Germany - People

Germany is the 3rd largest source of students at Oxford, and the 2nd largest source of international students. There are over 750 German students studying at Oxford, the majority of whom – 69% – are postgraduates and over a quarter of whom – 28% – are full-time undergraduates. This makes Germany the 3rd largest source of undergraduate students after the UK and China.

German students have access to a wide range of scholarships, particularly for graduate study. Germany is the only European country whose students are eligible to apply for the prestigious Rhodes Scholarships for graduate study. In addition to being able to apply for the full range of scholarships open to students from all EU countries including the Clarendon Scholarships, German students at Oxford are also funded by the Jenkins Memorial Fund, the Scatcherd European scholarships, Marie Curie Research Training Grants, Die Studienstiftung Deutschen Volkes, Eheleute Carl-Russ-Stiftung, Haniel Stiftung, Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD),  Friedrich Ebert Foundation, Konrad Adenauer Foundation, Hanns Seidel Foundation, Friedrich Naumann Foundation, Heinrich Boell Foundation, and the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation.

The German-speaking student community at Oxford is very vibrant and active. The Oxford German Society is one of the University’s oldest student societies. Originally founded as the “Hanover Club” in the early 20th century, the society recently celebrated its centenary. The society organizes social and cultural activities, hosts speaker events and co- organizes conferences, the most recent being the Oxford German Forum in 2011 which focused on German, British and European perspectives on emerging powers.

With over 240 German citizens on faculty, Germany is the 3rd largest source of academics at Oxford.

Oxford has been home to an impressive number of Nobel Prize winners who were members of the faculty either shortly before or at the time of their award, two of whom were from Germany. Sir Ernst Boris Chain (1906 –1979) was a German-born biochemist and co-recipient of the 1945 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine alongside Howard Florey for their work on penicillin. In the 1930s he had been a lecturer in chemical pathology at Oxford, working on a broad range of research topics including snake venoms, tumour metabolism, lysozymes, and biochemistry techniques. His work on penicillin built on and greatly expanded the work of Alexander Fleming, discovering its therapeutic action, its chemical composition and theorising its structure.

Klaus von Klitzing, a German physicist, was awarded the 1985 Nobel Prize in Physics. He worked from 1979 to 1980 conducting research in Oxford’s Clarendon Laboratory where he had access to the necessary equipment to produce the very strong magnetic fields that he needed to carry out the work that would eventually lead to the discovery of the Quantized Hall Effect, the work for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize.

Professor Stefan Vogenauer
Professor Vogenauer is Director of the Oxford Institute of European and Comparative Law (IECL), Professor of Comparative Law, and Fellow of Brasenose College. Apart from comparative law his research interests lie mainly in the areas of private law, international uniform law, European legal history and legal method. For his comparative and historical analysis of the interpretation of statutes in English, French, German and EU law, he was awarded the Max Weber Prize of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences and Humanities and the Otto Hahn Medal of the Max Planck Society in 2002, as well as the 2008 Prize of the German Legal History Conference.  In 2012 he was given a Humboldt Research Award, conferred in recognition of his lifetime achievements in research and bringing with it an invitation to carry out research projects of his own choice in cooperation with specialist colleagues in Germany.

Professor Vogenauer obtained his legal education in Kiel (First State Examination,) Paris, Oxford, and Regensburg (Second State Examination.) Before coming to Oxford he was a Senior Research Fellow at the Hamburg Max Planck Institute for Comparative and Private International Law and had a part time Lectureship at Bucerius Law School.

Professor Reinhard Strohm
Professor Reinhard Strohm FBA is Professor of Music in the Faculty of Music, Oxford; Visiting Professor in Musicology at Vienna University; and Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College. His research interests focus on late-medieval music, Italian opera, eighteenth-century studies and postmodern debates concerning musicology.

Strohm is co-founder and chairman of Bach Network UK, an international research association dedicated to the music of J. S. Bach. He works as advisor with performing groups, opera houses and scholarly academies. He is a member or corresponding member of various academies, and collaborates with international journals and performing institutions. He was elected to the fellowship of the British Academy in 1993 and in 2009 he was elected Honorary Member of the Scientific Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences (ZRC SASA) in a ceremony at Ljubljana, Slovenia. At present he is teaching Musicology at the Institut für Musikwissenschaft of the University of Vienna. He has also recently been awarded a Fellowship of the Wissenschaftskolleg zu Berlin for the academic year 2010–11.

Born in Munich in 1942, Professor Strohm has studied Musicology, Violin, Medieval Latin and Romance literatures in Munich (University), Berlin (Technische Universität), Pisa (Scuola Normale Superiore) and Milan (Conservatorio G. Verdi). He was awarded his PhD in 1971 at Technische Universität Berlin (with Carl Dahlhaus) on “Italienische Opernarien des frühen Settecento (1720-1730)”. He was a Co-editor of the Richard-Wagner-Gesamtausgabe, 1970-82, Lecturer at King’s College, University of London (1975-83), Professor at Yale University (1983-90) and Reader and Professor at King’s College London (1990-96). 

With 2,445 alumni, Germany is home to the 5th largest concentration of Oxford alumni in the world.

Among Oxford’s notable alumni are:

• Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, Oscar-winning director and screenwriter
• Hans-Paul Bürkner, President and CEO of the Boston Consulting Group
• Norbert Lammert, Bundestag president and Rhodes Scholar
• Elisabeth Blochmann, eminent scholar of education and philosophy, and a pioneer in and researcher of women's education in Germany
• Richard von Weizsäcker, president of the Federal Republic of Germany 1984–1994, first president of the reunified Germany
• Adam von Trott zu Solz, a German diplomat who opposed the Nazis and was involved in the July 1944 plot to assassinate Hitler
• Ernst Schumacher, internationally influential economic thinker.