Germany

🇩🇪Friedrich Hölderlin

Philosophy

Idealism

1770–1843

"Wer das Tiefste gedacht, liebt das Lebendigste."

🇩🇪Friedrich Schiller

Literature

Sturm und Drang

1895–1990

"What one refuses in a minuteNo eternity will return."

🇩🇪Karl Marx

Philosophy

Materialism

1867–1894

"What's sauce for the gander is sauce for the goose."

🇩🇪Carl Jung

Psychology

1852–1924

"You can take away a man's gods, but only to give him others in return."

🇩🇪Hermann Hesse

Literature

existentialism

1861–1948

"Abraxas was the god who was both god and devil."

🇩🇪Jürgen Habermas

Philosophy

Pragmatism

1929–2026

"Jürgen Habermas in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy"

🇩🇪Rosa Luxemburg

Social Activism

1871–1919

"——Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy"

🇩🇪Walter Benjamin

Literature

Idealism

1892–1940

"History breaks down in images not into stories."

🇩🇪Pat Murphy

Literature

b. 1955

"“Picture postcards never show the bugs,” I told her. “Stinging ants, wasps, fleas, roaches the size of your hand. Postcards never show the heat."

🇩🇪Heidi Klum

Sports

b. 1973

"My philosophy is that, in life, you have to want something. If you just say "la-la-la" and go through life without a goal, nothing will happen."

🇩🇪Friedrich Engels

Philosophy

Marxism

1796–1860

"Libcom.org/library Frederick Engels archive"

🇩🇪Herta Müller

Literature

b. 1953

"The real secret is why love starts out with claws like a cat and then fades with time like a half-eaten mouse."

🇩🇪Joscha Bach

Philosophy

b. 1973

"Long ago, physics and other natural sciences... had become computational."

"I'm afraid I do believe that all earthly love can die - since man is mortal, why not also his most human feature? - and for me pretensions such as love that dies was never love, etc. belong to schoolgirls' albums."

🇩🇪Max Ernst

Art

Surrealism

1891–1976

"The 2nd of April at 9:45 a.m. Max Ernst had his first contact with the sensible world, when he came out of the egg which his mother had laid in an eagle's nest and which the bird had brooded for seven years."

🇩🇪Charles Bukowski

Literature

Beat Generation

1920–1994

"Morals were restrictive, but they were grounded on human experience."

🇩🇪Ivan Illich

Religion

degrowth

1926–2002

"Ivan Illich at Penn State: Continuing the Conversation"

🇩🇪Rudolf Hess

Politics

1894–1987

"The party is Hitler, Hitler is Germany, and Germany is Hitler! Sieg heil!"

🇩🇪Nico

Music

1938–1988

"You will never see these lightsGlowing in your nights If you don't know And there are roses growing in the snow."

🇩🇪Christian Scriver

Politics

1629–1693

"My God, give me neither poverty nor riches; but whatsoever it may be Thy will to give, give me with it a heart which knows humbly to acquiesce in what is Thy will."

🇩🇪Anne Frank

Literature

1929–1945

"Anne Frank House - only known film footage of Anne Frank"

🇩🇪Kurt Schwitters

Art

Dada

1887–1948

"Kurt Schwitters is the inventor of Merz and I, and aside of himself, he recognizes no one as a Merz artist or an I artist with highest regards."

"Is it possible to love so desperately that life is unbearable? I don't mean unrequited, I mean being in the love. In the midst of it and desperate. Because knowing it will end, because everything does. End."

🇩🇪Joseph Beuys

Art

Fluxus

1921–1986

"This is precisely what the shaman does in order to bring about change and development: his nature is therapeutic."

"A liberal public is interesting to have as an audience. It is for that very reason that corporations make such an effort to ally themselves with cultural institutions."

"Bakunin went so far as to see in ‘Marx’ ‘authoritarian communism’ only the mirror miage of the reactionary Bismarck empire."

🇩🇪Cornelia Funke

Literature

b. 1958

"Dustfinger still clearly remembered the feeling of being in love for the first time. How vulnerable his heart had suddenly been! Such a trembling, quivering thing, happy and miserably unhappy at once."

🇩🇪Günter Nooke

Social Activism

b. 1959

"She showed the direction, and the party followed her. It was decisive that Merkel appeared human and credible, thereby winning over the trust of the party members."

🇩🇪Werner von Blomberg

Politics

1878–1946

"He became a willing tool in Hitler's hands for every one of his decisions."

🇩🇪Saša Stanišić

Literature

b. 1978

"Missing someone, they say, is self-centered.I self-center you more than ever."

🇩🇪Johann Gottlieb Fichte

Philosophy

German idealism

1762–1814

"Who am I? Subject and object in one — contemplating and contemplated, thinking and thought of. As both must I have become what I am."

🇩🇪Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Religion

1906–1945

"Bonhoeffer Reading Room, Tyndale Seminary"

🇩🇪Carl Schmitt

Literature

Continental philosophy

1888–1985

"Whoever asserts a value, must bring its influence to bear. Whoever maintains that it has value regardless of the influence brought to bear by any individual human being who endorses it, is simply cheating."

🇩🇪Wilhelm Keitel

Politics

1882–1946

"Hitler gave us orders - and we believed in him. Then he commits suicide and leaves us to bear the guilt. He should have remained alive to bear his share."

🇩🇪Paul von Hindenburg

Politics

1847–1934

"You are all young men and you have played to me the “March of Entry into Paris” well. But I hope that one day you will be playing this military march where you should, at the same spot where I was in 1870."

🇩🇪Joseph B. Soloveitchik

Philosophy

1903–1993

"Newtonian physics found its apostle in Kant; modern physics is still awaiting its modern expounder."

🇩🇪Michael Schumacher

Literature

b. 1969

"It is a pity for F1 to lose such a great champion, but the time to stop comes to everyone."