100 Notable alumni of University of Marburg

Elisabeth Blochmann was a scholar of education, as well as of philosophy, and a pioneer in and researcher of women's education in Germany.

Robert Lehr was a German politician (DNVP, CDU). He served as Federal Minister of the Interior from 1950 to 1953 under chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

Gerhard Jahn was a German politician and a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). He was Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Foreign Affairs from 1967 to 1969, and Federal Minister of Justice from 1969 to 1974.

Philipp Wilhelm Grimm was a German lawyer and father to the Brothers Grimm and seven other children, including Ludwig Emil Grimm and Charlotte Amalie Grimm. He was husband of Dorothea Grimm.

Sören Bartol is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD) who has been serving as a member of the German Parliament since 2002.

Hermann Josef von Kuhl was a Prussian military officer, member of the German General Staff, and a Generalleutnant during World War I. One of the most competent commanders in the German Army, he retired in 1919 to write a number of critically acclaimed essays on the war. Hermann von Kuhl is one of only three recipients to be distinguished with...

Alexander Markowich Ostrowski was a mathematician.

Dr. Lale Akgün is a German politician and member of the SPD. She served as an MP for Cologne II electoral district in the German Bundestag from 2002 to 2009.

Kirsten Kappert-Gonther is a German psychotherapist and politician of Alliance 90/The Greens. Since the 2017 German federal election, she has been a member of the Bundestag, the federal parliament of Germany. She did not win the constituency mandate in Bremen I, but was elected via the Bremen state list.

Carl Leverkus was a German chemist and chemistry entrepreneur. The city of Leverkusen is named after him.

Torben Braga is a German politician of the Alternative for Germany (AfD), previously FDP. He entered the state parliament of Thuringia after the state elections of 27 October 2019.

Juris Hartmanis was a Latvian-born American computer scientist and computational theorist who, with Richard E. Stearns, received the 1993 ACM Turing Award "in recognition of their seminal paper which established the foundations for the field of computational complexity theory".

Sergei Ivanovich Shmatko was a Russian businessman and politician specializing in the energy industry.

Ludwig Mond FRS was a German-born British chemist and industrialist. He discovered an important, previously unknown, class of compounds called metal carbonyls.

Sir Edward Frankland, KCB, FRS, FRSE was an English chemist. He was one of the originators of organometallic chemistry and introduced the concept of combining power or valence.

Dmitry Ivanovich Vinogradov was a Russian chemist who developed Russian hard-paste porcelain; he was the founder of the Imperial Porcelain Factory.

Jürgen Kocka is a German historian.

Paul Julius Möbius was a German neurologist born in Leipzig. His grandfather was the German mathematician and theoretical astronomer August Ferdinand Möbius (1790–1868).

Iris Wolff is a German writer.

The Baron Friedrich Adolf Riedesel zu Eisenbach was a general officer of the Principality of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel who commanded the Brunswick Corps in the Northern theater of the American War of Independence.

Hans Georg Calmeyer was a German lawyer from Osnabrück who saved thousands of Jews from certain death during the German occupation of the Netherlands from 1941 until 1945. On 4 March 1992, Yad Vashem recognised Hans Calmeyer as Righteous Among the Nations.

Burkhard Hirsch was a German politician and civil liberties advocate. A member of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), Hirsch spent 21 years in the Bundestag (1972–1975, 1980–1998). He also served five years as Minister of the Interior of North Rhine-Westphalia (1975–1980).

Manfred Kanther is a German conservative politician and was Minister of the Interior of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1993 to 1998. He has been a member of the CDU (since 1958).

Nechama Leibowitz was Israel Prize laureate and Israeli Bible scholar and commentator who rekindled interest in Bible study.

Helmut Hasse was a German mathematician working in algebraic number theory, known for fundamental contributions to class field theory, the application of p-adic numbers to local class field theory and diophantine geometry (Hasse principle), and to local zeta functions.

Abraham Fraenkel was a German-born Israeli mathematician. He was an early Zionist and the first Dean of Mathematics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He is known for his contributions to axiomatic set theory, especially his additions to Ernst Zermelo's axioms, which resulted in the Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory.

Baroness Gertrud von Le Fort was a German writer.

George I of Hesse-Darmstadt was the Landgrave of Hesse-Darmstadt from 1567 to 1596.

Heinrich Anton de Bary was a German surgeon, botanist, microbiologist, and mycologist (fungal systematics and physiology). He is considered a founding father of plant pathology (phytopathology) as well as the founder of modern mycology. His extensive and careful studies of the life history of fungi and contribution to the understanding of algae and higher plants established landmarks in biology.

Walter Wallmann was a German lawyer and politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). He served as the Mayor of Frankfurt between 1977 and 1986, and as Minister-president of Hesse from 1987 to 1991.

Paul Gerhard Natorp was a German philosopher and educationalist, considered one of the co-founders of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. He was known as an authority on Plato.

María de Maeztu Whitney was a Spanish educator, feminist, founder of the Residencia de Señoritas and the Lyceum Club in Madrid. She was sister of the writer, journalist and occasional diplomat, Ramiro de Maeztu and the painter Gustavo de Maeztu.

Adolph Wilhelm Hermann Kolbe was a German chemist and academic, and a major contributor to the birth of modern organic chemistry. He was a professor at Marburg and Leipzig. Kolbe was the first to apply the term synthesis in a chemical context, and contributed to the philosophical demise of vitalism through synthesis of the organic substance acetic acid from carbon...

Julius Plücker was a German mathematician and physicist. He made fundamental contributions to the field of analytical geometry and was a pioneer in the investigations of cathode rays that led eventually to the discovery of the electron. He also vastly extended the study of Lamé curves.

Annette Kurschus is a German Protestant theologian and pastor. She was Praeses (or in German Präses) of the Protestant Church of Westphalia from 2012 until 2023, in November 2015 she became Vice-President of the Council of the Protestant Church in Germany (EKD – Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland). She was President of the Council of the EKD from 2021 until 2023.

Werner Bergengruen was a Baltic German novelist and poet. His best known works include the 1935 novel A Matter of Conscience and the 1939 short story collection Death from Reval.

Nahum Goldmann was a leading Zionist. He was a founder of the World Jewish Congress and its president from 1951 to 1978 and was also president of the World Zionist Organization from 1956 to 1968.

Count Georg Ludwig Cancrin was a Russian German aristocrat and politician best known for spearheading reforms in the Russian financial system early in the 19th century.

Maurice of Hesse-Kassel, also called Maurice the Learned or Moritz, was the Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel (or Hesse-Cassel) in the Holy Roman Empire from 1592 to 1627.

Adolf Eugen Fick was a German-born physician and physiologist.

Frederick William I was, between 1847 and 1866, the last Prince-elector of Hesse-Kassel (or Hesse-Cassel).

Konrad Alexander Friedrich Duden was a German philologist and teacher. He founded the well-known German language dictionary bearing his name, Duden.

Wolfgang Gerhardt was a German politician and the leader of the Free Democratic Party of Germany (FDP) from 1995 until he was succeeded by Guido Westerwelle in 2001.

Werner Wilhelm Jaeger was a German-American classicist.

Wilhelm Röpke was a German economist and social critic, one of the spiritual fathers of the social market economy. A professor of economics, first in Jena, then in Graz, Marburg, Istanbul, and finally Geneva, Röpke theorised and collaborated to organise the post-World War II economic re-awakening of the war-wrecked German economy, deploying a program referred to as ordoliberalism, a more...

Adolf Friedrich Johann Butenandt was a German biochemist. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1939 for his "work on sex hormones." He initially rejected the award in accordance with government policy, but accepted it in 1949 after World War II. He was President of the Max Planck Society from 1960 to 1972. He was also the first,...

Karl Waldemar Ziegler was a German chemist who won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1963, with Giulio Natta, for work on polymers. The Nobel Committee recognized his "excellent work on organometallic compounds...led to new polymerization reactions and... paved the way for new and highly useful industrial processes". He is also known for his work involving free-radicals, many-membered rings, and...

Hermann Cohen was a German philosopher, one of the founders of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism, and he is often held to be "probably the most important Jewish philosopher of the nineteenth century".

Herwart Holland-Moritz, known as Wau Holland, was a German computer security activist and journalist who in 1981 cofounded the Chaos Computer Club (CCC), one of the world's oldest hacking clubs.

Elisabeth Selbert was a German politician and lawyer. She was one of the four women who worked on the Basic Law for the Federal Republic of Germany, collectively called the Mütter des Grundgesetzes (English: Mothers of the Basic Law). She had a central role in ensuring that explicit equality between men and women was included as a fundamental right in...

Jules Alphonse Nicolas Hoffmann is a Luxembourgish-French biologist. During his youth, growing up in Luxembourg, he developed a strong interest in insects under the influence of his father, Jos Hoffmann. This eventually resulted in the younger Hoffmann's dedication to the field of biology using insects as model organisms. He currently holds a faculty position at the University of Strasbourg. He...

Hsu Chia-ching is a Taiwanese politician who served as the minister of the Overseas Community Affairs Council since 2023.

Konstantinos Simitis was a Greek politician who led the 'Modernization' movement of Greece. He succeeded in leadership Andreas Papandreou, the founder of the Panhellenic Socialist Movement (PASOK), and served as Prime Minister of Greece from 1996 to 2004.

Wolfgang Clement was a German politician and a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). He was the 7th Minister President of North Rhine-Westphalia from 27 May 1998 to 22 October 2002 and Federal Minister of Economics and Labour from 2002 to 2005. He was an Honorary Member of the International Raoul Wallenberg Foundation.

Karl Ferdinand Braun was a German applied physicist who shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Guglielmo Marconi for their contributions to the development of radio. With his two circuit system, long range radio transmissions and modern telecommunications were made possible. His invention of the phased array antenna in 1905 led to the development of radar, smart antennas, and...

Paul Nicolai Hartmann was a German philosopher. He is regarded as a key representative of critical realism and as one of the most important twentieth-century metaphysicians. His early work in the philosophy of biology has been cited in modern discussions of genomics and cloning.

Michael Köhlmeier is a contemporary Austrian writer and musician.

Peter Manuel Feldmann is a German politician of the Social Democratic Party (SPD). On 25 March 2012, he was elected Mayor of Frankfurt as successor of Petra Roth (CDU). On 6 November 2022, he was recalled, with 95% of the vote against him, and he left office on 11 November 2022.

Ernst Rudolf Johannes Reuter was a German politician who was the mayor of West Berlin from 1948 to 1953, during the Cold War. He played a significant role in unifying the divided sectors of Berlin and publicly and politically took a stand against the Soviet Union.

Jacob Ludwig Karl Grimm, also known as Ludwig Karl, was a German author, linguist, philologist, jurist, and folklorist. He formulated Grimm's law of linguistics, and was the co-author of the Deutsches Wörterbuch, the author of Deutsche Mythologie, and the editor of Grimms' Fairy Tales. He was the older brother of Wilhelm Grimm; together, they were the literary duo known as...

Hans-Georg Gadamer was a German philosopher of the continental tradition, best known for his 1960 magnum opus on hermeneutics Truth and Method (Wahrheit und Methode).

Gottfried Benn was a German poet, essayist, and physician. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature five times. He was awarded the Georg Büchner Prize in 1951.

Friedrich Carl von Savigny was a German jurist and historian.

John Tyndall was an Irish physicist. His scientific fame arose in the 1850s from his study of diamagnetism. Later he made discoveries in the realms of infrared radiation and the physical properties of air, proving the connection between atmospheric CO2 and what is now known as the greenhouse effect in 1859.

Joachim-Friedrich Martin Josef Merz is a German politician who has served as Chancellor of Germany since 6 May 2025. He has also served as Leader of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) since January 2022, leading the CDU/CSU (Union) parliamentary group as Leader of the Opposition in the Bundestag from February 2022 to May 2025.

Mikhail Vasilyevich Lomonosov was a Russian polymath, scientist and writer, who made important contributions to literature, education, and science. Among his discoveries were the atmosphere of Venus and the law of conservation of mass in chemical reactions. His spheres of science were natural science, chemistry, physics, mineralogy, history, art, philology, optical devices and others. One of the founders of modern...

Friedrich Wilhelm Ernst Paulus was a German Generalfeldmarschall (Field Marshal) during World War II who is best known for his surrender of the German 6th Army during the Battle of Stalingrad (July 1942 to February 1943). The battle ended in disaster for the Wehrmacht when Soviet forces encircled the Germans within the city, leading to the ultimate death or capture...

Boris Leonidovich Pasternak was a Russian and Soviet poet, novelist, and literary translator.

Jürgen Habermas is a German philosopher and social theorist in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. His work addresses communicative rationality and the public sphere.

Ernst Ferdinand Sauerbruch was a German surgeon. His major work was on the use of negative-pressure chambers for surgery.

Felix Manuel Lobrecht is a German stand-up comedian, podcast host, and author.

Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl was a German professor, journalist, novelist, and folklorist.

Wilhelm Martin Philipp Christian Ludwig Liebknecht was a German social democratic politician, journalist, and a principal founder of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). His political career was a pioneering project in steering a Marxist-inspired workers' party to electoral success and mass membership. With his long-time political collaborator August Bebel, he was a leading figure in nineteenth-century German socialism....

Eberhardt Alexander Gauland is a German politician, journalist and lawyer who served as leader of the political party Alternative for Germany (AfD) in the Bundestag from September 2017 to 2021, and co-leader of the party from December 2017 to November 2019. He has been the Member of the Bundestag (MdB) for Chemnitz since March 2025, having previously served on the...

Ernst Lemmer was a German politician of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and former member of the German Bundestag.

Alexander Kluge is a German author, philosopher, academic and film director.

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.

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...

Ernst Alfred Cassirer was a German philosopher and historian of philosophy. Trained within the Neo-Kantian Marburg School, he initially followed his mentor Hermann Cohen in attempting to supply an idealistic philosophy of science.

Wilhelm Carl Grimm was a German author, philologist and anthropologist. He was the younger brother of Jacob Grimm, of the literary duo the Brothers Grimm.

Emil von Behring, was a German physiologist. In 1901, he received the first Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine "for his work on serum therapy, especially its application against diphtheria, by which he has opened a new road in the domain of medical science and thereby placed in the hands of the physician a victorious weapon against illness and deaths"....

Tania Singer is a German psychologist and social neuroscientist and the scientific director of the Max Planck Society's Social Neuroscience Lab in Berlin, Germany. Between 2007 and 2010, she became the inaugural chair of social neuroscience and neuroeconomics at the University of Zurich and was the co-director of the Laboratory for Social and Neural Systems Research in Zurich. Her research...

Hans-Jochen Vogel was a German lawyer and a politician for the Social Democratic Party (SPD). He served as Mayor of Munich from 1960 to 1972, winning the 1972 Summer Olympics for the city and Governing Mayor of West Berlin in 1981, the only German ever to lead two cities with a million+ inhabitants. He was Federal Minister of Regional Planning,...

Gustav Walter Heinemann was a German politician who was President of West Germany from 1969 to 1974. He served as mayor of Essen from 1946 to 1949, West German Minister of the Interior from 1949 to 1950, and Minister of Justice from 1966 to 1969.

Otto Hahn was a German chemist who was a pioneer in the field of radiochemistry. He is referred to as the father of nuclear chemistry and discoverer of nuclear fission, the science behind nuclear reactors and nuclear weapons. Hahn and Lise Meitner discovered isotopes of the radioactive elements radium, thorium, protactinium and uranium. He also discovered the phenomena of atomic...

Hans Fischer was a German organic chemist and the recipient of the 1930 Nobel Prize for Chemistry "for his researches into the constitution of haemin and chlorophyll and especially for his synthesis of haemin."

Friedrich Wilhelm Georg Kohlrausch was a German physicist who investigated the conductive properties of electrolytes and contributed to knowledge of their behaviour. He also investigated elasticity, thermoelasticity, and thermal conduction as well as magnetic and electrical precision measurements.

Carl Friedrich Wilhelm Ludwig was a German physician and physiologist. His work as both a researcher and teacher had a major influence on the understanding, methods and apparatus used in almost all branches of physiology.

Adolf Gaston Eugen Fick was a German ophthalmologist who invented the contact lens. He was the nephew of the German physiologist Adolf Eugen Fick, and the son of the German anatomy professor Franz Ludwig Fick.

Friedrich Wöhler FRS HonFRSE ( German: [ˈvøːlɐ]; 31 July 1800 – 23 September 1882) was a German chemist known for his work in both organic and inorganic chemistry, being the first to isolate the chemical elements beryllium and yttrium in pure metallic form. He was the first to prepare several inorganic compounds, including silane and silicon nitride.

Hans Mommsen was a German historian, known for his studies in German social history, for his functionalist interpretation of the Third Reich, and especially for arguing that Adolf Hitler was a weak dictator. Descended from Nobel Prize-winning historian Theodor Mommsen, he was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany.

Rudolf Karl Bultmann was a German Lutheran theologian and professor of the New Testament at the University of Marburg. He was one of the major figures of early 20th-century biblical studies. A prominent critic of liberal theology, Bultmann instead argued for an existentialist interpretation of the New Testament. His hermeneutical approach to the New Testament led him to be a...

Margot Käßmann is a Lutheran theologian, who was Landesbischöfin (bishop) of the Evangelical-Lutheran Church of Hanover in Germany. On 28 October 2009, she was also elected to lead the Protestant Church in Germany, a federation of Protestant church bodies in Germany. She stepped down from both offices on 24 February 2010 following a drink-driving incident. After serving as a "Reformation...

Hans Jonas was a German and American philosopher. From 1955 to 1976 he was the Alvin Johnson Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City.

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...

Hannah Arendt was a German and American historian and philosopher. She was one of the most influential political theorists of the twentieth century.

Katarina Barley is a German politician and lawyer who has been a Member of the European Parliament since 2019, serving as one of its Vice-Presidents. She served as Federal Minister of Justice and Consumer Protection in the fourth Cabinet of Angela Merkel. Prior to that, she had served as Federal Minister of Family Affairs, Senior Citizens, Women and Youth and...

Ole Worm, who often went by the Latinized form of his name Olaus Wormius, was a Danish physician, natural historian and antiquary. He was a professor at the University of Copenhagen where he taught Greek, Latin, physics and medicine.

Charles de l'Écluse, L'Escluse, or Carolus Clusius, seigneur de Watènes, was an Artois doctor and pioneering botanist, perhaps the most influential of all 16th-century scientific horticulturists.