July 16

© 1997, 1998 by Paul A. Schons

July 16, 1664

Death of Andreas Gryphius in Glogau, Germany (now Poland). Gryphius was one of the greatest of the German Baroque writers. Gryphius is noted for his poetry and his dramas. He is the author of Leo Armenius, Catharina von Georgien, Cardenio und Celinde and Herr Peter Squentz.

July 16, 1890

Death of Gottfried Keller in Zürich, Switzerland. Keller was a writer, primarily known for his novellas, in the period of Realism.

July 16, 1918

Death of Alexandra, the German wife of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. She and her family were executed by the Russian revolutionaries.

July 16, 1960

Death of Albert Kesselring in Bad Nauheim, Germany. Kesselring was a field marshal during WWII and a leading war strategist. He was tried by a British military court in 1947 for war crimes. He was sentenced to death. Later his sentence was changed to life in prison. In 1952 he was pardoned and freed.

July 16, 1985

Death of Heinrich Böll near Bonn. Böll won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1972. Born in 1917, he graduated from high school on the eve of World War II. He spent 6 years in the German army suffering the, "frightful fate of being a soldier and having to wish that the war might be lost." Among Böll's works are Wo warst du Adam? (1951), Billard um halb zehn (1959), Ansichten eines Clowns (1963), Gruppenbild mit Dame (1971) and Die verlorene Ehre der Katharina Blum (1974). Böll's pacifist and humanist views and actions made him a figure of some controversy in his later life.

July 16, 1989

Death of Herbert von Karajan in Anif, Austria. Von Karajan, as the director of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra from 1955 to 1989, was one of the outstanding conductors of the 20th century.