← Fame through time1900-1999
The 20th century
Whose names filled the books of the 20th century - anyone at all, however long dead - counted as mentions per million words printed, so a period that simply published more does not inflate anyone.
Talked about then
Whose names appeared most in German books during the 20th century, whenever they lived.
- 1
Thomas Mann6.1 - 2
Novalis5.5 - 3
Karl Marx4.7 - 4
Jean Paul4.3 - 5
Adolf Hitler2.6 - 6
Maria Theresa2.5 - 7
Max Weber2.5 - 8
Paracelsus2.5 - 9
Richard Wagner2.4 - 10
Friedrich Engels2.3 - 11
Friedrich Schlegel1.8 - 12
Erich Honecker1.7 - 13
Heinrich Mann1.7 - 14
Martin Luther1.6 - 15
Heinrich Heine1.6 - 16
Charles Augustus, Grand Duke of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach1.5 - 17
Karl Kraus1.5 - 18
Walter Ulbricht1.4 - 19
Hans Sachs1.4 - 20
William IV, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel1.4 - 21
Gottfried Keller1.4 - 22
Rosa Luxemburg1.4 - 23
Gerhart Hauptmann1.4 - 24
Gustav Adolph, Duke of Mecklenburg-Güstrow1.3 - 25
Tannhäuser1.3
Lived then
The most notable people whose working lives fell in the 20th century, ranked where coverage and readership agree.
- 1
Donald Trump4 decades - 2Adolf Hitler10 decades
- 3
Vladimir Putin3 decades - 4
Barack Obama2 decades - 5
John F. Kennedy11 decades - 6
Joe Biden4 decades - 7
Joseph Stalin9 decades - 8
George W. Bush4 decades - 9
Franklin D. Roosevelt10 decades - 10
Ronald Reagan9 decades - 11
Xi Jinping3 decades - 12
Winston Churchill13 decades - 13
Bill Clinton4 decades - 14
Jimmy Carter7 decades - 15
Benjamin Netanyahu4 decades - 16
Vladimir Lenin12 decades - 17
Benito Mussolini11 decades - 18
Ali Khamenei4 decades - 19
Mao Zedong13 decades - 20
George H. W. Bush2 decades - 21
Richard Nixon8 decades - 22
Dwight D. Eisenhower9 decades - 23
Nicolás Maduro2 decades - 24
Saddam Hussein6 decades - 25
Narendra Modi2 decades - 26
Margaret Thatcher6 decades - 27
Nelson Mandela6 decades - 28
Muammar Gaddafi2 decades - 29
Mikhail Gorbachev4 decades - 30
Kamala Harris1 decades - 31
Fidel Castro10 decades - 32
Lyndon B. Johnson8 decades - 33
Harry S. Truman9 decades - 34
Charles de Gaulle9 decades - 35
Gerald Ford6 decades - 36
Keir Starmer0 decades - 37
Ruhollah Khomeini5 decades - 38
Indira Gandhi7 decades - 39
Hugo Chávez3 decades - 40
Hillary Clinton3 decades - 41
Nikita Khrushchev10 decades - 42
Bernie Sanders3 decades - 43
Nicolas Sarkozy5 decades - 44
Joseph Goebbels9 decades - 45
Hermann Göring9 decades - 46
Pablo Escobar4 decades - 47
Chiang Kai-shek4 decades - 48
Francisco Franco9 decades - 49
Angela Merkel3 decades - 50
14th Dalai Lamanot measured- - 51
Pol Pot5 decades - 52
Heinrich Himmler9 decades - 53
Henry Kissinger7 decades - 54
Leonid Brezhnev7 decades - 55
Jawaharlal Nehru10 decades - 56
Boris Yeltsin4 decades - 57
Dick Cheney4 decades - 58
Boris Johnson2 decades - 59
Tony Blair3 decades - 60
Deng Xiaoping11 decades - 61
Grigori Rasputin11 decades - 62
Friedrich Merz3 decades - 63
Claudia Sheinbaum1 decades - 64
Herbert Hoover11 decades - 65
Ursula von der Leyen2 decades - 66
Hu Jintao6 decades - 67
Alexander Lukashenko3 decades - 68
Robert F. Kennedy7 decades - 69
Recep Tayyip Erdoğan1 decades - 70
Mustafa Kemal Atatürk2 decades - 71
Idi Amin5 decades - 72
Sun Yat-sen12 decades - 73
Al Gore4 decades - 74
Viktor Orbán1 decades - 75
Calvin Coolidge11 decades - 76
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad2 decades - 77
Warren G. Harding11 decades - 78
Nicolae Ceaușescunot measured- - 79
Nancy Pelosi3 decades - 80
John McCain4 decades - 81
Lee Kuan Yew7 decades - 82
Ho Chi Minh8 decades - 83
Yasser Arafat5 decades - 84
Eleanor Roosevelt9 decades - 85
Georgy Zhukov6 decades - 86
Patrice Lumumba8 decades - 87
Augusto Pinochet5 decades - 88
Jacques Chirac8 decades - 89
Silvio Berlusconi6 decades - 90
Olaf Scholz2 decades - 91
José Mujica4 decades - 92
Adolf Eichmann8 decades - 93
Sanae Takaichi0 decades - 94
Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva1 decades - 95
Benazir Bhutto4 decades - 96
Rodrigo Duterte1 decades - 97
Jiang Zemin9 decades - 98
François Mitterrand8 decades - 99
Konrad Adenauer8 decades - 100
Mike Pence2 decades
How to read these rankings
- Attention, not reputation. A place on these lists reflects the attention a person still draws in the public record. It is not a judgement on the life.
- Fame in print. The curves show how often a name appeared in the books of each decade from 1800 to 2019, drawn from the Google Books Ngram corpus.
- Gaps are left as gaps. Where the record is too thin to be fair, we would rather show nothing than guess.