Curated playlist
Humboldt University of Berlin alumni
- 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…
- 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…
- Felix MendelssohnFelix Mendelssohn was born on the 3rd of February 1809 in Hamburg, in the same house where, exactly one year later, the violinist Ferdinand David would be born. That coincidence would prove fitting: David would one day give the world…
- 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…
- Max PlanckMax Karl Ernst Ludwig Planck was born on the 23rd of April 1858 in Kiel, and he would go on to crack open one of the most stubborn problems in all of physics by proposing an idea that, at the time, he himself could barely believe. That…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Mikhail BakuninMikhail Bakunin spent three years chained in the Peter and Paul Fortress in St. Petersburg, alone in a cell, with no certainty he would ever leave alive. He had already been sentenced to death. He had already been extradited once and tried…
- W. E. B. Du BoisW. E. B. Du Bois died on the 27th of August 1963 in Accra, Ghana, at the age of 95. The very next day, hundreds of thousands of Americans gathered in Washington for the March on Washington. The man who had spent nearly a century fighting…
- 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…
- Austen ChamberlainAusten Chamberlain won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925, yet never became prime minister. He served in Parliament for 45 years, led his party, and shaped European diplomacy in its most dangerous decade since Napoleon. And still, history has…
- Otto JahnOtto Jahn was born in Kiel on the 16th of June 1813, into a world where the boundary between classical scholarship and musical biography had barely been tested. By the time he died in Göttingen on the 9th of September 1869, he had helped…
- Wernher von BraunWernher von Braun helped carry humanity to the Moon, yet more people died building his most famous weapon than were ever killed by it. Born on the 23rd of March 1912 in the small Prussian town of Wirsitz, he grew into a man whose…
- 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…
- Walther NernstWalther Nernst drove a car with a cylinder of nitrous oxide bolted to it, injected directly into the carburetor for extra power. This was not a stunt. It was the natural behavior of a man who sold a lightbulb patent for one million marks…