Curated playlist
German Lutherans
- Immanuel KantA Prussian king's censors forbade Immanuel Kant to speak publicly about religion. The philosopher answered in 1798.
- Johann Sebastian BachFor decades after he died, Bach was remembered as an organist, not a composer.
- Wilhelm IIWilhelm II, the last German Emperor, spent much of his adult life holding a pair of white gloves in his left hand. The gloves made that arm look longer than it was. He reigned from 1888 to 1918 over a country that had become Europe's…
- Caspar David FriedrichSamuel Beckett said a Caspar David Friedrich painting was the source of Waiting for Godot.
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich HegelHegel watched Napoleon ride out of Jena the day before the 1806 battle. The philosopher called him "this world-soul."
- Johannes KeplerJohannes Kepler refused to accept a Mars orbit that was off by eight arcminutes. An ellipse finally fit.
- Werner HeisenbergA spy once carried a pistol to a Werner Heisenberg lecture, ready to shoot him. Moe Berg did not fire.
- Carl Friedrich GaussAt nineteen, Carl Friedrich Gauss proved a 17-sided polygon could be drawn with just a compass and straightedge.
- Edmund HusserlA Franciscan priest smuggled approximately 40,000 pages of Edmund Husserl's notes out of Nazi Germany.
- Alexander von HumboldtAlexander von Humboldt climbed Chimborazo in 1802, gasping and bleeding from his gums.
- Willy BrandtWilly Brandt, later West Germany's chancellor, fled Nazi Germany under a false name. He made it legal in 1948.
- Ursula von der LeyenUrsula von der Leyen, who would later lead the European Commission, spent more than a year of her youth hiding in London under the name Rose Ladson. In 1978 her family was warned that the Red Army Faction, a West German terrorist group,…
- Paul von HindenburgPaul von Hindenburg left retirement in 1914 and destroyed a Russian army. The battle became known as Tannenberg.
- Albrecht DürerAlbrecht Dürer drew a rhinoceros he had never seen. His 1515 woodcut still appeared in some German school textbooks.
- Otto von BismarckIn 1889, Otto von Bismarck was recorded on an Edison phonograph, quoting the opening verse of La Marseillaise among other lines. That recording is the only known capture of his voice. One biographer argues that he chose the French song to…
- Fritz HaberFritz Haber, the German chemist born in 1868, devised a method that now underpins roughly a third of the world's annual food production. The method turns nitrogen gas and hydrogen gas into ammonia, the raw material for both fertilizers and…
- Paul HindemithJoseph Goebbels publicly called composer Paul Hindemith an "atonal noisemaker" in December 1934.