Karl Jaspers House opened: "A place for interdisciplinary thinking"

It is a "gem of humanities research": the Karl Jaspers House, restored and furnished over the past two years, is home to Karl Jaspers' 12,000-volume library. The villa in the Dobbenviertel district has now been opened with a grand ceremony.

"The Karl Jaspers House illustrates the university's high-calibre research and long-standing commitment to Karl Jaspers. With its unique infrastructure, it is a gem of research in the humanities," explains Prof Dr Gunilla Budde, Vice President of the University of Oldenburg and board member of the Karl Jaspers Society. The extraordinary history of the building shows how the intellectual legacy of a world-famous scholar from Oldenburg can be successfully institutionalised and continued for the benefit of the university, the city and the region.

The villa in the Dobbenviertel district has been restored and furnished over the last two years with funding from EWE AG. It houses Karl Jaspers' library, which contains 12,000 volumes. The house is home to the Karl Jaspers-Gesellschaft e.V., which was founded last year, and the EWE Foundation. The building includes modern workstations and two flats on the upper floor for visiting academics researching the famous psychiatrist and philosopher.

"The Karl Jaspers House is intended to be a place where Jaspers' central perspectives on interdisciplinary thinking can be reconsidered and discussed in an international context," says Prof Dr Matthias Bormuth, holder of the Heisenberg Professorship for the Comparative History of Ideas at the University of Oldenburg and Chair of the Karl Jaspers Society. It offers Oldenburg an excellent opportunity to promote dialogue between the sciences in the humanities and to communicate this to the interested public through lectures, conferences and publications.

The starting point for the efforts to establish the Jaspers House was the internationally acclaimed "Jaspers Year 2008", which the University of Oldenburg organised to celebrate the 125th birthday of the Oldenburg psychiatrist and philosopher. "This year provided the impetus to maintain and further cultivate Jaspers' interdisciplinary thinking as an invigorating element for the University and the city of Oldenburg," said Prof Dr Reinhard Schulz, Managing Director of the Karl Jaspers Lectures on Contemporary Issues and Academic Director of the "Jaspers Year 2008".

The Oldenburg University Library then succeeded in acquiring Jaspers' library with funding from the Lower Saxony Foundation and EWE AG and bringing it to Oldenburg for research purposes. Dr Dr h.c. Hans Saner, Jaspers' last personal assistant, looked after the library in Basel for decades. "Jaspers' working library offers optimal working conditions. For example, the special online catalogue for the more than 12,000 volumes allows conclusions to be drawn about Jaspers' working methods," explains Hans-Joachim Wätjen, Director of Oldenburg University Library and responsible for cataloguing the Jaspers Library.

As a result, in November 2011 the "Joint Science Conference" of the federal and state governments (GWK) approved the project "Annotation and Complete Edition of the Works of Karl Jaspers and Edition of the Letters and the Estate in Selection". The complete edition has been compiled since 2012 under the leadership of the Heidelberg Academy of Sciences and Humanities in co-operation with the Karl Jaspers Foundation in Basel at the Universities of Heidelberg and Oldenburg. The project, which is funded with five million euros, is scheduled to run for 18 years and will comprise more than 50 volumes. One of four research centres is based in Oldenburg; the co-editor of the complete edition is the Oldenburg philosopher Prof. Dr Reinhard Schulz.

In summer 2012, Prof. Dr Matthias Bormuth took up the Heisenberg Professorship for the Comparative History of Ideas at the Institute of Philosophy and founded the Karl Jaspers Society, which aims to promote dialogue in the humanities - in the spirit of Jaspers, who cultivated exchange with scholars from the fields of medicine, politics, religion, art and literature. In early summer this year, the society presented its first lecture programme and organised an interdisciplinary conference. Now established and young academics are coming to Oldenburg to conduct research in the Jaspers House. In mid-September, Prof. Dr Martin Vialon, professor of philosophy at Xeditepe University in Istanbul, will be one of the first Jaspers Fellows to visit the research institution. "The invitation of Fellows by the Jaspers Society allows for a public exchange on burning issues of our time, also with experts on an international level, and thus to gain new perspectives on Karl Jaspers' thinking," says Bormuth.

The keynote speech entitled "In Jaspers' Footsteps - Or Thinking Beyond the Boundaries of Subjects" was given at the opening ceremony of the Jaspers House by the former President of the German Research Foundation (DFG), Prof Dr Wolfgang Frühwald.