January 31, 1632

Death of Joost Bürgi (1552-1632) in Kassel, Germany. A watchmaker, astronomer and mathematician, Bürgi invented logarithms, possibly as early as 1588 and had compiled his logarithmic tables by 1603. (The Scottish mathematician, John Napier, who is often credited with the invention in British histories, invented logarithms independently and published his tables in 1614.)

January 31, 1741

Birth of Theodor Gottlieb von Hippel in Gerdauen, Germany (now in Russia). Hippel was the mayor of Königsberg and a novelist. Among his works are Lebensläufe nach aufsteigender Linie (1781) and Über die Ehe (1774). Hippel was devoted to the ideas of Immanuel Kant.

January 31, 1746

Birth of Friedrich Ludwig Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen in Ingelfingen, Germany. Hohenlohe-Ingelfingen was a general of the Prussian army in the battle against Napoleon at Jena in 1806 in which the Prussian army was crushed and Prussia became a dependency of France.

January 31, 1797

Birth of Franz Schubert in Himmelpfortgrund, Austria. Schubert studied music in Vienna where one of his teachers was Antonio Salieri. Schubert is best known for his symphonies and Lieder (the best known of which are “Erlkönig”, “Gretchen am Spinnrad” and “Die Forelle”) but he also wrote excellent music in other genres.

January 31, 1831

Death of Barthold Georg Niebuhr (1776-1831) in Bonn, Germany. He became the Prussian state historiographer, member of the Berlin Academy of Sciences and lecturer at the University of Berlin. In 1816 he became the Prussian ambassador to the Vatican. As a part of his studies of ancient history he developed a critical method of doing history, thus bringing it to a scientific level.

January 31, 1848

Birth of Nathan Straus (1848-1931) in Otterberg, Germany. Straus immigrated to the U.S. where he became co-owner of Macy’s department store in New York. Besides being a very successful retailer, he is remembered as a philanthropist. During the depression he provided food and coal for the poor in New York City. In 1909 he built a tuberculosis facility for children in New Jersey.

January 31, 1854

Birth of Ludwig Pastor in Aachen, Germany. 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).

January 31, 1866

Death of Friedrich Rückert in Neuses, Germany. Rückert was a poet who taught oriental languages and literature at the universities of Erlangen and Berlin. He is remembered largely for his lyric poems. Collections of poetry by Rückert include, Deutsche Gedichte (1814), Kindertotenlieder (1834), and Liebesfrühling (1844). Gustav Mahler set the Kindertotenlieder to music in 1902.

January 31, 1884

Theodor Heuss born in Brackenheim, Germany. Heuss was the first president of the Federal Republic of Germany. He was a member of the FDP (Freie Demokratische Partei) of which he was a founder. During the Nazi period his books were burned as “un-German”.

January 31, 1901

Birth of Marie Luise Kaschnitz (1901-1974) (born von Holzing Berstett) in Karlsruhe, Germany. Kaschnitz was a novelist and poet. She is considered to be one of the leading post-war German poets. Among her books are, Liebe beginnt (1933), Totentanz und Gedichte zur Zeit (1947), Zukunftsmusik (1950) and Lange Schatten (1960).

January 31, 1917

Germany, concerned about American public opinion, had taken a policy on May 10, 1916 limiting submarine warfare. On January 31, 1917, however, unrestricted submarine warfare was reinstated. The U.S. broke diplomatic relations on February 3.

January 31, 1925

Death of Ulrich Wille in Meilen, Switzerland (born in Hamburg, Germany). Wille was a Swiss army officer. After study of Prussian army organization, he reformed the Swiss army along those lines. He published a new cavalry code in 1892. During World War I he was commander in chief of the Swiss army.

January 31, 1929

Birth of Rudolf Mössbauer (1929-2011) in Munich. Mössbauer, a physicist, won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1961 for his discovery of the Mössbauer effect, a means for the measurement of the magnetic field of atomic nuclei. He was a professor at the Technical Academy of Munich.

January 31, 1943

German general von Paulus surrenders at Stalingrad in World War II.

January 31, 1958

The U.S. under the leadership of Wernher von Braun and his team launches its first satellite, the Explorer 1.

Back to Today in German History Calendar

November 30, 1744

Birth of Karl Ludwig von Knebel near Nordlingen, Germany. Knebel was a poet and close friend of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It was Knebel who introduced Herzog Karl August to Goethe and arranged for Goethe to come to Weimar.

November 30, 1760

Death of Caroline Neuber (born Friederike Caroline Weissenborn) in Laubegast, Germany. “Die Neuberin” as her close associate, the critic, Johann Gottsched, called her was largely responsible as an actress and a theater director of moving German theater from loose slapstick productions to serious performance of quality plays. She and her husband, Johann Neuber, formed their first theater company in 1727 in Leipzig. The early collaboration with Gottsched turned to a bitter feud in later years. At one point she referred to him from the stage as a “bat-eared censor”. She is the model for the character Nelly in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.

November 30, 1793

Birth of Johann Schönlein in Bamberg, Germany. Schönlein was professor of medicine at the Universities of Würzburg, Zürich and Berlin. He was the first to use the microscope to diagnose disease from urine and blood. He created the term “hemophilia”. He discovered Schönlein’s disease.

November 30, 1796

Birth of Carl Loewe in Löbejün, Germany. Loewe is remembered primarily for his Lieder (artistic songs). Noted among his Lieder are, “Erlkönig”, “Edward”, “Herr Oluf” and “Archibald Douglas”.

November 30, 1802

Birth of Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg in Eutin, Germany. Trendelenburg was a professor of philosophy at the University of Berlin. He was much taken with the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle and spent a great deal of his professional life in criticism of the followers of Kant and Hegel.

November 30, 1817

Birth of Theodor Mommsen in Garding, Germany. Mommsen won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1902. His monumental Römische Geschichte was a masterpiece. Even more important is his Römisches Staatsrecht in which he organized Roman constitutional law from the myriad of legal details of Roman constitutional tradition. He served as a professor at the Universities of Zürich, Breslau and Berlin.

November 30, 1823

Birth of Nathaniel Pringsheim in Wziesko, Germany. He was a botanist, who, through his observations of algae, was the first to note the entry of sperm cells into the ovum, thereby significantly advancing knowledge of the reproductive process.

November 30, 1846

Death of Friedrich List in Kufstein, Austria. List was an economist who felt that protective tariffs were essential to industrial development. Due to his liberal ideas, he was exiled from Germany in 1825 and came to the United States where he had some influence with his views on tariffs.

November 30, 1907

Death of Paula Modersohn-Becker in Worpswede, Germany. Modersohn-Becker was a painter active in Germany and France.

November 30, 1945

There is an agreement at a meeting of the 4 occupation powers in Germany that West Berlin may be reached from the West by 3 air corridors.

November 30, 1947

Death of Ernst Lubitsch in Hollywood, California (born in Berlin, Germany). In his early career Lubitsch had acted in the company of Max Reinhardt and started to make one-reel film comedies in Germany. Some of his early films which gained international note were Madame Du Barry (1919), Das Weib des Pharao (1921) and Sumurun (1920). In 1923 he was called to Hollywood to direct Mary Pickford in Rosita. He continued as a major director in Hollywood with such films as Forbidden Paradise, Lady Windermere’s Fan, Kiss Me Again, So this is Paris, The Merry Widow, Heaven Can Wait, and That Lady in Ermine, his last film completed in 1948.

November 30, 1954

Death of orchestra director Wilhelm Furtwängler in Baden-Baden, Germany. He specialized in the music of Beethoven and Wagner. During his career he was conductor of the Mannheim Opera, the Berlin Opera, the Gewandhaus Orchestra, the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, the Bayreuth Festival, and the Berlin State Opera. He conducted in Germany in the Nazi years which brought him much suspicion and hostility. He was offered the post of Conductor of the New York Philharmonic Orchestra in 1936, but public pressure drove him from it. He was given the Directorship of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1949 but was again forced away by public pressure.

November 30, 1966

Ludwig Erhard resigns as chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany).

November 30, 1989

Alfred Herrhausen, head of Die Deutsche Bank and advisor to Helmut Kohl is assassinated in Bad Homburg, Germany. The Red Army Faction claims credit.

November 29, 1378

Death of Karl IV (King Wenceslas) in Prague, Bohemia. Karl raised Bohemia to a central power and after his rise to the rank of German King, Bohemia controlled that position for centuries. Karl was the son of the powerful John of Luxemburg. In 1343 Karl’s father gave him the regency of Bohemia. In 1343 through Karl’s efforts Bohemia was raised to an archbishopric and Bohemia thus gained autonomy in the Church. At this same time efforts were underway to depose the German King, Ludwig IV, as the Pope had excommunicated him in 1324. By 1346 an election was arranged and Karl was elected German King. However, Ludwig did not recognize the election and continued to reign. Thus there were two German kings until Ludwig’s death in 1347. In 1355 Karl also became the Holy Roman emperor. In 1348 he established the University of Prague, the first central European university. In 1356 he promulgated (with the consent of the German Diet) the Golden Bull which established firm guidelines for the election of the German king by seven electors (the archbishops of Mainz, Cologne and Trier and the electors of Bohemia, Brandenburg and Saxony.)

November 29, 1780

Death of Maria Theresa. Maria was the daughter of the Holy Roman Emperor, Karl VI. Since Karl had no sons he sought to bring his daughter to the rule of the Habsburg empire through a new regulation, Die Pragmatische Sanktion, which changed the custom of excluding women from the succession. Thus Maria became in 1740 the Archduchess (Erzherzogin) of Austria and the Queen of Hungary and Bohemia. However since there were forces who did not accept the succession, she was forced to fight for her heritage in the War of Austrian Succession (Erbfolgekrieg) (1740-48). She further had to contend with Prussia’s claims on Silesia, the Seven Years’ War (1756-1763) and the War of Bavarian Succession (1778-1779). She was married to Franz Stephan von Lothringen and the mother of 16 children, of whom Josef II succeeded her. She was a deeply committed Catholic both in her moral views and in her devotion to the Church.

November 29, 1802

Birth of Wilhelm Hauff in Stuttgart, Germany. Hauff was a poet and novelist, but is probably remembered most for his fairy tales.

November 29, 1803

Birth of Christian Doppler in Salzburg, Austria. Doppler was a physicist at the University of Vienna. His article Über das farbige Licht der Dopelsterne (1842) contains the first recognition of what came to be known as the “Doppler effect”, the variation in pitch of moving sound and in color of moving light sources.

November 29, 1939

Death of Philipp Scheidemann in Copenhagen, Denmark (born in Kassel.) Without party or government authorization he created the Weimar Republic de facto by announcing it from the Reichstag. He went on to become chancellor of the Weimar Republic.

November 29, 1957

Death of Erich Wolfgang Korngold in Hollywood (born in Brünn, Austria). Korngold composed a ballet, Der Schneemann, at age 11. In his teens he wrote operas which gained international attention, Der Ring des Polykarates (1914) and Violanta (1916). He wrote Die Tote Stadt in 1920. Korngold immigrated to the United States in 1934 where he became a composer of music for films in Hollywood. He won academy awards for the music for Anthony Adverse (1936) and The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938). During the Hollywood years he continued to write symphonies, concertos and other serious music. But his non-film music came to be appreciated only after his death.

November 28, 1794

Death of Friedrich von Steuben in Remsen, New York (born in Magdeburg, Germany). Steuben was a Prussian officer who was induced by Benjamin Franklin to come to America on the side of the rebelling colonies. Arriving in 1777 he was placed in charge of the troops at Valley Forge. He retrained the forces and wrote a manual, Regulations for the Order and Discipline of the Troops of the United States. The city of Steubnville, Ohio is named for him.

November 28, 1820

Birth of Friedrich Engels 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 early on 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 after Marx’s death from the incomplete manuscript and notes. When Marx went to London, Engels took a position with Ermen and Engels in Manchester the income from which he contributed to Marx’s support. 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.

November 28, 1881

Birth of Stefan Zweig in Vienna, Austria. Stefan Zweig was a writer who worked in a variety of genres. Noted works by Zweig are, Drei Meister (1920), Der Kampf mit dem Dämon (1925), Sternstunden der Menschheit (1928) and Verwirrung der Gefühle (1925). At the rise of the Nazis he went into exile in 1934. He went first to England and then to Brazil. He committed suicide in Brazil in 1942.

November 28, 1887

Birth of Ernst Röhm in Munich, Germany. Röhm was a member of the National Socialist Party (Nazi) before Hitler. He organized the SA (Sturmabteilung, storm troops; also called the Brownshirts). By 1934 Hitler began to see Röhm as a rival and began to be concerned about the power of the SA. He had Röhm shot.

November 28, 1898

Death of Conrad Ferdinand Meyer in Kilchberg, Switzerland. Meyer wrote poetry and novels. Among his works are Das Amulett, Der Heilige, Das Leiden eines Knaben, and Die Hochzeit des Mönchs.

November 28, 1912 .

Death of Otto Brahm in Berlin, Germany. Brahm, a literary critic, cofounded the theater company “Freie Bühne” in Hamburg in 1889 and in 1890 a periodical also called Freie Bühne. The theater company and the periodical were his vehicles to introduce the Naturalist movement into German theater. Freie Bühne changed its name later to Neue Deutsche Rundschau.

November 28, 1914

Death of Johann Wilhelm Hittorf in Münster, Germany. Hittorf was the first to calculate the electricity-bearing capacity of charged atoms and molecules. He was a professor of physics and chemistry at the University of Münster.

November 28, 1989

Chancellor Helmut Kohl presents a 10-point plan for German reunification to the Bundestag.

November 27, 1680

Death of Athanasius Kirchner in Rome (born in Geisa, Germany). Kirchner studied in Fulda, Paderborn, Cologne and Koblenz. In 1628 he was ordained a Jesuit priest in Mainz. In 1634 he moved to Rome and took up the task of assembling and organizing information sent by Jesuit missionaries from all parts of the world.

November 27, 1715

Johann Gottlob Leidenfrost (November 27, 1715 – December 2, 1794) was a German doctor and theologian who first described the scientific phenomenon eponymously named the Leidenfrost effect. The effect Leidenfrost described is a phenomenon in which a liquid, in near contact with a mass significantly hotter than its boiling point, produces an insulating vapor layer which keeps that liquid from boiling rapidly. This is most commonly seen when cooking; one sprinkles drops of water in a skillet to gauge its temperature—if the skillet’s temperature is at or above the Leidenfrost point, the water skitters across the metal and takes longer to evaporate than it would in a skillet that is hot, but at a temperature below the Leidenfrost point. It has also been used in some dangerous demonstrations, such as dipping a wet finger in molten lead or blowing out a mouthful of liquid nitrogen, both enacted without injury to the demonstrator.

November 27, 1841

Paul Christoph Hennings (November 27, 1841–October 14, 1908) was a German mycologist and herbarium curator. He discovered the study of cryptogams and mushrooms as a volunteer at the botanical garden. A complete autodidact, Hennings rose to become one of the foremost mycologists of his time, and particularly a specialist of tropical fungi thanks to the innumerable collections sent to Berlin from the German colonies and South America. He had two sons from his wife Mathilde, which he had married in 1876, but lost one to illness in 1907, which, in the words of his obituarist, “paralyzed his energies and stole the pen from [his] busy hand”. He died within a year.

 

November 26, 1885

Birth of Heinrich Brüning in Münster, Germany. Brüning, a member of the Catholic Center Party, became chancellor of the Weimar Republic in 1930. Although he was considered an economics expert, the world depression along with the reparation payments of the Versailles Treaty made economic stability in Germany impossible. Unemployment increased dramatically and there was a drastic fall in the standard of living. As the situation grew more and more chaotic, he made use of Article 48 in the constitution and governed by presidential emergency decree. Hoping to bring about a more workable situation, he dissolved parliament (Reichstag) and called for new elections in September, 1930. The plan was a disaster, for it was in that election that the Nazi party gained considerably in the new parliament. In 1932 Brüning resigned. He left Germany in 1934 and found his way to the United States where he taught political science at Harvard University from 1937 to 1952.

November 26, 1898

Birth of Karl Ziegler in Helsa, Germany. Ziegler was a professor of chemistry at the Universities of Heidelberg and Halle. Later he was director of the Max Planck Institute at Mülheim. (At that time it was called the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute.) Ziegler won the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1963 for his work on polymers. Ziegler was the first to explain the process involved in the synthesis of rubber.He is also known for his work involving free-radicals, many-membered rings, and organometallic compounds, as well as the development of Ziegler-Natta catalyst. One of many awards Ziegler received was the Werner von Siemens Ring in 1960 jointly with Otto Bayer and Walter Reppe, for expanding the scientific knowledge of and the technical development of new synthetic materials.

November 26, 1899

Birth of Bruno Hauptmann in Kamenz, Germany. After having trouble with the law in Germany he came illegally to the United States where he also built a criminal record. In 1932 the child of Charles Lindbergh was kidnapped and later murdered. In 1934 Bruno Hauptmann was arrested for the crime. In 1936 he was executed. Hauptmann insisted on his innocence to the end.

November 26, 1917

The new Russian revolutionary government abandons all war efforts in WWI. A truce will be signed on December 15.

November 26, 1968

Death of Arnold Zweig in East Berlin, Germany. Zweig was a writer whose works include Junge Frau von 1914 (1931), Erziehung vor Verdun (1935) and Der Streit um den Sergeanten Grischa (1927).

November 25, 1844

Birth of Carl Benz in Karlsruhe, Germany. In 1885 he built the world’s first working automobile powered by an internal combustion engine. He founded the motor company, Benz u. Co. in 1883. The first four wheeled cars began to be produced in 1893. Benz merged with the Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft in 1926. It was the Daimler-Benz company which started to produce a car called the Mercedes-Benz. (Siegfried Marcus of Munich had built an automobile as early as 1864 with a gasoline engine, but it was not fully functional.)

November 25, 1865

Death of Heinrich Barth in Berlin, Germany. Bart was an early explorer of Africa. He traveled over 10,000 miles in his explorations. He published his findings in Reisen und Entdeckungen in Nord- und Central-Afrika in den Jahren 1849 bis 1855. He became a professor of geography at the University of Berlin in 1863.

November 25, 1878

Birth of Georg Kaiser in Magdeburg, Germany. Kaiser was a dramatist who began his artistic career in the period of Expressionism. Noted plays by him are Die Burger von Calais (1914), Von Morgens bis Mitternachts (1916), Gas and Oktobertag (1928). He was banned by the Nazis because of his pacifism. At that time he fled to Switzerland and continued writing. He wrote over 60 plays.

November 25, 1881

Death of Theobald Boehm in Munich, Germany. Boehm was a concert flutist and instrument maker who developed the Boehm system of construction for the flute, clarinet and oboe. The system was further developed by the French instrument maker, Auguste Buffet.

November 25, 1901

Death of Joseph Rheinberger in Munich, Germany (born in Vaduz, Liechtenstein). Rheinberger studied music in Feldkirch and Munich. In 1867 he became a professor of music at the Munich Conservatory. His students included Engelbert Humperdinck and Wilhelm Furtwangler. Rheinberger composed 20 organ sonatas, four operas and church and chamber music.

November 25, 1914

End of the battle of Lodz. Russian forces had halted the German advance but the Russian army had lost an estimated 100,000 and the planed Russian offensive had again been disrupted. (WWI)

November 25, 1964

The requirement is introduced in East Germany that any visitors from the west must exchange a given amount of West German marks for East German marks (at an exchange rate set by East Germany).

November 25, 1980

Death of Konrad Wachsmann in Los Angeles (born in Frankfurt an der Oder, Germany). Wachsmann was an architect who was trained in Germany and worked in Germany and Italy before immigrating to the United States in 1941. In America he joined a partnership with Walter Gropius. In 1950 he became a professor at the Institute of Design at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago. In a contract with the Air Force he designed a system of building large hangers with prefabricated components. In 1954 he accepted an assignment at the University of California. He designed the City Hall in California City in 1966.

November 25, 2001

The Bavarian Crescentia Höss is canonized by Pope John Paul II. Maria Crescentia Höss was the daughter of a poor weaver who at age 14 reported a vision in which angles urged her to become a Franciscan nun. She was taken into the order in 1703. During her time as a Franciscan she reported numerous additional visions. She was beatified in 1900 and in 1956 the process of canonization was initiated.

November 24, 1828

Birth of Heinrich Lomb in Hesse-Kassel, Germany. Lomb immigrated to the United States in 1849 and found work as a cabinet maker. By 1854 he had befriended another immigrant from Germany, Johann Bausch, who operated an optical shop in Rochester, New York. In 1854 he loaned his friend, Bausch, $60 to use in growing his optical business against the promise that if Bausch’s optical business should grow to the point of needing a partner, it would be Lomb. In 1855 Lomb joined Bausch as a partner. Together they developed the business into Bausch and Lomb, one of the leading optical companies in the United States. Lomb died in 1908.

November 24, 1844 Birth of Franziska Streitel (1844 – 1911)

The processes of beatification has been initiated on behalf of Franziska Streitel. She was born on November 24, 1844 in Mellrichstadt in Bavaria, Germany. She became a Franciscan nun in Augsburg. In 1883 she founded a new order, the Sisters of the suffering Mother or the Adolorata Sisters. She was removed as the Mother Superior in 1896 on the basis of accusations which were since proven to be false. She then lived in cloisters in Rome until her death in 1911. The order is active today in Austria, Italy and the U.S.A. The sisters dedicate themselves to care of the sick and the education of young women.

November 24, 2001

Former German Minister of Defense, Gerhard Stoltenberg (CDU) dies of cancer at his home in Bonn-Bad Godesberg.

November 23, 912

Birth of Otto I in Germany. Otto became the German King in 936 and the Holy Roman Emperor in 962. He brought order to the empire, which was greatly fragmented, strengthened the position of the church, and made possible a period of prosperity and development of culture referred to as the “Ottonian Renaissance”.

November 23, 1826

Death of Johann Elert Bode in Berlin, Germany. Bode was an astronomer, the director of the Berlin Observatory. Through his enunciation of observations made by Daniel Titius, the law of mathematical expression of the relative mean distances between the relative mean distance from the sun to the planets became known as Bode’s Law.

November 23, 1920

Birth of the poet, Paul Celan (Paul Antschel). Celan was a German-speaking Jew who was born in Eastern Europe, suffered in concentration camps during World War II, began writing poetry in Vienna after the war and spent the rest of his life in France, but continued to write poetry in German. Volumes of poetry by Celan include Der Sand aus den Urnen (1948), Mohn und Gedächtnis (1952) and Lichtzwang (1970).

November 22, 1867

Birth of Wilhelm Groener in Ludwigsburg, Germany. In October 1918 he replaced General Erich Ludendorff as quartermaster general (Ludendorff had to resign to make armistice negotiations possible). He joined General Paul von Hindenburg in informing Kaiser Wilhelm that he no longer had the confidence of the army and should abdicate. He kept the army in support of the new democratic government of Friedrich Ebert.

November 22, 1867

Birth of Joseph Olbrich in Troppau, Germany (now in the Czech Republic). Olbrich was a cofounder of the “Wiener Sezession”, an Austrian Art Nouveau group. An architect, Olbrich built a number of houses and public buildings in Darmstadt, Cologne and Düsseldorf.

November 22, 1941

Death of Kurt Koffka in Northampton, Mass. (born in Berlin, Germany). Koffka worked with Wolfgang Köhler and Max Wertheimer at the University of Giessen to develop a holistic approach to psychology which is known as “gestalt psychology”. In 1927 Koffka accepted an appointment at Smith College in the United States, where he remained for the rest of his life, teaching and promoting his concept of holistic psychology.

November 22, 1948 .

The Free University of Berlin is founded. The Freie Universität Berlin (Free University of Berlin, often abbreviated as FU Berlin or simply FU) is a research university located in Berlin and one of the most prominent universities in Germany. It is internationally known for its research in the humanities and social sciences, as well as in the field of natural and life sciences.
Founded in West Berlin during the early Cold War period, its name refers to city’s status as part of the free western world. Freie Universität Berlin is one of eleven German elite universities in the German Universities Excellence Initiative, a national competition for institutions of higher education. Winning a distinction for five doctoral programs, three interdisciplinary research clusters and its overall institutional strategy as an “International Network University”.

November 22, 1967

Birth of the tennis star, Boris Becker, in Leimen, Germany. It was on July 7, 1985 that he won the men’s singles at Wimbledon and became the youngest ever to win that title. Becker started playing competitively at age 8.

November 22, 1981

Death of Hans Adolf Krebs in Oxford, England. Krebs won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine in 1953 for the discovery of the ticarboxylic acid cycle in living beings. He had been a professor at the University of Freiburg. Krebs fled Germany in 1933 and moved to England.