Curated playlist
20th-century German male writers
- Adolf HitlerAdolf Hitler was born on the 20th of April 1889 in Braunau am Inn, a town in Austria-Hungary near the German border. He died by suicide on the 30th of April 1945, in a bunker beneath a city in ruins. Between those two dates lies the…
- Herbert MarcuseHerbert Marcuse was born on the 19th of July, 1898, in Berlin, into an upper-middle-class Jewish family well integrated into German society. Few thinkers of the twentieth century managed to shape radical politics from inside a government…
- Rudolf CarnapRudolf Carnap was born on the 18th of May 1891 in Ronsdorf, in what is now the city of Wuppertal, Germany. At the age of 14, he taught himself Esperanto and attended the World Congress of Esperanto in Dresden in 1908. That detail says…
- Gerd B. AchenbachGerd B. Achenbach was born on the 11th of February 1947 in Hameln, Germany, under the name Gerd Bottcher. In 1981, he did something no philosopher had done before: he opened the world's first philosophical practice. Not a university…
- Willy BrandtWilly Brandt was born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm on the 18th of December 1913 in the Free City of Lübeck, the illegitimate son of a single mother who worked as a cashier and a father he never once met. He died on the 8th of October 1992, his…
- Paul TillichPaul Tillich arrived in the United States in 1933 at age 47, without fluent English, his university post stripped by the Nazi regime, his first marriage long collapsed, his nerves still frayed from years of burying soldiers in the mud of…
- Rudolf BultmannRudolf Bultmann once told his students that it did not matter what happened throughout Jesus's life. To Bultmann, only that Jesus existed, preached, and died by crucifixion mattered. He called this the difference between the "thatness" and…
- Hermann WeylWhenever Michael Atiyah turned his attention to a mathematical topic, he kept running into the same name. He found that Hermann Weyl had already been there before him. Freeman Dyson placed Weyl in a category almost no one else could enter.…
- Hans JonasHans Jonas died at his home in New Rochelle, New York, on the 5th of February 1993, at the age of 89. He was a philosopher born in Germany who later became an American citizen. His career moved between two subjects that seem to share…
- Roland EmmerichRoland Emmerich's films have earned more than $3 billion at the worldwide box office. That makes him the 17th-highest-grossing Hollywood director of all time. The movie industry calls him a "master of disaster," a label that suits a…
- Erich FrommErich Fromm was born on the 23rd of March 1900 in Frankfurt am Main, the only child of Rosa and Naphtali Fromm, and he would spend the next eight decades asking a question that unsettled everyone who heard it: why do people choose their…
- Erwin PanofskyErwin Panofsky looked at a fifteenth-century Flemish painting of a man and a woman in a dim room and saw something no one else had seen: a legal contract. The year was 1934, and the painting was Jan van Eyck's Arnolfini Portrait. Panofsky…
- Eric GutkindEric Gutkind sent Albert Einstein a copy of his book "Choose Life: The Biblical Call To Revolt" sometime before January 1954. Einstein wrote back from Princeton on the 3rd of January 1954, and what he said was blunt. God, Einstein wrote,…
- Timothy ReuterTimothy Alan Reuter was born on the 25th of January 1947 into a family already woven into history. His grandfather, Ernst Reuter, had served as mayor of Berlin. That lineage did not make Reuter's career inevitable, but it perhaps gave him…