Curated playlist
Humboldt University of Berlin alumni
- Karl Joseph SimrockKarl Simrock lost his government job for writing a poem praising a revolution.
- Karl MarxKarl Marx left an estate valued at just 250 pounds when he died in 1883. He died stateless in London at 64.
- Felix MendelssohnAt 20, Felix Mendelssohn conducted Bach's St Matthew Passion in Berlin.
- Herbert MarcuseHerbert Marcuse analyzed Nazi ideology for American spies before students made him a hero.
- Max PlanckMax Planck called his quantum idea "an act of despair." The cautious physicist launched quantum physics reluctantly.
- Edmund HusserlA Franciscan priest smuggled approximately 40,000 pages of Edmund Husserl's notes out of Nazi Germany.
- Rudolf BultmannRudolf Bultmann told students it hardly mattered what Jesus did in his life.
- Max WeberMax Weber died in 1920 with his major book unfinished on his desk. His widow spent two years preparing it.
- Mikhail BakuninKarl Marx had the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin expelled from the First International in 1872.
- Walter BenjaminWalter Benjamin reached the Catalan border town of Portbou on the 25th of September 1940, a German-Jewish philosopher and critic with almost nothing published that the wider world had noticed. He had crossed the French-Spanish frontier…
- W. E. B. Du BoisW. E. B. Du Bois died in Ghana the day before the March on Washington. He was 95 and had renounced his U.S. citizenship.
- Georg SimmelMax Weber and Edmund Husserl backed Georg Simmel, yet he got no full professor's chair until age 56.
- Austen ChamberlainAusten Chamberlain won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1925 but never became prime minister. His half-brother Neville did.
- Otto JahnOtto Jahn gave away his entire Mozart manuscript collection. It went to Ludwig von Köchel for his catalogue.
- 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…
- Menachem Mendel SchneersonMenachem Mendel Schneerson, known to his followers as the Lubavitcher Rebbe, handed out dollar bills every Sunday in Brooklyn. From 1986, he stood outside his office and greeted a line of visitors one by one. Each person received a dollar…
- Max StirnerMax Stirner was born Johann Caspar Schmidt, and the name history remembers began as a joke about the size of his forehead. He later adopted that nickname as his pen name, and it outlasted the man himself. Almost everything we know about…
- Wernher von BraunWernher von Braun's V-2 rocket cost more lives to build than it took as a weapon.
- Erwin PanofskyIn 1934, Erwin Panofsky argued a famous Flemish painting was really a legal contract.
- Walther NernstChemist Walther Nernst also invented an electric piano. He built it in 1930 with Bechstein and Siemens.