Background

The Free University was founded in 1948 in response to a demand for a university in West Berlin. The original University of Berlin, now known as the Humboldt University, is located in the former East Berlin, German Democratic Republic. When the Free University opened, many of the 3,000 students who enrolled came from the old university.

Faculties include veterinary medicine, law, economics, philosophy and social sciences, education, history, classics and archaeology, political science, German literature and philology, mathematics, physics, chemistry, pharmacy, biology, geosciences, and various departments of medicine. In 1990 the teaching staff numbered about 4,000, and the student enrollment was about 60,000. The combined libraries of the university and affiliated institutes contain about three million volumes