Famous people who grew up or lived in Germany

Albrecht Dürer1509–1528

📍 Albrecht-Dürer-Straße 39, 90403 Nuremberg, Germany

I was the son of a goldsmith in Nuremberg, one of eighteen children, and at thirteen I drew my own face from a mirror in silverpoint — my first self-portrait. I trained in my father's…

Angela Merkel1957–1973

📍 Templin, Brandenburg, Germany

Angela Merkel was born Angela Kasner in Hamburg in 1954, but within weeks her father, Horst, a Lutheran pastor, took the family east into the communist German Democratic Republic, where the…

Bernhard Langer1957–1976

📍 Anhausen, Diedorf, Germany

Bernhard Langer was born in August 1957 in Anhausen, a small, Catholic village in the farmland near Augsburg, in Bavaria. His father, Erwin, was a bricklayer who had been captured by…

Boris Becker1967–1985

📍 Leimen, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

Boris Becker was born in Leimen, a small town at the foot of the Odenwald hills just south of Heidelberg, in November 1967. His father, Karl-Heinz, was an architect who designed and built…

Charlemagne742–814

📍 Palatine Chapel (Palace of Aachen), Klosterplatz 2, 52062 Aachen, Germany

I chose Aachen because of its hot springs — the Romans had known their virtue, and I found them invaluable for my aging body after decades of campaigning. But Aachen became far more than a…

Constantine the Great306–316

📍 Aula Palatina (Basilica of Constantine), Konstantinplatz, 54290 Trier, Germany

My father was a Roman general who rose to become emperor in the west, and I spent much of my youth at the court of the eastern emperor Diocletian, where I learned both soldiering and…

Dietrich Bonhoeffer1935–1943

📍 Marienburger Allee 43, 14055 Berlin, Germany

I grew up in a large, cultured family in Berlin; my father was one of Germany's leading psychiatrists and my mother educated us at home in our early years. We were eight children, with…

Doro Pesch1964–1982

📍 Düsseldorf, Germany

Dorothee Pesch was born in Düsseldorf, West Germany, in June 1964, the daughter of a truck driver who ran his own transport company, and grew up in the city on the Rhine. She has said that…

Franz Beckenbauer1945–1964

📍 Giesing, Munich, Germany

I was born in September 1945 in Munich, just months after the end of the war, and I grew up in Giesing, a working-class district on the east bank of the Isar, with my older brother, Walter…

Friedrich Nietzsche1858–1864

📍 Nietzsche-Haus, Weingarten 18, 06618 Naumburg (Saale), Germany

My father, a Lutheran pastor, died when I was four, and my mother took my sister Elisabeth and me to Naumburg, a cathedral town on the Saale, where we lived in a household of women: my…

George Frideric Handel1685–1703

📍 Große Nikolaistraße 5, 06108 Halle (Saale), Saxony-Anhalt, Germany

I was born Georg Friedrich Händel on the 23rd of February 1685 in Halle, a prosperous Saxon city on the Saale River. My father was a court barber-surgeon who initially opposed my musical…

Gerd Müller1945–1964

📍 Nördlingen, Bavaria, Germany

I was born in November 1945, just after the war, in Nördlingen, a medieval walled town in the Ries crater in western Bavaria, the youngest of five children of Johann, a labourer, and…

Hildegard von Bingen1098–1179

📍 Bermersheim vor der Höhe, 55234 Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany

I was born around 1098 in Bermersheim in the Rhineland, the tenth child of a noble family who offered me to the church as a tithe. I was given as a companion to the anchoress Jutta von…

Johann Sebastian Bach1685–1700

📍 Frauenplan 21, 99817 Eisenach, Thuringia, Germany

I was born Johann Sebastian Bach on the 21st of March 1685 in Eisenach, Thuringia, the son of Johann Ambrosius Bach, a town musician. Eisenach was the city of Luther's castle, Wartburg…

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe1749–1775

📍 Großer Hirschgraben 23–25, 60311 Frankfurt am Main, Germany

The house on Großer Hirschgraben was rebuilt entirely by my father in the year of my birth — he spent three years on the renovation as if preparing a stage for my arrival. My bedroom on the…

Johannes Brahms1833–1853

📍 Speckstraße, Neustadt, Hamburg 20095, Germany

I was born on the 7th of May 1833 in Hamburg, the son of a double-bass player in the Hamburg city theatre. The Hamburg of my childhood was a port city of commercial energy and musical…

Johannes Kepler1571–1576

📍 Kepler-Museum, Keplergasse 2, 71263 Weil der Stadt, Germany

I was born in Weil der Stadt in December 1571, a small walled Free Imperial City in the hills west of Stuttgart, with a market square, a great Catholic church and a few thousand people. My…

Karl Lagerfeld1934–1952

📍 Bad Bramstedt, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany

I was born in Hamburg, but the countryside I remember is Bissenmoor, the estate near Bad Bramstedt where my family lived in the manor house in the 1930s. My father, Otto, had made his…

Karl Marx1818–1819

📍 Karl-Marx-Haus, Brückenstraße 10, 54290 Trier, Germany

I was born at two in the morning on 5 May 1818, in an alcove of a rented apartment of six rooms in this baroque house on Brückenstraße in Trier, a small, ancient city on the Moselle full of…

King Ludwig II of Bavaria1886

📍 Neuschwansteinstraße 20, 87645 Schwangau, Bavaria, Germany

I built Neuschwanstein to escape. The Bavarian government wanted a constitutional puppet; I wanted to live inside the world of Lohengrin and Parsifal that Wagner had given me. Every room…

Konrad Adenauer1876–1967

📍 Cologne, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

I was born Konrad Hermann Josef Adenauer on the 5th of January 1876 in Cologne, the third child of a court official, and Cologne was my city for most of my life — I was its Lord Mayor from…

Lothar Matthäus1961–1979

📍 Herzogenaurach, Bavaria, Germany

Lothar Matthäus was born in Erlangen in March 1961 and grew up in Herzogenaurach, a small town in Franconia, near Nuremberg, famous as the home of the sports companies Puma and Adidas…

Ludwig van Beethoven1770–1792

📍 Bonngasse 20, Bonn, Germany

I was born at Bonngasse 20 in Bonn on the 17th of December 1770, the son of Johann van Beethoven, a court musician and alcoholic, and Maria Magdalena Keverich. The house on Bonngasse is now…

Marlene Dietrich1901–1930

📍 Leberstraße 65, 10829 Berlin, Germany

I was born Marie Magdalene Dietrich on the 27th of December 1901 in Schöneberg, a comfortable middle-class district of Berlin. My father died when I was six and my mother Josephine…

Martin Luther1483–1546

📍 Lutherstraße 15, 06295 Lutherstadt Eisleben, Germany

I was born Martin Luther on the 10th of November 1483 in Eisleben, Saxony, the son of Hans Luther, a copper miner who had risen to become a mine owner. My father intended me for a legal…

Max Planck1867–1877

📍 Munich, Bavaria, Germany

I was born in Kiel in April 1858 into a family of scholars: my great-grandfather and grandfather were theology professors in Göttingen, and my father, Wilhelm, was a professor of law. One…

Michael Schumacher1969–1987

📍 Kerpen, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany

Michael Schumacher was born in Hürth, near Cologne, in January 1969 and grew up in Kerpen-Manheim, a small working-class village in the flat farmland and brown-coal mining country west of…

Otto von Bismarck1815–1898

📍 Bismarckstraße 1, 39524 Schönhausen (Elbe), Saxony-Anhalt, Germany

I was born in 1815 at Schönhausen in the Altmark region of Prussia, on the family estate that had been in Bismarck hands for centuries. The Junker world of my childhood — the Protestant…

Richard Wagner1874–1883

📍 Richard-Wagner-Straße 48, 95444 Bayreuth, Bavaria, Germany

I built Wahnfried — Freed from Illusion and Strife — in Bayreuth in 1874, and it was my home for the last nine years of my life. I had chosen Bayreuth because King Ludwig II of Bavaria had…

Robert Schumann1810–1856

📍 Hauptmarkt 5, 08056 Zwickau, Saxony, Germany

I was born Robert Alexander Schumann on the 8th of June 1810 in Zwickau, a Saxon city known for textiles and for the writer Jean Paul, whom my father published and who was my first literary…

Sophie Scholl1932–1942

📍 Münsterplatz, 89073 Ulm, Germany

My family moved to Ulm when I was eleven, in 1932, and in 1939 we settled in a spacious flat on the fourth floor of an Art Nouveau building at Münsterplatz 33, looking out on the great…

Steffi Graf1978–1986

📍 Brühl, Baden-Württemberg, Germany

Steffi Graf was born in Mannheim, in south-west Germany, in June 1969. Her father, Peter, a car and insurance salesman who loved tennis and later became a coach, gave her a sawn-off racket…

Wassily Kandinsky1909–1914

📍 Münter-Haus, Kottmüllerallee 6, 82418 Murnau am Staffelsee, Germany

I grew up in Moscow and Odessa, and even as a child colours seemed to me to have sounds and feelings. I studied law and economics and taught at Moscow University before deciding at thirty…

Willy Brandt1913–1992

📍 Lubeck, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany

I was born Herbert Ernst Karl Frahm on the 18th of December 1913 in Lübeck, illegitimate, the son of a shop assistant. I took the name Willy Brandt as a young socialist activist to hide my…