Jena and the start of the PhD

 After four intense months in Dresden, during one of the hottest summers I have ever lived through, time came for me to move to what was suppose to be my home for the entire PhD. The small university town of Jena was chartered in 1230 and its university was founded in 1548. It is best known for having been the home of the German Romantic movement, home of such intellectuals a Friedrich Schiller  and Wolfgang Goethe. Walking through the small university town it is easy to find many a blue plaque identifying 'X" house as the home or birthplace of some well-known, long dead personage. What fascinated me the most was that it had managed to remain so small, for so many centuries, somehow it felt unchanged -minus the hideous communistoid tower right smack in the middle of an otherwise medieval/early modern town centre- since the 13th century. This feeling was helped by the fact that the medieval Catholic Church, only one in the town, had been Catholic since its foundation back in the 13th Century. That is had survived all the vicissitudes of the region was a testament to the small but vibrant catholic community I encountered. 

Today it is known for its factory of medical glass production and chemical research plant, named after 19th century chemist Carl Zeiss. A lesser known fact, it is the place where Goethe, a trained lawyer, discovered a random tooth in the university's anatomical theatre. Goethe had been called to the university and the near-by town of Weimar by the then Duke who was interested in reforming his Duchy along the lines of the Enlightenment ideals and of bolstering his university with the day's leading intellectuals. The Dukes efforts paid off as Weimar and the University of Jena became known for being the most innovative university of its time. 

Jena was also the place where I began my PhD. It took me some time to realise I was a doctoral candidate, that I had somehow managed to convince some people to fund my research. Partly I was exhausted from the intense German course, partly it was the fact that I lacked a cohort of fellow PhD students. I was in the now dying traditional German doctoral programme in which the candidate is left largely to their own devices to get on with it. This is now being replaced by an increasingly structured programmed with courses and more concrete requirements than writing a book on your own because university authorities realised that too many doctoral candidates were leaving programmes unfinished or were taking a decade to complete their theses when left totally on their own. In my case this lasted a total of 9 months because my then supervisor, an excellent man and intellectual, died unexpectedly of a cancer that was diagnosed too late for anything to be done to save him.

Those 9 months served me well in terms of work, I spent a lot of time in the archives and libraries collecting material that would form a large part of some of the main chapters of the thesis. I didn't realise this at the time but I was laying the necessary groundwork for that book. At the time, though, all I felt was a bit lost, as if I were dabbling in things that interested me that were not necessarily connected. And some of them weren't. The problem with having so many great resources in what was an intellectual hub for some many centuries is that it is easy to get lost in endless reading. Even today I have a paper, still half written, lying in wait of another archival visit to Weimar, that began as one of those tangential finds in the archives during my time in Thuringia.