THIS DAY IN GERMAN HISTORY:  TRANSCRIPTS

THIS DAY... AUGUST 10TH

1794
Birth of Leopold Zunz in Detmold, Germany. Zunz was a historian of Jewish literature and succeeded in bringing scientific rigor to the field. In his work Zur Geschichte und Literatur he integrated Jewish literature with European literature and politics.

1827
Birth of Adalbert Falk in Metschkau, Prussia. He was in charge of the “Kurlturkampf” against the Roman Catholic Church. His title was Minister of Ecclesiastical Affairs and Education.

1868
Birth of Hugo Eckener in Flensburg, Germany. It was Eckener who commanded the dirigible, Graf Zeppelin, on its around-the-world flight in 1929 and a number of other spectacular flights. Out of favor with the Nazi government, he had been relieved of command just prior to the 1937 disaster in Lakehurst, New Jersey.

1877
Birth of Rudolf Hilferding in Vienna, Austria. Hilferding was a leader in Viennese Marxism. He became a German citizen in 1920. He fled Germany during WWII but was captured. He died in a prison in Paris in 1941.

August10, 1878
Birth of Alfred Döblin in Settin, Germany. Döblin was a novelist of the Expressionist period. During WWII he lived in the United States. His works include, Wallenstein, Berge, Meere und Giganten and Berlin Alexanderplatz.

1895
Death of Ernst Felix Hoppe-Seyler in Wasserburg am Bodensee, Germany. Hoppe-Seyler was a physician who worked to establish biochemistry as an academic discipline. He was the first to extract lecithin in a pure form. He introduced the term protein.

1896
Death of Otto Lilienthal in Berlin, Germany. He was an aeronautical pioneer. He experimented with flying machines with flapping wings and wings as gliders. He made over 2,000 experimental flights with gliders. His book Der Vogelflug als Grundlage der Fliegekunst (1889) and aeronautical articles he published based on his experiments were used by the Wright brothers in their experiments. Lilienthal was killed in one of his experimental flights.

1913
Birth of Wolfgang Paul in Lorenzkirch, Germany. A physicist, he won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1989 for the invention of a device which captures ions and retains them to allow measurement. He taught at the Universities of Bonn and Göttingen.

1979
Death of Walther Gerlach in Munich, Germany. Gerlach was a professor of physics at the University of Tübingen and Munich. He did substantial work on the deflection of atoms in a non-homogeneous magnetic field.

THIS DAY... AUGUST 17TH

1875
Death of Wilhelm Bleek in Berlin, Germany. The philologist, Bleek moved to Africa after his studies and spent his life working on the study of South African languages. He has been referred to as “the father of Bantu Philology.”

1876
Richard Wagner‘s opera Götterdämmerung is produced for the first time in Bayreuth. Götterdämmerung, WWV 86D, is the last in Richard Wagner’s cycle of four music dramas titled Der Ring des Nibelungen. It received its premiere at the Bayreuth Festspielhaus on 17 August 1876, as part of the first complete performance of the Ring.

1887
Birth of Karl I in Persenbeug Castle, Austria. Karl was the last ruler of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He ruled from 1916 to 1918 (the end of WWI).

1944
Having been suspected of having been involved in the assassination attempt on Hitler, the western commander of German forces General Günther von Kluge is relieved of command. He commits suicide on August 18.

1969
Death of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (Ludwig Mies) in Chicago (born in Aachen, Germany). Van der Rohe was one of the leading architects of the early 20th century. He started his life in architecture at age 15 as an apprentice to an architect in Aachen. He is noted for his two desiderata, “architectural integrity” and “structural honesty”. He pioneered the steel and glass style of skyscrapers. In 1930 he was appointed director of the Bauhaus in Dessau. It was he who closed the Bauhaus in 1933 before the Nazis could close it. In 1937 he immigrated to the United States. He settled in Chicago at the Illinois Institute of Technology (then called the Armour Institute). Some of his noted buildings are: in Chicago, the Lake Shore Drive Apartments and the Seagram Building in New York City (1956-58). Later he designed the Bacardi Building in Mexico City (1961), the Federal Center in Chicago (1964), the Public Library in Washington D.C. (1967) and the New National Gallery in Berlin (1968).

1987
Death of Rudolf Hess in Spandau prison, Berlin. Hess joined the Nazi Party in 1920 and ultimately became the deputy Führer. Hess flew alone to England in a small plane in 1941 during World War II. He had a wild idea that if he could only meet Churchill, he could persuade him to come over to Germany’s side in the war, or at least withdraw from the war. He was arrested as soon as he landed in England and put into prison. He stayed in prison in England until the end of the war, when he was tried as a war criminal at the Nürnberg trials. He was sentenced to life in prison. He served that sentence in Berlin in Spandau prison.

THIS DAY... AUGUST 24TH

410
Alaric, the leader of the Visigoths takes and plunders Rome, one of the final blows which would bring about the end of the Roman Empire.  The Visigoths were one of the east Germanic tribes; north Germanic, west Germanic, and east Germanic. Modern Germans descend from the west Germanic grouping. The Gothic language and culture did not survive into modern times. The gothic peoples were driven from their lands by the Huns. The Visigoths moved finally into the area which is now France and were assimilated there and the Ostrogoths into Italy where they were assimilated by the majority culture.

1772
Birth of Georg von Reichenbach in Durlach, Germany. Reichenbach was a maker of astronomical instruments who introduced the meridian, a navigational instrument.  Reichenbach’s principal achievement was the introduction into observatories of the meridian or transit circle, which combined the transit and the mural circle into one instrument. 
This had already been done by Ole Rømer in around 1704, but the idea had not been adopted by anyone else, except in the transit circle constructed by Edward Troughton for Stephen Groombridge in 1806. 
The transit circle in the form given it by Reichenbach had one finely divided circle attached to one end of the horizontal axis and was read by four verniers on an “alidade circle,” the unaltered position of which was tested by a spirit level. The instrument came almost at once into universal use on the continent of Europe (the first one was made for F. W. Bessel in 1819), but in England the mural circle and transit instrument were not superseded for many years.

1849
Birth of Rudolf Oskar Geiger in Erlangen, Germany. A meteorologist, Geiger’s observations helped develop the science of microclimatology (climatic conditions just above the ground.)

1888
Death of Rudolf Clausius in Bonn, Germany. Clausius was a professor of physics in Berlin, Zürich and Würzburg. He formulated the second law of thermodynamics and made major contributions to the theory of electrolysis.

1940
Death of Paul Gottlieb Nipkow in Berlin, Germany. Nipkow was an electronic engineer who developed the scanning principle of television. To effect a workable television he developed the Nipkow disk (now outdated by electronic devices).

1959
Death of Alfred Kubin in Zwickledt, Austria. Kubin was a painter noted for his morbid, neurotic subjects. He studied art in Munich and spent most of his life in Zwickledt, Austria.

2003
Death of the East German author, Herbert Otto. Among his noted works are: Time of the Storks, 1966, and the novel, The Dream of the Moose, 1983.