Letters to and from four great minds of the University of Wrocław

The University of Wrocław, Poland, was founded in 1702, making it one of the oldest universities in Central Europe. Let’s discover some of the professors and scientists who have helped establish the University’s reputation as a leader of research, science and technology.

Who are they and why are they important?

Friedrich Gottlob Heinrich Christian Haase was a classical philologist and expert in rhetoric. The law and its history were the subject of interest for Siegfried Brie. The only representative of exact sciences in this group is the physicist Otto Richard Lummer, known for his achievements in the field of optics and thermal radiation. Alfred Hillebrandt was an Orientalist specialising in the language, culture and history of ancient India.

Friedrich Haase - book-lover, philologist and letter-writer

First of all, let’s meet Friedrich Gottlob Heinrich Christian Haase. Haase was born in Magdeburg in 1808. He studied classical philology at the Universities of Halle and Greifswald. In 1838, he defended his doctoral dissertation at the University of Halle. He worked at the University of Wrocław from 1840, where he was a full professor in philology from 1846, and in rhetoric from 1851. Between 1858 and1859, he was the university's rector.

From an early age, Haase was interested in and collected books. At the end of his life, he had a collection of over 7,000 titles. There were about 40 manuscripts among them. Several of them found their way to the University Library in Wrocław, including the 12th-century Arator’s codex containing his Historia apostolica or the Greek liturgical manuscript from the 17th century.

Haase’s correspondents were mainly representatives of the broadly understood science of antiquity. Among them were his two university teachers, outstanding classical philologists of the first half of the 19th century - August Böckh, the publisher of, among others, Pindar’s works and Karl Lachmann, the founder of contemporary text criticism.

In Haase's correspondence, one can find not only letters of scholars. For example, he exchanged letters with a well-known social activist and thinker, Ferdinand Lassalle, considered one of the founders of social democracy. In 1863, Lassalle founded the General German Workers' Association, the first workers’ party in history.

Siegfried Brie - law expert, newspaper editor and rector

Siegfied Brie was born on 21 January 1838 in Hamburg. He came from a merchant family of Jewish origin, which had converted to Protestantism.

He studied law in Heidelberg, Leipzig and Berlin, where he gained a doctorate in 1861. Then he worked as an editor for the newspaper Berliner Allgemeine Zeitung. From 1866 onwards, he taught law in Heidelberg and obtained his habilitation (the highest university degree in many European countries) in 1869. From 1874 to 1878, he was a Professor of Law in Rostock and later in Wrocław until 1921, when he retired.

During the last stage of his career, he edited a series of research works on law: Abhandlungen aus dem Staats- und Verwaltungsrecht, and also served as rector of the University of Wrocław in the academic year 1890-1891. He died on 3 December 1931 in Wrocław.

Wrocław University Library currently holds 209 letters addressed to Siegfried Brie. There are letters from important authors including Georg Bender, who was the mayor of Breslau from 1891 to 1912 (shelf-marks: Brie 8-10).

Otto von Gierke was a famous German legal historian (shelf-marks: Brie 84-86).

Eduard Norden was a world-renowned classical philologist (shelf-mark: Brie 146).

Otto Lummer - specialist in radiation

Otto Richard Lummer’s (1860-1925) research interests focused primarily on optics and black body radiation.

He was born in Thuringia, in the city of Gera (Polish: Góra), and studied at several German universities, until he ultimately became an assistant to professor Hermann von Helmholtz at the Physikalisch-Technische Bundesanstalt in Berlin. He took the position of professor there in 1894, and, from 1904 until his death, he worked at the Schlesische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Breslau, where he was the director of the Institute of Physics for many years.

Professor Lummer discovered the phenomenon of interference occurring in a long, flat-parallel glass plate with a bevelled end. His invention was perfected by another German physicist, Ernst Gehrcke, and therefore today it is called the Lummer-Gehrecke plate. This instrument is used in interferometer, spectrography and interference spectroscopy. In the field of optics, Lummer is also known as the co-creator of the photometric cube, which he invented with Eugen Brodhun.

In 1895, in collaboration with Wilhelm Wien, Lummer created the first black body model, which consisted of a blackened, opaque, hollow sphere with a small outlet recess, the walls of which were uniformly heated. Then, in 1899, Otto Lummer and Ernst Pringsheim Sr. conducted groundbreaking research into the distribution of energy in the black body spectrum, which led Max Planck to formulate the quantum hypothesis. It is worth adding that Lummer also developed a mercury lamp for producing monochromatic light, and in 1902 he built a high-resolution spectroscope.

Otto Lummer also initiated the creation of the first radio station in Wrocław: Schlesische Funkstunde.

Among the senders of letters written to Lummer, there are many world-famous scholars. These include Nobel Prize winners, well as other well-known professors of the University of Wrocław, such as Max Born, Philipp Lenard and Fritz Haber. All three were known for their research in the field of quantum mechanics.

Among this group, it is also worth mentioning the physicist Gustav Robert Kirchhoff, who worked at the University of Wrocław from 1850 to1854, the discoverer of anode radiation Eugen Goldstein, the chemist Alfred Stock, and the zoologist Willy Kükenthal, who specialised in research on corals and was the Rector of the University of Wrocław between1911 and 1912. Ernst Mach, an Austrian physicist known primarily for the airspeed unit named after him, also wrote to Lummer.

Alfred Hillebrandt - linguist and mythologist

Alfred Hillebrandt (1853-1927) was born in Silesia, and studied comparative linguistics and Sanskrit at the University of Wrocław, under the guidance of Adolf Friedrich Stenzler, one of the great pioneers of indology. Afterwards, he continued his studies for a few years in Munich. Having earned his PhD, he came back to his alma mater, where he obtained a professorship of Sanskrit and was twice Rector. He stayed there until his retirement in 1921.

Professor Hillebrandt bequeathed his collection of Sanskrit manuscripts to the University of Wrocław, where they are still preserved.

He was well-versed in all aspects of ancient India, but his great specialty was the Veda and its mythology. His research is so outstanding that it is still read today by scholars, more than a century after it was published.

Therefore, it is not surprising to find amongst his correspondents the greatest western indologists of his time. Eugen Hultzsch was known for deciphering the inscriptions of Ashoka. Arthur Macdonell was the author of classical Vedic textbooks. Ernst Windisch was an indologist, who was also known for his work on Celtic cultures. We also find letters from scholars from India, including Rudrapatta Schamasastry, the discoverer of the Arthashastra, Keshavlav Harshad Dhruv, a prominent specialist of Middle and Old Gujarati, or Vishnu Sitaram Sukthankar, the famous editor of the Mahabharata.