Who Was Alive

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

German writer, artist, natural scientist and politician

Born 28 August 1749 · died 22 March 1832, aged 82

Who was alive at the same time as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe?

  1. Johann Sebastian Bach
  2. Voltaire
  3. Benjamin Franklin
  4. Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  5. Adam Smith
  6. Immanuel Kant
  7. George Washington
  8. Thomas Jefferson
  9. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
  10. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
  11. Ludwig van Beethoven
  12. Napoleon
  13. Lord Byron
  14. Alexander Pushkin
  15. Victor Hugo
  16. Hans Christian Andersen
  17. Edgar Allan Poe
  18. Abraham Lincoln
  19. Charles Darwin
  20. Charles Dickens
  21. Otto von Bismarck
  22. Karl Marx
  23. Fyodor Dostoyevsky
  24. Leo Tolstoy
Drag across the timeline to see who was alive in any year and the age each person reached that year. Faded ends mark uncertain dates.

When Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was born, George Washington was 17, Johann Sebastian Bach was 64, Voltaire was 54, Immanuel Kant was 25 and Jean-Jacques Rousseau was 37.

When Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died, Karl Marx was 13, Abraham Lincoln was 23, Leo Tolstoy was 3, Charles Darwin was 23 and Victor Hugo was 30.

Born during Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s lifetime: Karl Marx, Abraham Lincoln, Napoleon, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Darwin, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Ludwig van Beethoven and Victor Hugo.

Not quite contemporaries: Friedrich Nietzsche was born 12 years after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died, Thomas Edison was born 15 years after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died, Mark Twain was born 3 years after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died and Sarah Bernhardt was born 12 years after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died.

Compare

All 249 contemporaries we track

  1. Karl Marx 1818 – 1883
  2. Abraham Lincoln 1809 – 1865
  3. Napoleon 1769 – 1821
  4. Leo Tolstoy 1828 – 1910
  5. Charles Darwin 1809 – 1882
  6. George Washington 1732 – 1799
  7. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart 1756 – 1791
  8. Ludwig van Beethoven c. 1770 – 1827
  9. Victor Hugo 1802 – 1885
  10. Johann Sebastian Bach 1685 – 1750
  11. Voltaire 1694 – 1778
  12. Fyodor Dostoyevsky 1821 – 1881
  13. Immanuel Kant 1724 – 1804
  14. Charles Dickens 1812 – 1870
  15. Alexander Pushkin 1799 – 1837
  16. Hans Christian Andersen 1805 – 1875
  17. Jean-Jacques Rousseau 1712 – 1778
  18. Thomas Jefferson 1743 – 1826
  19. Edgar Allan Poe 1809 – 1849
  20. Adam Smith 1723 – 1790
  21. Lord Byron 1788 – 1824
  22. Otto von Bismarck 1815 – 1898
  23. Benjamin Franklin 1706 – 1790
  24. Carl Linnaeus 1707 – 1778
  25. Louis Pasteur 1822 – 1895
  26. Richard Wagner 1813 – 1883
  27. Jane Austen 1775 – 1817
  28. Carl Friedrich Gauss 1777 – 1855
  29. Frédéric Chopin 1810 – 1849
  30. Friedrich Engels 1820 – 1895
  31. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel 1770 – 1831
  32. Leonhard Euler 1707 – 1783
  33. Jules Verne 1828 – 1905
  34. John Adams 1735 – 1826
  35. James Cook 1728 – 1779
  36. Francisco Goya 1746 – 1828
  37. Friedrich Schiller 1759 – 1805
  38. Michael Faraday 1791 – 1867
  39. Giuseppe Verdi 1813 – 1901
  40. Charles Baudelaire 1821 – 1867
  41. Katsushika Hokusai 1760 – 1849
  42. James Madison 1751 – 1836
  43. Honoré de Balzac 1799 – 1850
  44. Simón Bolívar 1783 – 1830
  45. Arthur Schopenhauer 1788 – 1860
  46. Victoria 1819 – 1901
  47. Alexandre Dumas 1802 – 1870
  48. Franz Schubert 1797 – 1828
  49. Søren Kierkegaard 1813 – 1855
  50. Henrik Ibsen 1828 – 1906
  51. Heinrich Heine 1797 – 1856
  52. John Quincy Adams 1767 – 1848
  53. Andrew Jackson 1767 – 1845
  54. James Clerk Maxwell 1831 – 1879
  55. William Blake 1757 – 1827
  56. George Frideric Handel 1685 – 1759
  57. Montesquieu 1689 – 1755
  58. James Watt 1736 – 1819
  59. Gustave Flaubert 1821 – 1880
  60. David Hume 1711 – 1776
  61. Ulysses S. Grant 1822 – 1885
  62. Joseph Haydn 1732 – 1809
  63. James Monroe 1758 – 1831
  64. Nikolai Gogol 1808–1809 – 1851–1852
  65. Lewis Carroll 1832 – 1898
  66. Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803 – 1882
  67. Ivan Turgenev 1818 – 1883
  68. Catherine II of Russia 1729 – 1796
  69. Denis Diderot 1713 – 1784
  70. John Stuart Mill 1806 – 1873
  71. Florence Nightingale 1820 – 1910
  72. Walt Whitman 1819 – 1892
  73. James A. Garfield 1831 – 1881
  74. Emily Dickinson 1830 – 1886
  75. Martin Van Buren 1782 – 1862
  76. Andrew Johnson 1808 – 1875
  77. Henry David Thoreau 1817 – 1862
  78. Zachary Taylor 1784 – 1850
  79. James Buchanan 1791 – 1868
  80. John Keats 1795 – 1821
  81. James K. Polk 1795 – 1849
  82. John Tyler 1790 – 1862
  83. Percy Bysshe Shelley 1792 – 1822
  84. Mikhail Bakunin 1814 – 1876
  85. Alexander von Humboldt 1769 – 1859
  86. William Wordsworth 1770 – 1850
  87. Millard Fillmore 1800 – 1874
  88. William Henry Harrison 1773 – 1841
  89. Walter Scott 1771 – 1832
  90. Franklin Pierce 1804 – 1869
  91. Rutherford B. Hayes 1822 – 1893
  92. Benjamin Disraeli 1804 – 1881
  93. Taras Shevchenko 1814 – 1861
  94. George Eliot 1819 – 1880
  95. Stendhal 1783 – 1842
  96. George Sand 1804 – 1876
  97. Thomas Paine 1737 – 1809
  98. Hector Berlioz 1803 – 1869
  99. Charlotte Brontë 1816 – 1855
  100. James Prescott Joule 1818 – 1889
  101. Samuel Johnson 1709 – 1784
  102. Gregor Mendel 1822 – 1884
  103. Marie Antoinette 1755 – 1793
  104. Maximilien Robespierre 1758 – 1794
  105. Joseph Fourier 1768 – 1830
  106. Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres 1780 – 1867
  107. Mary Shelley 1797 – 1851
  108. Auguste Comte 1798 – 1857
  109. Ada Lovelace 1815 – 1852
  110. Chester A. Arthur 1829 – 1886
  111. Giuseppe Garibaldi 1807 – 1882
  112. Robert Schumann 1810 – 1856
  113. Emily Brontë 1818 – 1848
  114. Herman Melville 1819 – 1891
  115. Antoine Lavoisier 1743 – 1794
  116. Mary Wollstonecraft 1759 – 1797
  117. Adam Mickiewicz 1798 – 1855
  118. Napoleon III 1808 – 1873
  119. Mikhail Lermontov 1814 – 1841
  120. Pierre-Simon Laplace 1749 – 1827
  121. Franz Liszt 1811 – 1886
  122. Louis XVI of France 1754 – 1793
  123. Theodor Mommsen 1817 – 1903
  124. Frederick II of Prussia 1712 – 1786
  125. Edmund Burke 1729 – 1797
  126. Robert Burns 1759 – 1796
  127. Felix Mendelssohn 1809 – 1847
  128. Frédéric Mistral 1830 – 1914
  129. Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772 – 1834
  130. Eugène Delacroix 1798 – 1863
  131. André-Marie Ampère 1775 – 1836
  132. Herbert Spencer 1820 – 1903
  133. Thomas Carlyle 1795 – 1881
  134. Alfred Tennyson 1809 – 1892
  135. Harriet Beecher Stowe 1811 – 1896
  136. Alessandro Volta 1745 – 1827
  137. Nathaniel Hawthorne 1804 – 1864
  138. John Ruskin 1819 – 1900
  139. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow 1807 – 1882
  140. Alexis de Tocqueville 1805 – 1859
  141. Leo XIII 1810 – 1903
  142. Jean Le Rond d'Alembert 1717 – 1783
  143. William Herschel 1738 – 1822
  144. Edward Jenner 1749 – 1823
  145. Johann Gottlieb Fichte 1762 – 1814
  146. Novalis 1772 – 1801
  147. Charles Babbage 1791 – 1871
  148. John Dalton 1766 – 1844
  149. Giacomo Leopardi 1798 – 1837
  150. Édouard Manet 1832 – 1883

The 150 best known are listed.