Carl Spitzweg (born on February 5, 1808 – died on September 23, 1885) was a German romanticist painter, especially of genre subjects. He is considered to be one of the most important artists of the Biedermeier era. The Biedermeier period refers to an era in Central Europe between 1815 and 1848, during which the middle class grew in number and arts appealed to common sensibilities. Biedermeier themes in visual arts reinforced feelings of security, Gemütlichkeit, traditional pieties and simplicity, eschewing political and social commentary during the epoch. Thus, the techniques, while classic in nature were of the utmost importance to reach a realistic rendering. Regarding the thematic, the technique was seen not only as a narrative medium to tell the past in anecdotal vignettes, but also to represent the present.

Spitzweg was born in Unterpfaffenhofen, the second of three sons of Franziska (née Schmutzer) and Simon Spitzweg. His father, a wealthy merchant, had Carl trained as a pharmacist. He attained his qualification from the University of Munich but, while recovering from an illness, he also took up painting. Spitzweg was self-taught as an artist, starting out by copying the works of Flemish masters. He contributed his first work to satiric magazines. Upon receiving an inheritance in 1833, he was able to dedicate himself to painting.

Later, Spitzweg visited European art centers in Prague, Venice, Paris, London, and Belgium studying the works of various artists and refining his technique and style. His later paintings and drawings are often humorous genre works. Many of his paintings depict sharply characterized eccentrics, for example The Bookworm (1850) and The Hypochondriac (c. 1865, in the Neue Pinakothek, Munich).

It’s more said his about paintings than his life, and his much-loved paintings are among the most targeted by thieves.

Germans rank Spitzweg’s The Poor Poet second only to Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa among their all-time favorite paintings. It is small compared to most paintings and at only 36 X 45 cm has proven a fairly desirable target for thieves. The Poor Poet has been stolen twice. A daring day-time robbery in 1989 that involved speed and the ruse of a wheelchair-bound art patron left the Charlottenburg Palace in Berlin without this famous painting and The Love Letter, another much loved work by Spitzweg. Both paintings remain unaccounted for.

In 1992, the German Federal Crime Department added 36 Spitzweg paintings to their list of missing works. Leaving the art world to assume that all 36 works had been recently stolen from their owners.

Spitzweg’s works are not so much admired for their technique or school of painting as much as they are for their subject matter. Spitzweg often included satire within each work and instead of creating just a portrait or a landscape, he created a humorous look into life in the middle class. One historical reference of the artist referred to him as a “genius who united in himself three qualities which seem to be contradictory – realism, fancy and humor.” Many in the art world liken viewing his paintings to wandering through an old German town of the 1840s.

Spitzweg lived alone in a small garret room perched above the beautiful Bavarian town of Rothenburg ob der Tauber. He lived a fairly monastic lifestyle and he was often seen gazing down at the town below, perhaps seeking inspiration and details for a current or future work.

Perhaps it comes from living in a fairy-tale setting or the fact that he was a pharmacist prior to taking up painting and began painting for the sheer joy of it, Spitzweg’s works capture a bit of our humanity as they poke fun at life in general. All of this makes Spitzweg a much-loved painter and his works a source of joy and contentment.

 

 

 

 

Emmy Noether (March 23, 1882 – April 14, 1935) was a German mathematician known for her landmark contributions to abstract algebra and theoretical physics. She was named Amalie, but always called “Emmy”. She was the eldest of four children, but one of only two that survived childhood. Her brother, Fritz also made a career of mathematics. Her father was Max Noether, a noted mathematician of his time. Her mother was Ida Amalie, for whom Emmy was named.

Albert Einstein called her the most “significant” and “creative” female mathematician of all time, and others of her contemporaries were inclined to drop the modification by sex. She invented a theorem that united with magisterial concision two conceptual pillars of physics: symmetry in nature and the universal laws of conservation. Some consider Noether’s theorem, as it is now called, as important as Einstein’s theory of relativity; it undergirds much of today’s vanguard research in physics, including the hunt for the almighty Higgs boson. Yet Noether herself remains utterly unknown, not only to the general public, but to many members of the scientific community as well.

Noether was a highly prolific mathematician, publishing groundbreaking papers, sometimes under a man’s name, in rarefied fields of abstract algebra and ring theory. And when she applied her equations to the universe around her, she discovered some of its basic rules, like how time and energy are related, and why it is, as the physicist Lee Smolin of the Perimeter Institute put it, “that riding a bicycle is safe.”

As a child, Emmy Noether did not concentrate on mathematics. She spent her time in school studying languages, with a concentration on French and English. Her mother taught her the traditional skills of a young woman of that time. She learned to cook, clean, and play the clavier. At the time of her graduation from high school, she passed a test that allowed her to teach both French and English at schools for young women.

At the age of 18, Emmy Noether decided to take classes in mathematics at the University of Erlangen. Her brother, Fritz, was a student there, and her father was a professor of mathematics. Because she was a woman, the university refused to let Emmy Noether take classes They granted her permission to audit classes. She sat in on classes for two years, and then took the exam that would permit her to be a doctoral student in mathematics. She passed the test, and finally was a student in good standing at the University. After five more years of study, she was granted the second degree to a woman in the field of mathematics. The first graduated a year earlier.

Now that Emmy Noether had her doctorate in mathematics, she was ready to find a job teaching. The University of Erlangen would not hire her, as they had a policy against women professors. She decided to help her father at the Mathematics Institute in Erlangen. She began doing research there, and helped her father by teaching his classes when he was sick. Soon, she began to publish papers on her work.

During the ten years Emmy worked with her father, Germany became involved in World War I. Emmy was a pacifist at heart, and hated the war. She longed for a Germany that was not at war. In 1918, her wish was granted, as the war ended. The German monarchy was removed and the country became a republic. Noether, and all women in Germany, were given the right to vote for the first time. Even with the new rights granted to women, Noether was not paid for her work teaching.

Noether remained a leading member of the Göttingen mathematics department until 1933. Her students were sometimes called the “Noether boys”. In 1924, Dutch mathematician B. L. van der Waerden joined her circle and soon became the leading expositor of Noether’s ideas: her work was the foundation for the second volume of his influential 1931 textbook, Moderne Algebra. By the time of her plenary address at the 1932 International Congress of Mathematicians in Zürich, her algebraic acumen was recognized around the world.

Noether’s mathematical work has been divided into three “epochs”. In the first (1908–19), she made contributions to the theories of algebraic invariants and number fields. Her work on differential invariants in the calculus of variations, Noether’s theorem, has been called “one of the most important mathematical theorems ever proved in guiding the development of modern physics”. In the second epoch (1920–26), she began work that “changed the face of [abstract] algebra”. In her classic paper Idealtheorie in Ringbereichen (Theory of Ideals in Ring Domains, 1921) Noether developed the theory of ideals in commutative rings into a tool with wide-ranging applications. She made elegant use of the ascending chain condition, and objects satisfying it are named Noetherian in her honor. In the third epoch (1927–35), she published works on noncommutative algebras and hypercomplex numbers and united the representation theory of groups with the theory of modules and ideals. In addition to her own publications, Noether was generous with her ideas and is credited with several lines of research published by other mathematicians, even in fields far removed from her main work, such as algebraic topology.

In 1933, Germany’s Nazi government dismissed Jews from university positions, and Noether moved to the United States to take up a position at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania. She said she felt deeply appreciated as she never had been in Germany.

That didn’t last long, though. Only 18 months after her arrival in the United States, at the age of 53, Noether was operated on for an ovarian cyst, and died within days. There is no record of Noether ever marrying or having children.

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy (born on February 3, 1809 – died on November 4, 1847), born and widely known as Felix Mendelssohn, was a German composer, pianist, organist and conductor of the early romantic period. Felix Mendelssohn wrote Overture to a Midsummer Night’s Dream and founded the Leipzig Conservatory of Music.

A grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn was born into a prominent Jewish family. He was brought up without religion until the age of seven, when he was baptized as a Reformed Christian. Felix was recognized early as a musical prodigy, but his parents were cautious and did not seek to capitalize on his talent.

Mendelssohn enjoyed early success in Germany, and revived interest in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, notably with his performance of the St Matthew Passion in 1829. He became well-received in his travels throughout Europe as a composer, conductor and soloist. His ten visits to Britain  – during which many of his major works were premiered – formed an important part of his adult career. His essentially conservative musical tastes set him apart from more adventurous musical contemporaries such as Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, Charles-Valentin Alkan and Hector Berlioz. The Leipzig Conservatoire, which he founded, became a bastion of this anti-radical outlook.

Mendelssohn’s parents were Jewish, but converted to Christianity before he, his brother and two sisters were born. When Mendelssohn was 2 years old, he moved to Berlin with his parents and siblings. In Berlin, the young Mendelssohn began taking piano lessons with Ludwig Berger. Mendelssohn also studied composition under composer K.F. Zelter as a child. In 1816, he broadened his lessons, studying under pianist Marie Bigot during an extended stay in Paris, France.

During his childhood, he composed a handful of operas and 11 symphonies. At just 9 years old, he made his public debut in Berlin.

In 1819, Felix Mendelssohn joined the Singakademie music academy and began composing non-stop. In 1820 alone, he wrote a violin sonata, two piano sonatas, multiple songs, a cantata, a brief opera and a male quartet. In 1821 his teacher Carl Friedrich Zelter introduced Mendelssohn to his friend and correspondent Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (then in his seventies), who was greatly impressed by the child, leading to perhaps the earliest confirmed comparison with Mozart in the following conversation between Goethe and Zelter.

In 1826, Mendelssohn produced one of his best known works, Overture to a Midsummer Night’s Dream. His “Wedding March” in C major, written in 1842, is one of the best known of the pieces from his suite of incidental music (Op. 61) to Shakespeare’s play A Midsummer Night’s Dream.  It is one of the most frequently used wedding marches, generally being played on a church pipe organ.

At weddings in many Western countries, this piece is commonly used as a recessional, though frequently stripped of its episodes in this context. It is frequently teamed with the “Bridal Chorus” from Richard Wagner’s opera Lohengrin, or with Jeremiah Clarke’s “Prince of Denmark’s March”, both of which are often played for the entry of the bride.

The first time that Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” was used at a wedding was when Dorothy Carew wed Tom Daniel at St Peter’s Church, Tiverton, England, on 2 June 1847 when it was performed by organist Samuel Reay. However, it did not become popular at weddings until it was selected by Victoria, The Princess Royal for her marriage to Prince Frederick William of Prussia on 25 January 1858. The bride was the daughter of Queen Victoria, who loved Mendelssohn’s music and for whom Mendelssohn often played while on his visits to Britain. 

At Singakademie, Mendelssohn also became a conductor. In 1829, he conducted a performance of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. The performance’s success led to other great opportunities, including a chance to conduct the London Philharmonic Society that same year.

In 1836, a year after his father died, Mendelssohn met Cécile Jeanrenaud, a clergyman’s daughter, in Frankfurt. Mendelssohn was 10 years Jeanrenaud’s senior. She was just 16 when they got engaged. The couple married on March 28, 1837. Over the course of their marriage, they had five children.

The same year that he married, Mendelssohn composed his Piano Concerto No. 2 in D Minor. From 1838 to 1844, he toiled away on his Violin Concerto in E Minor. Prior to the piece’s completion, Mendelssohn founded the Leipzig Conservatory of Music and became its director. In so doing, he put Leipzig on the map as the musical center of Germany. After finishing Violin Concerto in E Minor, Mendelssohn conducted a string of concerts for the Philharmonic. In 1846 he presented his newly written Elijah at the Birmingham Festival.

In May 1847, Mendelssohn’s sister, Fanny, who was a lifelong inspiration to him, died suddenly. Her death left him so devastated that he soon lost his own zest for life. His health, already compromised by his strenuous career, began to deteriorate rapidly. Six months later, on November 4, 1847, Felix Mendelssohn died of a ruptured blood vessel in Leipzig, Germany. He had recently returned from a brief visit to Switzerland, where he’d completed composition of his String Quartet in F Minor.

Although he was only 38 when he died, Mendelssohn managed to distinguish himself as one of the first significant Romantic composers of the 1800s.

Alexander von Humboldt (born Sept. 14, 1769, Berlin—died May 6, 1859, Berlin), a German naturalist and explorer who was a major figure in the classical period of physical geography and biogeography—areas of science now included in the earth sciences and ecology. With his book Kosmos he made a valuable contribution to the popularization of science. The Humboldt Current off the west coast of South America was named after him.

He was the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835). Humboldt’s quantitative work on botanical geography laid the foundation for the field of biogeography. Humboldt’s advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement laid the foundation for modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.

Between 1799 and 1804, Humboldt travelled extensively in Latin America, exploring and describing it for the first time from a modern scientific point of view. His description of the journey was written up and published in an enormous set of volumes over 21 years. Humboldt was one of the first people to propose that the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean were once joined (South America and Africa in particular). Humboldt resurrected the use of the word cosmos from the ancient Greek and assigned it to his multi-volume treatise, Kosmos, in which he sought to unify diverse branches of scientific knowledge and culture. This important work also motivated a holistic perception of the universe as one interacting entity. He was the first person to describe the phenomenon and cause of human-induced climate change, in 1800 and again in 1831, based on observations generated during his travels.

Due to his youthful penchant for collecting and labeling plants, shells and insects, Alexander received the playful title of “the little apothecary”. Marked for a political career, Alexander studied finance for six months in 1787 at the University of Frankfurt (Oder), which his mother might have chosen less for its academic excellence as its closeness to their home in Berlin. On 25 April 1789 he matriculated at Göttingen, then known for the lectures of C. G. Heyne and anatomist J. F. Blumenbach.

At Göttingen he met Georg Forster, a naturalist who had been with Captain James Cook on his second voyage. Humboldt traveled with Forster in Europe. The two traveled to England, Humboldt’s first sea voyage, The Netherlands, and France. In England, he met Sir Joseph Banks, President of the Royal Society, who had traveled with Captain Cook. Banks showed Humboldt his huge herbarium, with specimens of the South Sea tropics. The scientific friendship between Banks and Humboldt lasted until Banks’s death in 1820, and the two shared botanical specimens for study. Banks also mobilized his scientific contacts in later years to aid Humboldt’s work.

A year spent at the University of Göttingen, from 1789 to 1790, finally opened the world of science to him; he became particularly interested in mineralogy and geology and decided to obtain a thorough training in these subjects by joining the School of Mines in Freiberg, Saxony, the first such establishment.

He left Freiberg in 1792 after two years of intensive study but without taking a degree. A month later he obtained an appointment in the Mining Department of the Prussian government and departed for the remote Fichtel Mountains in the Margraviate of Ansbach-Bayreuth, which had only recently come into the possession of the Prussian kings. Here Humboldt came into his own; he travelled untiringly from one mine to the next, reorganizing the partly deserted and totally neglected pits, which produced mainly gold and copper. He supervised all mining activities, invented a safety lamp, and established, with his own funds, a technical school for young miners. Yet he did not intend to make mining his career.

Humboldt’s researches into the vegetation of the mines of Freiberg led to the publication in Latin (1793) of his Florae Fribergensis, accedunt Aphorismi ex Doctrina, Physiologiae Chemicae Plantarum, which was a compendium of his botantical researches. That publication brought him to the attention of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who had met Humboldt at the family home when Alexander was a boy, but Goethe was now interested in meeting the young scientist in order to discuss metamorphism of plants. An introduction was arranged by Humboldt’s brother who lived in the university town of Jena, not far from Goethe. Goethe had developed his own extensive theories on comparative anatomy. Working before Darwin, he believed that animals had an internal force, an urform, that gave them a basic shape and then they were further adapted to their environment by an external force. Humboldt urged him to publish his theories. Together the two discussed and expanded these ideas. Goethe and Humboldt soon became close friends.

Humboldt’s mother died when he was 27, in 1796, and this left him a good inheritance which would pay for his future explorations. A year after his mother’s death, he left government service and planned his travels with the botanist Aime Bonpland. Humboldt had always wanted to travel and explore and he seized his chance. Together with Bonpland, they traveled to Madrid to obtain the special permission needed at that time to explore South America.

On the 5th of June 1799 Bonpland and Humboldt finally set sail aboard the ship Pizarro. They had a 6-day stop at Tenerife, where they explored the Teide volcano. On the 16th of July, they landed at Cumana, Venezuela. During their stay in South America, Bonpland and Humboldt studied the topography, flora, and fauna of the continent. Bonpland and Humboldt continued their explorations of South America and they took a trip to the Andes, climbing to the top of Mt. Chimborazo, located in today’s modern Ecuador. At that time, this summit was believed to be the highest peak in the world.

While on South America’s west coast, Humboldt discovered and measured the Peruvian Current. This current is also now known as the Humboldt Current.

Other notable experiences from his explorations in South America included being able to see an amazing meteor shower the “Leonids” on the nights of November 11 and 12 shortly after their arrival. Humboldt was the first person to connect altitude sickness to a lack of oxygen, due to his many mountain climbs and his own personnel experiences at high altitudes. Bonpland and Humboldt captured and dissected electric eels from which they received a number of electric shocks themselves.

Eventually the fortune from his mother’s inheritance ran out. Humboldt then found a stable source of income and became one of the advisors of Prussia’s King. He was invited to Russia in 1829 and on his extensive journey found diamonds in the gold mines of the Urals and collected data for an isothermal world map.

In 1827, Humboldt visited in Berlin, giving public lectures. These lectures became so popular that he decided to write all his research in a work which he called the “Kosmos”. The first volume was published in 1845 when he was 76 years old. Five volumes in total were published, the final volume posthumously.

Humboldt suffered a minor stroke on February 24, 1857. Two years later, his health began to decline and at the age of 89, he died on May 6, 1859. To this day, he is known as one of the most significant contributors to the earth sciences.

Karl Marx, in full Karl Heinrich Marx, (born May 5, 1818, Trier, Rhine province, Prussia [Germany]—died March 14, 1883, London, England), revolutionary, sociologist, philosopher, historian, and economist.

He published (with Friedrich Engels) Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei (1848), commonly known as The Communist Manifesto, the most celebrated pamphlet in the history of the socialist movement. He also was the author of the movement’s most important book, Das Kapital. These writings and others by Marx and Engels form the basis of the body of thought and belief known as Marxism.

His father was a successful lawyer who had converted from Judaism to Christianity in order to help his law career.

At the age of 17, Karl Marx enrolled in the University of Bonn to study Law. He was not the most diligent student, enjoying drinking societies and meeting friends. His father eventually had him transferred to the University of Berlin, which had a stricter reputation. During his time at University, Marx increasingly became attracted to radical ideas and philosophies. For a time he associated with a group known as the ‘Young Hegels’ – those students who rejected the ideas of Hegel.

Jenny von Westphalen and Karl Heinrich Marx regularly met each other as children. She was four years older than Karl. They became close friends as teenagers. Both of them were well-read and literary, and they soon began courting. According to Marx, she was the most beautiful girl in the town of Trier. Her father, Ludwig von Westphalen, a friend of Marx’s father, also befriended the teenage Marx, and would often go on walks with him, where they would discuss philosophy and English literature. Jenny and Karl became engaged in 1836. They eventually married on 19 June 1843 in the Kreuznacher Pauluskirche (the Kreuznach church of Saint Paul), Bad Kreuznach.

Following their marriage, Karl and Jenny Marx moved to Rue Vaneau in Paris and befriended the German poet Heinrich Heine.

Karl and Jenny Marx had the following seven children, in chronological order:

1. Jenny Caroline (1 May 1844 – 11 January 1883). Married Charles Longuet in 1872. She was a socialist activist. She wrote for the socialist press in France in the 1860s, most importantly in exposing British treatment of Fenian revolutionaries in Ireland. She died of bladder cancer, aged 38.
   

   Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Marx’s daughters Jenny Caroline, Jenny Julia Eleanor, and Jenny Laura. All of Marx’s daughters were named Jenny in honor of their mother Jenny von Westphalen

2. Jenny Laura (26 September 1845 – 26 November 1911), born in Brussels, Belgium. Married Paul Lafargue in 1868. She was a socialist activist. Laura and her husband did decades of political work together, translating Marx’s work into French, and spreading Marxism in France and Spain. She died in a suicide pact with her husband. She was 66.
3. Charles Louis Henri Edgar (3 February 1847 in Brussels – 6 May 1855), “Mush” to family and friends, named for his uncle Edgar, the brother of Jenny von Westphalen. He died, aged 8.
4. Henry Edward Guy (“Guido”; Henry Edward Guy 5 September 1849, born at London; died 19 November 1850, London, England).
5. Jenny Eveline Frances (“Franziska”; 28 March 1851 – 14 April 1852)
6. Jenny Julia Eleanor (16 January 1855 – 31 March 1898), born in London. She was a socialist activist. She committed suicide at the age of 43 by poisoning herself with prussic acid, after discovering that her long term partner, Edward Aveling, had secretly married a young actress named Eva Frye in June 1897.
7. An unnamed child, born and died 6 July 1857 in London.

Paris in the 1840s was a hotbed of revolutionary activity. Here, Marx met many revolutionaries such as Frederick Engels – an English radical. These two were to become lifelong friends and supporters; Engels would later become the chief source of the financial support for Marx.

Engels wrote an influential book The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844. This helped Marx develop his idea of a proletarian revolution. This led to Marx’s first work – Communism Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844. This philosophical work sought to show Communism as a moral force for good to overcome the alienation of labor under capitalism.

Marx also became interested in the development of history and the changes which inevitably passed through society. He termed this idea – historical materialism. Marx increasingly began to believe that a Proletarian (Communist revolution) was not just desirable, but, an inevitable consequence of historical evolution.

This period led up to Marx and Engel’s most famous work – A short pamphlet titled ‘ The Communist Manifesto‘. Unlike the majority of Marx’s work, this Manifesto was short, to the point and included fiery, inspirational language, designed to awaken the desire for revolution.

After the revolutions which swept Europe in 1848, Marx increasingly found himself under suspicion and scrutiny from French and Belgian authorities. He decided to flee to London and continue his work from there.

In London, Marx became more involved with the burgeoning Communist Movement. He was influential in the First Congress of the international, where he sought to argue against the anarchist wing led by Mikhail Bakunin.

Another influential event was the Paris Commune uprising of 1871, though defeated after two months. Marx enthusiastically supported this as being a forerunner of future Communist revolutions.

Marx spent considerable time in the British Library researching political economy. This led to his deepest work – Das Capital – a dense and thorough examination of Capitalist society and economy.

From 1850 to 1864 Marx lived in material misery and spiritual pain. His funds were gone, and except on one occasion he could not bring himself to seek paid employment. In March 1850 he and his wife and four small children were evicted and their belongings seized. Several of his children died—including a son Guido, “a sacrifice to bourgeois misery,” and a daughter Franziska, for whom his wife rushed about frantically trying to borrow money for a coffin. For six years the family lived in two small rooms in Soho, often subsisting on bread and potatoes. The children learned to lie to the creditors: “Mr. Marx ain’t upstairs.” Once he had to escape them by fleeing to Manchester. His wife suffered breakdowns.

During all these years Engels loyally contributed to Marx’s financial support. The sums were not large at first, for Engels was only a clerk in the firm of Ermen and Engels at Manchester. Later, however, in 1864, when he became a partner, his subventions were generous. Marx was proud of Engels’s friendship and would tolerate no criticism of him.

Marx’s political isolation ended in 1864 with the founding of the International Working Men’s Association. Although he was neither its founder nor its head, he soon became its leading spirit. Its first public meeting, called by English trade union leaders and French workers’ representatives, took place at St. Martin’s Hall in London on September 28, 1864. The International grew in prestige and membership, its numbers reaching 800,000 in 1869. It was successful in several interventions on behalf of European trade unions engaged in struggles with employers.

Marx’s ideas have had a profound impact on world politics and intellectual thought. Followers of Marx have frequently debated amongst themselves over how to interpret Marx’s writings and apply his concepts to the modern world.

From an academic perspective, Marx’s work contributed to the birth of modern sociology. He has been cited as one of the nineteenth century’s three masters of the “school of suspicion” alongside Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud and as one of the three principal architects of modern social science along with Émile Durkheim and Max Weber. In contrast to other philosophers, Marx offered theories that could often be tested with the scientific method.

During the next and last decade of his life, Marx’s creative energies declined. He was beset by what he called “chronic mental depression,” and his life turned inward toward his family. He was unable to complete any substantial work, though he still read widely and undertook to learn Russian. He was broken by the death of his wife on December 2, 1881, and of his eldest daughter, Jenny Longuet, on January 11, 1883. He died in London, evidently of a lung abscess, in the following year. He was buried at Highgate cemetery London.

“I had neither mother nor father. Richard was everything to me. He is the only one who has given me love. “ – Cosima Wagner

Cosima Wagner (born December 25, 1837, Bellagio, Lombardy, Austrian Empire [now in Italy] – died April 1, 1930, Bayreuth, Germany), wife of the composer Richard Wagner and director of the Bayreuth Festivals from his death in 1883 to 1908.

Cosima was the illegitimate daughter of the composer-pianist Franz Liszt and the countess Marie d’Agoult. Liszt later legitimatized their births, he also provided generously for their education and, in the case of his daughters, their dowries. With her sister Blandine, Cosima was educated in Paris by the governess of her father’s mistress, Princess Wittgenstein, and then at the house of the mother of Hans von Bülow in Berlin. In 1857 she married Hans von Bülow, one of the outstanding conductors of his time and a favorite pupil of Liszt. But, though she encouraged him in his work and remained devoted to him throughout her life, their marriage proved unsatisfactory. During their honeymoon, along with Liszt she visited Wagner at his home near Zurich. This visit was repeated the following year, when Cosima, on taking her leave, shocked Wagner with an emotional demonstration: “[S]he fell at my feet, covered my hands with tears and kisses … I pondered the mystery, without being able to solve it”.

Bülow was committed to Wagner’s music. In 1858 he had undertaken the preparation of a vocal score for Tristan und Isolde, and by 1862 he was making a fair copy of Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. A social relationship developed, and during the summer of 1862 the Bülows stayed with Wagner at the composer’s home at Biebrich. Wagner records that Cosima became “transfigured” by his rendering of “Wotan’s Farewell” from Die Walküre. In October 1862, just after Blandine’s death, Wagner and Bülow shared conducting duties at a concert in Leipzig. Wagner records that, during a rehearsal, “I felt utterly transported by the sight of Cosima … she appeared to me as if stepping from another world”. In these years Wagner’s emotional life was in disarray. He was still married to his first wife, Minna Planer (she was to die in 1866), and was involved in several extramarital relationships. On 28 November 1863 Wagner visited Berlin. While Bülow was rehearsing a concert, Wagner and Cosima took a long cab ride through Berlin and declared their feelings for each other: “with tears and sobs”, Wagner later wrote, “we sealed our confession to belong to each other alone”.

She bore von Bülow two daughters. The two daughters subsequently born to Cosima—Isolde (1865) and Eva (1867)—were Richard Wagner’s children. In 1868, Cosima with her four daughters left von Bülow and went to live with Wagner in Tribschen, Switzerland; they were finally married in 1870. In that year Wagner composed the Siegfried Idylle to commemorate the birth of their son, Siegfried (1869–1930).

With the passing of Wagner (1883), she took upon herself the management of the Bayreuth Festivals, of which she was art director until 1908, when her son took over. To this self-imposed task she applied her characteristic energies and her continued devotion to Wagner’s works. She was the moving force behind the festival plays in both commercial and social matters, influencing the selection of repertory, artists, and style of presentation. She died in Bayreuth in total blindness.

Cosima’s life mission was total service to Wagner and his works. In the words of the music critic Eric Salzman she “submitted herself body and soul to the Master”. In Wagner’s lifetime she fulfilled this purpose primarily by recording in her journal every facet of his life and ideas. After his death the journal was abandoned, she would henceforth serve the master by perpetuating his artistic heritage through the Bayreuth Festival. Cosima was also a superb business woman – she succeeded in making the festival first solvent, then profitable.

Related article:
Richard Wagner and His Women
Richard Wagner

Bertha Benz (May 3, 1849 – May 5, 1944) was a German automotive pioneer. She was the business partner and wife of automobile inventor Karl Benz. In 1888, she was the first person to drive an automobile over a long distance. In doing so, she brought the Benz Patent-Motorwagen worldwide attention and got the company its first sales.

Two years before her marriage to Karl Benz, she used part of her dowry to invest in his failing iron construction company. As an unmarried woman, she was able to do so; after she married Benz, according to German law, Bertha lost her legal power to act as an investor. On 20 July 1872, Bertha Ringer married Karl Benz. As he moved on to a new manufacturing venture, Benz & Cie, he continued to use her dowry as financial support. He finished his work on his first horseless carriage in December 1885. Although Bertha financed the development process, and would hold patent rights under modern law, as a married woman she was not allowed to apply for the patent.

Together they had five children: Eugen (1873), Richard (1874), Clara (1877), Thilde (1882), and Ellen (1890).

In 1886, Benz presented the Patent Motorwagen automobile to the world. Within the decade, 25 vehicles had been built. With cutting-edge bicycle constructions, the Model I was the original Patent Motor Car and the world’s first automobile. The Model II was converted to a four-wheeler for test purposes, making it the only one of this model. The first Patent Motor Car sold in small production runs was the Model III. It had powered rear wheels with a ringed steel and solid rubber, steerable front wheel. Various options were provided for customers to choose from, such as seat arrangements and a folding top.

However, while Karl was a genius engineer, he was neither a businessman nor a visionary. His ambition for his car was so limited he didn’t even think to fit it with a fuel tank.

Bertha saw its potential more clearly. Which is why one morning in August 1888 she crept downstairs with her two sons Eugen and Richard and left a vague note on the kitchen table saying she was taking the boys to see her mother for a few days. She made no mention of how she planned to get there.

Before this historic trip, motorized drives were merely very short trial drives, returning to the point of origin, made with mechanical assistants. Following wagon tracks, this pioneering tour had a one-way distance of about 106 km.

Although the ostensible purpose of the trip was to visit her mother, Bertha Benz had other motives: to prove to her husband—who had failed to consider marketing his invention adequately—that the automobile in which they both had heavily invested would become a financial success once it was shown to be useful to the general public; and to give her husband the confidence that his constructions had a future.

So, a few days later the Benzes returned to Mannheim by a more direct route with no known troubles save the Motorwagen’s brake shoes wearing out. These were covered in leather by a local cobbler, thereby inventing the brake lining. History does not recall the expression on Karl’s face when she returned, but one would hope it was mixture of pride blended with disbelief.

Bertha’s journey proved many things, not least that a woman was every bit as capable of handling one of these newfangled contraptions as a man. She proved the car was a tool, not a toy, and that her husband had created probably the single most important invention in the history of transport with the exception of the wheel.

The drive was a key event in the technical development of the automobile. The pioneering couple introduced several improvements after Bertha’s experiences. She reported everything that had happened along the way and made important suggestions, such as the introduction of an additional gear for climbing hills and brake linings to improve brake-power. Her trip proved to the burgeoning automotive industry that test drives were essential to their business.

Bertha lived until 1944, dying at the grand old age of 95. Today anyone can go to Mannheim and retrace her steps by following the signs of the Bertha Benz Memorial Route. It would be worth doing, just to gain some sense of what this extraordinary pioneer and one of the most important people in the history of the car achieved 125 years ago.

Here are seven German female inventors whose innovations, both large and small, have improved our world in various ways.

Caroline Lucretia Herschel

Caroline Lucretia Herschel (1750-1848) was the first woman to receive full recognition in the world of astronomy. Between 1786 and 1797, she discovered eight comets and 14 nebulae. She received many rewards, including the golden medal of the British Royal Astronomic Society in 1828. The asteroid 281 Lucretia was named after her, as was C. Herschel crater in the Sinus Iridium on the Moon.

 

 

 

 

Katharina Paulus

Germany’s first professional air pilot, Katharina Paulus (1868-1935) developed the so-called “parachute packet” in 1913. She folded the parachute and stowed it in a bag, creating the first modern parachute. It saved many lives during World War I, earning her a medal for help during the war. Paulus also invented the intentional breakaway, a system that has one small parachute open to pull out the main one.

 

 

 

Melitta Bentz

Apparently sick and tired of dealing with coffee grounds in her cups, Melitta Bentz (1873-1950) developed the first coffee filter in 1908. She perforated the bottom of a brass pot in a sieve-like fashion and covered the bottom with a piece of blotting paper from her son’s notebook. Bentz registered her invention with the Imperial Patent Office. The same year, she founded her own company that has since grown into a billion-euro multinational conglomerate. It is still family-owned.

 

 

Amalie Emmy Noether

Amalie Emmy Noether (1882-1935) is one of the founders of modern algebra. Albert Einstein called Emmy Noether “the most significant creative mathematical genius thus far produced since the higher education of women began.” Her theorem (Noether’s theorem), which deals with symmetry in nature and the universal laws of conservation, is considered by some to be as important as Einstein’s theory of relativity. It became a basic pillar of the mathematical foundations of physics. As a Jew, she was forced to flee Germany after the Nazis came to power in 1933 and emigrated to the US, where she taught at Bryn Mawr until her death two years later.

 

Maria Göppert-Mayer

In 1949, Maria Göppert-Mayer (1906-1972) developed a model to explain the so-called magic numbers, certain amounts of nucleons in the nucleus of an atom that cause an atom to be extremely stable. In 1963, she shared the Nobel Prize for Physics for her model of the nuclear shell structure with J. Hans D. Jensen and Eugene Paul Wigner.

 

 

Marga Faulstich

Working at Schott glass company for 44 years, Marga Faulstich (1915-1998) developed over 300 kinds of eyeglass lenses. In 1973, she received the IR100 award from the American Industrial Research Council for the 100 most significant new technical products for her SF64 lightweight lens. It made it possible to create much lighter glasses that were also aesthetically more pleasing. She was the first female executive at Schott in Mainz. About 40 patents are still registered in her name.

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard

Christiane Nüsslein-Volhard (b. 1942) is a German developmental biologist, an expert in the fields of genetics and developmental biology. She became the director of the Max Planck Institute for Developmental Biology in Tübingen in 1985.  In 1986, she received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, which is the highest honor awarded in German research. In 1995, she shared the Nobel Prize for Medicine with Eric Wieschaus and Edward B. Lewis, for “their discoveries concerning the genetic control of early embryonic development.”




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German Socialist Luise Zietz proposed the establishment of an annual International Woman’s Day and was seconded by fellow socialist and later communist leader Clara Zetkin, supported by Käte Duncker, although no date was specified at that conference. Delegates (100 women from 17 countries) agreed with the idea as a strategy to promote equal rights including suffrage for women. The following year on March 19, 1911, International Woman’s Day was celebrated for the first time, by over a million people in Austria, Denmark, Germany and Switzerland.

Therefore, on International Women’s Day, it’s only right that we celebrate the German women who have impacted the face of politics, sports, film, and everyday life.

Hildegard von Bingen

Saint Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179) was a nun born in the Holy Roman Empire. She is known for having visions of the holy ghost, which she called “The Shade of the Living Light.” She saw her first vision when she was three years old, and after that went on to compose music and write theological texts that were inspired by her regular visions. She is also known for her botanical and medical texts and other scientific writings, marking her as a pioneer in her time for women in the natural sciences. Von Bingen was canonized a saint and in 2012 was named a Doctor of the Church, a title given only to those saints who contributed heavily with their theological writings. She is only one of four women to be given this title.

 

 

 

Marlene Dietrich

Marlene Dietrich (1901-1992) was a household name in both Germany and the US in the 1930s and 40s. Dietrich was born in Germany and began her acting career in Berlin. She later moved to the US to pursue her Hollywood dream. Her breakthrough film, The Blue Angel, was filmed in Germany and hit theaters in 1930. From then on, she was one of Hollywood’s best loved and best paid actresses. Dietrich was staunchly anti-Nazi, and, even after the Nazi party approached her to become and icon for Germany, she turned them down and instead became a US citizen. Dietrich was one of the first celebrities to raise war bonds. She is also one of the only celebrities to take her USO tours to the front lines of Italy, France, and even Germany. She was awarded the Medal of Freedom by the US in 1945. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, Dietrich was laid to rest next to her mother in Berlin.

 

Beate Uhse

Beate Uhse (1919-2001) was a pilot during WWII. She got her start as a pilot before the war, when she was Germany’s first and only female stunt pilot. At the end of the war, she rescued her son and his nanny from Berlin and was then captured by British Troops. After the war, Uhse, along with all Luftwaffe pilots, was banned from ever flying again. Her husband had died during the war and she had no source of income to care for her two-year-old son. In order to make ends meet, Uhse began selling pamphlets door to door to women who were having trouble conceiving, or, conversely, trying to avoid conception. Horrified by the amount of women who were turning to back-alley abortions and seriously harming themselves, Beate Uhse began selling marriage guides called “Pamphlet X”, which offered tips for women to prevent pregnancy. Soon, she had started a mail order company that offered condoms and books on “marital hygiene”. In 1962, she opened the “specialty store for marital hygiene,” the first sex store in the world. Uhse championed women’s reproductive rights and health and was a pioneer for safe sex and sex education in Germany. She received the Federal Cross of Merit in 1989 for her work.

Sophie Scholl

Sophie Scholl (1921-1943) was only 21 years old when she was executed for high treason in 1943. She, along with her brother Hans were activists in the resistance group the White Rose during WWII. Scholl’s roots as an activist stem from the first time she read Cardinal John Henry Newman’s sermons, after which she became a devout Catholic. She and her friends founded the White Rose after being inspired by Newman’s anti-Nazi sermons. She and her brother were arrested for distributing anti-Nazi leaflets that preached non-violence and acceptance. After her death, the sixth and final leaflet was smuggled out of Germany and allied forces dropped millions of copies over Germany. The set of leaflets was later renamed The Manifesto of the Students of Munich. Sophie Scholl became a symbol after the war for resistance and courage.

Rosa Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg (1871-1919) was a Marxist philosopher and economist in the late 19th and early 20th century. She was born in Poland, but became a naturalized German citizen in 1898. During WWI, Luxemburg was an avid anti-war activist and was jailed for distributing anti-war pamphlets and protesting. She was released from jail in 1918, however was murdered not even a year later. Luxemburg advocated pacifism and free thought and held the violent power grabs across Europe and Russia during and after the war in contempt. She is remembered today as one of the only female socialist revolutionaries in Europe.

“Without general elections, without unrestricted freedom of press and assembly, without a free struggle of opinion, life dies out in every public institution, becomes a mere semblance of life, in which only the bureaucracy remains as the active element.”

 

Steffi Graf

Steffi Graf (b. 1969) was a tennis sensation in the late 80’s and early 90’s. She is the only player ever to win each of the grand slams four times, and has the second most grand slam wins of any tennis player ever, behind Margaret Court. She has two Olympic gold medals under her belt, along with one silver and bronze. Graf began playing tennis when she was four years old and won her first tournament at five. She was ranked number one for a record 377 weeks. Steffi Graf is an icon for athletes of all nationalities and genders.

 

 

 

Angela Merkel

Angela Merkel was born in the former West Germany, but her family moved to East Germany when she was very young. She went to primary school, high school, and college in the former DDR and studied physics and chemistry. She was awarded her doctorate in 1990 for her thesis in quantum chemistry. Merkel was elected into the Bundestag in the first election after reunification and represented the district Stralsund – Nordvorpommern – Rügen. The rest, as they say, is history: Merkel went on to be elected the leader of her party, the CDU, and in 2005 she became the first female Chancellor in German history. She is widely regarded as one – if not the – most powerful women in the world. She has navigated Germany through conflicts, crisis, and celebration and was recently elected to her third term as Chancellor.

 

 Trümmerfrauen

The Trümmerfrauen, literally “women of the rubble”, were the women who rebuilt Germany. After the Second World War, there were around seven million more women than men left in Germany. Along with that, there was an estimated 400 million cubic meters of rubble to be cleared and four million homes to be rebuilt. For months after the end of the war, women aged 15-50, some volunteers, others contracted, set to work to build the country back up. There were a few rough years directly after the year, but after the rubble was cleared and the Marshall Plan went into full swing, West Germany’s economy recovered tenfold and, by the late 1950s, the economic miracle had taken hold. Without these brave women, Germany may never have fully recovered from the devastation of the war.

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Karl Friedrich Hieronymus Freiherr von Münchhausen, also known as “the baron of lies” (born May 11, 1720, Bodenwerder, Hanover – died February 22, 1797, Bodenwerder), initially served as a page to Prince Anton Ulrich von Braunschweig, and later as a cornet, lieutenant and cavalry captain with a Russian regiment in two Turkish wars. In 1760 he retired to his estates as a country gentleman.

He became famous around Hannover as a narrator of extraordinary tales about his life as a soldier, hunter, and sportsman. After the death of his first wife, Münchhausen married a 17-year old noblewoman. This marriage was an unhappy one which constantly drove him to debt and caused scandals.

A collection of extraordinary tales appeared anonymously in the magazine Vademecum für lustige Leute (1781-1783), all of them attributed to the Baron, though several can be traced to much earlier sources.

The man who created the Münchhausen myth was a family friend, a penniless scholar and librarian professor from Kassel, Rudolf Erich Raspe (1737-1794), who had had to flee England because of thefts. Raspe used the earlier stories as basic material, extended it, translated it into English, and published it anonymously in a small volume in London in 1785: Baron Munchhausens Narrative of His Marvellous Travels and Campaigns in Russia. The book was a great success and the second edition was translated into German in 1786, in 1798 further extended with eight stories by the poet Gottfried August Bürger (1747-1894) and soon became a truly popular book.

The book became such a sensation that a year later, a German translation of Raspe’s anonymous book was published in Germany under the title the “Marvelous Travels on Water and Land: The Campaigns and Comical Adventures of the Baron of Münchhausen as commonly told over a bottle of wine at a table of friends”.   The German version was even further expanded and exaggerated.  Münchausen felt his honor wounded and reputation at stake.  He attempted to take the translator, Godfried Bürger, to trial.  However, the case was thrown out, as the judge stated that Burger had merely translated the work of an unknown author in England, and therefore was not at fault for any damage to Münchausen’s reputation.  The trial never advanced beyond this point. 

From that time on, the Baron knew no rest:  he had been ridiculed and accused of lying, and had to hire servants to chase away gawkers from his estate with sticks, curious fans hoping to get a glimpse of the ‘King of Lies’.

It has been reported that the Baron suffered greatly from his new reputation of being insane, dying alone and childless in his home town of Bodenwerder.  His stories leave a legacy of the tale of a man trying to regain his dignity from the world around him, and at the same time they inspire future generations of imagination with their impossibility, wit, and magic.