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April 28 in German History
--------------------------------- April 28, 1849
On this date the Prussian king Friedrich
Wilhelm rejected the title of "Kaiser" as offered
to him by the Frankfurt Parliament a month before. He also
rejected the new constitution of the parliament, finding it
to be subversive.
April 28, 1853
Death in Berlin of Ludwig Tieck, an leading
writer and theorist of the romantic period of literature.
April 28, 1868
Birth of Hermann Lietz in Dumgenewitz,
Germany. Lietz was an educational reformer. Impressed with
the Abbotsholme model in England, he established similar
schools in Germany which combined individual instruction with
physical education.
April 28, 1874
Birth of Karl Kraus in Gitschin, Bohemia
(now in the Czech Republic). Kraus was a dramatist and poet.
He settled in Vienna as a young man. He founded the
literary/political journal Die Fackel in 1899. In that
journal he criticized Austrian society with masterful satire.
He is noted especially for Sprüche und Wiedersprüche (1909),
Nachts (1919), Sittlichkeit und Kriminalität (1908)
and Literatur und Lüge (1929).
April 28, 1886
Birth of Erich Salomon in Berlin, Germany.
Salomon was a photographer who specialized in candid
photographs of politicians and celebrities. He was the first
to break with the tradition of showing leaders only in formal
poses. At one point he was called "the king of
indiscretion". As the world grew accustomed to this kind
of photography, however, he developed a global reputation
(and opened the way to this kind of photography becoming the
norm in the 20th Century). He published a collection of his
photos in Berühmte Zeitgenossen in unbewachten
Augenblicken" in 1931. When the Nazis came to power
he fled to the Netherlands but was discovered there, and sent
to the concentration camp in Auschwitz where he was murdered.
April 28, 1896
Death of the historian, Heinrich von
Treitschke, in Berlin, Germany. Treitschke was a professor of
history and political science at the Universities of Leipzig,
Freiburg, Kiel, Heidelberg and Berlin. He was a strong
advocate of German unification as a rebirth of the Holy Roman
Empire under Prussian leadership. His philosophy of political
structure was authoritarian.
April 28, 1906
Birth of Kurt Gödel in Brünn, Austria.
Gödel was a mathematician who developed "Gödel's
proof" which shows that mathematics can have internal
contradictions. This has had a heavy impact on the
understanding of mathematics in the 20th Century. Gödel was
professor of mathematics at the University of Vienna. He
immigrated to the United States in 1940 where he worked at
the Princeton Advanced Study Institute. The Gödel proof was
published in Monatshefte für Mathematik und Physik, vol.
38 in 1931.
April 28, 1908
Birth of Oscar Schindler who outwitted the Nazis and saved more Jews from the gas chambers than any other during World War II.
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