Curated playlist
German male non-fiction writers
- Albert EinsteinGerman-born theoretical physicist (1879–1955)
- Karl Joseph SimrockKarl 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…
- 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…
- Lambert SchmithausenLambert Schmithausen was born on the 17th of November 1939 in Cologne, Germany, and went on to become one of the most methodical voices in Buddhist scholarship. He earned his doctorate in philosophy from the University of Vienna in 1963,…
- Christoph Martin WielandChristoph Martin Wieland was born on the 5th of September 1733 in Oberholzheim, a village split between two jurisdictions: half belonging to the Free Imperial City of Biberach an der Riss, and the other half to Gutenzell Abbey. That…
- Philipp LahmPhilipp Lahm scored in the sixth minute of the 2006 FIFA World Cup's opening match, cutting inside the area and launching a right-foot shot into the top-right corner of the net. The venue was Munich. The opponent was Costa Rica. And the…
- 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…
- Martin LutherMartin Luther stood before the Diet of Worms on the 17th of April 1521, a German priest summoned to answer for his own books. The Emperor Charles V presided. His writings lay spread across a table, and Luther was asked a plain question:…
- Hermann OldenbergHermann Oldenberg was born in Hamburg on the 31st of October 1854, and by the time he died in Göttingen in March 1920, he had left a body of scholarly work that touched almost every corner of ancient Indian religious literature. He…
- Jacob GrimmJacob 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 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Carl von ClausewitzCarl 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…
- Marcus JunkelmannMarcus Junkelmann grew up inside a palace. Born on the 2nd of October 1949 in Munich, he spent his formative years at Lustheim Palace in Schleißheim, where his family had taken up residence. His father, Erich Junkelmann, was an art…
- Walter BurkertWalter Burkert was born on the 2nd of February 1931 in Neuendettelsau, Germany, and over the course of a long career he changed how the modern world thinks about Greek religion. By the time he died in Zurich on the 11th of March 2015, he…
- Jan AssmannJan Assmann spent decades working through one of the most charged questions in the study of religion: whether the birth of monotheism was not a triumph of spiritual insight but an act of violence against an older, more tolerant way of…
- Theodor MommsenTheodor 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'…
- Barthold Georg NiebuhrBarthold 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…
- Johann Joachim WinckelmannJohann Joachim Winckelmann was born on the 9th of December 1717 into poverty in Stendal, a town in the Margraviate of Brandenburg, the son of a cobbler and the grandson of a weaver. Half a century later, he would be murdered in a hotel…
- 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…
- 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…