Heidelberg Profiles
Since its foundation in 1386, Heidelberg University has brought forth many persons of renown – as researchers, teachers and graduates.
Among its eminent professors are philosophers Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Karl Jaspers and Hans-Georg Gadamer, natural scientists Robert Bunsen, Hermann von Helmholtz and Gustav Kirchhoff, national economists and sociologists Max and Alfred Weber, lawyer Gustav Radbruch and psychoanalyst Alexander Mitscherlich. Those who studied in Heidelberg include Reformer Philipp Melanchthon, Baroque poet Martin Opitz, composer Robert Schumann, writer Joseph von Eichendorff, philosopher Hannah Arendt, psychoanalyst Margarethe Mitscherlich and former Federal Chancellor Helmut Kohl; likewise Monika Harms, the first woman to become Federal Advocate-General, and Wolfgang Ketterle, who won the Nobel Prize for Physics. Other notable figures have been linked to the university as honorary senators or honorary citizens, and this is still true today. A few of these prominent individuals are profiled here in interviews and (short) portraits.
