Curated category
Recipients of the Pour le Mérite (civil class)
- Voltaire"This is no time to make new enemies." Those words are attributed to Voltaire on his deathbed, when a priest urged him to renounce Satan.
- Giuseppe VerdiGiuseppe Verdi was an intensely private man who liked to claim he had risen from illiterate peasants. The truth was tidier and less romantic.
- James ChadwickIn February 1932, after only about two weeks at the laboratory bench, James Chadwick sent a letter to the journal Nature with a deliberately tentative title…
- Charles DarwinCharles Robert Darwin once jotted his thoughts about marriage on two scraps of paper, drawing two columns headed "Marry" and "Not Marry".
- T. S. EliotT. S. Eliot wrote the opening of "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" when he was twenty-two years old. The lines compared an evening sky to "a patient…
- Eugène IonescoEugène Ionesco sat down at age 40 to learn English from a textbook, and what came out of that exercise was not a language skill but a theatrical revolution.
- Gioachino RossiniGioachino Rossini wrote his last opera while still in his thirties, then stopped composing operas for the remaining 40 years of his life.
- Johannes BrahmsJohannes Brahms once interrupted a friend's toast in Berlin with five blunt words: "Quite right; here's Mozart's health." It was January 1896, near the end…
- Eugène BurnoufEugène Burnouf died on the 28th of May 1852, the same year his translation of the Lotus Sutra finally appeared in print.
- Robert KochRobert Koch announced the cause of tuberculosis before the German Physiological Society in Berlin on the 24th of March 1882. There was no particular reaction.
- 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…
- Henry Wadsworth LongfellowHenry Wadsworth Longfellow published his first poem at age 13 in the Portland Gazette on the 17th of November, 1820. It was a patriotic four-stanza piece…
- Richard StraussRichard Strauss died on the 8th of September 1949 in Garmisch-Partenkirchen with the words "dying is just as I composed it in Tod und Verklärung" on his lips.
- Hermann HesseHermann Hesse died on the 9th of August 1962, aged 85, in Montagnola, Switzerland, and a memorial in The New York Times called his works largely inaccessible…
- Thomas CarlyleThomas Carlyle arrived at the University of Edinburgh in November 1809 by walking one hundred miles from his home village in Dumfriesshire.
- Erwin SchrödingerErwin Schrödinger was born on the 12th of August 1887 in Vienna, and by the time he died on the 4th of January 1961, he had left behind an equation that…
- Hendrik LorentzHendrik Antoon Lorentz died on the 4th of February 1928, and three days later something remarkable happened at his funeral in Haarlem.
- Friedrich HayekFriedrich Hayek wrote on the 26th of October 1929, three days before the Wall Street crash, that there was no reason to expect a sudden collapse of the New…
- August Wilhelm SchlegelAugust Wilhelm Schlegel died in Bonn in 1845, just three months before the unveiling of a monument he had personally organized in honour of Ludwig van…
- 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…
- 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…
- 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.
- 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…
- 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…
- 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…
- Sofia GubaidulinaSofia Gubaidulina was born on the 24th of October 1931 in Chistopol, a small town in the Tatar Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic.
- 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…
- 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…
- Michael FaradayMichael Faraday could not do trigonometry. His mathematical abilities were limited to the simplest algebra. Yet James Clerk Maxwell, the physicist who turned…
- Elias LönnrotElias Lönnrot was born on the 9th of April 1802 in Sammatti, a small village in the province of Uusimaa, in what was then the Swedish-controlled territory of…
- Karl JaspersKarl Jaspers died on the 26th of February 1969 -- his wife Gertrud's 90th birthday. That detail is small, but it says something.
- George F. KennanGeorge Frost Kennan sent a telegram from Moscow on the 22nd of February, 1946, that would reshape American foreign policy for the rest of the twentieth…
- Horace VernetHorace Vernet was born on the 30th of June 1789 inside the Paris Louvre itself, while his parents sheltered there during the French Revolution.
- Jean-Auguste-Dominique IngresJean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres died at eighty-six on the 14th of January 1867, in his apartment on the Quai Voltaire in Paris, and his studio held more than…
- Pieter GeylPieter Geyl spent thirteen months inside Buchenwald concentration camp with a half-finished argument in his pocket. The Dutch historian had written an…
- Niels BohrNiels Bohr once described the tension at the heart of all good teaching as the struggle between "Klarheit und Wahrheit" - clarity and truth.
- Vasily ZhukovskyVasily Zhukovsky composed the words that Russians sang as their national anthem for decades, yet he spent much of his career translating other people's poems.
- 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…
- Ronald SymeRonald Syme published The Roman Revolution in 1939, just as fascism was tightening its grip on Europe, and the book hit the scholarly world like nothing…
- Lawrence Alma-TademaLawrence Alma-Tadema was born on the 8th of January 1836 in Dronryp, a village in the Dutch province of Friesland, and died one of the most celebrated and…
- Max MüllerMax Müller was born on the 6th of December 1823 in Dessau, the son of Wilhelm Müller, a lyric poet whose verse Franz Schubert had set to music in those…
- John C. FrémontJohn Charles Frémont was born on the 21st of January 1813, the illegitimate son of a French-Canadian schoolteacher and a Virginia planter's daughter who had…
- 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…
- Paul DelarochePaul Delaroche painted a man being led to his death while an archbishop stretched his arms from a prison window to bless him.
- 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.
- Santiago Ramón y CajalSantiago Ramón y Cajal was once imprisoned at the age of eleven for destroying a neighbor's yard gate with a homemade cannon.
- 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.
- Anton RubinsteinAnton Rubinstein once told a young Josef Hofmann, "When you are as old as I am, you may do as I do. If you can." That final dare captures the man entirely.