Curated playlist
19th-century German philosophers
- Friedrich NietzscheOn 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 KantImmanuel 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…
- Johann Wolfgang von GoetheOn 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 SchillerFriedrich 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…
- Karl MarxOn the 14th of March 1883, at a quarter to three in the afternoon, Friedrich Engels left Karl Marx alone in his armchair for scarcely two minutes. When he returned, he found his lifelong friend peacefully gone to sleep, but forever. The…
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelOn 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,…
- Friedrich EngelsFriedrich 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,…
- Edmund HusserlEdmund 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 WeberMax 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…
- Georg SimmelGeorg 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 KautskyKarl 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…
- Rosa LuxemburgRosa Luxemburg was shot in the head, her body weighted with stones and dropped into a Berlin canal. It was the night of the 15th of January 1919, and she had spent most of the preceding four years in prison. She was 47. Her killers were…