April 20

© 1997, 1998 by Paul A. Schons

April 20, 1494

Birth of Johann Agricola (original name: Johann Schneider) in Eisleben, Germany (He was a friend and supporter of Martin Luther). Agricola became a strong proponent of the concept that Christian grace replaces the Ten Commandments, which would no longer, then, have force. These views led to a cooling of relations with Luther. In 1584 Agricola was called upon to draft the Augsburg agreement, which for a time settled difficulties between Protestants and Catholics.

April 20, 1707

Death of Johann Christoph Denner in Leipzig, Germany. Denner was a musical instrument maker who invented the clarinet.

April 20, 1805

Birth of Franz Aver Winter halter in Menzenschwand, Germany. Winterhalter was a portrait painter who did many portraits of royalty. He was active in France and England as well as Germany.

April 20, 1869

Death of Carl Loewe in Kiel, Germany. Loewe is remembered primarily for his Lieder (artistic songs). Noted among his Lieder are, "Erlkönig", "Edward", "Herr Oluf" and "Archibald Douglas".

April 20, 1889

Birth of Adolf Hitler in Braunau, Austria.

April 20, 1913

Birth of Willi Hennig in Dürrhennersdorf, Germany. He was a leader of the cladistic school of phylogenetic systematics (a system of biological classification). Hennig worked at the German entomological Institute in East Berlin. He resigned in 1961 in protest at the construction of the Berlin Wall. He then moved immediately to West Germany and later found a research position at the State Museum of natural History in Stuttgart.

April 20, 1927

Birth of Karl Alexander Müller in Basel, Switzerland. In 1927 Müller won the Nobel Prize for Physics for his work in superconductivity in 1987. Müller did research at the IBM Zürich Research Laboratory beginning in 1963. He became an IBM fellow in 1982.

April 20, 1968

Death of Rudolf Dirks in New York City (born in Heide, Germany). Dirks was the creator of the "Katzenjammer Kids", a popular American cartoon strip. He had come to America with his family at age 7. When he took a position with the New York Journal he initiated his own version of Max und Moritz, characters created by Wilhelm Busch in 1856. The name was changed to The Captain and the Kids at the time of World War I to obscure the German character of the strip.

April 20, 1980

Death of Helmut Käutner in Castellina, Italy (born in Düsseldorf, Germany). Käutner was a film director who started his directing career in film during World War II. His first film Romanze in Moll (1943) had the distinction of being designated by Joseph Goebbels as "decadent and defeatist". Subsequent films include In jenen Tagen (1947), Des Teufels General (1955), and two films he made in Hollywood The Wonderful Years (1957) and A Stranger in My Arms (1957).