Compared to some universities, Freie Universität Berlin is quite young: a mere seventy-five years old. That youthfulness makes it much easier to trace the history of our university’s founding in great detail. For example, there are still people living today who witnessed its earliest years. The university’s very first student, Stanislaw Karol Kubicki, died just four years ago in October 2019. He was fondly referred to as “Student Number 1,” since he was the very first person to register at the newly founded university in November 1948, as a young medical student.

Read more about why the founding ceremony was held in a movie theater, how two chemistry students brought the Internet to the university, and much more...