Short answers, pulled from the story.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher who lived from 1770 to 1831 and was a major figure in the tradition of German idealism. He developed a comprehensive philosophical system, often termed absolute idealism, to account for reality as a unified whole.
Hegel was born on the 27th of August 1770 in Stuttgart, capital of the Duchy of Wurttemberg in the Holy Roman Empire. He was christened Georg Wilhelm Friedrich and was known as Wilhelm to his close family.
In Hegel's most general sense, Geist denotes the human mind and its products, in contrast to nature and the logical idea. He presented spirit as humankind coming to know itself through a historical process of rational development, and held that the essence of spirit is freedom.
Hegel's major works include the Phenomenology of Spirit, published in 1807, and the Science of Logic, published in three volumes in 1812, 1813, and 1816. He also published the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences in 1817 and the Elements of the Philosophy of Right in 1821.
On the day before the Battle of Jena in October 1806, Hegel saw Napoleon ride out of the city on horseback. He wrote to his friend Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer that he had seen the Emperor, this world-soul, who astride a horse reaches out over the world and masters it.
After Hegel's death his followers split into rival Right and Left Hegelian camps. The Left, including Ludwig Feuerbach and Karl Marx, adapted his dialectical method for their materialist critiques of religion and society.