Berlin University Commemorates Liberation from Napoleon (1913) This photograph was taken in front of Berlin University (later Humboldt University) in 1913. It shows students and faculty commemorating the hundredth anniversary of the Battle of the Nations [Völkerschlacht] near Leipzig, where the German territories defeated France and liberated themselves from Napoleonic rule. University students and faculty members were among the most strident supporters of German nationalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and the Napoleonic wars were a rallying symbol for them.