Famous Personalities

Important artists and scientists have lived or worked in Hannover, such as the polymath and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, the composer Georg Friedrich Händel, the poet Gottfried Benn, who wrote his poems here, the world-famous Dada artist Kurt Schwitters and the renowned philosopher and sociologist Hannah Arendt.

Today, it is the famous rock group Scorpions that flies the flag for Hannover on its world tours, or the band Fury in the Slaughterhouse.

A number of Hanoverian names have become well known in the world: Emil Berliner invented the gramophone and the gramophone record, and at the beginning of the 1960s Professor Walter Bruch developed the PAL system for colour television in Hannover. Here the first compact car, made by Hanomag, took to the road, Continental presented the first passenger car tyre with profiled tread, and it is now more than one hundred years since the Bahlsen Company produced its first „Leibniz Keks“ (biscuit) here.

Hannover’s honorary citizen Niki de Saint Phalle is the creator of the world famous Nanas and also had the idea for reshaping the grotto in the Herrenhausen Gardens.