Deutsche Hochschule für Politik

The Deutsche Hochschule für Politik (DHfP), or German Academy for Politics, was a private academy in Berlin, founded in October 1920. It was integrated into the Faculty for Foreign Studies (Auslandswissenschaftliche Fakultät) of the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in 1940, was re-founded in 1948 and turned into the Otto-Suhr-Institut of the Freie Universität Berlin in 1959.

The DHfP was to establish the elementary principles of a democratic community in Germany in a liberal spirit and thus help to strengthen the young Weimar Republic against anti-democratic tendencies. Political science was at this time still understood as the study of democracy. The predecessor institution of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik was the "Staatsbürgerschule" (Citizens' Academy) in Berlin, founded in 1918.

Sponsors or members of the founding board of trustees were amongst others Walter Simons, Ernst Jaeckh, Friedrich Naumann, Friedrich Meinecke, Max Weber, Hugo Preuß, Gertrud Bäumer and Otto Heinrich von der Gablentz. The Prussian education reformer (and scholar of Islamic studies) Carl Heinrich Becker played an important role in the successful founding of the new academy.

Lectures and seminars for the first 120 students at first took place only in the evening, mostly with volunteer lecturers. The core areas of teaching were at first:

With rising numbers of students, in the following years the proportion of paid teaching staff rose, as did the number of professorships. A degree could not be awarded by the Hochschule für Politik until the mid-1920s, due to the difficulties in making the education sufficiently academic.

The teaching staff included, amongst others, the women's rights activist Gertrud Bäumer, Carl Heinrich Becker, Rudolf Breitscheid, the constitutional lawyer Hermann Heller, the later Bundespräsident Theodor Heuss, Rudolf Hilferding, Wilhelm Heile, Hermann Luther, the politician and sociology professor Ernst Niekisch, the German-Jewish sociologist Albert Salomon, the historian Hans Delbrück, Hajo Holborn, Eckart Kehr, Veit Valentin, Ernst Jaeckh, the jurists Hermann Pünder, and Arnold Brecht, the economist Hans Staudinger and the government ministers Walther Rathenau, Bill Drews and Walter Simons. The latter's son Hans Simons was the head of the academy and also had teaching duties.

...
Wikipedia