Friedrich Schiller University

Friedrich Schiller University is one of Germany's oldest universities, founded in 1558, and the intellectual centre of the city. The main building on the Fürstengraben is a handsome Baroque structure, and the surrounding university quarter contains several other notable buildings including the Collegium Jenense, housed in a former Dominican monastery.

The university's golden period was the 1790s and 1800s, when it attracted a remarkable assembly of Romantic and idealist philosophers. Schiller was professor of history here; Goethe visited regularly from Weimar and maintained close connections with the university for decades. The Schiller Memorial on the Johannisplatz commemorates the most famous of the university's professors. Walking through the old university quarter gives a palpable sense of the city's intellectual inheritance — the architecture is modest but the associations are extraordinary.

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A story
In the 1790s, Friedrich Schiller, Goethe, Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, and the Schlegel brothers were all at Jena simultaneously — a concentration of intellectual firepower that has almost no parallel in German history. Hegel wrote the Phenomenology of Spirit here in 1806, reportedly completing the final pages on the night before the Battle of Jena as Napoleon's guns were audible outside the window.