Curated playlist
Stateless people
- Albert EinsteinGerman-born theoretical physicist (1879–1955)
- Friedrich NietzscheOn the 3rd of January 1889, in the streets of Turin, Friedrich Nietzsche caused a public disturbance and two policemen approached him. An often-repeated tale holds that he had watched a horse being flogged across the Piazza Carlo Alberto,…
- Adolf HitlerAdolf Hitler was born on the 20th of April 1889 in Braunau am Inn, a town in Austria-Hungary near the German border. He died by suicide on the 30th of April 1945, in a bunker beneath a city in ruins. Between those two dates lies the…
- 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…
- Henry KissingerHenry Kissinger arrived in New York City on the 5th of September, 1938, a 15-year-old Jewish refugee who had fled Germany with his family just weeks before. He had grown up in Fürth, Bavaria, watched Hitler Youth gangs beat him and his…
- Robert E. LeeRobert Edward Lee was born on the 19th of January 1807 at Stratford Hall Plantation in Westmoreland County, Virginia, into one of the oldest and most storied families in the state. His father was Henry "Light Horse Harry" Lee III, a…
- Aleksandr SolzhenitsynOn the 9th of May 1945, all of Moscow erupted in fireworks and searchlights to mark Germany's surrender. Aleksandr Isayevich Solzhenitsyn watched those heavens from a cell in the Lubyanka prison. He had been arrested three months earlier,…
- Rohingya peopleThe Rohingya people are a stateless Indo-Aryan ethnolinguistic group from Rakhine State in western Myanmar, and by one measure, they are among the most persecuted minorities anywhere on earth. Before a wave of catastrophic violence in…
- Leon TrotskyLeon Trotsky was murdered in Mexico City in 1940 by Ramon Mercader, a Stalinist agent. He had been sentenced to death in absentia four years earlier at the Moscow show trials. Of all the men Stalin defeated, Trotsky was one of the few…
- Otto von HabsburgOtto von Habsburg was born on the 20th of November 1912 at Villa Wartholz in Reichenau an der Rax, at a moment when Austria-Hungary still stood as one of the great empires of Europe. His full baptismal name ran to twenty-two words: Franz…