The Deutsches Technikmuseum commemorates his contributions too. It was one of the things I marveled at in that geek paradise of a museum. Because otherwise the only time I ever heard of Zuse is in a few paragraphs in the cursory and customary "History of Programming Languages" that opened my PL class at uni.
(Claims below are completely opinions, very unsubstantiated, yours might vary, doesn't matter, just my musings. Take it as a light-hearted commentary, not some hill I'd be willing to die on.)
So what even amuses me further is how I find the question of the earliest computer as largely political for lack of a better term. Most of the world would say it's either Alan Turing and his work at Enigma, some would claim Charles Babbage. Growing up in SE Asia, some of my elementary books would even claim the abacus as the earliest "computing device" (I disagree on principle). And of course, Berlin, Germany would say it is Konrad Zuse.
It seems to me this is because there is a very loose definition of "achieving computing". I won't get into Turing vs Zuse, but consider the arguments I remember for the abacus:
- it aids computation, was used as, basically, a calculator
- yes you can still make mistakes, but hey garbage-in garbage out!
- interpreting the configurations of the device to mean something is not so different from interpreting a computer's state through the configuration of lights on your monitor
Of course, if you qualify the debate as achieving electronic computing, then we have a bit more to chew on. But I imagine you could hammer arguments to go either way even with the "electronic" qualifier.