Famous German People

Germany is famous for the contributions the country has made to the world, from the first pocket watch in the world, to cars like the Volkswagen, Porsche, Audi, Mercedes-Benz, and the BMW, to the first jet engine, motorcycle, diesel engine, and petrol engine, to the classical musicians like Brahms, Beethoven, Bach, Strauss, Wagner, and Schumann, to philosophers like Nietzsche, Hegel, Kant, Marx, Leibniz, and Heidegger, to other famous people like Albert Einstein, Marlene Dietrich, Bertolt Brecht, Boris Becker, Erich Maria Remarque, Konrad Zuse, Levi Strauss, Rudolf Diesel… And, of course, one of the most notorious of all in German and World history – Adolf Hitler.

Given below is an account of a few of the famous German people who have made their country proud.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Regarded as the greatest German poet, Goethe lived between 1749 and 1832. His works include the fields of science, humanism, theology, literature, drama, and of course poetry. However, ‘Faust’, his two-part dramatic poem, is considered his magnum opus, which according to C.G Jung is an alchemical drama from the start to the finish. Goethe started composing Faust when he was 23 years old, finishing the second part just prior to his death, in 1832. Goethe, like the character in his poem, Gregorius Faustus, had a deep interest in alchemy. He also was responsible for evolving an unconventional theory about color and light, which had an influence on abstract artists like Mondrian and Kandinsky. His discoveries in animal and plant life had an influence on Darwin.

Ludwig van Beethoven: He was a virtuoso pianist and a great composer who was born in 1770 and died in 1827. Beethoven was an influential persona during the transitional era between the Classical and the Romantic periods in Western classical music. To date, Beethoven’s name is remembered as one of the most influential and famous in the world.

Arthur Schopenhauer: A great German pessimist philosopher, Schopenhauer was born in 1788 and died in 1860, and had a powerful impact on the human minds, literature, and philosophy of that era. In his works, which he wrote in simple language, which was quite unusual for the subject of philosophy, he mulled over the tragedies and concerns of real life, rather than the empyrean conundrums other philosophers cogitated about. Schopenhauer was the first thinker of European origin who studied the Indian teachings, the Upanishads and Buddhism, which had a deep influence on his mind, along with the works of Plato and Kant.

In his best-known work of 1819, ‘The World as Will and Idea’, wherein the ‘will’ was characterized as a force that was non-rational, which drove the ultimate meaninglessness of the struggle for existence. In other words, mankind would still be unhappy despite satisfying all the demands of the will, since disappointment is the ending of everything, ultimately culminating in death. According to him, reality is not a reflection of God, but of the Will.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: Born in 1844 and died in 1900, Nietzsche, along with Soren Kiekegaard, is noted for being the harbinger of the philosophy of Existentialism, which is basically about rejecting abstractions, stressing instead on concrete reality, particularly factors like the freedom of the individual, subjectivity, choice, and of course existence. He attended the Bonn and Leipzig universities, where he studied classics, and was awarded his doctorate in 1869 from the latter university. Before he officially received the doctorate, the University of Basel offered him the chair of classical philology, because he was regarded as a brilliant student and had already published a few philological articles.

In ‘The Birth of Tragedy’, Nietzsche’s first book, he showcased the foundations of art and a theory of Greek drama, which had far-reaching effects on philology as well as literary theory. It was in this work that he presented his well-known distinction between the Dionysian aspect of human nature, which is passionate and the Apollonian aspect, which is rational, represented by the Greek gods Dionysus and Apollo.

According to Nietzsche’s reasoning, the emphasis that Christianity places on the afterlife ends up making its followers less capable of coping with earthly life. Nietzche’s argument was that the ‘Ubermensch’, or the ideal individual, would have the capacity to channelize his/her passions in a creative manner, rather than curbing them. Some of Nietzsche’s other works are, ‘Thus Spake Zarathustra’, ‘Beyond Good and Evil’, ‘Human, All Too Human’, and ‘The Gay Science’.