University of Potsdam

The University of Potsdam, a public institution, was formed in 1991 as the largest university in the Berlin-Brandenburg region of Germany, through the merging of Potsdam Brandenburg College (previously known as the Karl Liebknecht Educational College) and the Potsdam-Babelsberg (previously the Walter Ulbricht German academy for political science and jurisprudence), as well as several other smaller institutions.

There are four campuses across Potsdam and Brandenburg, with some parts of the university located in historical buildings that have been named as World Heritage Sites by UNESCO. The university library, Faculties of Philosophy, and the Institutes of Mathematics, History and Sports are located within the parks of Sanssouci (the summer palace of Frederick the Great, King of Prussia), and the Institute of Mathematics is in a former stables.

The Golm campus buildings were built in the 1930s to house the Luftwaffe’s intelligence department. Today it contains most institutes of the Faculties of Science and Human Sciences, making it one of the largest science parks in the region. Babelsberg/Griebnitzsee, in the 1939 buildings of the German Red Cross, houses the Faculties of Law, Economics and Social Studies, Institutes of Computer Science and the Hasso Plattner Institute for Software Systems Engineering.

The Hasso-Plattner Institute for Software Systems Engineering, which cooperates with, among others, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and is based on an institute of the same name at California’s Stanford University. It accepts only 80 students a year.

The Abraham Geiger College, founded in 1999 to ordain Jewish clergy, was the first rabbinical seminary in Germany since the Holocaust. It was named in honour of Abraham Geiger, who started the Hochschule fur die Wissenschaft des Judentums (College for the Science of Judaism) in Berlin, which was shut down by the Gestapo in 1942.