Birthdays
1791: Marie Ellenrieder
Marie Ellenrieder (1791-1863) was a German painter. Read more abut her here.
1770: Friedrich Hölderlin
Friedrich Hölderlin (1770-1843) was a German poet, best known for his poetry and his epistolary novel “Hyperion”. Hölderlin worked as a tutor and in 1802, his friend Isaac von Sinclair got him a job as a court librarian in Homburg and paid Hölderlin out of his own pocket. When Sinclair is accused and prosecuted for treason, Hölderlin got caught up in it and had a psychotic breakdown. He was diagnosed with phrenesis and frenzy (Wahnsinn und Raserei) and deemed incurable after almost a year of treatment. In Tübingen, Hölderlin was taken in by carpenter Erich Zimmer and his wife. For the rest of his life (until his death in 1843, 36 years), he lived and wrote in the tower attached to the house. This so-called Hölderlinturm is a tourist attraction. Find out more here: www.hoelderlinturm.de.
1848: Friedrich Karl "Fritz" Henkel
Friedrich Karl “Fritz” Henkel (1848-1930) was a German entrepreneur and founder of the Henkel company (1879). The company’s first product was a Universalwaschmittel (universal detergent). Their real success came with Henkel’s Bleich-Soda (bleaching soda), partly because they sold it in small packages and not loose like other companies did. In 1907, Henkel introduced Persil and marketed it as “erstes selbsttätiges Waschmittel der Welt” (first self-activating detergent in the world). The name Persil is derived from the two main ingredients: sodium perborate and sodium silicate.
1961: Maja Maranow
Maja Maranow (1961-2016) was a German actress. She performed on stage in Hamburg and Lübeck, and had multiple roles in TV movies and series. Her breakthrough came in 1989 in the limited TV series “Rivalen der Rennbahn”. She is best known for her role as detective Verena Bertholdt in the TV crime show “Ein starkes Team” (1994-). Maranow also had roles in other movie and TV productions until her death from breast cancer in early 2016.
1944: Erwin Neher
Erwin Neher (1944-) is a German physician who, together with Bert Sakmann, won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1991 for” their discoveries concerning the function of single ion channels in cells”.
1770: Johann Gottfried Tulla
Johann Gottfried Tulla (1770-1828) was a German engineer who was in charge of straightening the Upper Rhine river. This made it easier to navigate the Rhine, reduced flooding, and shortened the route from Basel to Worms from 355 km to 275 km. Tulla founded an engineering college that was predecessor of the Karlsruher Institut für Technologie.
Death Anniversaries
1858: Elisabetha Grossmann
Elisabetha Grossmann (1795-1858) was a Swiss boatwoman on Lake Brienz (Brienzersee). She was commonly called “Die schöne Schifferin von Brienz” (The beautiful boatwoman of Brienz) and became a tourist attraction in the early 1800s. When she was twelve years old, she started rowing tourists across the lake. After a short stint at a school, paid by a German baron, she returned to Brienz where she gained her reputation as the schöne Schifferin. During this time, she was often painted and there are quite a few portraits of her. Her private life was not as beautiful: her fiancé had the engagement annulled because of their difference in social status, and she had a drunk and abusive husband whom she divorced in 1827. Her second marriage was content though.
1878: Robert Mayer
Robert Mayer (1814-1878) was a German physician and researcher in physiology. He was one of the first researchers who formulated the first law of thermodynamics which says that the sum of all energy in an isolated system is a constant.
1895: Ludwig Schläfli
Ludwig Schläfli (1814-1895) was a Swiss mathematician. His field of study was geometry and he was one of the key players in developing the idea of higher-dimensional spaces. For classifying regular polytopes, he used {}, the so-called Schläfli symbols still used today.
1990: Hildegard Bienen
Hildegard Bienen (1925-1990) was a German visual artist. She created plastics, glass windows and mosaics as well as other items for many churches, especially in the Lower Rhine region.
Seasonal Events and Holidays
Beginning of Spring
Last day of the zodiac sign Pisces (Fische)
Historical and Cultural Events
1212: The Thomanerchor of Leipzig was mentioned for the first time in a document. The St. Thomas Choir of Leipzig is a boys’ choir (Knabenchor), consisting of around 90 boys aged 9-18, and one of the oldest five boys’ choirs in Germany. The other four are: Aachener Domchor, Regensburger Domspatzen, Stadtsingechor zu Halle, and Bamberger Domchor. Read more about the choir and their concerts here: thomanerchor.de.
1921: In Upper Silesia, the population voted with 59.6% to stay part of Germany while 40.4% voted to be part of Poland. This led to the third uprising of Poles against Germans.
1939: At the “Old Fire Station” in Berlin, Nazis supposedly burned around 5000 art pieces that were deemed entartet (degenerate). It is not clear if this burning actually took place, there are no photos or other documents. What we do know is that ‘degenerate art’ was confiscated from museums and sold for foreign currencies or destroyed. But some art was also hidden, and some pieces that were thought destroyed still show up decades later.
2010: The Bach-Museum in Leipzig was reopened by President Horst Köhler after renovation. March 21, 2010 would have been Johann Sebastian Bach’s 325th birthday. More about the museum here: www.bachmuseumleipzig.de
Action Days and Invented Holidays
International Day of Happiness (Internationaler Tag des Glücks),
- Announced by the United Nations in 2012
- Recognition and focus of happiness and well-being as a universal goal
- Read more about it here.
World Storytelling Day (Weltgeschichtentag)
- since 2004
- Focus on the art of oral story telling.
Astrology Day
Names of the zodiac signs are:
- Steinbock – Capricon
- Wassermann – Aquarius
- Fische – Pisces
- Widder – Aries
- Stier – Taurus
- Zwillinge – Gemini
- Krebs – Cancer
- Löwe – Leo
- Jungfrau – Virgo
- Waage – Libra
- Skorpion – Scorpio
- Schütze – Sagittarius
:
Welttag der Spatzen (World Sparrow Day)
- Intended to raise awareness about house sparrows and other common birds that share our environment.
Bibliomania Day
Bock Beer Day
