After World War II Stanislaw Karol Kubicki began to study medicine at the former University of Unter den Linden, which increasingly came under ideological pressure from the Communist leadership in the eastern sector of divided Berlin. After three students critical of the system were expelled for political reasons, Kubicki along with many fellow students and instructors urged that a free university be founded in one of the western sectors of the city. Their goal was to be able to study and conduct research without political influence. With assistance from the American Allies and supported by politicians in Berlin, on December 4, 1948 – in the middle of the Berlin Blockade – Freie Universität Berlin was founded.

Stanislaw Karol Kubicki is the son of Stanislaw Kubicki, a writer, philosopher, translator, and expressionist painter murdered by the  Gestapo in 1943. In 1948 he was officially the first student to enroll at Freie Universität. Kubicki was a founding member of the university student council that had been founded in the wake of the protests against the expulsions of three student editors of the magazine Colloquium. After completing his medical degree and a doctorate, Stanislaw Karol Kubicki became a professor of neurology. Highly regarded for his research on sleep, Kubicki headed the department of clinical neurophysiology in Freie Universität's hospital in Charlottenburg from 1974 to 1991.

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