Thinkers Timeline

Hildegard of Bingen was a German nun, writer, composer, and healer. She was one of the most important thinkers in medieval Europe. She was born in 1098 in a small village in what is now western Germany. Her family were minor nobles. She was the tenth child. At that time, some families gave a child to the Church. This was called a 'tithe', a kind of gift. Hildegard was sent to a small group of religious women when she was about eight. She lived with an older woman called Jutta. Jutta taught her to read and write Latin. Hildegard spent almost her whole life in religious houses. She never travelled far in the usual sense. But her ideas travelled across Europe. From childhood, Hildegard said she saw bright lights. She called these visions. She thought they came from God. For many years she did not tell anyone. She was afraid people would laugh at her. When she was about 42, she finally began to write them down. Her first book, Scivias, took ten years to finish. The Pope himself read parts of it and said it was good work. After Jutta died, Hildegard became the leader of her small group. She then founded a new house for women at Rupertsberg, near the River Rhine. Later she founded a second house at Eibingen. She wrote books on God, on medicine, on plants, and on music. She composed many songs, which are still performed today. She wrote nearly 400 letters. Kings, popes, and abbots asked her for advice. She died on 17 September 1179, aged about 81. The Catholic Church made her a saint in 2012, over 800 years after her death.

Martin Luther (1483-1546) was a German friar, theologian, and biblical scholar whose objections to Catholic practice became the catalyst for the Protestant Reformation — a movement that reshaped European Christianity, politics, and culture, and whose effects continue to the present day. He was born at Eisleben in Saxony on 10 November 1483, the son of Hans Luder, a copper miner who eventually became a small mine owner, and Margarethe Luder. His father intended him for a legal career and sent him to study at the University of Erfurt, where he completed a master's degree in 1505. In July 1505, caught in a thunderstorm, he was thrown from his horse and vowed to Saint Anne that he would become a monk if she saved him. Two weeks later, against his father's wishes, he entered the Augustinian monastery at Erfurt. He was ordained priest in 1507, completed a doctorate in theology at Wittenberg in 1512, and was appointed professor of biblical studies at the new University of Wittenberg, where he remained for the rest of his life. His extensive study of scripture — particularly Paul's letter to the Romans — combined with his own spiritual struggles produced the theological breakthrough that would become the foundation of Protestant Christianity. On 31 October 1517, he sent a letter with his Ninety-Five Theses — academic propositions for debate, originally intended to challenge the sale of indulgences — to his archbishop; whether he actually nailed them to the church door at Wittenberg is uncertain. The theses spread rapidly through new printing technology, and what began as a scholarly dispute became a European crisis. In 1521 he refused to recant before the Diet of Worms, was excommunicated, and was sheltered at Wartburg Castle by his prince Frederick the Wise, where he translated the New Testament into German. He married Katharina von Bora, a former nun, in 1525; they had six children. Over the following twenty-five years he wrote extensively — biblical commentaries, sermons, treatises, hymns, and the Small and Large Catechisms. He died in 1546 at Eisleben, the town of his birth. His legacy is deeply contested. He transformed European Christianity, made the Bible broadly accessible in German, and articulated principles that would shape modern ideas about conscience and authority. He also produced shockingly anti-Jewish writings in his later years that provided material for subsequent antisemitic use, and his political theology helped legitimise the brutal suppression of the 1524-1525 Peasants' War. Engaging honestly with Luther requires holding both dimensions of his legacy together.

Johann Sebastian Bach (1685-1750) was a German composer and organist usually regarded as the supreme master of Baroque music and one of the greatest composers in any tradition. He was born in Eisenach into a large and distinguished family of working musicians — the name Bach had become almost a synonym for musician in parts of central Germany. He was orphaned at ten and raised by an older brother who trained him in the organ and in composition. From fifteen he worked continuously as a professional musician: as a choirboy, as a church organist in small towns, as a court musician at Weimar and then Cothen, and from 1723 until his death as Thomaskantor in Leipzig, where he was responsible for the music at several city churches, the Thomasschule, and important civic occasions. He wrote music almost constantly. His output includes more than two hundred sacred cantatas, the St Matthew and St John Passions, the B minor Mass, the two books of the Well-Tempered Clavier, the Brandenburg Concertos, the Goldberg Variations, The Art of Fugue, dozens of organ works, and hundreds of other pieces. He married twice and had twenty children, several of whom became important composers in the following generation. He went blind in his last year and died after an unsuccessful eye operation. His music was not widely celebrated after his death and had slipped into relative obscurity by 1800; its revival in the nineteenth century, launched by Felix Mendelssohn's 1829 performance of the St Matthew Passion, began a long process by which Bach came to be regarded as a central figure of world music.

Immanuel Kant was a German philosopher. He is one of the most influential thinkers in the history of Western philosophy. He was born on 22 April 1724 in Königsberg, a city in East Prussia (now Kaliningrad, Russia). His family was Lutheran and not wealthy. His father was a saddle-maker. His mother, who died when he was 13, was a strong early influence and encouraged his studies. He studied at the University of Königsberg from the age of 16. He worked for several years as a private tutor for noble families before returning to the university as a lecturer in 1755. He became a full professor of logic and metaphysics in 1770. He stayed in Königsberg his whole life. He is said never to have travelled more than about 150 kilometres from his birthplace. His daily routine was famously strict: neighbours were said to set their watches by his afternoon walks. For most of his career he was a respected but not famous teacher. Then, starting in his late fifties, he wrote a series of huge books that changed philosophy. The Critique of Pure Reason (1781), the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and the Critique of Judgement (1790) set out a new system. He wrote important shorter works on ethics, religion, politics, and history. He continued writing until his death on 12 February 1804, aged 79. His work is hugely influential, but parts of it are also troubling. He wrote racist statements about non-European peoples. These texts sat alongside his claims about universal human dignity. Modern scholarship has taken this tension seriously, and honest study of Kant now includes this difficulty.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was a German philosopher. He was the last of the great system-builders in Western philosophy. He was born on 27 August 1770 in Stuttgart in southern Germany. His father was a civil servant. His mother taught him Latin before he started school but died when he was eleven. He had one sister, Christiane, who became very close to him. Hegel studied philosophy and theology at the University of Tübingen. There he became friends with two other young men who would become famous: the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the philosopher Friedrich Schelling. The three were excited by the French Revolution, which broke out in 1789 when Hegel was nineteen. For years Hegel struggled to find an academic post. He worked as a private tutor in Switzerland, then in Frankfurt. In 1801 he became an unpaid lecturer at the University of Jena. There he wrote his first major book, the Phenomenology of Spirit. He famously finished the manuscript on the same day Napoleon's army arrived in the city in October 1806. The book was published in 1807. Hegel's career then bounced around. He worked as a newspaper editor in Bamberg, then as a high school principal in Nuremberg. He married Marie von Tucher in 1811. In 1816 he became a professor at Heidelberg, then at Berlin from 1818. By the 1820s he was the most famous philosopher in Germany. His lectures filled large halls. He died of illness, possibly cholera, on 14 November 1831 in Berlin, aged 61.

Ludwig van Beethoven was a German composer and pianist. He was born in 1770 in Bonn, in what is now Germany. He is one of the most important composers in the history of Western music. He was baptised on 17 December, so he was probably born a day or two earlier. He came from a musical family. His grandfather was a respected court musician. His father, Johann, was also a musician but a difficult man and a heavy drinker. Johann saw young Ludwig's talent and pushed him hard, sometimes cruelly, hoping to create a child star like Mozart. Beethoven gave his first public performance at the age of seven. In 1792, aged 21, he moved to Vienna, the music capital of Europe. He studied briefly with Joseph Haydn. He soon became famous in Vienna, first as a pianist and then as a composer. Wealthy noble families paid him to write music. He never took a full court post. He preferred to work as a freelance composer, which was unusual for his time. In his late twenties, he began to lose his hearing. By his forties he was almost completely deaf. He kept composing, often using a notebook to communicate with visitors. His later works, including the Ninth Symphony, were written when he could no longer hear them properly performed. He never married, though he loved several women, often unhappily. He died in Vienna in 1827, aged 56. Around 20,000 people attended his funeral.

Karl Marx (1818-1883) was a German economist, philosopher, historian, and political thinker whose ideas have shaped the modern world more than almost any other thinker of his century. He was born in Trier, in what was then the Prussian Rhineland. His family was Jewish — both his grandfathers had been rabbis — but his father had converted to Lutheran Christianity to be allowed to practise law. Marx grew up in a comfortable middle-class home with a good education. He studied law at the University of Bonn and then philosophy at Berlin, where he was deeply influenced by the philosophy of Hegel. He completed his doctorate in 1841. He could not become a university professor because of his radical views, so he turned to journalism. As editor of a Rhineland newspaper, he began writing on political and economic questions. The Prussian authorities soon shut the paper down. In 1843 he married his childhood sweetheart Jenny von Westphalen and moved to Paris, where he met Friedrich Engels in 1844. The two men would remain close friends and intellectual partners for the rest of Marx's life. Engels, whose family owned textile factories, gave Marx direct knowledge of industrial conditions and later supported him financially for many years. In 1848 Marx and Engels published The Communist Manifesto. Revolutions broke out across Europe that same year. Marx was expelled from several countries before settling in London in 1849. He lived there for the rest of his life, working in the British Museum reading room and writing his great book Capital — the first volume of which was published in 1867. He worked in great poverty for much of this period, losing several children to the diseases of poverty and depending heavily on Engels's financial help. He helped found the International Working Men's Association in 1864, which brought together socialists and labour activists from many countries. He died in London in 1883 at the age of sixty-four. Engels edited and published the remaining volumes of Capital after his death. Marx's influence has been enormous and contested. Movements calling themselves Marxist transformed whole societies in the twentieth century, with results both remarkable and, in some cases, catastrophic. His work itself remains a reference point for anyone trying to understand capitalism, class, and modern history.

Rudolf Virchow (1821-1902) was a German physician, pathologist, anthropologist, and politician. He was born in Schivelbein in Pomerania, now part of Poland, and studied medicine in Berlin. He became one of the most important scientists of the nineteenth century, founding modern cellular pathology through his demonstration that all disease originates in the malfunction of cells, and that all cells come from pre-existing cells. He also made significant contributions to anthropology, archaeology, and public health. As a politician, he served for many years in the Berlin City Council and in the Prussian parliament and the German Reichstag, where he was a prominent liberal opponent of Bismarck. He used his political position to advocate for sanitary reform, improved housing, clean water supplies, and public health infrastructure. He famously declared that medicine is a social science, and politics is nothing but medicine on a large scale. He lived until the age of eighty-one, remaining scientifically and politically active almost to the end, and died in 1902 from complications of a broken hip.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, cultural critic, and classicist. He was one of the most influential and most misunderstood thinkers of the 19th century. He was born on 15 October 1844 in Röcken, a small village in Prussia. His father was a Lutheran pastor who died when Friedrich was four. His grandfather and great-grandfather were also pastors. He grew up in a household of women: his mother, sister, and two aunts. He was a brilliant student. At 24, before he had even finished his doctorate, he was offered the chair of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. He held this post for ten years. His first major book, The Birth of Tragedy (1872), was a study of Greek culture that was considered wildly unorthodox by other classical scholars. His academic career stalled. Health problems forced him to retire at 35. He spent the next decade as a wandering philosopher, moving between Switzerland, Italy, and France. He wrote his major works in this period: Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883-1885), Beyond Good and Evil (1886), and On the Genealogy of Morality (1887). He was almost unknown during his lifetime. His books sold poorly. In January 1889, in Turin, Italy, Nietzsche collapsed in the street. He had a complete mental breakdown. He spent the last eleven years of his life in the care of his mother and then his sister, unable to work or speak coherently. He died on 25 August 1900, aged 55. After his death, his sister Elisabeth edited his unpublished notes to push them in a nationalist and antisemitic direction. She aligned his legacy with the rising German right and later with the Nazis, despite the fact that Nietzsche himself had opposed antisemitism sharply.

Franz Boas (1858-1942) was a German-American anthropologist, widely regarded as the founder of modern cultural anthropology. He was born in Minden, Westphalia, into a secular Jewish family with strong liberal values. He studied physics and geography at German universities, completing his doctorate in 1881. A field expedition to Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic in 1883, where he spent a winter studying the Inuit people, transformed his intellectual orientation: he became convinced that geography and environment could not explain the enormous variety of human cultures and that culture had to be understood on its own terms. He emigrated to the United States in 1887, eventually becoming a professor at Columbia University in New York, where he spent most of his career. He became the most influential figure in American anthropology, training a generation of students who went on to transform the discipline — including Margaret Mead, Ruth Benedict, Zora Neale Hurston, and many others. He was a lifelong anti-racist and used his scientific authority to challenge the racial pseudo-science that was used to justify immigration restriction, colonialism, and eventually Nazism. He died in 1942, reportedly collapsing mid-conversation at a dinner where he had been speaking about racism.

Edmund Husserl was a German philosopher. He is the founder of phenomenology, one of the most important schools of twentieth-century thought. He was born on 8 April 1859 in Prossnitz, a town in Moravia, then part of the Austrian Empire (today Prostějov in the Czech Republic). His family was Jewish and middle class. They spoke German rather than Czech. His father ran a business. As a young man, he studied mathematics in Leipzig, Berlin, and Vienna. He earned a doctorate in mathematics in 1883. He could have had a career as a mathematician. But he became interested in deeper questions: what does it mean to know something? What are the foundations of mathematics itself? In 1884, he attended lectures by the philosopher Franz Brentano in Vienna and was so impressed that he switched to philosophy. He taught at the University of Halle from 1887. In 1891 he published Philosophy of Arithmetic. The mathematician Gottlob Frege criticised it sharply. The criticism pushed Husserl in new directions. In 1900-1901 he published Logical Investigations, the work that founded phenomenology. He taught at Göttingen from 1901 to 1916, then at Freiburg from 1916 to 1928. Many of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century were his students or were shaped by his work. In 1933 the Nazis came to power. Although Husserl had converted to Lutheran Protestantism in 1887, the Nazi racial laws still classified him as Jewish. He was banned from his own university library. He died on 27 April 1938 in Freiburg, aged 79.

Max Weber (1864-1920) was a German sociologist who wrote about religion, politics, economics, and the nature of modern society. He was born in Erfurt, in central Germany, into a prosperous middle-class Protestant family. His father was a lawyer and National Liberal politician who enjoyed public life. His mother was a devout Calvinist with strong moral convictions. The clash between his father's worldly ambition and his mother's religious seriousness shaped Weber from childhood. He was an extraordinarily serious student who read law, economics, philosophy, and history at the universities of Heidelberg, Berlin, and Göttingen. He completed his doctorate in 1889 on medieval trading companies and his second doctorate in 1891 on Roman agrarian history. In 1893 he married his cousin Marianne Schnitger, who became a notable sociologist and feminist in her own right and would later edit and promote his work. In his early thirties he seemed set for a great academic career. He became a professor at Freiburg in 1894 and at Heidelberg in 1896. But in 1897, after a violent argument with his authoritarian father — who died shortly afterwards — Weber suffered a severe mental breakdown. For several years he could not read or teach. He took leave from his professorship and spent long periods travelling to recover. Though he regained his capacity for work, he never returned to regular teaching. Instead he wrote intensively from private life for nearly two decades. His major works come mostly from this period. The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (1904-1905) is his most famous book. Economy and Society, an enormous unfinished work on the structure of social life, was edited and published by Marianne after his death. He also wrote major studies on the religions of China and India, on ancient Judaism, on the city, and on politics. He briefly returned to teaching at the end of his life — at Vienna in 1918 and Munich in 1919. He died in Munich in 1920 at the age of fifty-six, probably from the Spanish flu pandemic. His influence has grown continuously since his death. His work is now studied worldwide as foundational for sociology, political science, and the study of religion.

Wassily Kandinsky (1866-1944) was a Russian painter and art theorist usually credited as one of the pioneers of abstract painting in the European tradition. He was born in Moscow to a prosperous tea-trading family and spent his early childhood in the southern Russian port of Odessa. He studied law and economics at Moscow University and was preparing for an academic career when, at thirty, he decided to abandon it and become a painter. He moved to Munich in 1896 and trained at the city's art academy. Over the following decade he developed from a competent painter of folk-inflected landscapes into a theorist and practitioner of a new kind of painting that dispensed with recognisable subjects. In 1910 he painted what is often regarded as one of the earliest purely abstract works, a watercolour that broke decisively with representation. He co-founded the Blue Rider group in Munich in 1911, published his major theoretical work Concerning the Spiritual in Art that same year, and played a central role in the artistic ferment of the years before the First World War. He returned to Russia during the war, worked in the cultural institutions of the early Soviet period, and came back to Germany in 1921 to teach at the Bauhaus. When the Nazis closed the Bauhaus in 1933, he moved to Paris, where he lived until his death in 1944. He was married twice and had a long partnership with the painter Gabriele Münter during his Munich years.

Albert Einstein was a German-born theoretical physicist. He is widely seen as the most influential scientist of the twentieth century. He was born on 14 March 1879 in Ulm, in southern Germany. His family was secular Jewish and middle class. His father ran an electrochemical business that often struggled. His mother was a musician who pushed Albert to play the violin from age five. He had one younger sister, Maja. As a child, he was shy and slow to speak, but fascinated by science. A compass given to him at age five made him wonder about invisible forces. He found regular school dull. At sixteen he ran away from his German school. He finished his education in Switzerland and entered the Swiss Federal Polytechnic School in Zurich in 1896. He graduated in 1900. He could not find a teaching post and took a job at the Swiss Patent Office in Bern. There, in his spare time, he produced his most famous work. In 1905, his 'miracle year', he published four papers that changed physics: on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, special relativity, and the equation E=mc². Fame followed slowly. He held professorships in Zurich, Prague, and Berlin. In 1915 he completed the general theory of relativity. He won the Nobel Prize in Physics for 1921. In 1933, the Nazis came to power. Einstein, who was Jewish, was already in the United States and never returned to Germany. He took a position at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, where he worked until his death on 18 April 1955, aged 76.

Emmy Noether was a German mathematician who changed how we understand algebra and physics. She was born in 1882 in Erlangen, Germany. Her father was a mathematics professor. At the time, women were not allowed to study at German universities as full students. She had to sit in on classes without being officially enrolled. She finished her doctorate in 1907, but she could not get a paid teaching job because she was a woman. In 1915, the famous mathematician David Hilbert invited her to the University of Göttingen. He tried to get her a proper position. The university refused. For years, she had to teach under Hilbert's name and received no pay. She did not complain. She just kept doing brilliant work. Her ideas were so new that many people did not understand them at first. She worked on abstract algebra. This is a part of mathematics that studies the structure behind numbers and shapes. She also helped Einstein with his theory of general relativity. In 1933, the Nazis came to power and forced her out of her job because she was Jewish. She moved to the United States and taught at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. She died there in 1935, aged only 53, after surgery went wrong.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor, theologian, and resister against Hitler. He was born in 1906 in Breslau, then in Germany, now Wrocław in Poland. His father was a leading psychiatrist; his mother homeschooled the children. The family was educated, musical, and largely secular. When the teenage Dietrich announced he would study theology, his family was surprised but supportive. He earned his doctorate at the University of Berlin in 1927, aged just 21. He was a brilliant student. In 1930 he spent a year at Union Theological Seminary in New York. There he attended an African American Baptist church in Harlem, sang gospel hymns, and read the social gospel of writers like Walter Rauschenbusch. The experience changed him. He returned to Germany convinced that Christian faith required real engagement with the world, especially with the suffering and oppressed. Hitler took power in January 1933. Two days later, Bonhoeffer gave a radio talk attacking the Nazi 'leader principle'. The broadcast was cut off. Over the next decade he became one of the founding voices of the Confessing Church, which resisted the Nazification of German Protestantism. He ran an underground seminary at Finkenwalde. He helped Jews escape to Switzerland. He joined the German military resistance through the Abwehr (military intelligence), where his brother-in-law worked. He knew of plots to kill Hitler. In April 1943 he was arrested. He spent nearly two years in Tegel prison in Berlin, writing constantly. After the failed July 1944 plot to kill Hitler, his deeper involvement was discovered. On 9 April 1945, two weeks before American troops liberated the camp, he was hanged at Flossenbürg concentration camp. He was 39.

Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) was a German-American political philosopher. She was born into a Jewish family in Hanover, Germany, and studied philosophy under Martin Heidegger and Karl Jaspers. When the Nazis came to power in 1933 she fled Germany, was briefly interned in France, and eventually reached the United States in 1941, where she spent the rest of her life. Her experience as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany shaped all of her thinking: she wanted to understand how the totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century, Nazi Germany and Stalinist Russia, had been possible, and what they revealed about the fragility of political freedom and human dignity. Her most important books are The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), The Human Condition (1958), and Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963). She was a professor at the University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research in New York. She died in 1975, mid-sentence at her typewriter, working on her final book.