Inspired by the need to increase general awareness of foreign sentiments and cultures the Prussian Parliament decided in 1917 to found Area Studies Institutes. In the University of Greifswald the reform saw the establishment of the Nordic Institute, an interdisciplinary institute that was to study Northern Europe in a wide variety of aspects and disciplines. Beholden to interdisciplinarity and implicitly political tasks, the Nordic Institute and its successor institutions remained an oddity in the university, existing in a field of tension between politics and academia. This study tracks the development of the Nordic Institute under four different political regimes, the interaction between scholars, their academic environment, and the political system. It asks for the motivation and outcome of scholarly cooperation with the regimes, and tries to contextualize the specific problems of Area Studies in German academia. Marco Nase is a historian working at the Institute for History and Contemporary Studies at Södertörns Högskola.