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19th-century German male writers

  • Friedrich Nietzsche12 minOn the 3rd of January 1889, in the streets of Turin, Friedrich Nietzsche caused a public disturbance and two policemen approached him. An often-repeated tale holds that he had watched a horse being flogged across the Piazza Carlo Alberto,…
  • Immanuel Kant9 minImmanuel Kant lived so rigidly that his neighbors in Königsberg were said to set their watches by his daily walks. He was born Emanuel on the 22nd of April 1724, the son of a harness-maker, in a Lutheran household that prized humility and…
  • Karl Joseph Simrock4 minKarl Joseph Simrock was born in Bonn on the 28th of August 1802, the son of a music publisher in a city already steeped in German cultural life. He would grow up to become the man who handed medieval German poetry to the modern world, not…
  • Johann Wolfgang von Goethe11 minOn the 13th of October 1806, Napoleon's army poured into Weimar, and the least disciplined of the French soldiers, the so-called spoon guards, broke into the home of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. They drank his wine, made a great uproar, and…
  • Friedrich Schiller11 minFriedrich Schiller was born on the 10th of November 1759 in Marbach, in the Duchy of Württemberg, named after King Frederick the Great but called Fritz by nearly everyone who knew him. He died at forty-five from tuberculosis, and in the…
  • Robert Schumann11 minRobert Schumann was born on the 8th of June 1810 in Zwickau, in the Kingdom of Saxony, into a family of booksellers and translators with no particular musical connections. His father August made his fortune selling German translations of…
  • Brothers Grimm13 minThe Brothers Grimm published their first collection of folk tales in 1812, and the world has never quite looked at fairy stories the same way since. Jacob Grimm, born on the 4th of January 1785, and Wilhelm Grimm, born on the 24th of…
  • Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel12 minOn the day before the Battle of Jena, in October 1806, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel watched 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,…
  • Hermann Hesse13 minHermann Hesse died on the 9th of August 1962, aged 85, in Montagnola, Switzerland, and a memorial in The New York Times called his works largely inaccessible to American readers. Within a few years that judgment collapsed completely. By…
  • Friedrich Engels16 minFriedrich Engels was born on the 28th of November 1820 in Barmen, a Prussian industrial town his contemporaries called the "German Manchester". He would spend his adult life moving between factory offices, revolutionary barricades,…
  • August Wilhelm Schlegel10 minAugust Wilhelm Schlegel died in Bonn in 1845, just three months before the unveiling of a monument he had personally organized in honour of Ludwig van Beethoven. That small gap tells you something essential about the man. He was always…
  • Jacob Grimm11 minJacob Ludwig Karl Grimm was born on the 4th of January 1785, in Hanau in Hesse-Kassel, and he spent nearly eight decades building what may be the most wide-ranging scholarly legacy in the history of the German language. His father Philipp,…
  • Edmund Husserl14 minEdmund Husserl was born on the 8th of April 1859 in Proßnitz, a small town in the Margraviate of Moravia, the second of four children of a Jewish milliner. He would go on to found phenomenology, one of the most far-reaching philosophical…
  • Max Weber19 minMax Weber died on the 14th of June 1920 in Munich, of pneumonia, almost certainly contracted during the post-war Spanish flu pandemic. He was fifty-six years old, and he had not finished his book. The manuscript that became Economy and…
  • Carl von Clausewitz12 minCarl von Clausewitz was born on the 1st of July 1780 in Burg bei Magdeburg, in the Prussian Duchy of Magdeburg. He died on the 16th of November 1831 of cholera, the same disease that had just killed the commander of the army he was…
  • Georg Simmel10 minGeorg Simmel was born on the 1st of March 1858 in Berlin, the youngest of seven children in an assimilated Jewish family. His father, a prosperous businessman, had founded a confectionery store called "Felix & Sarotti." His mother came…
  • Karl Kautsky15 minKarl Kautsky spent thirty-five years as editor of Die Neue Zeit, the most prestigious Marxist journal in the world, and in that time he became known as the "Pope of Marxism". Born in Prague on the 16th of October 1854 and educated in…
  • Theodor Mommsen10 minTheodor Mommsen stood up at a formal banquet at the University of Berlin in 1892, and the entire room rose with him. Mark Twain was there, seated at the head table among roughly twenty eminent professors, and he watched as the guards'…
  • Heinrich Schliemann9 minHeinrich Schliemann claimed that at the age of seven he had announced he would one day excavate the city of Troy. The boast came from a poor pastor's son in Mecklenburg-Schwerin, a child who left grammar school after three months because…
  • Max Müller10 minMax Müller was born on the 6th of December 1823 in Dessau, the son of Wilhelm Müller, a lyric poet whose verse Franz Schubert had set to music in those celebrated song-cycles Die schöne Müllerin and Winterreise. His godfather was Carl…
  • Barthold Georg Niebuhr9 minBarthold Georg Niebuhr was born in Copenhagen on the 27th of August 1776, the son of Carsten Niebuhr, a prominent German geographer. He grew up to become a statesman, banker, and historian, eventually earning the title of Germany's leading…

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