100 Notable alumni of University of Hamburg

Percy Ernst Schramm was a German historian who specialized in art history and medieval history. Schramm was a Chair and Professor of History at the University of Göttingen from 1929 to 1963.

Detlef Scheele is a German politician (SPD). On 1 April 2017, he became chairman of the German Federal Employment Agency.

Aygül Özkan is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who has been serving as managing director of the German Property Federation (ZIA) since 2020.

Shokichi Iyanaga was a Japanese mathematician.

Claude Chevalley was a French mathematician who made important contributions to number theory, algebraic geometry, class field theory, finite group theory and the theory of algebraic groups. He was a founding member of the Bourbaki group.

Klaus-Peter Siegloch is a former German journalist and lobbyist.

Henning Otte is a German politician and member of the Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU) who has been serving as Parliamentary Commissioner for the Armed Forces of Germany since 2025.

August-Wilhelm Scheer is a German Professor of business administration and business information at Saarland University, and founder and director of IDS Scheer AG, a major IT service and software company. He is known for the development of the Architecture of Integrated Information Systems (ARIS) concept.

Anja Hajduk is a German psychologist and politician of the Alliance '90/The Greens who has been serving as State Secretary in the Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action in the coalition government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz since 2021.

Georg Heinrich Patrick Baron von Tiesenhausen was a German and American rocket scientist.

Katharina Focke was a German politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). She served as Federal Minister of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth from 1972 to 1976.

Christine Ann Buchholz is a German politician and was member of the Bundestag, the German federal diet from 2009 to 2021 for the Die Linke. A progressive activist, Bucholz is a member of Marx21, a network of trotskyists within Die Linke broadly aligned with the International Socialist Tendency.

Cora Stephan is a German-speaking writer and essayist.

Melanie Leonhard is a German historian and politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) who has been serving as State Minister for Economic Affairs in the Government of Hamburg since 2022. She previously was the State Minister of Labor, Social Affairs, Family and Integration under mayors Olaf Scholz and Peter Tschentscher from 2015 to 2022. Since March 2018...

Bastian Sick is a German journalist and author.

Bhupendranath Datta was an Indian communist revolutionary and later a noted sociologist and anthropologist. He was younger brother of Swami Vivekananda, and he was also associated with Rishi Aurobindo in his political works. In his youth, he was closely associated with the Jugantar movement, serving as the editor of Jugantar Patrika until his arrest and imprisonment in 1907. In his...

Volker Ullrich is a German historian and journalist.

Gernot Böhme was a German philosopher and author, contributing to the philosophy of science, theory of time, aesthetics, ethics, and philosophical anthropology. He is the main pioneer of German ecocriticism, the study of the relationship between culture and the environment. He has been the director of the Institute for Practical Philosophy in Darmstadt, Hesse, since 2005. Despite being one of...

Donika Gërvalla-Schwarz is a Kosovar Albanian politician. A member of the Guxo political list of the Vetëvendosje political party, she has served as Minister of Foreign Affairs and Second Deputy Prime Minister in the Second Kurti cabinet since 2021. Gërvalla-Schwarz is the daughter of assassinated Albanian activist Jusuf Gërvalla. She is the president of the centre-right political party Guxo!.

Beate Heinemann is a German particle physicist who has held positions at universities in Europe and the United States. She is Chairperson of the Board of Directors at the DESY laboratory in Hamburg.

Johannes Hans Daniel Jensen was a German theoretical physicist. During World War II, he worked on the German nuclear energy project, known as the Uranium Club, where he contributed to the separation of uranium isotopes. After the war, Jensen was a professor at the University of Heidelberg. He was a visiting professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, the Institute for...

Tim Klüssendorf is a German economist and politician of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). He has been serving as a member of the Bundestag since the 2021 federal election, representing Lübeck, and has been the General Secretary of the SPD since June 2025. Klüssendorf is associated with the party’s left wing and served as a spokesperson for the...

Bartel Leendert van der Waerden was a Dutch mathematician and historian of mathematics.

Gerd Bucerius was a German politician, publisher and journalist, one of the founding members of Die Zeit. He is the namesake of the Bucerius Law School in Hamburg and of the Bucerius Kunst Forum, an art gallery.

Petr Robejšek is a Czech political scientist, economist and politician. From 1975 to 2016 he lived primarily in Germany. In 2016 he established the political party Realists. Since 2016, he lives primarily in the Czech Republic. He is known for his eurosceptic views.

Klaus Johann Jacobs was a German-born billionaire in the coffee and chocolate industry, with Swiss citizenship.

Chang Ya-chung is a Taiwanese political scientist and professor at National Taiwan University. He founded the Democratic Action Alliance in 2004 and was elected to the National Assembly in 2005, but resigned on the first day to protest the parliament's formation. He later chaired the Chinese Integration Association. Chang subsequently became an active member of the Kuomintang, contesting the party's...

Paul Fleming was a German physician and poet.

Carl Erich Correns was a German botanist and geneticist notable primarily for his independent discovery of the principles of heredity, which he achieved simultaneously but independently of the botanist Hugo de Vries, and for his acknowledgment of Gregor Mendel's earlier paper on that subject.

Hans von Storch is a German climate scientist. He is a professor at the Meteorological Institute of the University of Hamburg, and (since 2001) Director of the Institute for Coastal Research at the Helmholtz Research Centre (previously: GKSS Research Center) in Geesthacht, Germany. He is a member of the advisory boards of the journal Journal of Climate. He worked at...

Andreas Reckwitz is a German sociologist and cultural theorist. He is professor at the institute of social sciences at Humboldt University Berlin.

Niels Annen is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Since May 2025, he has been serving as a State Secretary at the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ). From December 2021 until May 2025, he was Parliamentary State Secretary in the same ministry. Prior to that, from March 2018 to December 2021, he served as...

Hans Eberhard Apel was a German politician and a member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). From 1972 to 1974 he was Parliamentary State Secretary to the Foreign Minister. From 1974 to 1978 he was the Minister of Finance and from 1978 to 1982 he was the Minister of Defence.

Henning Scherf is a German lawyer and politician of the SPD party who served as President of the Senate and Mayor of Bremen from 4 July 1995 to 8 November 2005.

Jochen Heisenberg is a German physicist specializing in nuclear physics, and Professor Emeritus of Physics at the University of New Hampshire. He is the son of Nobel Prize-winning physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was a co-founder of quantum mechanics, and who, in particular, introduced the uncertainty principle. He is the brother of German neurobiologist and geneticist Martin Heisenberg and the uncle...

Christoph Ploß is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who has been serving as a member of the Bundestag from the state of Hamburg since 2017.

Kirsten Boie is a German children's author and activist. Having worked as a teacher, she began publishing in 1985 and is the author of more than 100 books. Among her best-known works are Paule ist ein Glücksgriff, the Kinder aus dem Möwenweg series, and Ritter Trenk. She has been recognised with the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of...

Archbishop Anastasios, was the Archbishop of Tirana, Durrës and All Albania and as such the primate and Head of the Holy Synod of the Autocephalous Orthodox Church of Albania. He was elected in June 1992. He was Professor Emeritus of the National University of Athens and an honorary member of the Academy of Athens. Anastasios was one of the presidents...

Birgit Breuel is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) who served as president of the Treuhand Agency and as Commissioner General of Expo 2000 in Hannover. She later worked in several honorary positions.

Katharina Nocun is a Polish-German politician and author who, from May 2013 to October 2016, has been the policy coordinator of the Pirate Party of Germany.

Henning Voscherau was a German politician who was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany. He was the First Mayor of his home city of Hamburg from 1988 to 1997, serving as President of the Bundesrat from 1990 to 1991.

Antje Boetius is a German marine biologist. She is a professor of geomicrobiology at the Max Planck Institute for Marine Microbiology, University of Bremen. Boetius received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize in March 2009 for her study of sea bed microorganisms that affect the global climate. She has been the director of Germany's polar research hub, the Alfred Wegener Institute,...

Elizabeth Kolbert is an American author and journalist. Since 1999, she has been a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she has covered politics and the environment.

Roland Berger is a German entrepreneur, consultant and philanthropist.

Daniel Ridwan "Budi" Budiman is a German presenter. He was a presenter at GIGA from 2003 to 2006 and then developed the computer game show Game One together with Simon Krätschmer, where he hosted and produced from 2006 to 2014. He is co-founder and presenter of the media production company Rocket Beans Entertainment GmbH, founded in 2011, of which he...

Volker Rühe is a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He served as German Defence minister from 1 April 1992, succeeding Gerhard Stoltenberg during the first government of a reunified Germany in the fourth cabinet of Chancellor Kohl, to the end of the fifth Kohl Cabinet on 27 October 1998. During his time at the Defence Ministry Rühe...

Osvaldo Bayer was an Argentine writer and journalist. He lived in Buenos Aires. In 1974, during the presidency of Isabel Perón, he went into exile, residing in Linz am Rhein, Germany, throughout the National Reorganization Process dictatorship (1976–1983).

Klaus Ernst is a German politician and was a leading member of the Labour and Social Justice Party, later The Left and switched to BSW in October 2023.

Arvid Harnack was a German jurist, Marxist economist, Communist, and German resistance fighter in Nazi Germany. Harnack came from an intellectual family and was originally a humanist. He was strongly influenced by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe but progressively moved to a Marxist-Socialist outlook after a visit to the Soviet Union and the Nazis' appearance. After starting an undercover discussion group...

Wilfried "Willi" Lemke was a German football manager who later worked as a United Nations official. He served as United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Adviser on Sport for Development and Peace. He was appointed to the position by United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon on 18 March 2008.

Karl Mauss was a German general during World War II. He commanded the 7th Panzer Division and was one of only 27 German military men to receive the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross with Oak Leaves, Swords and Diamonds.

Fabio Valeriano Lanfranco De Masi is a German-Italian politician. He was a member of the German Bundestag from 2017 to 2021 and was a member of the European Parliament (MEP) from Germany from July 2014 to October 2017. Until September 2022 he was a member of The Left Party, part of the European United Left–Nordic Green Left. He joined the...

Peter Struck was the German Minister of Defence under chancellor Gerhard Schröder from 2002 to 2005. A lawyer, Struck was a member of the Social Democratic Party.

Johannes Kahrs is a former German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who served as a member of the German parliament, Deutscher Bundestag, from 1998 until 2020.

Ole von Beust is a former German politician who was First Mayor of Hamburg from 31 October 2001 to 25 August 2010, serving as President of the Bundesrat from 1 November 2007 on for one year. He was succeeded as mayor by Christoph Ahlhaus.

Mojib Latif is a German meteorologist and oceanographer of Pakistani descent. Latif graduated with a Diplom in meteorology in 1983. He took a position as scientist at the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in 1985. In 1987 he earned a Ph.D. in oceanography from the University of Hamburg. In 2003 he became professor at IFM-GEOMAR, Kiel, the Leibniz Institute of...

Reinhard Dieter Grindel is a German journalist, politician (CDU) and football administrator.

Ingeborg Rapoport was a German pediatrician who was a prominent figure in East German medicine and, at age 102, the oldest person to receive a doctorate degree.

Monica-Christiane Lierhaus is a German sports journalist.

Ralf Gustav Dahrendorf, Baron Dahrendorf, was a German-British sociologist, philosopher, political scientist and liberal politician. A class conflict theorist, Dahrendorf was a leading expert on explaining and analysing class divisions in modern society. Dahrendorf wrote multiple articles and books, his most notable being Class and Conflict in Industrial Society (1959) and Essays in the Theory of Society (1968).

Peter Tschentscher is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). Since 28 March 2018 he has been the First Mayor of Hamburg. As First Mayor, he is head of the current government of the city-state. Since 2008 he has been a member of the Hamburg Parliament. From 2011 until 2018 he served as State Minister of Finance in...

Jan Paul van Aken is a German biologist and politician. He has been co-leader of The Left since October 2024 and a member of the German Bundestag since 2025, a position he held previously from 2009 to 2017.

Aydan Özoğuz is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), who has been a member of the Bundestag since 2009 and as its Vice-president of the German Bundestag from 2021 to 2025.

Shiing-Shen Chern was a Chinese American mathematician and poet. He made fundamental contributions to differential geometry and topology. He has been called the "father of modern differential geometry" and is widely regarded as a leader in geometry and one of the greatest mathematicians of the twentieth century, winning numerous awards and recognition including the Wolf Prize and the inaugural Shaw...

Yōko Tawada is a Japanese writer currently living in Berlin, Germany. She writes in both Japanese and German. She is a former writer-in-residence at MIT and Stanford University.

Björn Engholm is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). He was Federal Minister for Education and Science from 1981 to 1982, and in 1982 also Federal Minister for Food, Agriculture and Forests. From 1988 to 1993 he was the Minister-President of Schleswig-Holstein and from 1991 to 1993 the leader of the Social Democratic Party.

Hans-Dietrich Genscher was a German statesman and a member of the liberal Free Democratic Party (FDP), who served as Federal Minister of the Interior from 1969 to 1974, and as Federal Minister for Foreign Affairs and Vice Chancellor of Germany from 1974 to 1992 (except for a two-week break in 1982, after the FDP had left the Third Schmidt cabinet),...

Heiko Echter von der Leyen is a German physician. He was born into the von der Leyen family in Hanover. Von der Leyen is married to Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission since 2019.

Steffen Rüdiger Seibert is a German journalist and former television host who serves as German Ambassador to Israel. He previously served as head of the German Federal Government's Press and Information Office and as the German government's spokesperson from 2010 to 2021. During his tenure, Seibert was officially ranked as a Secretary of State.

Sibylle Berg is a German-Swiss contemporary author, playwright, and member of the European Parliament. They write novels, essays, short fiction, plays, radio plays, and columns. Their 18 books have been translated into 30 languages. They have won numerous awards, including the Thüringer Literaturpreis, the Bertolt-Brecht-Literaturpreis, and the Johann-Peter-Hebel-Preis. They have become an iconic figure in German alternative sub-cultures, gaining a...

Jan Philipp Fürchtegott Reemtsma is a German literary scholar, author, and patron who founded and was the long-term director of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research. Reemtsma lives and works mainly in Hamburg. In 1996, Reemtsma was kidnapped by Thomas Drach and only released after a ransom of 30 million German Marks was paid.

Siegfried Lenz was a German writer of novels, short stories and essays, as well as dramas for radio and the theatre. In 2000 he received the Goethe Prize on the 250th Anniversary of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's birth. He won the 2010 International Nonino Prize in Italy.

Egils Levits is a Latvian politician, lawyer, political scientist and jurist who served as the tenth president of Latvia from 2019 to 2023. He was a member of the European Court of Justice from 2004 to 2019.

Caren Miosga is a German journalist and television presenter. She was a longtime presenter of the news television show Tagesthemen on ARD.

Olaf Scholz is a German politician who served as the chancellor of Germany from 2021 to 2025. A member of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), he previously served as Vice Chancellor in the fourth Merkel cabinet and as Federal Minister of Finance from 2018 to 2021. He was also First Mayor of Hamburg from 2011 to 2018, deputy leader of...

Helmut Heinrich Waldemar Schmidt was a German politician and member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), who served as the chancellor of West Germany from 1974 to 1982. He was the longest lived chancellor in German history and had the longest post-chancellorship, at over 33 years.

Mateusz Jakub Morawiecki is a Polish economist and politician who served as Prime Minister of Poland from 2017 to 2023. A member of the Law and Justice (PiS) party, he previously served in the cabinet of prime minister Beata Szydło as deputy prime minister from 2015 to 2017, Minister of Development from 2015 to 2018 and Minister of Finance from...

Richard Gustavovich Sorge was a German-Russian journalist and Soviet military intelligence officer who was active before and during World War II and worked undercover as a German journalist in both Nazi Germany and the Empire of Japan. His codename was "Ramsay" (Рамза́й).

Prince Claus of the Netherlands, Jonkheer van Amsberg was Prince of the Netherlands from 30 April 1980 until his death on 6 October 2002, as the husband of Queen Beatrix.

Rüdiger Grube is a German engineer who served as the chairman of the board of Deutsche Bahn from 2009 until 2017 and as the chairman of EADS from 2007 until 2009.

Ria Schröder is a German politician of the Free Democratic Party (FDP) who served as a member of the Bundestag from 2021 to 2025.

Annalena Charlotte Alma Baerbock is a German diplomat and politician of the Alliance 90/The Greens party. She served as Germany's minister for foreign affairs from 2021 to 2025. She has served as President of the United Nations General Assembly during its 80th session since 9 September 2025.

Elke Heidenreich is a German author, TV presenter, literary critic and journalist. She has written audio plays, a magazine column, scripts for television plays and books. Heidenreich is known as the Kabarettist who created a character, Else Stratmann. She is a literary critic in the television Literaturclub of the Schweizer Fernsehen.

Otto Georg Schily is a former Federal Minister of the Interior of Germany, his tenure was from 1998 to 2005, in the cabinet of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder. He is a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) and was a founding member of the West-German Green Party.

Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher and cultural theorist. He was a professor of philosophy and media theory at and Rector from 2001 to 2015 of the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe. He co-hosted the German television show Das Philosophische Quartett from 2002 until 2012.

Christian Friedrich Hebbel was a German poet and dramatist.

Harald zur Hausen NAS EASA APS was a German virologist. He carried out research on cervical cancer and discovered the role of papilloma viruses in cervical cancer, for which he received the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2008. He was chairman of the German Cancer Research Center (Deutsches Krebsforschungszentrum, DKFZ) in Heidelberg.

Arnulf Martin Baring was a German lawyer, journalist, political scientist, contemporary historian and author. He was a member of the German-British Baring family of bankers.

Hans-Ulrich Klose was a German politician from the Social Democratic Party and a member of the German Federal parliament (German: Bundestag). Klose was the First Mayor (German: Erster Bürgermeister) of the Free and Hanseatic City of Hamburg from 1974 up to 1981, serving as President of the Bundesrat in 1979–80.

Walter Jens was a German philologist, literature historian, critic, university professor and writer.

Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker is a German scientist and politician (SPD). He was a member of the German Bundestag and served as co-president of the Club of Rome jointly with Anders Wijkman from 2011 – 2019.

Sir Hans Adolf Krebs, FRS was a German-British biologist, physician and biochemist. He was a pioneer scientist in the study of cellular respiration, a biochemical process in living cells that extracts energy from food and oxygen and makes it available to drive the processes of life. He is best known for his discoveries of two important sequences of chemical reactions...

Hans Magnus Enzensberger was a German author, poet, translator, and editor. He also wrote under the pseudonyms Andreas Thalmayr, Elisabeth Ambras, Linda Quilt and Giorgio Pellizzi. Enzensberger was regarded as one of the literary founding figures of the Federal Republic of Germany and wrote more than 70 books, with works translated into 40 languages. He was one of the leading...

Leo Strauss was a German-American political philosopher and historian of philosophy whose work greatly influenced twentieth-century political theory in the United States and the study of classical political thought. He is known best for his interpretation of ancient and medieval philosophy, his account of classical natural right, and his claim that philosophers often wrote esoterically, presenting different teachings to general...

Wolfgang Schäuble was a German politician whose political career spanned more than five decades. A member of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), he was the longest-serving member of any democratic German parliament. Schäuble served as the 13th president of the Bundestag from 2017 to 2021.

Robert Habeck is a German writer and former politician (Alliance 90/The Greens) who served as Vice Chancellor of Germany, Federal Minister for Economic Affairs and Climate Action in the cabinet of Chancellor Olaf Scholz and as a Member of the German Bundestag for Flensburg – Schleswig from 2021 to 2025. From 2018 to 2022, he also served as co-leader of...

Ole Schröder is a German politician and member of the CDU. From 2009 until 2018, he served as Parliamentary State Secretary in the German Federal Ministry of the Interior.

Hendrik Frensch Verwoerd, also known as H. F. Verwoerd, was a Dutch-born South African politician, academic, and newspaper editor who served as Prime Minister of South Africa from 1958 until his assassination in 1966.

Wilferd Ferdinand Madelung FBA was a German author and scholar of Islamic history widely recognised for his contributions to the fields of Islamic and Iranian studies. He was appreciated in Iran for his "knowledgeable and fair" treatment of the Shia perspective. In the obituary of the Institute of Ismaili Studies (London) where Madelung worked his last years, it reads: "With...