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The humanities contribute towards shaping the future and towards our cultural memory. They mediate between cultures; they reflect and offer guidance on values and developments in sections of our society. In particular, the ability of the humanities to discover commonalities in diversity is more important than ever with the manifold opinions and viewpoints which exist in today’s world. Cultural memory, intercultural skills, evaluating and describing the factors related to modernisation processes are the key elements of the humanities at the outset of the 21st century.

The humanities are – more than any other research area – characterized by a plurality of methods and a broad spectrum of disciplines and research objectives. The German Council of Science and Humanities summarizes 17 courses of study and 96 disciplines under the term “humanities”. They are not simply commentators on the sciences or technology. They are essential partners in a dialogue with the sciences.

About 25% of the students in Germany were registered for one of the disciplines within the humanities and more – the total number of first-year students within the humanities in Germany kept growing over the past 15 years.

The internationality of the German humanities is shown by the high proportion of humanity scholars in the research and exchange programmes of the Alexander von Humboldt-Foundation (AvH).

During their time at the university a large number of German humanities students study some time abroad. The diversity of the humanities also reveals itself in the research landscape outside of German universities. More than 140 research projects from the humanities and the social sciences were established from the Union of the German Academies of Sciences and Humanities. 14 institutes of the Leibniz Association and seven of the Max Planck Society focus on research within the humanities.

The German Research Foundation (DFG),  provides numerous special research fields and funds young academics in a huge number of research training groups (“Graduiertenkollegs”).

Furthermore there are institutions like the German Historical Institutes (“Deutsche Historische Institute”) in several countries all over the world, the Institute for Advanced Study in Berlin (“Wissenschaftskolleg”) or four from the five Humanities research centres (“Geisteswissenschaftlichen Zentren”) which are funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) and by the Länder.