On 17 October 1456, the University of Greifswald was ceremoniously opened with papal approval by Duke Wartislaw IX of Pomerania-Wolgast. The sovereign founding is due in large to the initiative and generous funding from Greifswald’s mayor, Heinrich Rubenow.

By the end of the 15th Century, Greifswald had gained importance for students from the Empire’s northern territories and from Scandinavia. However, the University opposed the Reformation and together with an outbreak of the Plague, this led to no more enrolments from 1527 onwards.

The University of Greifswald was reopened in 1539 with a teaching programme based on the example set by Wittenberg. A visible sign of the new beginning was the erection of an own building for the University (Ernesto-Ludovicianum 1591-1596) and the creation of a library from 1604 onwards. By giving the Eldena District to the University in 1634, Duke Bogislaw XIV hoped to guarantee the existence of the higher education establishment and thus managed to enable financial independence until 1872. As a result of the Thirty Years’ War (1618-1648), Vorpommern and the University fell under Swedish rule, at first destroying the first signs of any academic flourishing.

The “Swedish Era” (up to 1815) did the University good, despite repeated and long-lasting wars. Enlightenment impulses were adopted by the University, which by then was acting more and more as a cultural bridge to Sweden, and developed on an intellectual level by scholars such as J.P. Palthen, A. v. Balthasar, H.E. Warnekros and P. Ahlwardt. The University Main Building with its famous Aula, which still stands today, was erected according to a design from A. Mayer from 1747-1750.

In 1815, Swedish Pomerania was passed to Prussia. The University was then Prussia’s smallest, but oldest university. At that time, it was medicine that developed particularly quickly. The expansion of the clinical field and the early subject-specific differentiation led to Greifswald developing Prussia’s second largest Faculty of Medicine, where researchers such as F. Loeffler and F. Sauerbruch worked. Prussia’s first Agricultural Academy was founded in 1835 on the University’s estate in Eldena and remained in close cooperation with the University until 1876.

Many new buildings have been built at the University since the end of the 19th Century. Inaddition to several clinics and the Audimax, the University Library was built in 1882 as one of the first buildings with a self-supporting closed stack system, where the bookshelves serve as both structure and shelving. From 1925 onwards, the University expanded with its Institutes of Medicine and Natural Sciences, on land given to the University by the town, in the eastern part of town. This is where the new campus is being developed today.

In 1908, women were admitted for studying for the first time. The University was supported again and again by private patrons. This was shown not only by the roughly 50 scholarships from private foundations that were awarded in Greifswald up until 1920, but also by the creation of the first German biological research institute on the Island of Hiddensee by the Society of Friends and Supporters of the University.

In 1933, the University adopted the name Ernst Moritz Arndt University. In the following years, many academics became victims of Nazi persecution and arbitrariness, which was not opposed in any considerable way by members of the University, students or teaching staff. The principles of academic self-government were destroyed to a large extent.

Thanks to the efforts of members of the University, the town of Greifswald was not destroyed during the peaceful handing over of the town to the Red Army in 1945. Teaching started again at the University on 15 February 1946. The Faculty of Law remained closed until its re-erection in 1992. Shaped by the university reforms of 1945/46, 1951 and 1968, Greifswald developed into a socialist university. In 1968, the faculty and institute structure was incorporated into the newly formed sections, the academic Senate ceased to exist.

After the political turn in 1990, the faculties and the academic Senate were reinstated. The process of legal and structural reorganisation and the evaluation of the subjects and employees were largely completed with the implementation of the first University Statutes in 1995.