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Curated playlist

19th-century German male writers

  • Friedrich NietzscheFriedrich Nietzsche's sister edited his writings to fit her own ultranationalist views.
  • Immanuel KantA Prussian king's censors forbade Immanuel Kant to speak publicly about religion. The philosopher answered in 1798.
  • Karl Joseph SimrockKarl Simrock lost his government job for writing a poem praising a revolution.
  • Johann Wolfgang von GoetheWhen French soldiers broke into Goethe's home in 1806, his companion Christiane Vulpius defended it.
  • Friedrich SchillerFriedrich Schiller's tomb is now empty. On the 3rd of May 2008, DNA tests showed the skull in it was not his.
  • Robert SchumannComposer Robert Schumann fought his own piano teacher in court for the right to marry the teacher's daughter.
  • Brothers GrimmThe Brothers Grimm were academics trying to build a science, not storytellers. Their 1812 tales became a mythology.
  • Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelHegel watched Napoleon ride out of Jena the day before the 1806 battle. The philosopher called him "this world-soul."
  • Hermann HesseHermann Hesse's biggest audience came after he died. His novels became U.S. paperback bestsellers by the mid-1960s.
  • Friedrich EngelsFriedrich Engels rode with an aristocratic fox hunt while funding Karl Marx.
  • August Wilhelm SchlegelAugust Wilhelm Schlegel translated Shakespeare so well that the playwright became a national poet of Germany.
  • Jacob GrimmJacob Grimm and his brother expected their dictionary to take roughly ten years. It was finished in 1961.
  • Edmund HusserlA Franciscan priest smuggled approximately 40,000 pages of Edmund Husserl's notes out of Nazi Germany.
  • Max WeberMax Weber died in 1920 with his major book unfinished on his desk. His widow spent two years preparing it.
  • Carl von ClausewitzCarl von Clausewitz died of cholera with his masterwork unfinished. His widow published On War the next year.
  • Georg SimmelMax Weber and Edmund Husserl backed Georg Simmel, yet he got no full professor's chair until age 56.
  • Karl KautskyLenin once called Karl Kautsky's book the "New Testament" of Marxism. Later, Lenin branded him a renegade.
  • Max StirnerMax Stirner was born Johann Caspar Schmidt, and the name history remembers began as a joke about the size of his forehead. He later adopted that nickname as his pen name, and it outlasted the man himself. Almost everything we know about…
  • Theodor MommsenTheodor Mommsen insisted on checking every Latin inscription against the original stone.
  • Heinrich SchliemannHeinrich Schliemann left school after three months because his family could not pay. He still became the digger of Troy.
  • Max MüllerMax Müller persuaded the East India Company to fund his edition of the Rig-Veda. He worked on it from 1849 to 1874.
  • Barthold Georg NiebuhrHistorian Barthold Georg Niebuhr found a lost Roman law text in a Verona cathedral library.

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