At least in Leipzig: going to pubs that have no closing hours, sleeping in generously dimensioned stucco decorated old houses and studying in lecture halls where you can hear properly. Because you don't need to share your seat in Leipzig with other students. In the scene pubs of the city centre it is different; they are in fact just as in demand as, for example, the university, the Private Business School or the Music academy. When mam and dad insist on coming to visit, it is best to send them on a shopping spree in Leipzig's impressive shopping arcades or one of the many museums in the city. It could happen, however, that they come often. If you need to recuperate we recommend the parks or one of the many lakes for a swim. Leipzig is also a great place to do nothing at all. That is Leipzig Freedom.

We are learning for freedom

Always first in the rankings and with a registration record in 2002 for the first term: That is Germany's second oldest university, Leipzig University. The Pope gave his consent in1409 and since then famous people such as Leibnitz, Wagner, Nietzsche, Lessing, Gustav Hertz, Goethe, Erich Kästner, Werner Heisenberg und Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker have studied here. Goethe related his impressions in the famous „Mein Leipzig lob' ich mir" (My Leipzig, I sing your praises) in the first part of Faust, where you can read what else he experienced. The university is in any case a place where the freedom of research and learning has always been at home.

Fragments, papyrus and Gutenberg's rare items

The university library, seen as motive, has its beginnings in the colleges founded in 1409 which were unified in 1543 and has been housed in the Albertina, reopened in the summer of 2001. To read all 4.8 million volumes you would have to get very old. Perhaps you would rather take a glance at a few special ones: The special collections include 5,000 mainly Greek papyrus items, 1.600 antique ostraka (fragments with inscriptions), bible manuscripts, among them parts of the famous Codex Sinaiticus, altogether about 8,800 manuscripts from the middle ages and the modern era, about 3,600 Incunabela, among them a 42-line Gutenberg bible. If you still have an appetite for reading, just go to the Deutsche Bücherei (German Library), where you will find a collection of everything that has been printed and published in German since 1911.

Study conditions of the finest

And the library is more than a visiting card; it is a symbol for the excellent studying conditions altogether in the university. Free places, intensively caring professors in 190 courses, a comprehensively renovated alma mater ... Not to be dismissed: Life and living on a state grant is more elegant in Leipzig that elsewhere. Cost of living is lower and there are excellent apartments of the Founder Era for students and flat-sharing communities. It would be more within your reach that which the university adopts as its aim: „to contribute to the productive development of mankind."

Intellectual opportunities

The university focuses above all on the natural sciences; the city excels as science location for high-tech. The Max Planck Institute, the Leibnitz society, research centres and over 1.000 research institutes offer more than enough room for self realisation. The commercial college is the oldest private college in the world (in Leipzig many things have been tried out for the first time), the College of Technology, Business and Culture, for example, also trains architects and librarians. Dancing, theatre, painting, graphic design and music: there is a suitable and always renowned education centre in Leipzig for every taste (the Music Conservatory is the oldest… well, you know).

In the middle of the city, in the middle of life

Science everywhere: Even in the zoo you see pure research: Scientists of the MPI for evolutionary anthropology are trying to uncover the secrets of primates in the biggest (well, you know already) ape house "Pongoland". And in BIO CITY university and businesses are under one roof. Alma mater itself is located in the city centre; its students populate the city centre day and admittedly night. They study and live here better than anywhere else. That is Leipzig Freedom pure.