Curated playlist
German Lutherans
- 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 Sebastian BachIn May 1747, Johann Sebastian Bach sat at a new and unfamiliar instrument in the court of King Frederick the Great in Potsdam. The king handed him a theme and dared him to improvise a fugue on it. Bach obliged, working out a three-part…
- Caspar David FriedrichCaspar David Friedrich painted a figure standing alone on a mountain ridge, back turned to the viewer, gazing into a sea of rolling mist. No face, no name. Just a silhouette dwarfed by an infinite horizon. That image, completed in 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,…
- Johannes KeplerAt age six, Johannes Kepler was taken by his mother to a high place to look at the Great Comet of 1577. Three years later, in 1580, he was called outdoors to watch a lunar eclipse, and he remembered that the Moon appeared quite red. These…
- Werner HeisenbergWerner Heisenberg was born on the 5th of December 1901 in Würzburg, Germany, the son of a secondary school teacher who would become Germany's only ordinarius professor of medieval and modern Greek studies. That background in language and…
- Carl Friedrich GaussJohann Carl Friedrich Gauss was nineteen years old when he solved a problem the Ancient Greeks had left open for more than two thousand years. He proved that a regular seventeen-sided polygon, the heptadecagon, could be drawn with nothing…
- 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…
- Alexander von HumboldtAlexander von Humboldt stood at the top of the volcano Chimborazo in Ecuador in 1802 at 19,286 feet above sea level, higher than any Westerner had ever climbed. He was gasping for air, bleeding from his gums, and still taking measurements.…
- 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 von HindenburgPaul von Hindenburg stood at 1.98 meters tall, with a muscular frame and striking blue eyes, an imposing figure at the Palace of Versailles when the German Empire was proclaimed on the 18th of January 1871. He was there as his regiment's…
- Albrecht DürerAlbrecht Dürer was born in Nuremberg on the 21st of May 1471, the third child of a Hungarian goldsmith who had translated his own family name from the word for "doormaker". That family name, Dürer, carries a door in its coat of arms. By…
- Paul HindemithPaul Hindemith was born in Hanau, near Frankfurt, on the 16th of November 1895, and within two decades he would be playing concertmaster at the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra. He was a composer, yes, but also a theorist, a teacher, a violist, a…