History

Interdisciplinary collaboration between the humanities, natural sciences, and social sciences has a long and vibrant tradition at Friedrich Schiller University Jena, especially also in recent decades. In the 1990s and 2000s, the Collaborative Research Center 482 Ereignis Weimar-Jena: Kultur um1800 lastingly shaped university life. The project examined political, social, and intellectual upheavals decisive for the development of modernity, covering the period between Christoph Martin Wieland’s arrival in Weimar (1772) and Goethe’s death (1832). It posited the “twin city” of Weimar–Jena as a condensed communication space between representatives of the arts, literature, philosophy, theology, politics, and the natural sciences. This space enabled innovations that could in turn best be deciphered and understood through methodological networking.

“Thus, the same applies here as in so many other human endeavors: only when the interest of several is directed toward one point can something exceptional be brought forth”
(Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Der Versuch als Vermittler von Object und Subject). The university’s Forschungszentrum Laboratorium Aufklärung [Research center laboratory enlightenment], which was established in 2008 and remained active until 2022, was predicated on that sentiment. It centered on the connection of contemporary questions and problems with the formative phase of modern societies, as well as the structural and discursive comparison of 18th-century and early 21st-century social formations.

Moreover, the Forschungszentrum für Europäische Romantik [Research Center for European Romanticism], founded in 2010, focused on the interdisciplinary study of Romanticism, not only on its protagonists, key figures, and works, but also on parallel or competing phenomena and constellations. From this work emerged the DFG Priority Program Ästhetische Eigenzeiten: Zeit und Darstellung in der polychronen Moderne [Aesthetic individual temporalities: Time and Representation in Polychronous Modernity] (2013–2020). In recent years, European exchange relations and interconnections in particular have been at the center of both academic inquiry and public programming. The research group Europäische Romantik oder Romantiken in Europa? [European Romanticism or Romanticisms in Europe?] furthermore honed in on the relevance of artistic and visual forms of expression for Europe’s cultural development in modernity. The Research Center was closely affiliated with Schiller’s Garden House and the Goethe Laboratory at the University of Jena.

In 2015, the DFG-funded research training group Modell Romantik: Variation—Reichweite—Aktualität [The Romantic Model: Variation—Reach—Relevance] was initiated. Over the course of nine years and three generations of doctoral candidates, it yielded new insights into the reception and aftereffects of historical Romanticism in modern-day approaches to interpreting the world, practices of life, self-constitution, and aesthetic design. The actualization and modification of ‘Romanticism’ in different cultural and national contexts was rendered interdisciplinary palpable through new methodologies.

This work—which has been institutionally diversified for a long time and can be summarized with key terms such as ‘Constellations in Cultural Spaces around 1800,’ ‘Romanticism and its Influence,’and ‘Historically Informed Contemporary Analysis’—now coalesces in the Jena Center for Romanticism Research, founded in 2025. It strengthens the Friedrich Schiller University’s profile line “Liberty,” alongside “Light” and “Life.”