Mitchell G. Ash:
The Max Planck Society in the Process of German Unification, or:
How did the KHI come to the MPG?
A Preliminary Research Report

The talk begins with a brief summary of how the system of support for science and scholarship changed during the process of German unification from 1989 to 2002, with emphasis on the role of the Max-Planck-Society (MPG). As will be shown, the common depiction of this process as a linear imposition of West German institutions on the territory of the former German Democratic Republic is not entirely correct. Unexpected, important changes in that system (including the MPG) took place, and significant funding cuts in the West resulted.

The second part of the talk addresses an indirect result of the unification process, the transfer of the KHI (= Kunsthistorisches Institut) in Florence to the Max-Planck-Society (= MPG) in 2001. Preliminary research in the records of the Senate of the MPG suggests that the transfer was not initiated or proposed by a member or the leadership of the MPG, but rather by the Federal Ministry for Education and Research in Bonn. Although this step was not a direct result of the unification of the two German states, funding shortfalls in Western Germany caused by unification led the Ministry to rid itself of several humanities-oriented institutes, including the KHI, and thus to renew its previous emphasis on natural scientific and technologically oriented research. The Ministry also proposed a merger of the KHI and the Bibliotheca Hertziana in Rome, which, however, was not accepted.

Mitchell G. Ash (PhD Harvard University), is Professor Emeritus of Modern History, with emphasis on history of science, at the University of Vienna, Austria, where he served from 1997 to 2016. A member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the European Academy of Sciences and Arts, Ash was a Fellow of the Wissenschaftskolleg (Center for Advanced Study) Berlin, and has held visiting professorships and fellowships at the University of Göttingen, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Princeton University, the University of California at Berkeley, and the Max-Planck-Institute for History of Science in Berlin. He is author or editor of twenty books and nearly 200 articles and book chapters on various topics related to the sciences and humanities in social, cultural and political contexts. His most recent book is a study of the Max-Planck-Society in the process of German unification, 1989-2002, published in 2023.