Distinguished guests, dear Professor Windbichler,

Thank you very much for the invitation. It is truly an honour to speak here today on behalf of the German Young Academy - and thus about Paul Baltes’s enduring legacy.

As we have heard, the Young Academy was envisioned as a unique space of freedom for emerging scholars in German academia – including the freedom to be wrong in productive ways. As a current member and a recent alumnus, we can attest that it has blossomed into precisely such a space. Its 50 members are free to choose what they want to work on, which projects they want to pursue, and how they want to collaborate.

According to our guidelines, the Young Academy’s purpose is twofold: it seeks to encourage interdisciplinary collaborations among its members and to promote initiatives at the intersections of science, art, science policy and society. For most of us, the five years we spend as members are the first period in our academic life that we are encouraged to actively explore these intersections – not with a view to an immediate, publishable outcome; but rather as broader explorations of new horizons, themes, and frontiers; or as we say in German: über den Tellerrand hinausblicken, literally to look beyond the rim of one’s own plate. The Young Academy gives us a protected place for this, where researchers from very different fields can meet without the usual pressures of the academic system.

My co-speaker, Garvin Brod, a recent alumnus of the Young Academy and a psychologist who spent formative parts of his career at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, can unfortunately not be with us today. But he has asked me to share what only he can tell: how Paul Baltes’s ideas lived on at the Max Planck Institute after his death, as experienced by a PhD student there. I will read his words as he wrote them – so when you hear “I”, it is Garvin speaking.

Garvin Brod
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Young Academy’s purpose fits Paul Baltes well. He was a pioneer at heart, as shown by his role as a doyen of life-span developmental psychology and by the way he reshaped the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, broadening its focus from educational research in a narrower sense to human development in its full breadth.

I benefited from his pioneering spirit directly. I did my PhD at the Center for Lifespan Psychology, which he founded at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, under the supervision of his student and successor Ulman Lindenberger. Although Paul Baltes had died some years before I joined the Institute, his spirit was still visible everywhere. The first paper every new PhD student had to read was his 2006 chapter on life-span theory, written together with Ulman Lindenberger and Ursula Staudinger. It captured the breadth of his contributions to understanding human development. It spanned his overall architecture of life-span development, which captures the co-evolution and co-construction of biology and culture; his meta-theory of how resources are allocated differently across the life span, which gave rise to his famous theory of “selective optimization with compensation”; and his work on personality development across the life span, which culminated in his research on wisdom. Paul Baltes’s ideas were thus still the anchor for the work in the department.

This was true at a much more mundane level, too. I vividly remember that whenever a results graph lacked an axis label, some senior member of the department would speak up and say that Paul Baltes would have pointed this out immediately.

Even though I quickly focused on child development during my PhD, his ideas have left a mark on my thinking as well. For example, his dictum that in human development there are no gains without losses has stayed with me ever since. At first glance, it is a deeply counterintuitive idea: what does a child lose by learning to speak their native language? Well, learning a language requires specialization in hearing and producing the specific sounds, and understanding the specific concepts, used in that language. The downside of this specialization is that children lose the ability to distinguish sounds that their language does not use, which makes mastering a second language later on harder. Through numerous examples like this, Paul Baltes made clear that child development is not a monolithic march towards overall improvement, just as aging is not all decline. These important insights deserve even more public recognition than they have received.

Coming back to the Young Academy, the bidirectional dynamic of gains and losses quickly becomes clear to every member: every year, ten new members join and the ten longest-serving members leave. Last year I was one of them. What helped me to get over the initial shock of leaving was recalling Paul Baltes’s dictum: there are no gains without losses, but also no losses without gains.

Kerstin Pahl
Those were Garvin’s words. And the gains he speaks of are easy to see in what every new cohort brings with it: new people, new questions, new projects. The projects that we pursue and the working groups we found are as diverse as our members. Some of them are concerned with pressing social issues, such as Money and Society, AI, Posthumanism, and Sustainability. Others, such as our working groups on conceptions of utopias and on dying, address broader questions of human existence and human imagination.

We are particularly proud of a feature that makes us stand apart from most other young academies: the integration of the arts. Together with our artist members, we have conceived exhibitions and performances that brought together the various ways of knowledge-making found in these different domains. In this, we see a continuation of what Paul Baltes pursued at the Leopoldina: opening an institution up to perspectives it did not yet include.

In recent years, moreover, the Young Academy has increasingly looked beyond the boundaries of national academia – extending Paul Baltes’s idea into a European and global setting. The German Young Academy was the first academy for early- and mid-career researchers to join ALLEA, the European Federation of Academies of Sciences and Humanities, and has been represented on its board since 2022.

At a recent workshop organized by our working group on language, we welcomed participants from 18 countries and 4 continents – among them Colombia, Nepal, and Sudan. In an academic world that is usually defined by English as the default language, they discussed what it means ‘to do’ academia – to think, write, and discuss – in other languages, including in one’s second or third language.

Finding a voice is not only a matter of language, however. It is thanks to the Young Academy, and thus thanks to Paul Baltes’s vision, that emerging and mid-career researchers feel they have a public voice at the interface of science and policy. For researchers at these stages in particular, it is of critical importance to have institutional backing if they want to address matters of immediate concern to their academic life. The Young Academy is frequently invited to present its position to political stakeholders, from the national to the European level, especially on career trajectories below the senior level.

This year, moreover, we awarded, for the second time, a prize we conceived – not for the best individual research, but for the best research environment, honouring the creation of conditions that make excellent research possible rather than looking only at the outcome. It echoes a question at the heart of Paul Baltes’s thinking: under which conditions can human potential unfold?

Improving conditions of research is critical to our engagement. Our paper advocating for departments instead of chairs at German universities is among our most cited; it is also among the most controversial. That it has drawn both enthusiastic support and fierce opposition attests to a lively discussion culture that allows for strong disagreements – the fair, argument-driven kind that, as we heard earlier, Paul Baltes himself valued; and thus attests to the very freedom that was so important to Paul Baltes’s founding vision.

As Professor ter Meulen recalled, the Leopoldina knew for forty-five years what it costs when academic freedom is missing. Because the freedom we have come to enjoy is not a given, the Young Academy has, in the last two years, been increasingly active in doing its part in defending freedom of science and research. Last year, we published a paper on Academic Freedom and have been continuously involved in events exploring the intersections of science and democracy. In this way, we want to contribute to strengthening two convictions that have become paramount in recent years: that establishing shared factual baselines enhances trust in both science and democratic institutions; and that the current political volatility requires a robust defence of the very freedom that makes both possible: settling on shared facts, and questioning how we arrive at them.
Most of today’s members of the Young Academy never met Paul Baltes. We know him through what he built; and what he built was, above all, a gift of freedom: to explore, to disagree, to ‘look beyond the rim of our plates.’ Freedom of this kind is never finished; it has to be used and it has to be defended. Twenty years after Paul Baltes’ passing, the best way to honour him is to use it well – generously, critically, and in public – and, after our five years, to hand it on to those who come next.

Thank you, Paul Baltes, for giving us an idea that became an institution.