Harry Graf Kessler
Diplomat, patron of the arts and bibliophile1868-1937Diplomat, dandy, artist, sophisticate, compulsive diarist, alleged illegitimate son of the German Kaiser – Kessler was a dazzling personality in the cultural life of his epoch. He attempted to unite life and art in Germany as William Morris had in England.
Athanasius Kircher
A Jesuit seeking the very first writing1602-1680The Jesuit Athanasius Kircher was one of the greatest polymaths of the 17th century. Although he was originally earmarked as a court mathematician in Vienna, Kircher ultimately settled in Rome where his study of Coptic handwriting acted as a basis for his attempts to solve the riddle of Egyptian hieroglyphics.
Heinrich Klemm
Successful tailor with a weakness for print history1819-1886Born as the son of a tailor and made an orphan early in life, Heinrich Klemm also completed an apprenticeship in tailoring and went on his journeyman years. In 1844 he founded a drawing institute for dressmakers and two years later published his first title, the Vollständiges Lehrbuch der modernen Zuschneidekunst und Bearbeitung sämmtlicher Herrenkleider (The Complete Teaching Book for the Art of Modern Tailoring and Working with all Men’s Clothing).
Victor Klemperer
Working as a censor in the Deutsche Bücherei1881-1960The writer and novelist Victor Klemperer, after a stay in military hospital, succeeded in not returning to the front but, arranged for by his brother, was posted instead to the Book Assessment Office of the Eastern Command. After a short tour in Kaunas, Lithuania, he arrived in Leipzig in August 1916.
Alexander Kluge
Professional provocateur in mainstream television*1932In spite of successfully completing a doctorate in law, at the end of the 1950’s Alexander Kluge turned his attention to the arts. After an internship at the CCC-Film production company, he directed Abschied von gestern (Yesterday Girl) in 1960 – one of the key works that helped to shape the style of New German Cinema and in 1962 Kluge was one of the signatories of the Oberhausen Manifesto, the programmatic foundation document of the movement.
Anton Koberger
Printer, book trader, large-scale entrepreneurcirca 1440-1513Anton Koberger opened a print workshop in Nuremberg in 1472. It was already organised like a factory and soon had at least 15 printing presses and was efficient enough to manage printing Schedel’s Weltchronik (Wolrd Chronicle), a huge work with around 1,800 woodcut illustrations printed in Latin and German.
Rudolf Koch
A master of blackletter typefaces1876-1934Between 1892 and 1896 Rudolf Koch, who was born the son of a sculptor father, successfully completed an apprenticeship as a chaser before going onto train as a drawing instructor at the Nürnberg Kunstgewerbeschule (school of arts and crafts) and Munich’s Technische Hochschule (Technical University). In 1906, after an interim spell in Leipzig, he took up a creative post at the Rudhardschen type foundry (later known as Klingspor Brothers) in Offenbach am Main while also working as a teacher at the same city’s technical academy.
Friedrich Koenig
Inventor of the jobbing and cylinder press1774-1833Removed early from secondary school for economic reasons, Friedrich Koenig learned his trade at the Leipzig printing company Breitkopf & Härtel. An autodidact, he learned his mathematics and mechanical skills on his own, and he attended lectures at Leipzig University as a guest.
Nikolaus Kopernikus
An astronomer revolutionises humanity’s view of the world1473-1543Two months after Nicolaus Copernicus died, his epochal book De revolutionibus orbium coelestium (On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres), which upended the prevailing geocentric worldview, was published in Nuremberg. The astronomer, who hailed from Thorn (present-day Toruń) on the River Vistula, recognised that it was the Sun rather than the Earth which was the mid-point of the universe.
Siegfried Kracauer
The founder of film sociology1889-1966Among the hugely varied achievements of Siegfried Kracauer, it is his sociocultural studies that particularly stand out today. After studying architecture, he became editor of the Frankfurter Zeitung in 1922 and in the following years published his two much-revered studies Das Ornament der Masse (The Mass Ornament) in 1927 and Die Angestellten (The Salaried Masses) in 1930, in which he began his examinations of the interactions of art and society.
