BERLIN QUOTES: WILHELM SAID IT
“Do greet from me all the streets and all the lanes in the City of Seven Hills! I know, I believe, them all. Just as now, regrettably, I seem to know all of the local ones.
Oh, that Berlin! I can think of no other city that’d be more dreadful. There is nothing to see here, and nothing happens here either.”
Clearly, Wilhelm von Humboldt - whose stone effigy, perhaps a tad ironically, thrones in front of Berlin’s oldest university on the oldest boulevard - found Rome so exciting, enchanting and worthwhile that returning to Berlin, he half expected to encounter the same delights.
Admittedly, the city at the Spree was not ancient Rome and Schloß Tegel, family palace on the Humboldt estate then still north of Berlin, was not Palazzo Tomati (Wilhelm’s and his wife’s casa near the Spanish Stairs) but it could not all have been bad.
Wilhelm von Humboldt settled in Berlin, became a Minister for Education and was the main influence behind an ambitious project: a new university.
Between 1810 and 1949 called Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität zu Berlin. And since 1949? Humboldt Universität. In honour of Wilhelm and his equally famous brother, Alexander.