THIS DAY IN GERMAN HISTORY:  TRANSCRIPTS

1716
Birth of Wilhelm Freiherr von Knyphausen in Luxembourg. In 1776 as a general with over 40 years of service, Knyphausen was appointed second in command to General Leopold von Heister commanding the Hessian troops fighting with the British against the colonial rebels in America. In 1777 Knyphausen assumed the command. He returned to Germany in 1782 and died in 1800.

1847
Death of Jacob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn in Leipzig, Germany. The composer, Mendelssohn is one of the outstanding figures in the history of music. Mendelssohn was born to a Jewish family in Hamburg, but was baptized a Lutheran. The name, Bartholdy, was taken from a wealthy uncle and attached to the Mendelssohn name at the time the uncle’s properties passed to the family. A child prodigy, Mendelssohn gave his first public concert at age 9 in Berlin. He wrote one of his masterpieces, the overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream at age 17. In 1843 Mendelssohn founded a conservatory of music in Leipzig where he and his friend Robert Schumann taught composition.

1885
Birth of Felix Braun, a writer, in Vienna, Austria. Braun was a Neo-Romantic, who wrote refined, cultivated poetry in multiple forms. His work centered around the themes of religion, classical antiquity, and his Austrian homeland. Braun edited and published a highly respected anthology of German lyric poetry, called Der Tausendjährige Rosenstrauch (The Thousand-Year Rose Bush), in 1937.

1890
Birth of Klabund (pseudonym of Alfred Henschke) in Crossen, Germany. Klabund was an Expressionist writer who brought forms from East-Asia to Germany. In 1924 he presented Der Kreidekreis which Bert Brecht later adapted as Der kaukasische Kreidekreis. Other works by Klabund include Bracke (1918) and Borgia (1928).

1918
Hostilities cease between Austria-Hungary and the western allies.

1989
Mass demonstrations occur in East Germany.

THIS DAY... OCTOBER 28TH

1017
Birth of the Holy Roman Emperor, Heinrich III, called the Black or the Pious, who was a member of the Salian Dynasty of Holy Roman Emperors. He was the eldest son of Conrad II of Germany and Gisela of Swabia. His father made him duke of Bavaria (as Heinrich VI) in 1026, after the death of Duke Heinrich V.  On Easter Day, 1028, after his father was crowned Holy Roman Emperor, Heinrich was elected and crowned King of Germany in the cathedral of Aachen by Pilgrim, Archbishop of Cologne.  After the death of Herman IV, Duke of Swabia in 1038, his father gave him that duchy (as Henry I), as well as the kingdom of Burgundy, which Conrad had inherited in 1033. Upon the death of his father on 4 June 1039, he became sole ruler of the kingdom and was crowned emperor by Pope Clement II in Rome.

1200
Birth of St. Ludwig IV von Thüringen (1200-1227). Ludwig IV has never been formally canonized but has been regarded locally as a saint since shortly after his death. He led a pious life and was a good duke in Thuringia. He is remembered primarily due to the holiness of his wife, the very popular St. Elisabeth von Thüringen. (She was canonized by Pope Gregory IX in 1235.) Ludwig died during his participation in the 5th Crusade as a member of the Teutonic Knights (Deutscher Orden).

1754
Death of Friedrich von Hagedorn in Hamburg, Germany. Hagedorn was an Anacreontic poet. His collections of poems include Versuch in poetischen Fabeln und Erzählungen (1738) and Oden und Lieder (3 vols. 1742-1752).

1787
Death of Johann Karl August Musäus in Weimar, Germany. Musäus was a writer known for his satire and his fairy tales. His Volksmärchen der Deutschen (5 vols. 1782-86) was a vehicle for his satirical bent.

1860
Birth of Hugo Preuß in Berlin, Germany. Preuß, a political theorist, was the primary author of the constitution of the Weimar Republic (Germany between WWI and WWII).

1865
Death of Karl Ferdinand Buol-Schauenstein in Vienna, Austria (born in Regensburg, Germany). Buol Schauenstein became the foreign minister of the Austrian Empire from 1852-1859. He succeeded Felix Schwarzenber in that position. Buol-Schauenstein regarded the “Holy Alliance” with Prussia and Russia as unnatural. His policies broke down that alliance as he sought to replace it with understandings with France and England.

1867
Birth of Hans Adolf Driesch in Bad Kreuznach, Germany. A philosopher and embryologist, Driesch was a leading voice against the view that life can be explained through purely physical or chemical processes. He was a professor at the universities of Heidelberg, Cologne and Leipzig. He was strongly influenced philosophically by Immanuel Kant.

1899
Death of Ottmar Mergenthaler in Baltimore, OH (born in Hachtel, Germany). Mergenthaler immigrated to the United States in 1872. In 1886 he invented the linotype machine, the first device that could easily and quickly set complete lines of type for use in printing presses. This machine revolutionized the art of printing.

1929
Death of Bernhard Fürst von Bülow in Rome, Italy (born in Altona, Germany). Von Bülow was the chancellor of the German Empire from October 17, 1900 through July 14, 1909.

THIS DAY... OCTOBER 21ST

October 21st

1660
Birth of Georg Ernst Stahl in Ansbach, Germany. He was one of the first professors in the newly founded school of medicine in Halle in 1694. In the debates of the time Stahl opposed a purely mechanical view of the nature of life and adopted the philosophy of animism (an abstract principle of life). He hypothesized that all matter had a vital force, or a soul of sorts. He burned wood, and crediting the lower mass of the ashes compared to the original wood to the leaving of the vital force, because the wood had been killed in the process of burning. This theory was replaced by that of Antoine Lavoisier.

1704
Birth of Johann Friedrich Schönemann in Crossen, Germany. He was an actor in Karoline Neuber’s troop after 1730. In 1740 he formed his own theater company. Although less than the influence of Neuber on the development of the German theater, Schönemann too led toward the development of serious theater in Germany.

1871
Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff visits Friedrich Nietzsche in Naumburg. He was a German Classical Philologist. Wilamowitz, as he is known in scholarly circles, was a renowned authority on Ancient Greece and its literature. Before he even gained a professorial title, Wilamowitz was a main protagonist in a scholarly dispute about Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy that attracted much attention. In 1872-73, he published two unusually aggressive polemics (“Zukunftsphilologie”, i.e. “Philology of the future”), which strongly attacked Nietzsche (then Professor at the University of Basel) and Professor Erwin Rohde (University of Kiel). Richard Wagner, whose views on art had influenced Nietzsche and Rohde, reacted by publishing an open letter and Rohde wrote a damning response. The issue at stake was the deprecation of Euripides, on whom Nietzsche blamed the destruction of Greek tragedy. Wilamowitz saw the methods of his adversaries as an attack on the basic tenets of scientific thought, unmasking them as enemies of the scientific method. His polemic was considered as Classical philology’s reply to Nietzsche’s challenge.

1830
Birth of Georg von Dollmann in Ansbach, Germany. Dollmann was the architect employed by Ludwig II of Bavaria to build his (now very popular tourist attractions) palaces – Neuschwanstein, Herrenchiemsee and Linderhof.

1881
Death of Johann Kaspar Bluntschli in Zürich, Switzerland. Bluntschli was a professor of law at the universities of Zürich, Munich and Heidelberg. He is one of the developers of the system of international law. In his book Das moderne Kriegsrecht (1866) he set out standards of law for war. His system was largely adopted at the Hague conferences of 1899 and 1907. He also wrote Das moderne Völkerrecht in 1868 and Lehre vom modernen Staat in 1876.

1885
Birth of the Austrian composer/musicologist, Egon Wellesz in Vienna, Austria. He taught at the University of Vienna and Oxford University. He became a leading authority on Byzantine music.

1917
The first American troops engage in WWI.

1931
 Death of Arthur Schnitzler in Vienna, Austria. Schnitzler was a physician in Vienna, who had a strong interest in psychiatry. He is, however, remembered for his plays and novels. Among his noted works are Anatol (1893), Liebelei (1896), Leutnant Gustl (1901) and Der Weg ins Freie (1908).

1969
Willy Brandt of the SPD is elected the fourth chancellor of West Germany. Germany has been divided into two states for 20 years at the time of his election. His time as chancellor will be characterized by “Ostpolitik”, an attempt to soften relations with the East. Walter Scheel (FDP) becomes the vice chancellor and foreign minister.

THIS DAY... OCTOBER 14TH

1806
The Prussian army is crushed by Napoleon at the Battle of Jena.

1871
Birth of Alexander Zemlinsky in Vienna, Austria. Zemlinsky was a composer and conductor. Arnold Schoenberg was his brother-in-law. He wrote 6 symphonies and 10 operas including, Eine florentinische Tragödie and Der Zwerg.

1874
Birth of Hugo Erfurth in Halle, Germany. Erfurth was an innovator in photography in Germany from 1896 to 1948. He is noted for his portraits of artists, and intellectuals.

1894
Birth of Heinrich Lübke in Enkhausen, Germany. He would grow up to be the president of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany at that time). He studied economics and law at the universities in Berlin and Münster. He entered politics in 1931. In 1933 he was removed from all offices and sent to prison by the Nazis. In 1945 he reentered politics within the CDU party. He was very interested in agricultural policy and served in several posts with responsibility for that area. From 1959-1969 he served as President of the Federal Republic of Germany. (Remember that the President of Germany is a different office than that of the Chancellor. It is the Chancellor who is the head of government. During the time that Lübke was President, the chancellors were Konrad Adenauer, Ludwig Erhard and Kurt Georg Kiessinger.)

1906
Birth of Hannah Arendt in Hannover, Germany. Arendt earned her doctorate at the University of Heidelberg. In 1933 she fled the new Nazi government first to France and then to the U.S.A. In New York she became the director of the Conference on Jewish Relations, the chief editor of Schocken Books and the executive director of Jewish Cultural Reconstruction, Inc. Later she became a professor at the University of Chicago and the New School for Social Research in New York. Her books include, Origins of Totalitarianism, Eichmann in Jerusalem, On Violence and On Revolution.

1933
Edith Stein enters the Carmelite order in Cologne.

1933
Germany withdraws from the League of Nations.

1940
Death of Heinrich Kayser in Bonn, Germany. Kayser was a physicist, who, through spectral analysis, discovered helium in the atmosphere of the earth (1895). Prior to that scientists had detected helium only in the sun and in some minerals.

1991
Death of Walther M. Elsasser in Baltimore, MD (born in Mannheim, Germany). Elsasser was a physicist who studied at the University of Göttingen. He then taught at the universities at Frankfurt and Paris before immigrating to the U. S. and taking a position at the California Institute of Technology. Subsequently he taught at the universities in Pennsylvania, Utah, California and Maryland and finally at Johns Hopkins University. Elsasser formulated the dynamo model of the earth’s structure to explain the earth’s magnetic field. Books by Elsasser include The Physical Foundation of Biology (1958), Atom and Organism (1966) and The Chief Abstractions of Biology (1975).

THIS DAY... OCTOBER 7TH

1794
Birth of Wilhelm Müller in Dessau, Germany. Müller was a lyric poet who focused on Greek culture.

1822
Birth of Rudolf Leuckart in Helmstedt, Germany. Leuckart pioneered the science of parasitology. He was a professor of biology at the Universities of Göttingen, Giessen and Leipzig.

1919
Death of Lassa Francis Lawrence Oppenheim in Cambridge, England (born in Windecken, Germany). Oppenheim, a jurist, immigrated to London in 1895 to teach at the London School of Economics. In 1908 he became a professor at Cambridge University. He specialized in international law. He based his concept of international law on adherence to specific agreements and customs between nations. His most significant book is International Law: A Treatise (2 vols. 1905-1906). 

1926
Death of Emil Kraepelin in Munich, Germany. A psychiatrist at the universities of Heidelberg and Munich, Kraepelin organized psychiatric disorders into a system usable by psychiatrists. The first publication of his Compendium der Psychiatrie was in 1883. His system was the starting point for contemporary classifications. He was the first to distinguish between schizophrenia and manic-depressive psychosis.

1949
Establishment of East Germany. October 7 was the national holiday of the GDR until it ceased to exist in 1990.

1989
Despite the mass exits of East Germans and the mass protests, East Germany continues to try to celebrate its 40th anniversary. On October 7 Soviet president Gorbatschov is a featured speaker in Berlin, but rather than encourage the Honecker government he says,”Whoever comes too late will be punished by events.”

2001
Pope John-Paul II beatifies two Germans, Nikolaus Groß and Maria Euthymia Üffing.

THIS DAY... SEPTEMBER 30TH

Feast day of St. Ursus (? – ca. 303). St. Ursus was a Roman Legionnaire who had converted to Christianity. According to the legends of the saints he was tortured, trying to force him to worship pagan idols. Finally he was beheaded. He is associated with St. Maurice and Solothurn, Switzerland . The chapel of St. Peter stands at the place in Solothurn, Switzerland, where St. Ursus was put to death.

1452
Johann Gutenberg prints his first book, the Bible, at his workshop in Mainz, Germany.

1791
The first performance of Mozart’s Opera Die Zauberflöte is given in Vienna.

1811
Birth of Maria Luise Augusta Katharina in Weimar, Germany. She became the empress of the German Reich in 1871 as the wife of Wilhelm I. Her son became Emperor Friedrich III.

    1857
    Birth of Hermann Sudermann in Matziken, East Prussia (now in Lithuania). Sudermann was one of the leading writers of the Naturalist period of literature. 
    Noted works by Sudermann include Frau Sorge, Die Ehre, Heimat, Es lebe das Leben and Der gute Ruf.

1882
Birth of Hans Geiger in Neustadt an der Haardt, Germany. A physicist, he invented the Geiger counter, a type of particle detector that measures ionizing radiation. It detects the emission of nuclear radiation — alpha particles, beta particles, and gamma rays — by the ionization produced in a low-pressure gas in a Geiger–Müller tube, which gives its name to the instrument. In wide and prominent use as a hand-held radiation survey instrument, it is perhaps one of the world’s best-known radiation instruments. Hans Geiger studied at the University of Erlangen. He was later at the University of Manchester, England. In 1912 he accepted a position at the Physikalisch-Technische Reichsarnstalt in Berlin where he did research on atomic structure. He then became then a professor at the University of Kiel, the University of Tübingen and the Technische Hochschule in Berlin.

    1882
    Birth of Johann Jakob Herzog in Erlangen, Germany. A Protestant theologian at the Universities of Halle and Erlangen, 
    he edited the standard work on Protestant theology, Real-Encyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche.

    1928
    Death of Ludwig Pastor in Innsbruck, Austria. Pastor who was a professor of history at the University of Innsbruck and later the Austrian ambassador to the Vatican.     Pastor’s major work was the 16 volume Geschichte der Päpste seit dem Ausgang des Mittelalters (1886-1933).

1938, 
September 29th and 30th, Adolf Hitler and Nevil Chamberlain sign the Munich Accord. In 1938, amid growing concern about Adolf Hitler’s aims, the British prime minister, Nevil Chamberlain traveled to Munich to try to make a deal with Hitler. Chamberlain returned to London with the accord, announcing that he had secured “Peace in our time” with the compromises made at Munich. Hitler viewed it as a green light to take over Czechoslovakia and prepare for his next conquest.

1943
Birth of Johann Deisenhofer in Zusamaltheim, Germany. A biochemist, Deisenhofer won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1988 for determining the structure of those proteins needed for photosynthesis. He did research at the Max Planck Institute in Martinsried, Germany until 1987 and then went to the Howard Hughes Medical Institute in Dallas, Texas.

1946
At the Nürnberg War Crimes Trials, von Ribbentrop and Goering are sentenced to death.

1949
After 15 months and more than 250,000 flights, the Berlin Airlift officially comes to an end. The airlift was one of the greatest logistical feats in modern history and was one of the crucial events of the early Cold War. On 1949, the last plane–an American C-54–landed in Berlin and unloaded over two tons of coal. Even though the Soviet blockade officially ended in May 1949, it took several more months for the West Berlin economy to recover and the necessary stockpiles of food, medicine, and fuel to be replenished. The airlift had totaled over 277,000 flights.

1953
Death of Ernst Reuter in Apenrade, Germany. Reuter was the Mayor of West Berlin during the Blockade (1948-1949), and until 1953.

1985
Death of Herbert Bayer in Montecito, California (born in Haag, Austria). Bayer was an advertising designer. He trained and worked at the Bauhaus. He was an art director with Vogue magazine. He immigrated to the United States in 1938. In 1946 he became the chair of the department of design of the Container Corporation of America. He also worked as design consultant for Aspen Development.

1989
6,000 East Germans who have sought asylum at the West German embassy in Prague are allowed to leave to West Germany.

THIS DAY... SEPTEMBER 23RD

1122
The Concord of Worms is reached between Pope Callistus II and the Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Heinrich V. It is determined who has the right to invest clergy.

1783
Birth of Peter von Cornelius in Düsseldorf, Germany. He was an artist who revived the art of fresco painting. He was a member of the artists group, the Lukasbund. He decorated the Glyptothek (an art museum in Munich) and in Munich painted the east wall of the Ludwigskirche.

1846
The planet Neptune is observed for the first time by Johann Galle at the Berlin Observatory. He was a German astronomer and the first person ever to view the planet Neptune and know what he was looking at. Throughout his career he studied comets, and in 1894 (with the help of his son Andreas Galle) he published a list with 414 comets. He himself had previously discovered three comets in the short span from 2 December 1839 to 6 March 1840. Two craters, one on the Moon and the “happy face” one on Mars, the asteroid 2097 Galle, and a ring of Neptune have been named in his honor. He died in Potsdam at age 98.

1856
Birth of Karl Krumbacher in Kempten, Germany. Krumbacher was a professor at the Universities of Leipzig and Munich. He pioneered the study of Byzantine culture.

1861
Birth of Robert Bosch in Albeck near Ulm, Germany. Bosch, an inventor of the spark plug and magneto, and founder of Bosch GmbH), worked with Thomas Edison, for a time, in the USA. The Bosch corporation is one of the world’s largest electronic corporations.

1882
Death of Friedrich Wöhler in Göttingen, Germany. It was Wöhler who discovered how to synthesize urea from an inorganic compound (ammonium cyanate). It was at about the same time (1828) that he developed a method for the preparation of metallic aluminum, later used in industry. At that time Wöhler was a teacher at the technical school in Berlin. From a position at the technical school in Kassel, he took up his collaboration with Justus von Liebigand and from their investigation of benzaldehyde, there grew the theory of radicals.

1890
Birth of Friedrich Paulus in Breitenau, Germany (now in Austria). General Paulus was the field marshal who led the German forces in the siege of Stalingrad and was ultimately surrounded there and captured in 1943. This was a turning point in the war. 300,000 German soldiers were suddenly out of the war. After the war he lived in Dresden, East Germany until his death in 1957.

1929
Death of Richard Zsigmondy in Göttingen, Germany (born in Vienna, Austria). Zsigmondy was a chemist who won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1925 for his work on colloids. He earned his doctorate at the University of Munich and taught at the University of Graz and the University of Göttingen.

THIS DAY... SEPTEMBER 16TH

1736
Death of Daniel Fahrenheit in The Hague, Netherlands.  Born in Danzig, Germany, now in Poland, Fahrenheit was a Polish-German-Dutch physicist, engineer, and glass blower who is best known for inventing the alcohol thermometer in 1709, and the mercury thermometer,  in 1714, and for developing a temperature scale, now named after him. Until the switch to the Celsius scale, the Fahrenheit scale was widely used in Europe. It is still used for everyday temperature measurements by the general population in the United States and Belize and, less so, in the UK and Canada.

1853
Birth of Albrecht Kossel, in Rostock, Germany. Kossel was a German biochemist and pioneer in the study of genetics. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1910 for his work in determining the chemical composition of nucleic acids, the genetic substance of biological cells.  Kossel isolated and described the five organic compounds that are present in nucleic acid: adenine, cytosine, guanine, thymine, and uracil. These compounds were later shown to be nucleobases, and are key in the formation of DNA and RNA, the genetic material found in all living cells.

1876
Fritz Henkel, age 28 years old, founds Henkel & Cie in Aachen, Germany. Today Henkel AG & Company is a global company with brands and technologies for consumer and industrial businesses, and headquartered in Düsseldorf, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Historically, Henkel’s most famous brand is Persil, the first commercial laundry detergent. Before Persil, laundry soaps consisted of either soap flakes or actual bars of soap.

1885
Birth of Karen Horney in Hamburg, Germany. She earned her M.D. from the University of Berlin. After several years of practice in psychiatry she immigrated to the US.  She challenged many of Freud’s ideas, holding that neuroses are caused by problems in interpersonal relationships. She was primarily disturbed by Freud’s concepts of libido, the death wish and penis envy. She founded the Association for the Advancement of Psychoanalysis.

1889
Birth of Mercedes Jellinek in Austria. In Germany, Gottlieb Daimler had invented the automobile and was manufacturing and selling the Daimler. Emil Jellinek, an Austrian banker, was an enthusiastic Daimler owner and investor in the company. In a sweetheart deal he placed a large order for cars, obtained distribution rights and insisted that the car be named after his little girl, Mercedes. Today the car and the company are known more by that little girl’s names than the inventors of the automobile and founders of the company that makes the car, Gottlieb Daimler and Karl Benz.

1891
Birth of German Admiral, Karl Dönitz, in Grünau bei Berlin. Dönitz served as a submarine officer in WWI. In defiance of the Treaty of Versailles he rebuilt a submarine fleet after the war. In 1943 he was appointed commander of the German navy. After Hitler’s death, Dönitz assumed the leadership of the nation for a few days, long enough to surrender. The Nürnberg court sentenced him to 10 years in prison, a term which he actually served.

1898 
Birth of Hans Augusto Rey, in Hamburg, Germany.  Hans Augusto Reyersbach was a German-born American illustrator and author, known best for the series of children's picture books that he and his wife Margret Rey created about Curious George.  As German Jews, the couple first met in Hamburg, and met again in Brazil, where Hans was working as a salesman of bathtubs and Margret had gone to escape the rise of Nazism in Germany. They fled Paris in June 1940 on bicycles, carrying the Curious George manuscript with them.  Issued life-saving visas signed by Portuguese Vice-Consul Manuel Vieira Braga , they crossed the Spanish border, where they bought train tickets to Lisbon, and then  returned to Brazil, but this time they continued on to New York. 

1943
Birth of Oskar Lafontaine in Saarlouis, Germany.  A German politician who served in the government of Germany as Minister of Finance from 1998 to 1999, he previously was Minister-President of the state of Saarland from 1985 to 1998,

1983
The Austrian bodybuilding champion, movie actor, Arnold Schwarzenegger, becomes a US citizen.

THIS DAY... SEPTEMBER 9TH

1770
Death of Siegfried Bernard Albinus in Leiden, Netherlands (born in Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany). An anatomist, Albinus was the first to understand the relationship of the circulatory systems of a mother and unborn child. Albinus became a professor of anatomy at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands.

1873
Birth of Max Reinhardt (Reinhardt was his stage name. His original name was Max Goldmann) in Baden, Austria. He became a highly successful theater director as head of the Deutsches Theater in Berlin. He was one of the founders of the Salzburg Festival. The first festival was organized in 1920. As a theater director Reinhardt was abroad when the Nazis came to power. He remained away and in 1938 came to the United States. In the U.S. he opened a workshop in Hollywood. He remained in the United States until his death in 1943.

1894
Death of Heinrich Karl Brugsch in Berlin, Germany. Brugsch was a noted Egyptologist who was one of the pioneers in demotic, an Egyptian script. He was director of the School of Egyptology in Cairo and a professor at the University of Göttingen.

1901
Death of Andreas Schimper in Strasbourg, France. Schimper, a botanist, was the first to divide the continents into floral regions, Pflanzen-Geographie auf physiologischer Grundlage (1898). He completed his doctorate at the University of Strasbourg and taught at the universities of Bonn and Basel. Schimper determined the role of starch grains in chloroplasts, a term which he coined.

1922
Birth of Hans Dehmelt in Görlitz, Germany. The physicist, Hans Dehmelt won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1989 for his development of the penning trap which can hold ions long enough to be studied. Dehmelt immigrated to the U. S. in 1952 and became a professor at the University of Washington.

1944
Allied forces take Luxembourg in WWII.

THIS DAY... SEPTEMBER 2ND

1790
Death of Johann Nikolaus von Hontheim (pseudonym: Justinus Febronius) in Montquentin, Duchy of Luxembourg, born in Trier, Germany.  Hontheim, a Roman Catholic priest, was an historian and theologian. He was a professor at the University of Trier and in 1748 became an auxiliary bishop of Trier. In 1763 under the pseudonym, Justinus Febronius, he published a book "Concerning the state of the Church and the Legitimate Power of the Roman Pope" in which he proposed the limitation of the power of the pope in the Church. His intention was to draw Protestants back to the Church through the limitation of one of the factors which kept the division in Christianity. The pope, however, did not share his views. His book was condemned and placed on the Index of Forbidden Books.

1909
Birth of Heinz Harro Max Wilhelm Georg Schulze-Boysen in Kiel, Schleswig-Holstein, Germany.   Schulze-Boysen was a German publicist and Luftwaffe officer who would become a leading German resistance fighter as a member of the anti-fascist resistance group that was later called the Red Orchestra (Rote Kapelle) by the Gestapo, during World War II.  He was arrested and executed in 1942.

1912
Birth of Ingeborg Rapoport in Kribi, South, Cameroon.  Rapoport was a German pediatrician who studied medicine in Hamburg in Nazi-Germany, but was denied a medical degree because her mother was of Jewish ancestry.  After fleeing Nazi persecution, she emigrated to the United States in 1938, and completed her education in medicine.  In the early 1950s, Rapoport and her husband were under investigation for un-American activities, and she moved to the GDR (East Germany) after staying in Vienna for a year.  As a pediatrician, she helped to considerably reduce infant mortality in East Germany, which was even lower than in West Germany.  She was a member of the Socialist Unity Party of East Germany.  In 2015, the Faculty of Medicine of Hamburg University corrected the injustice of the Nazi regime and awarded her a medical degree after an oral examination.  She became the oldest person to receive a Doctorate degree at the age of 102.

1934
Birth of Hilla Becher in Potsdam, Brandenburg, Germany.  A German conceptual photographer known for her industrial photographs, or typologies, with longtime collaborator and husband, Bernd Becher, received the Erasmus Prize and the Hasselblad Award.  The Bechers founded the Düsseldorf School of Photography in the mid-1970s. In 2015, she died from a stroke at age 81, in Düsseldorf.  
Her career spanned more than 50 years and included photographs from the United States, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Great Britain, Belgium, Switzerland, Luxembourg, and Italy.

1987
Trial of the West German youth, Mathias Rust, starts in the Soviet Union.  Rust had flown a private plane from Germany to land in Red Square, Moscow. He was sentenced to four years in a general-regime labor camp for hooliganism, disregard of aviation laws and breaching of the Soviet border. He was never transferred to a labor camp and instead served his time at the high security Lefortovo temporary detention facility in Moscow. Two months later, Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to sign a treaty to eliminate intermediate-range nuclear weapons in Europe, and the Supreme Soviet ordered Rust to be released in August 1988 as a goodwill gesture to the West.

1997
Death of Viktor Frankl in Vienna, Austria. A psychiatrist, Frankl studied at the University of Vienna. In 1938 he became chief of neurology at the Rothschild Hospital in Vienna. In 1942 he and his family were sent to a concentration camp by the Nazis. In his experience there he noted that those who saw meaning in their lives were more likely to survive. This observation became a core of his psychiatry which came to be known as “logotherapy”. He viewed the role of the psychiatrist as helping patients find meaning. After the war he wrote "Man’s Search for Meaning". He finished his career as a professor at the University of Vienna.

Other dates:
1763   Birth of Caroline Schelling, née Michaelis, widowed Böhmer, divorced Schlegel in Göttingen, Lower Saxony, Germany.   Schelling was a noted German intellectual as writer, translator, salonnière, and literary critic.  She was one of the so-called Universitätsmamsellen, a group of five academically active women during the 18th and 19th centuries, daughters of academics at Göttingen University, alongside Meta Forkel-Liebeskind, Therese Huber, Philippine Engelhard, and Dorothea Schlözer.

1850   Birth of Woldemar Voigt in Leipzig, Leipzig District, Germany.  Voigt was a German physicist, who taught at the Georg August University of Göttingen.  Voigt eventually went on to head the Mathematical Physics Department at Göttingen and was succeeded in 1914 by Peter Debye, who took charge of the theoretical department of the Physical Institute.

1853   Brith of Friedrich Wilhelm Ostwald in Riga, Latvia.  Ostwald was a Baltic German chemist and philosopher.  He received the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1909 for his work on catalysis, chemical equilibria and reaction velocities.  Ostwald, Jacobus Henricus van 't Hoff, Walther Nernst, and Svante Arrhenius are usually credited with being the modern founders of the field of physical chemistry.

1884   Birth of Joachim Wilhelm Robert Feulgen in Werden, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany.  He was a German physician and chemist who, in 1914, developed a method for staining DNA (now known as the Feulgen stain) and who also discovered plant and animal nuclear DNA ("thymonucleic acid") congeniality.

1889  Birth of Ludwig Kübler in Thalkirchen-Obersendling-Forstenried-Fürstenried-Solln, Bavaria, Germany.  Kübler was a German General der Gebirgstruppe (Lieutenant General) who commanded the 1st Mountain Division, XXXXIX Mountain Corps, 4th Army and the Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral during World War II.  He was awarded the Knight's Cross of the Iron Cross for his actions commanding the 1st Mountain Division during the invasion of Poland in 1939.  He also commanded the division during the invasion of France and the Low Countries before being appointed to command XXXXIX Mountain Corps.  During his command of this corps it was involved in the invasion of Yugoslavia and the attack on the Soviet Union.  In December 1941 he was appointed to command the 4th Army, but was dismissed from this post in January of the following year, and placed in the Führerreserve des Heeres (senior officer reserve pool).  In September 1943 he was appointed as the commanding general of security troops for Army Group Centre on the Eastern Front, but the following month he was appointed to command the Operational Zone of the Adriatic Littoral, based at Trieste on the northern Adriatic coast.  After being captured by Yugoslav forces at the end of the war, he was tried and executed for war crimes. 

1900   Birth of Horst Freiherr Treusch von Buttlar-Brandenfels in Kassel, Hesse, Germany.  Treusch was a German general during World War II, commonly referred to as Treusch, but also as Buttlar-Brandenfels. In 1944, Treusch was Army Operations Chief (OKW Major-General); he played a major role in not releasing the Panzer reserves (Panzer Lehr and the 12th SS Division) which had been requested by Gerd von Rundstedt.  Rundstedt was Generalfeldmarschall of the German army during the initial Normandy landings by Allied troops.  He was briefly in command of the 11th Panzer Division of the Wehrmacht from April 1945 until the end of the war in May.

1911   Birth of Werner Döring in Berlin, Germany.  Döring was a German theoretical physicist.  From 1963 until his retirement in 1977, he was ordinary professor at the University of Hamburg.  His main interest was the theory of magnetism.  His textbooks on theoretical physics have influenced several generations of students. He is remembered today for the Becker–Döring theory of nucleation of liquid droplets in solids (in condensed matter physics), and for the Zel'dovich–von Neumann–Döring detonation model (in explosives engineering).

1953   Birth of Dr. Gerhard Paul Julius Thiele in Heidenheim an der Brenz, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.  Thiele is a German physicist and a former ESA astronaut.

THIS DAY... AUGUST 26TH

1882
Birth of James Franck in Hamburg, Germany. Frank became a professor of physics at the University of Göttingen in 1920. He won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1925 for his work on the excitation and ionization of atoms by electron bombardment. He fled Germany in 1933. In 1935 he accepted a position at Johns Hopkins University and in 1938 at the University of Chicago.

1895
Death of Johann Friedrich Miescher in Davos, Switzerland. Miescher was a biochemist at the Universities of Tübingen and Basel who discovered nucleic acids.
1914
Beginning of the battle at Tannenberg, East Prussia (now Poland) where the German armies under Ludendorf and Hindenburg defeat the Russian armies.

1921
Matthias Erzberger is fatally shot by right wing radicals. Erzberger, a member of the Catholic Center Party, worked toward the peace to end WWI and was a signatory of the Armistice in 1918. Later he was first berated by right extremist groups and in 1921 shot to death by right wing radicals while he was on vacation in the Black Forest.

1945
Death of the novelist, Franz Werfel, in Hollywood, U.S.A. (Born in Prague, Austro-Hungarian Empire.) He fled Germany as the Nazi movement grew stronger. Noted works by Werfel include Venti, Roman der Oper (1924), Die Vierzig Tage des Musa Dagh (1933) and Das Lied von Bernadette (1941).

1959
U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhauer visits West Germany. He renews the guarantee of the U.S. for the security and freedom of West Berlin.

1972
The Olympic games begin in Munich. The 1972 Summer Olympics, officially known as the Games of the XX Olympiad, was an international multi-sport event held in Munich, West Germany, from August 26 to September 10, 1972, the sporting nature of which was largely overshadowed by the Munich massacre in which eleven Israeli athletes and coaches, a West German police officer, and five terrorists were killed. The Israeli team’s march during the Olympic’s opening ceremony has become a well-known yet eerie video as a result of the massacre.

1976
Death of Lotte Lehmann in Santa Barbara, California (born in Perleberg, Germany). After musical study in Berlin, Lehmann began her operatic career in Hamburg. Later with the Vienna State Opera she developed a close working relationship with Richard Strauss. (The role of Arabella was created for her.) She immigrated to the United States and sang with the Metropolitan Opera.

THIS DAY... AUGUST 19TH

1753
NeumannDeath of the architect Balthasar Neumann in Würzburg. Neumann was clearly the master of Baroque architecture. He was born in Eger, Bohemia (then Austria, now in the Czech Republic) in 1687. He moved to Würzburg in 1711 and gained the patronage of the prince-bishop (Holy Roman Empire) of Würzburg. He eventually rose to be the chief designer. His masterwork is the palace of Würzburg which he started in 1719. Other noted buildings by Neumann include the Schoenborn Chapel in the Würzburg Cathedral, the Vierzehnheiligen pilgrimage church, the Paulinus church in Trier and the abbey church at Neresheim.

1780
Death of Johann Kalb in Camden, South Carolina (born in Hüttendorf, Germany). Experienced as an officer in a German regiment of the French infantry he secured a commission in the American Continental Army and immigrated in 1777. He died fighting the British.

1892
Death of Richard Adelbert Lipsius in Gera, Germany. Lipsius was a Protestant theologian who identified the authorship of early Christian literature. He also worked with the history of the early papacy.

1925
Death of Wilhelm Streitberg in Leipzig, Germany. Streitberg was one of leaders in work on early Germanic languages. He wrote Urgermanische Grammatik (1896), Gotisches Elementarbuch (1897) and Die gotische Bibel (1910). Streitberg was a professor at the universities of Freiburg, Münster, Munich and Leipzig.

1961
American vice-president, Lyndon Johnson, visits Bonn and Berlin. He reaffirms America’s commitment to the defense of West Berlin.

1989
East Germans flee over the Hungarian border to Austria as a result of the “pan-European picnic.” By the end of August 4,000 will have fled to Austria through Hungary. On 1989, Hungarian dissidents organized a peace demonstration on the Austro-Hungarian border at Sopron, and had agreed that they would symbolically open the border for a few hours that day so that they could have a picnic together. But it became more than a merely symbolic act: whilst Hungarians were already allowed to travel freely at that time, about 600 citizens of East Germany, the GDR, used the opportunity to flee to the West. The episode went down in history as a “pan-European picnic.”

Laszlo Magas from Sopron, now retired, was one of the main organizers of the event back then and still remembers that historic day very clearly: “It was a stroke of luck or a twist of fate that the East Germans could flee in this way,” he says. “At that time we were threatened with prosecution but by the next day I already felt that we had set the world on fire. And a friend said to me: ‘We’ve made history!’

THIS DAY... AUGUST 12TH

1644
Birth of Heinrich Biber in Wartenberg, Bohemia (Austrian Empire, now Czech Republicr). Biber was a composer and violinist who worked as court musician for the Archbishop of Salzburg.

1805
Birth of Johann Jakob Herzog in Basel, Switzerland. A Protestant theologian at the Universities of Halle and Erlangen, he edited the standard work on Protestant theology, Real-Encyklopädie für protestantische Theologie und Kirche.

1805
Birth of Johann Karl Rodbertus in Greifswald, Germany. Rodbertus was an economist whose views on economics were sufficiently liberal to enable economic reform, but sufficiently conservative to be accepted by the powers of the times. He was thus a key figure in passing the economic/social reforms in Prussia. He recognized that the working poor could not earn enough to have a positive effect on the whole of the national economy and thus needed more to effect a general rise in the standard of living.

1843
Birth of Colmar Freiherr von der Goltz near Labiau, East Prussia (now Russia). He was a Prussian field marshal who reorganized the Turkish army and was head of the Turkish army in Iraq during WWI.

1887
Birth of Erwin Schrödinger in Vienna, Austria. Schrödinger was a theoretical physicist who won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1933 for his work on the wave theory of matter. He was on the faculty at the University of Berlin until 1933 when he resigned and left due to growing Nazi influence in Germany.

1905
Birth of Hans Urs von Balthasar in Lucerne, Switzerland. He studied philosophy and German literature at the universities of Zurich, Vienna and Berlin. He became a Jesuit in 1929. He completed his theological studies with Henri de Lubac. He left the Jesuit order due to conflicts in views in 1950. Over time his work gained the admiration of such leaders in theology as Pope John Paul II, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, Henri de Lubac and Bishop Karl Lehmann. In 1988 he was named a cardinal by Pope John Paul II but died two days before the ceremony (June 26, 1988). Important works by Balthasar include, Herrlichkeit (1961-1969), Cordula (1966), Theodramatik (1973-1983), Die antirömische Affekt (1974) and Theologik (1985). Von Balthasar died on June 26, 1988.

1914
200,000 Austrian troops commanded by Austrian general, Oskar Potiorek attack Serbia. (They are driven back by August 16.)

1944
Karl Friedrich Goerdeler is arrested in Poland where he has been hiding. Goerdeler was one of the leaders in the resistance movement against Hitler. The culmination of the efforts was the attempted assassination of Hitler on July 20, 1944. It is likely that if the attempt had succeeded, Goerdeler would have become the chancellor of a new government. The attempt failed, however, and Goerdeler went into hiding. He was found and arrested on sent to prison and hanged on February 2, 1945.

1955
r Death of Thomas Mann in Zurich, Switzerland. Thomas Mann was certainly one of the greatest German novelists of the 20th century. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. Novels which have gained him world wide recognition as a writer include, Der Zauberberg, Der Tod in Venedig, Lotte in Weimar, and Doktor Faustus. Mann acknowledged a strong influence of the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche as well as the composer, Richard Wagner. Early on he spoke out against the growing Nazi party. He was on vacation in Switzerland in 1933 when Hitler became chancellor. Mann refused to return to Germany. In 1936 his German citizenship was revoked. He stayed in Switzerland until 1938 when he immigrated to the United States. After the war he refused to return to Germany. In 1952 he returned to live in Switzerland.

1970
The West German government under the leadership of Willy Brandt signs a non-aggression treaty with the Soviet Union.

THIS DAY... AUGUST 5TH

1889
Death of Fanny Lewald in Dresden, Germany. Lewald was a writer of popular novels. Among her novels are Die Familie Darner (1888), Geschlecht zu Geschlecht (8 vols. 1863-1865), and Diogena (1847).

1895
Death of Friedrich Engels in London (born in Barmen, Germany). Engels was the son of a wealthy industrialist who owned a textile factory in Barmen and was a partner in the firm of Ermen and Engels in Manchester. Friedrich Engels worked in his father’s business as a young man but developed radical ideas early on. He was strongly influenced by the “Young Hegelians”. He began writing radical essays under the name of Friedrich Oswald. He had met Karl Marx in Cologne and their friendship continued through Marx’s years in Paris and London. He worked closely with Marx on Das Manifest der kommunistischen Partei (1848), and on the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Engels completed Das Kapital from the incomplete manuscript and notes after Marx’s death. When Marx went to London, Engles took a position with Ermen and Engels in Manchester from which earnings he contributed to Marx’s income. By the time of Marx’s death he was giving him 350 pounds a year and incidentals. In addition to the materials he wrote with Marx, Engels wrote a great deal under his own name and that of Friedrich Oswald.

1915
In World War I German troops take Warsaw and Russian defenses crumble along the entire front. It is primarily the mud from autumn rains which halt the advance.

1946
Death of Wilhelm Marx in Bonn, Germany. Marx, a member of the Catholic Centrist Party, was chancellor of the Weimar Republic on two occasions. He was the founder and the first president of the Catholic Schools Organization.

THIS DAY... JULY 29TH

1605
Birth of Simon Dach in Memel, Prussia (now Lithuania). Dach was one of the outstanding German Baroque poets.

1889
Birth of Ernst Reuter in Apenrade, Germany. Reuter was the Mayor of West Berlin during the time of Cold War (1948-1953). Memorable is Reuter’s speech in front of the burned-out Reichstag building on 9 September 1948, facing a crowd of 300,000 where he appealed to the world not to abandon Berlin. In the election that was conducted in the western part of Berlin two months later, his popularity gave the SPD the highest win with 64.5% ever achieved by any party in a free election in Germany. As mayor he formed a grand coalition government with the next two largest parties to demonstrate West Berlin’s unity. Reuter’s appeal to the West did not go unheard. The airlift saved the city from starvation, and Reuter became only the second German postwar politician (after Konrad Adenauer) to be placed on the cover of Time Magazine. He was titled “Herr Berlin”.

1910
Birth of Heinz Ludwig Fraenkel-Conrat in Breslau, Germany (now Poland). A chemist whose research led to an understanding of the structure of viruses, Fraenkel-Conrat immigrated to the U. S. in 1941 and after 1958 taught at the University of California in Berkeley.

1914
Austria-Hungary, having declared war on Serbia on July 28, starts an artillery bombardment of Belgrade, the capital of Serbia.

1974
Erich Kästner dies in Munich. Kästner was a popular humorist and satirist. He is primarily remembered, however, for his children’s books, the most durable of which is certainly Emil und die Detektive of 1929.

1975
The only American president, Gerald Ford, to ever visit the concentration camp in Auschwitz.

1979
Death of the political philosopher, Herbert Marcuse, in Starnberg, Germany. Marcuse is noted for his Marxist philosophy and Freudian analyses of 20th century Western society. Marcuse was particularly influential among the protesters of the 60’s and 70’s. Marcuse worked in the Frankfurt “Institut für Sozialforschung” until the Nazis came to power in 1933. He then fled to the United States. During the war he was an intelligence analyst for the U. S. Army. Beginning in 1951 he taught at Columbia University, Harvard University, Brandeis University and the University of California at San Diego.

1994
The Bundestag votes to privatize the postal system. The postal service, the telephone service and the postal bank were to be privatized by January 1, 1995.

THIS DAY... JULY 22ND

1784
Birth of Friedrich Wilhelm Bessel (1784-1846) in Minden, Germany. An astronomer, Bessel measured the position of 50,000 stars and developed the first system of measuring the distance of stars. The asteroid 1552 Bessel was named in his honor.

1823
Birth of Ludwig Bamberger in Mainz, Germany. Bamberger was an economist with a specialization in currency problems. Working with Bismarck, he achieved the standardization of German coinage, the adoption of the gold standard and the founding of the Reichsbank.

1887
Birth of Gustav Hertz (1887-1975) in Hamburg, Germany. Hertz was a nephew of Heinrich Hertz (after whom the unit of frequency is named). Gustav Hertz worked on ion energy exchange and gaseous ionization potentials. His studies of electron energy loss in collisions between electrons and atoms supported the quantum nature of Bohr’s model of the atomic structure. This work, done with James Franck, won him and Franck the 1925 Nobel Prize for Physics.

1970
Death of Fritz Kortner (original name, Fritz Kohn) in Munich, Germany (born in Vienna, Austria). Kortner was a theater actor and director. Kortner established his reputation as a actor in Berlin on the stage and in films. He fled Germany when the Nazis came to power and spent the war years in the United States. He returned to Germany in 1949 and earned a reputation as an innovative theater director

THIS DAY... JULY 15TH

1291
Death of Rudolf I in Limburg-im-Breisgau, Germany. Rudolf was the first King of the Germans from the Habsburg dynasty. He was elected German king in Frankfurt am Main and crowned at Aachen on October 24, 1273. Pope Gregory X recognized the position only on the conditions that he would renounce any rights in Italy and lead a crusade.  Poland and Lithuania defeat the Teutonic Knights at the Battle of Tannenberg. The Teutonic Knights was an order of Christian knights founded to spread and/or protect Christianity through military means. The full name of the order was, Haus der Ritter des Hospitals sankt Marien der Deutschen zu Jerusalem. They wore a white uniform with a black cross. In a very limited form the order still exists in Vienna, although the military aspect of the order has been gone for centuries.

1458
Death of Bl. Bernhard von Baden (1428-1458). Bernhard von Baden was born near Baden-Baden, Germany in 1428. He was the margrave (Markgraf) of Baden but gave up his rights to lead a life dedicated to the church. He gave of his energy to initiate a crusade. A number of miracles were reported worked at his grave after his death. He was beatified in 1769 and the process of canonization was initiated in 1958.

1704
Birth of August Gottlieb Spangenberg in Klettenberg-Hohenstein, Germany. A Pietist theologian. Rejected in Germany, he went to the United States and founded the North American branch of the religious movement, Unitas Fratrum.

1809
Birth of Friedrich Henle in Fürth. Henle was an anatomist and pathologist, a teacher of Robert Koch. Henle published the theory that diseases were caused by living microscopic organisms. Henle was a professor at the University of Göttingen. One of Henle‘s most profound achievements was to establish microscopic anatomy into the curriculum of every medical student. His research focused on epithelium and its derivatives. He identified the endothelial layer in blood vessels, analysed the loop system in the kidney and described the root sheath of hair, which is important for its regeneration.

1857
Death of Carl Czerny in Vienna, Austria. Czerny was a pianist, teacher and composer. His pedagogical works are still widely used in piano instruction. He composed over 1,000 works.

1904
The assembly of abstaining Germans began in Altona. Out of this assembly grew the Allgemeine Deutsche Zentralverband zur Bekämpfung des Alkoholismus (General German Central Association for the Fight against Alcoholism.)

1926
The library of the University of Göttingen buys the manuscript of Gottfried August Bürger’s Lenore for 5,000 marks. The manuscript was purchased from a book dealer in Prague.

1929
Death of Hugo von Hofmannsthal in Vienna, Austria. Hofmannsthal was a poet and dramatist who gained his greatest international note through his collaborations with the composer, Richard Strauss. Hofmannsthal wrote the texts to Elektra (1903), Der Rosenkavalier (1911), Ariadne auf Naxos (1912), and Arabella (1933). Other works by Hofmannsthal include Der Tor und der Tod (1893), Jedermann (1911), and Dasw Salzburger grosse Welttheater (1922). Hofmannsthal died of a heart attack brought on by distress after the suicide of his son Franz.

1939
Death of Eugen Bleuler in Zollikon, Switzerland. Bleuler, a Swiss psychiatrist, introduced the term “schizophrenia” into the vocabulary of psychiatry (1908). He also introduced the concept of “autism”. He and his one-time assistant, Carl Jung, worked for a time with Sigmund Freud.

1946
The Czech government announces that starting immediately 12,000 ethnic Germans per day will be removed to Germany.

1955
Mainauer Kundgebung, meeting on an island in the Bodensee (Lake of Constance) takes place where 18 Nobel Prize winners including the Germans Otto Hahn and Werner Heisenberg sign an appeal to world governments, warning of the dangers of atomic war.

1959
Death of Ernest Bloch in Portland, Oregon (born in Geneva, Switzerland). The musician immigrated to America. He is noted for post-romantic traditions and Jewish cultural and liturgical themes.

THIS DAY... JULY 8TH

Feast Day of St. Kilian, who was born in about 640, possibly in Ireland. He undertook missionary work to Germany. He began his work near Würzburg. He was killed by the pagans in the area in about 689. He is entombed in Würzburg.

810
Death of Pepin, the son of Karl der Große (Charlemagne), in Italy.

1604
Birth of Heinrich Albert in Lobenstein, Germany. Albert composed a series of 170 popular Baroque songs. He had studied composition with his cousin, Heinrich Schütz.

1826
Birth of Karl Franz Chrysander in Lübtheen, Germany. Chrysander was a music critic and music historian. His historical note derives from his work of collecting the works of the musician Georg Händel.

1838
Birth of Graf Ferdinand von Zeppelin (1838-1917) in Konstanz, Germany. Zeppelin invented of the dirigible. His first flight was as a Prussian officer serving as an observer with the Union Army in America during the Civil War. He ascended in an observation balloon in 1863 from St. Paul, Minnesota. He then returned to Prussia and served in the Prussian army until 1890 when he retired and devoted the rest of his life to airships. He founded the Zeppelin Airship company.

1867
Birth of Käthe Kollwitz (1867-1945) in Königsberg, Germany (now in Russia). A graphic artist and sculptor, Kollwitz was an advocate for the victims of social injustice and war.

1873
Death of Franz Xavier Winterhalter in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Winterhalter was a portrait painter who did many portraits of royalty. He was active in France and England as well as Germany.

1881
Publication of Friedrich Nietzsche‘s Morgenröthe.

1885
Birth of Ernst Bloch, in Ludwigshafen, Germany. The Marxist philosopher, Bloch was at the University of Leipzig when Hitler came to power. He fled to Switzerland in 1933 and then to the United States. In America he wrote the first two books of his three volume, Das Prinzip Hoffnung. He returned to Leipzig in 1948. He proved to be too critical for the East German authorities, however, fell into disfavor, was prohibited from publication, and finally defected to the West in 1961. In West Germany he became a professor at the University of Tübingen.

1919
Birth of Walter Scheel in Höhscheid, Germany. Walter Scheel was a President of West Germany.

1927
Death of Max Hoffmann in Bad Reichenhall, Germany. Hoffmann was the developer of the military strategy which Hindenburg and Ludendorff used in the Battle of Tannenberg of 1914 which was the first major German victory on the Eastern Front in World War I. In 1918 he led the offensive against Russia which forced the final peace terms ending Russian participation in World War I.

1990
In the soccer World Cup finals Germany defeats Argentina 1-0.

THIS DAY... JULY 1ST