January 12

January 12

January 12, 1519

Death of Maximilian I in Wels, Austria. Maximilian was the Archduke of Austria, the German king and the Holy Roman Emperor. He did much to expand and consolidate the Habsburg holdings. He nearly became Pope. The Pope, Julius, was very ill and a schismatic Council of Pisa offered Maximilian the position as an anti-Pope. After much reflection he declined the offer. His greatest defeat was in a war with Switzerland. After that war through the Peace of Basel in 1499 he was forced to accept the independence of the Swiss.

January 12, 1721

Birth of Ferdinand in Wolfenbüttel, Germany. Ferdinand was the brother-in-law of the Prussian king, Fredrich II. As a general he was a dominant military force in Prussia's Seven Years' War against Austria. In the war of the American Revolution, he was offered a post by England at the head of British troops in America but he declined.

January 12, 1746

Birth of Johann Pestalozzi in Zürich, Switzerland. Pestalozzi was a philosopher of educational reform, whose ideas comprise much of the way we think of early education today. Such matters as his notion that the poor should also be educated, consideration of individual differences, group work, and formal training of teachers were revolutionary in his day. He was deeply influenced by the romantic philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Books by Pestalozzi include, Die Abendstunde eines Linsiedlers (1780), Meine Nachforschung über den Gang der Natur in der Entwicklung des Menschengeschlechts (1797) and Wie Gertrud ihre Kinder lehrt (1801).

January 12, 1829

Death of Friedrich von Schlegel in Hannover, Germany. Schlegel was one of the literary critics who laid the groundwork for the literary period of Romanticism. He gave new emphasis to antiquity and the Middle Ages. As many of the Romantics, he converted to Roman Catholicism, which he felt close to his ideals of medieval Romanticism.

January 12, 1833

Birth of Eugen Dühring in Berlin, Germany. Düring was a political philosopher. He practiced law and later taught at the University of Berlin. His optimistic view of human nature and its ramifications in economics led him to conflicts with the Marxists of his day. He was the negative subject of a book by Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring. Dühring's books include: Captial und Arbeit (1865), Kritische Geschichte der Philosophie (1869) and Cursus der National- und Socialökonomie (1873-92).

January 12, 1877

Death of Wilhelm Hofmeister in Lindenau, Germany. Hofmeister was a botanist who was a pioneer in comparative plant morphology. He was a professor at the University of Tübingen. His most important work is found in Vergleichende Untersuchungen (1851).

January 12, 1882

Birth of Jakob Jud in Wängli, Switzerland. Jud was a professor of linguistics at the University of Zürich. Jud developed a system of writing cultural history based on historic linguistic development.

January 12, 1893

Birth of Alfred Rosenberg in Reval, Estonia. Rosenberg moved to Munich, Germany in 1919 where he joined the young Nazi party. He edited the party's paper, Völkischer Beobachter. It was he who drew from the English racist Houston Stewart Chamberlain's views and warned of a Jewish plot to take over the world. He was designated by Hitler to lead the party while Hitler was in prison in the 20's. Possibly his most influential book was Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts in 1934 in which he developed the basis of the idea of "German racial purity". After the war at the war crimes trials in Nürnberg Rosenberg was executed by the Allies.

January 12, 1893

Birth of Hermann Göring in Rosenheim, Germany. Young Göring joined the German air force in 1912 and served with distinction. In 1918 after the death of the famous "Red Baron", Manfred von Richthofen, Göring was named to head the Red Baron's squadron. He joined the Nazi party in 1922. He became the head of Germany's air force and was one of the highest ranking Nazis. After the war he was tried at the war crimes trials, but was able to hide poison in his cell and committed suicide before he could be hanged.

January 12, 1899

Birth of Paul Hermann Müller in Olten, Switzerland. In 1948 he won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine for his discovery of the chemical DDT (dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane), as an insecticide of significant power. The chemical did much to increase world food production and control disease. Unfortunately it turned out that it stays in the environment for long periods of time and ultimately has negative effects on animal life. Today the chemical is widely banned.

January 12, 1901

Birth of Kurt Jooss in Wasseralfingen, Germany. Jooss was a musician and choreographer. In 1930 he became the ballet master at the Essen Opera House. He was abroad when Hitler came to power and declined to return to Germany and settled in England. After the war he returned to Germany in 1949 and continued to teach dance there.

January 12, 1993

A German court in Berlin drops charges against Erich Honecker (related to shootings at the German-German border) with the justification that he was 80 years old and terminally ill.