Hamburg Scientific Foundation
The non-profit Hamburg Scientific Foundation was established in 1907. It pursues the goal of promoting the sciences and their maintenance and dissemination in Hamburg .
history
At the end of 1904, Werner von Melle , Hamburg Senator and President of the High School Authority , began to advise the banker Max Warburg , who was open to the establishment of a university in Hamburg, about the establishment of a scientific foundation. Von Melle, who had been pursuing the goal of founding a university in Hamburg for years, wanted to achieve greater financial independence from the Hamburg Senate through a private foundation for the promotion of science . He planned to use the foundation to create the financial basis for a university.
Warburg recommended von Melle to approach the businessman Alfred Beit , who came from a Hamburg family, had made his fortune in the South African diamond business and was now a billionaire in London. At the end of 1905, after a conversation with von Melle, Beit promised two million marks. This sum formed the capital stock of the later Hamburg Scientific Foundation. After the donation by Beit, the Warburg family made a second donation of 250,000 marks in March 1906. By spring 1907, von Melle and Warburg had convinced another 45 donor (groups) to commit themselves financially to the planned foundation, which came into being on April 12, 1907.
As a first project, the foundation established an endowed professorship in Hamburg in 1907, to which Erich Marcks was appointed. From 1908 to 1910 she financed an ethnographic expedition to the South Seas to the Bismarck Archipelago and New Guinea , which was realized thanks to the support of Albert Ballin , a member of the Board of Trustees . In addition, in its early years it made it possible to appoint 21 additional professors as part of the general lecture system and to support the scientific institutes in Hamburg. After the University of Hamburg was founded in 1919, the foundation served and continues to serve the purpose of promoting science in general and its maintenance and dissemination in Hamburg.
In the inflation of 1923, the property on book of around 7 million marks was almost completely lost. The renewed loss of assets as a result of the currency reform in 1948 almost brought the Hamburg Scientific Foundation to a standstill. It was above all Kurt Hartwig Siemers , chairman of the foundation from 1951 to 1988, who rebuilt it in the post-war years.
present
Today the Hamburg Scientific Foundation mainly supports small and medium-sized projects. According to the funding guidelines, the requirements for support are a high scientific level of the project and a connection to Hamburg. This results from the person of the applicant.
The foundation has been awarding the Kurt Hartwig Siemers Science Prize since 1970 . It uses it to support scientists who have completed a habilitation or equivalent at the University of Hamburg. The prize is endowed with 50,000 euros and is awarded every two years. With the Werner von Melle Prize , the foundation honors outstanding dissertations that have been written at the University of Hamburg. The prize, endowed with 10,000 euros, is also advertised every two years, always on topics that are particularly relevant to society.
On the occasion of its 100th anniversary, the Hamburg Scientific Foundation launched the series "Patrons for Science" in 2007. Twenty-one volumes have been published so far: a base volume with short biographies of the founders of the foundation, as well as other life pictures about Sophie and Carl Laeisz , Eduard Lorenz Lorenz-Meyer , Hermann Mutzenbecher, Friedrich and Adolph Vorwerk, Albert Ballin , Ernst Friedrich Sieveking , Franz Bach , Alfred Beit , Hermann Blohm , Gustav Amsinck , Henry P. Newman , Adolph Lewisohn, August Lattmann Heinrich Ohlendorff , Edmund Siemers , Werner von Melle , Julius Ertel, Georg Hermann Stoltz , Aby Warburg and Max Warburg as well as Eduard Lippert and Ludwig Julius Lippert . If the "patrons of science" are about the life pictures of the foundation's founders, the series "Scientists in Hamburg" has been portraying those people who have worked at the University of Hamburg and far beyond since 2017. So far, three biographies have been published about the art historian Erwin Panofsky , the doctor Rahel Liebeschütz-Plaut and the philosopher Ernst Cassirer .
literature
- Johannes Gerhardt: The founders of the Hamburg Scientific Foundation. 3rd, completely revised and expanded edition. Hamburg 2019, ISBN 978-3-943423-69-3 , pp. 25f. ( Full text online )