Timeline

Under the regency of Maximilian I Joseph (1806-1825), the Academy transitions from an independent scholarly institution to a central state body with a new constitution and a staff of full-time civil servants on fixed salaries. It is put under the direct control of the Ministry of the Interior.

The scientific collections and institutes of the State of Bavaria are incorporated into the Academy as “attributes” in this year. These include the central library, the natural history collection, the chemistry laboratory, the coin cabinet, the antiquarium, the Bogenhausen observatory, the botanical gardens and the anatomical theatre. 

Joseph von Baader is appointed the first curator of the Academy’s polytechnic collection and remains in this post until 1817.

Construction gets underway on the Bogenhausen observatory, which starts operations on 4 January 1818. Johann Georg von Soldner (1776-1833) is its first director. 

Andreas Schmeller starts work on the Bavarian Dictionary, initiating a research project that is still in progress today. This work also lays the foundation for the first philology-based German-language dictionary.

This decade proves to be a mini-golden age for scientific research. Key innovations include the development of high-precision optical instruments by Joseph von Fraunhofer, the water column engine by Georg von Reichenbach and the galvanic telegraph by Samuel Thomas von Soemmerring.

Academy members Johann Baptist Spix and Karl Friedrich von Martius set off on a research expedition to Brazil. They return in 1820 with a large collection of plants for the botanical gardens in Munich. 

The major source edition for the German Middle Ages, the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (MGH), is launched by the Society for the Study of Early German History. Under the direction of historian Georg Heinrich Pertz (1795-1876), this work plays a key role in bringing German medieval studies to the international stage.

In 1826, the Bavarian state university moves from Landshut to Munich. The Academy now has access to a much wider pool of scholars than at its foundation. Its academic endeavours become increasingly professional as a result.

Under King Ludwig I of Bavaria (1786-1868), the Academy returns to its original status as an independent community of scholars and centre of research. Its members are released from public service. The collections are divided up again, with some of them moving to a newly created general conservatory, which is also headed by the President of the Academy until 1936. Others are merged with the university’s teaching collections. 

King Ludwig I appoints Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling as Academy President.

The polytechnic collection, formerly an attribute of the Academy, becomes a “central polytechnic institute”. This is a forerunner of the Technische Hochschule which would later become the Technical University of Munich (TUM) as it is known today.

King Ludwig I gets involved in the running of the Academy and reserves the right to appoint the President and six members of each class. This represents a major infringement on the Academy’s autonomy. 

The Bavarian State Palaeontology Collection is created by merging the collections of the Academy and the university.

Maximilian II ascends the throne of Bavaria. The Academy and its new President Friedrich Wilhelm von Thiersch ask the king to restore the Academy’s right to manage its own administrative affairs.

The Academy’s right to select all of its own members is restored.

Maximilian II founds the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities. The Commission is still in existence today and holds a large number of important source editions.

The Bavarian Commission for International Geodesy is founded. The Prussian officer and geodesist Johann Jakob Baeyer (1794-1885) is the driving force behind this initiative. Important figures in geodesy at the time include Carl Maximilian von Bauernfeind (Academy member since 1865), mathematician Ludwig von Seidel and physicist Philipp von Jolly (1809-1884). In 1885, the Commission is expanded, becoming the international geodesy project which is still in existence today.

Under President Max von Pettenkofer (1890-1899), Princess Therese of Bavaria becomes the first, and to date only, woman to be appointed as an honorary member of the Academy. After several disagreements regarding the acceptance of female members in general, she is awarded membership in recognition of her research in the fields of anthropology, zoology and botany.

The Commission for the Publication of the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae sets in motion the Academy’s first major humanities project involving international collaboration with academies in Berlin, Göttingen, Leipzig, Munich and Vienna. The central editorial office is established at the Academy in 1899. Since 1949, it has been supported by over 30 German and international academies and institutions of scholars.

The creation of an alliance formalises the thus-far informal collaboration between German-speaking academies (Göttingen, Leipzig, Munich and Vienna). The Berlin academy joins the alliance in 1906 and the academy in Heidelberg becomes a member in 1909/11.

Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen, who discovered X-rays, is awarded the first Nobel Prize in Physics, thus becoming the Academy’s first Nobel laureate.

The Commission for the Production of Bavarian Dictionaries and the Study of Bavarian Dialects is founded. In 1942, it was renamed as the Commission for Dialect Research and its mission is to produce a dictionary for the Bavarian, East Franconian and Rhineland-Palatinate dialects.

The Academy’s Bene Merenti medal of merit is designed by Theodor von Gosen (1873-1943), a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Breslau. There are two versions of the medal: a smaller gold medal and larger silver and bronze medals. The silver medal is awarded most frequently.

The Commission for the Collection and Editing of Soldiers’ Songs is set up under the leadership of Karl Theodor Ritter von Heigel (1904-1915). It concludes its work in 1925. The Commission for the Publication of an Encyclopaedia of Mathematical Sciences is also established and remains in existence until 1949.

With the fall of the House of Wittelsbach and the creation of the Free State of Bavaria in 1918, the Academy gets a new name: the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities (BAdW).

Inflation devalues almost all of the Academy’s endowed assets. This financial setback puts a stop to virtually all prize conferrals and research expeditions. 

The Commission for Bavarian History is founded along with the Institute for Bavarian Ethnology by decree of the Bavarian state government.

In April, Albert Einstein cancels his corresponding membership under pressure from the Academy. The minutes of the Department of Philosophy and History merely record this matter-of-fact statement: “The corresponding member of Department II, Mr Einstein, has left the Academy.” 

In compliance with the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service of 7 April 1933, the Academy and its Commissions dismiss Jewish staff members. 

On 2 March 1936, historian Karl Alexander von Müller is appointed President by the Reich Minister for Science, Education and National Culture, Bernhard Rust.

The oft-discussed idea of permanently removing the scientific collections from the Academy for cost and administrative reasons is finally acted upon in 1936. Biologist Max Dingler (1883-1961), non-tenured professor of biology in Gießen and member of the Nazi Party, is appointed as acting General Director of the Bavarian Natural History Collections. In 1945, Dingler is relieved of his office. The idea of returning the collections to the Academy is considered but never carried out. 

Jewish members Lucian Scherman (1864-1946), Alfred Pringsheim (1850-1941), Richard Willstätter (1872-1942) and Heinrich Liebmann (1874-1939) are excluded from the Academy.

The following members left “voluntarily”:
Ordinary members: Johannes Sieveking (1869-1942), Karl Walter Brecht (1876-1950)

Corresponding members: Eduard Norden (1868-1941), Otto Hintze (1861-1941), Ernst Bernheim (1850-1942), Kurt Hensel (1861-1941), Georg Bredig (1868-1944), Medea Norsa (1876-1952).

From 1941, any “non-Aryan” corresponding members living abroad are simply struck off the lists without being informed.

The following remain members of the Academy in spite of Jewish ancestry: Max Förster, Erich von Drygalski and Rudolf Pfeiffer.
The following members who survived the war  – Walter Brecht, Kazimierz Fajans and Rudolf Pfeiffer – are reinstated with full rights in 1945. 

Further information will be found in the Digital Memorial.

The Reich Ministry of Science, Education, and Culture announces a new statute on 12 July that significantly restricts the Academy’s right to choose its own members. Since 1936, the Academy President has not been elected but rather appointed by the Reich Minister. The new statute also abolishes the previously used ball ballot system. From 1940, new members are selected from a list.

In the Academy’s electoral meeting and under pressure from the Bavarian Ministry of Culture and Education, six candidates are elected who have not been proposed by the two classes: Walther Wüst, who had previously been rejected in the electoral meeting of the philosophy and history class, Lutz Pistor (vice-chancellor of the Technische Hochschule university), philologist Franz Dirlmeier, botanists Friedrich Boas and Friedrich von Faber and physicist Rudolf Tomaschek. 
The minutes of the general meeting held on 1 June state that the Academy agrees to “comply with the wishes of the state minister” and to “use the supplementary list to select members en masse across the entire Academy without assessing scientific merit on an individual basis”.

Mariano San Nicoló is elected President on 26 November.

The Academy building on Neuhauser Straße in Munich is completely destroyed during a night-time bombing raid on the night of 23 April 1944. All work at the Academy comes to a complete halt. 

Pre-empting his expulsion following an internal investigation initiated by the Academy, Karl Alexander von Müller resigns “voluntarily” from the Academy on 23 September. Müller resigns from his position as secretary of the Historical Commission at the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities in December 1945. Six months later, he also steps down from the Commission.

On 25 July, the military government unconditionally allows the Academy and some of its Commissions to resume their scientific activities. 

After denazification, the Academy moves into a temporary home on Maria-Josepha-Straße 11 in Munich under the Presidency of Walther Meißner. A shortage of paper poses a major obstacle to research work.

The Commission for Low Temperature Research is founded at the suggestion of Academy members Klaus Clusius (1903-1963), professor of physical chemistry at Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München (LMU), and Walther Meißner (1882-1974), professor of technical physics at Technische Hochschule in Munich and President of the Academy from 1946 to 1950. The Commission runs the Walther-Meißner-Institute for Low Temperature Research.

The first annual meeting after the Second World War takes place in the auditorium of the Brunnenhof Theatre.

By 1955, the prehistoric collection, the Egyptian collection and the coin collection have been removed from the Academy along with the Museum for Ethnology and the Museum for Casts of Classical Statues. The natural sciences collections are placed under the general management of the Bavarian State Natural Science Collections.

The new Society of Friends of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities is founded to improve the Academy’s strained financial situation and to help it source at least some of the funds it needs to carry out its many different activities.

The Bavarian State Minister for Education and the Arts, Prof. Dr. Theodor Maunz, awards the Academy the status of a corporation under public law on its 200th anniversary.

On its 200th anniversary, the Academy moves into its new home in the north-east wing of Munich’s Residenz royal palace, which was designed  by architect Leo von Klenze. The Academy now has 135 offices and rooms, a library, two meeting rooms and an imposing plenary hall.

The members of the Academy start wearing the gowns that are still worn today.

The Commission for Glaciology (the present-day “Geodesy and Glaciology” project) is founded. It is involved in research in the Alps and takes part in expeditions. The research work is focused on the Vernagtferner glacier in the Ötztal Alps. Here, the Commission operates the Vernagtbach monitoring station – the highest discharge station in the Eastern Alps at an altitude of 2,640 m.

Academy members Hans Piloty and Robert Sauer set up the Commission for Electronic Computing. With support from the Free State of Bavaria, they create a shared computing centre for research and teaching open to all Munich-based universities. Today, the organisation is known as the Leibniz Supercomputing Centre and is located on Richard-Wagner-Straße 18.

The Walther-Meißner-Institute moves into a new building in Garching.

The Leibniz Supercomputing Centre (LRZ) moves into a new building on Barer Straße 21 and takes on the role of IT training provider at the Technical University of Munich. 

The Dalai Lama visits the Academy, mainly to see the work being carried out by the Commission for Central Asian Studies, which is compiling a dictionary of the Tibetan written language.

The first post-War meeting of the Union Académique Internationale in Germany takes place at the Academy.

A new basis for the funding of long-term humanities projects at the Academy is created with the Academies Programme, a joint initiative of the federal and state governments. 

The Commission for the Exploration of Ancient Urbanism is set up to carry out archaeological research on urban culture in Greek and Roman antiquity. 

On 8 December, the Academy celebrates its 225th anniversary with special guests the German President Richard von Weizsäcker and the Bavarian Minister-President, Franz Josef Strauß.

The Commission for Ecology is set up by request of the Bavarian State Ministry for Regional Development and the Environment. It is tasked with addressing current environmental issues or those likely to become a future trend and discussing these with groups of experts.

Japan’s Emperor Akihito visits the Academy for the commemoration of Academy member Philipp Franz von Siebold (1796-1866). Siebold travelled to East Asia as a physician in Dutch service and had praised the wonders of Japan in one of his letters.

In a first for the Academy, two women are accepted as ordinary members: Johanna Narten, professor of Indo-European and Indo-Iranian studies, and Regine Kahmann, professor of genetics.