Gesellschaft für Informatik: Establishing Informatik in Germany

Zusammenfassung

The Gesellschaft für Informatik (GI) was founded on September 16, 1969, in Bonn — the same year as the Woodstock festival, the moon landing, and ARPANET’s first message — by computing scientists who had invented the call stack and shaped ALGOL. Its founding was an act of disciplinary declaration: computing was not mathematics, not electrical engineering, not operations research — it was Informatik, a discipline requiring its own institutional home. Over fifty years, the GI turned the German-language computing community from scattered academic departments into a coherent profession, establishing conferences, awards, and curriculum standards that persist to the present.

The Name and What It Meant

Before a society could be founded, the discipline needed a name. The word Informatik — a portmanteau of Information and Automatik — had been coined by Karl Steinbuch in 1957, in a report written while he was director of research at Standard Elektrik Lorenz (SEL) in Stuttgart (he joined the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology the following year), and had spread through German-language academic usage to denote the science of automatic information processing. By 1969, Informatik was the established German-language term for what English speakers called “computer science,” a term its proponents considered less precise (it named the machine rather than the activity).

The choice of Informatik in the society’s founding was not merely terminological. German universities classified computing activities variously under mathematics, electrical engineering, and physics departments, each of which had their own institutional interests and would resist the formation of independent Informatik faculties. By naming the society around Informatik rather than “computing” or “electronic data processing” (elektronische Datenverarbeitung, EDV — the industrial term), the founders were staking a claim for disciplinary independence.

The influence of the naming choice extended far beyond Germany. Informatique (French), informatica (Italian, Spanish, Portuguese), informatika (Russian, Czech, Polish, Hungarian, Finnish), and cognates in dozens of other languages all trace to this German coinage. English and Chinese are among the few major computing languages that use machine-centric rather than information-centric terminology.

Founding: September 16, 1969, Bonn

The Gesellschaft für Informatik was founded on September 16, 1969, in Bonn, and registered as an association in the Bonn register on October 29, 1969. The founding meeting brought together computing scientists from West German universities and research institutes who shared the conviction that Informatik required its own professional home.

Friedrich Ludwig Bauer was the most prominent founding figure. Bauer, a professor at TU Munich, had co-invented the call stack with Klaus Samelson in the late 1950s, contributed to the ALGOL programming language design, and built one of Germany’s leading computing research groups. He would go on to shape the field’s curriculum in Germany, was named an honorary member of the GI in 1987, and received numerous recognitions including the IEEE Computer Pioneer Award. (The GI’s first president was Günter Hotz, 1969–1971; Bauer was a leading founding member rather than an officeholder.) Bauer’s combination of theoretical depth, institutional energy, and long-term commitment made him the closest thing to a founding father the German computing community had.

Other founding members included figures from the major West German technical universities and the Gesellschaft für Mathematik und Datenverarbeitung (GMD) — the German government’s computing research center in Bonn, founded in 1968, which provided institutional weight behind the new society. The GI’s headquarters have been in Bonn from the founding.

The founding occurred in the same year that German universities were establishing their first Informatik departments: TU Munich (1967), TU Berlin (1969), and a wave of others that followed in the early 1970s. The GI and the new departments grew together — the society providing a community for the faculty being hired into institutions that were themselves new.

The German Chapter of the ACM: A Parallel Institution

One year before the GI was founded, Albert Endres established the German Chapter of the ACM in 1968 — making it technically Germany’s oldest computing professional society. The two organizations developed in parallel rather than in competition: the GI as a large national society building the German Informatik discipline, the German Chapter as a smaller, internationally oriented bridge to ACM’s global research community. Since 2004, the two organizations formally share their 34 regional groups throughout Germany. A full history is in German Chapter of the ACM.

IFIP Membership and International Position

West Germany’s IFIP member organization was the GI from the outset, giving it a formal international role alongside its domestic disciplinary function. The East German computing society (operating under various institutional names during the GDR era) held a separate IFIP membership, reflecting the political reality of German division.

German reunification in 1990 required merging these computing communities. The process was not entirely smooth: East German computing scientists had developed under different institutional arrangements, different industrial partnerships (with VEB Kombinat Robotron and other GDR computing enterprises), and different research priorities. Integration into the GI brought West German academic norms into contact with an East German tradition that had been more directly shaped by state industrial planning.

The INFORMATIK Conference

The GI’s annual conference, INFORMATIK, began in 1971 and became the flagship event of the German-language computing community. Unlike many national computing conferences that serve primarily networking functions, INFORMATIK attempted to cover the full breadth of the discipline and attract both academic and industry participants. The conference rotated through German cities and maintained a generalist scope — a deliberate choice that reflected the GI’s commitment to Informatik as a unified discipline rather than a collection of specialties.

Over decades, INFORMATIK evolved. As computing subfields matured and developed their own international conference venues, the rationale for a broad national conference became less clear. Specialized workshops and GI technical groups (Fachgruppen) emerged as the primary research venues for specific communities within German computing, while INFORMATIK shifted toward a broader professional community orientation.

The GI publishes the Informatik Spektrum (journal, founded 1978), which covers professional and research topics for the German-language computing community, and the Lecture Notes in Informatics (LNI) series, which publishes proceedings of GI workshops and conferences.

Establishing Informatik in the Universities

One of the GI’s most consequential activities in its first two decades was curriculum development — defining what Informatik students should learn and what Informatik faculties should teach. This was not merely academic; it was institutional politics. To win independent faculty positions, Informatik needed to demonstrate that it had a distinct body of knowledge that could not be obtained through mathematics or engineering programs.

The GI produced curriculum recommendations (Empfehlungen für ein Kerncurriculum Informatik) that defined Informatik’s intellectual core: algorithms and data structures, programming languages and compilers, operating systems, databases, and theoretical computer science. These recommendations were debated, revised, and eventually adopted by German universities as the basis for their Informatik degree programs.

The impact was cumulative. By the 1980s, Informatik had established itself as a legitimate academic discipline at German universities, with full professorships, research institutes, doctoral programs, and the institutional recognition that required. The GI’s curriculum work was a significant factor in that legitimacy.

GI Awards

The GI created awards to recognize achievement in the German-language computing community:

Konrad Zuse Medaille: The GI’s highest honor, named for Konrad Zuse, awarded biennially for outstanding contributions to Informatik. Recipients include Heinz Billing (the first, 1987) and Günter Hotz (1999), alongside subsequent leaders of German computing research.

Heinz Nixdorf Preis: Named for Heinz Nixdorf, awarded for the transfer of Informatik research results into industrial application — bridging the academic-industry divide that the GI has always tried to manage.

GI-Dissertationspreis: Annual award for outstanding doctoral dissertations in Informatik, recognizing early-career excellence.

GI-Preis für gesellschaftliche Wirkung der Informatik: Award for computing work with significant social impact, reflecting the GI’s interest in Informatik beyond technical research.

East Germany: Parallel Institutions

While the GI served West German computing, the German Democratic Republic developed its own computing institutional infrastructure. The primary East German computing society operated under various names during the GDR era, eventually operating as part of the Kammer der Technik (Chamber of Technology) — an umbrella organization for technical professionals in the planned economy.

East German computing was concentrated in the VEB Kombinat Robotron, the state computing enterprise headquartered in Dresden that produced mainframes, minicomputers, and eventually personal computers. The U880 microprocessor — a reverse-engineered clone of the Zilog Z80 — was produced at Carl Zeiss Jena and powered East German personal computers. The East German computing community operated in isolation from the international mainstream; Western computers were unavailable under embargo, and Western publications arrived slowly if at all.

Reunification brought East German computing scientists into the GI and the West German academic system simultaneously. Some transitioned smoothly; others found the research culture and institutional norms of West German academia difficult after careers shaped by GDR institutional frameworks.

The GI and Industry

The GI’s relationship with German industry has always been important but complicated. Germany’s major technology companies — SAP, Siemens, Volkswagen’s digital division, Deutsche Telekom, the Mittelstand software ecosystem — employ large numbers of Informatik graduates and conduct significant applied research. GI membership has historically overlapped substantially with industry practitioners as well as academics.

The challenge: industry practitioners often find GI activities too academic; academic researchers often find the GI too practitioner-oriented compared to ACM or IEEE venues. The GI has tried to serve both communities simultaneously, with varying success. Its Fachgruppen (special interest groups) provide more specialized forums that attract the relevant research communities, while the broader GI provides the institutional umbrella.

Modern GI: Scale and Challenges

The GI’s membership peaked at approximately 30,000 in the 2000s and has declined somewhat since, reflecting the general challenge of professional societies in an era of free online community formation. The society has approximately 20,000 members in the 2020s.

The challenges facing the GI are familiar to computing societies worldwide: maintaining membership relevance when online communities satisfy many of the networking and information-sharing functions that societies historically provided; remaining credible as a voice on computing policy and education in a German public debate where these questions are increasingly prominent; and serving both the research community (which operates in international venues and may not need a national society) and the practitioner community (which needs professional representation but may not find academic conferences relevant).

The GI’s most durable activities — curriculum standards, engagement with computing education at secondary school level, ethical guidelines for the profession, and policy advice to German government — address needs that are genuinely national and that the international computing societies (ACM, IEEE) do not serve well at the German-language level.