SOCIETY / PEOPLE

List: Top Ten Greatest Germans

Date: 2003

Source: Poll by ZDF Television

Base: The German public was allowed to vote for the most important Germans from a list of more than 300 people, plus additional suggestions.

Notes: Unsere Besten ("Our Best") was a television series shown on German public television in 2003. The series was the German version of the BBC series 'Great Britons'. Unlike the UK version, where public nominations were used to create a final list, in Germany an initial list was created by the makers of the programme. There were two main reasons for this: to exclude controversial figures from certain eras of German history, like Austrian-born Adolf Hitler and the former leader of Communist East Germany (GDR), Erich Honecker, and to decide beforehand who was to be considered as "German" in the first place, due to the complications of German history, which could have excluded such people as Mozart.