ABSTRACT
The crisis in the humanities first and foremost arises from the high teaching and supervision load, based on a poor student-professor ratio. If one of the key tasks of the humanities is 'to complexify' the world or to engage in 'understanding understanding', the crisis is an inevitable component that arises from the critical reflection upon the foundations, approaches, and findings of individual disciplines. The significant disparity in funding, also apparent in German Research Foundation (DFG)-programmes, is in itself not a matter of concern: it rather reflects the low-cost research tradition in the humanities, which do not need elaborate lab equipment or expensive technologies. In addition to the DFG, which is the most important funding organization for the humanities, several private foundations have launched programmes tailored specifically to the Geisteswissenschaften. Compared with the natural sciences or engineering, the 'inevitability' of the humanities might indeed be less apparent, as their findings are less tangible than in other subject areas.
