Berlin Observatory
The Berlin Observatory (Berliner Sternwarte) is a German astronomical institution with a series of observatories and related organizations in and around the city of Berlin in Germany, starting from the 18th century. It has its origins in 1700 when Gottfried Leibniz initiated the "Brandenburg Society of Science″ ("Sozietät der Wissenschaften") which would later (1744) become the Prussian Academy of Sciences ("Preußische Akademie der Wissenschaften"). The Society had no observatory but nevertheless an astronomer, Gottfried Kirch, who observed from a private observatory in Berlin. A first small observatory was furnished in 1711, financing itself by calendrical computations.
German Academy of Sciences at Berlin
The academy was founded in 1946 by the Soviet Military Administration in Germany to continue the long tradition of the Prussian Academy of Sciences and the Brandenburg Society of Sciences, which had been founded in 1700 by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz. To facilitate publishing, the Akademie Verlag was founded also in 1946. The 250th anniversary in 1950 was already boycotted by West Germans due to the influence of the socialist East German authorities, which mainly had East Germans elected to the academy in the decades to follow. It became the most important academy in the German Democratic Republic, and was accordingly renamed 'Academy of Sciences of the GDR' (Akademie der Wissenschaften der DDR) in 1972, once the division of Germany was accepted as the state of affairs. In the 1980s, the AdW itself had over 200 members, including two dozen West Germans. It coordinated research at 59 institutes that employed 22,000 persons. Following the fall of the Berlin wall, academy members called for a reform of the academy, rejecting the leading role of the Socialist Unity Party of Germany.