General, Manfred Erhardt. He has many years of experience as a senior civil servant in academic administration in the state sector, and then as Minister of Science in the Federal Land of Berlin. His successor, who took over at the beginning of this year, is Andreas Schlüter, aged 48, previously Secretary-General of the Goethe-Institut, and before that managing director of the Bertelsmann Foundation. Not least, he is also an expert on foundations. "This new function takes me back to my old field of work as a researcher and organiser," says Schlüter. "I find that attractive, because the social role of foundations will expand still further in Germany in the years to come."

Recommended reading: Winfried Schulze, Der Stifterverband für die Deutsche Wissenschaft 1920-1995, Berlin: Akademie Verlag 1995. 338 pages