July 28

© 1997, 1998 by Paul A. Schons

July 28, 1750

Death of Johann Sebastian Bach in Leipzig.

July 28, 1796

Birth of Ignaz Bösendorfer in Vienna, Austria. Bösendorfer was a piano maker. He founded the Bösendorfer piano company which still produces some of the world's finest pianos.

July 28, 1804

Birth of Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach in Landshut, Germany. Feuerbach was a philosopher who had far reaching influence on the thought of the 19th and 20th centuries. He developed a view of the essence or religion as anthropological.

July 28, 1808

Birth of Solomon Formstecher in Offenbach, Germany. Formstecher was a philosopher and rabbi in Offenbach. His most noted book is Die Religion des Geistes published in 1841.

July 28, 1874

Ernst Cassirer was born in Breslau, Germany (now Worclaw, Poland) on July 28, 1874. Cassirer studied at the University of Marburg where his intellectual direction was set by Hermann Cohen, the founder of Neo-Kantianism at Marburg. In 1919 Cassirer became a professor of philosophy at the University of Hamburg and rector there after 1930. As a Jew Cassirer was forced to leave his work at Hamburg after Hitler came to power. He taught at Oxford University from 1933-1935, in Sweden from 1935-1941, at Yale from 1941-1944 and at Columbia from 1944 until his death on April 13, 1945. In his academic career he continued to develop the thought of Immanuel Kant to suit developments in the modern world. Major works by Cassirer include Die Philosophie der symbolischen Formen (1923-1929), Sprache und Mythos (1925), Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (1932) and The Myth of the State (1946).

July 28, 1882

First performance of Richard Wagner's opera, Parsifal in Bayreuth.

July 28, 1902

Karl Raimund Popper was born on July 28, 1902 in Vienna, Austria. He completed his doctorate at the University of Vienna. Although his first book Logik der Forschung (1934) was published by the Vienna Circle (logical positivism) he did not remain with the limitations of the views of the Vienna Circle. He taught at Canterbury University College in New Zealand from 1937-1945. In 1945 he accepted a position at the London School of Economics as a professor logic and scientific method. He proposed the "falsifiability criterion" to replace the traditional idea of verification through replicability. Popper's books include The Open Society and its Enemies (1945), and Postscript to the Logic of Scientific Discovery. (1981-82). Sir Karl Popper was knighted in 1965. He died on September 17, 1994 in London.

July 28, 1914

Austria-Hungary declares war on Serbia starting WWI.

July 28, 1942

The Nazis kill 10,000 Jews in Minsk, Russia.

July 28, 1948

An I. G. Farben chemical plant in Ludwigshafen, Germany explodes and kills 182.

July 28, 1968

Death of Otto Hahn in Göttingen, Germany. Hahn and his colleagues discovered and named the process of nuclear fission in 1938. Hahn continued his research in Germany during the war. Only after the end of the war did he learn that he had been given the Nobel Prize for Chemistry in 1944. After the war he became an active opponent of the further development of nuclear weapons.

July 28, 1997

Death of Hedi Oplesch in St. Paul, MN (born in Munich, Germany.) Oplesch taught German in the school system of Robbinsdale, Minnesota . She created a long lasting television series teaching German to children. After retirement she directed the Minnesota/Baden-Württemberg exchange program for high school students.

July 28, 2005

In a surprise move, Jürgen Schrempp, who had been head of DaimlerChrysler for 10 years, resigns his position.  His successor was designated as Dieter Zetsche, who had been the very successful head of DaimlerChrysler's Chrysler division in the U.S.A.