In the project seminar "On the Prehistory and Early History of the Technische Hochschule Karlsruhe", Part I (WS 19/20) and II (WS 20/21), students identified the first students of the polytechnic school in Karlsruhe in independent work and through their own archival studies and undertook a social and cultural-historical classification of the polytechnics against the background of a differentiating higher education landscape using the example of Karlsruhe. In cooperation with the Forum Landesgeschichte at the Generallandesarchiv Karlsruhe, the results were presented to a broader public in lectures at an online event on May 21, 2021. The history of the origins of the Karlsruhe Polytechnic, an educational institution built on the Parisian model, and its technical student body, were highlighted here.

Opened in 1825, the Polytechnic was one of the first institutions of its kind in the German-speaking world - after Prague (founded in 1806) and Vienna (founded in 1815). Each of these institutions was characterized by a high regional character; at the same time, they all also referred to the model of the École polytechnique founded in Paris in 1794. The Karlsruhe Lehranstalt played a model role, especially after its extensive reorganization by Karl Friedrich Nebenius in 1832, and had a decisive influence on the development of the departmental system of the later technical universities in Germany.

In their lecture "Origin, Mobility, Discipline. Cultural Historical Perspectives on the Karlsruhe Polytechnics", Nicolas Novak and Martin Ullmann focused exemplarily on the first years of the Polytechnic School and here especially on the student cultures at the Polytechnic: in an overview of students of the institution and their formation as a group between school discipline on the one hand and academic character on the other hand, they presented their results from the preceding research work.