January 5

January 5

January 5, 1762

Birth of Konstanze Weber in Zell, Austria. Weber was a soprano who married Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 1782 in Vienna. After her husband's death she oversaw the publication of his music. In 1809 she married Georg Nissen, who wrote the first biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Nissen died in 1826 and Konstanze lived as a widow in Salzburg until her death in 1842.

January 5, 1846

Birth of Rudolf Eucken in Aurich, Germany. Eucken was a philosopher who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1908. Among his works are Der Sozialismus und seine Lebensgestaltung (1920), Der Sinn und Wert des Lebens (1908) and Können wir noch Christen sein? (1911).

January 5, 1876

Konrad Adenauer is born in Cologne, Germany. In 1917 he became Oberbürgermeister of Cologne. An opponent of the Nazi regime, he was sent to a concentration camp in 1944. After the war he worked in the founding and development of the CDU political party. In 1949 he became the first chancellor of the new Federal Republic of Germany, a post which he held until 1963.

January 5, 1919

The insurrection of the communist Spartakus group in Berlin began on January 5 and lasted for seven days before it was put down. A few days later the leaders of the group, Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg were assassinated.

January 5, 1902

70 years after its creation Geog Büchners "Dantons Tod" was performed for the first time by the "Neue freie Volksbühne".

January 5, 1921

Friedrich Dürrenmatt is born in Konolfinger, Switzerland. Dürrenmatt was one of the leading Swiss dramatists of the 20th century. Among his plays are Romulus der Große (1949), Die Ehe des Herrn Mississippi (1952), Der Besuch der alten Dame (1956) and Die Physiker (1952).

January 5, 1931

Birth of Alfred Brendel in Wiesenberg, Austria (now in the Czech Republic). Brendel made his piano debut in Gratz, Austria in 1948. Brendel became one of the leading pianists of the world. He is most admired for his interpretation of Beethoven, but is also noted for his performance of Schubert, Liszt and Mozart.

January 5, 1939

Felix Frankfurter is appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court. Frankfurter had been born in Vienna, Austria and immigrated to the U.S. with his family at age 12.

January 5, 1970

Death of Max Born in Göttingen, Germany. Born won the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1954 for his statistical formulation of the behavior of subatomic particles. Born was a professor of physics at the University of Göttingen. One of his students there was Werner Heisenberg. He developed the "Born approximation" describing the scattering of atomic particles. In 1933 he fled the Nazi regime and became a professor at the University of Cambridge.

January 5, 1996

German physicist, Walter Oelert succeeds in creating antimatter atoms at the CERN Research Center.