Under Saturday, February 18, the book of history records, among other things:
1268: Russian troops defeat a German-Danish army at the Battle of Wesenberg in modern-day Estonia.
1478: George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, brother and rival of the English King Edward IV of the House of York, sentenced to death for high treason, is executed – allegedly by drowning in a wine barrel.
1563: During the siege of Orléans, Francis of Lorraine, Duke of Guise, leader of the Catholic forces in the First Huguenot War, is badly wounded in an assassination attempt by Jean de Poltrot de Méré. He dies six days later.
1743: George Frideric Handel’s oratorio “Samson” has its world premiere at the Covent Garden Theater in London.
1853: An assassination attempt by the 21-year-old Hungarian János Libényi on Emperor Franz Josef I is foiled in Vienna by the (later ennobled) butcher Josef Ettenreich. The monarch is slightly injured by a knife wound in the back of the head. The votive church was built to commemorate the failed assassination attempt.
1873: In Sofia, the freedom fighter and leader of the Bulgarian independence movement Vasil Levski is executed by the Ottoman authorities.
1878: The Lincoln County cattle war between wealthy ranchers and businessmen begins in New Mexico and brings dubious fame to “Billy the Kid” (Henry McCarty, aka William H. Bonney).
1893: Start of construction on the Wiener Stadtbahn line.
1893: 46 years following the concert premiere in Paris, the scenic premiere of the dramatic legend “La damnation de Faust” (Faust’s Damnation) by Hector Berlioz takes place in Monte Carlo.
1913: In France, the new President Raymond Poincaré is inaugurated as the successor to Armand Fallières.
1913: British chemist Frederick Soddy coined the term “isotope” to describe atoms of the same chemical element that have different atomic masses.
1918: After the resumption of hostilities, German troops advance back into Russia.
1928: Kurt Weill’s comic opera “The Tsar lets himself be photographed” premiered at the New Theater in Leipzig.
1933: The company “Friedrich Krupp AG” succeeds for the first time in producing an air-cooled diesel engine for automobiles.
1943: The German Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels calls for “total war” to thunderous applause from a fanatic audience in the Berlin Sportpalast. He describes Judaism as “the incarnation of evil”.
1943: In Munich, the siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, members of the anti-fascist resistance group “White Rose”, are arrested following they threw leaflets into the atrium of the university. Almost all members of the group are executed.
1948: In Moscow, Hungarian President Zoltán Tildy signs a pact of friendship and assistance with the Soviet Union in the presence of Stalin.
1948: In Ireland, the nationalist Fianna Fáil loses an absolute majority in the general election.
1958: The Lebanese government rejects the country’s accession to the United Arab Republic (Egypt and Syria).
1968: Introduction of Central European Time (CET) in Great Britain. The clocks are put forward by one hour.
1983: In Greece, the parliament passes the law on equal rights for women with men with the votes of the socialist government majority. At the same time, divorce law is being liberalised.
1993: With a combination of three preparations, the American student of Chinese descent Chow Yung Kang succeeds in stopping the AIDS virus in the laboratory.
2003: A fire in the subway in the South Korean city of Daegu kills 198 people. The arsonist is mentally deranged.
2013: The German children’s book author Otfried Preußler, father of classic characters such as the robber Hotzenplotz, the little ghost and the little witch, dies at the age of 89. His 32 works have been translated into a total of 55 languages. The total circulation exceeds the 50 million mark.
birthdays: Ernst Mach, Austria physicist/philosopher (1838-1916); Louis Comfort Tiffany, US artisan (1848-1933); Enzo Ferrari, Italian automobile legend (according to other information February 20) (1898-1988); Yoko Ono, Japanese-US artist (1933); Elfriede Irrall, East. Actress (1938-2018); István Szabó, Hungarian film director (1938); Molly Ringwald, US actress (1968); Claude Makélélé French ex-soccer player (1973); Ilya Sergeyevich Roslyakov, former Russian ski jumper (1983); Maiara Walsh, US actress (1988).
days of death: George Plantagenet, Duke of Clarence, Earl of Salisbury prince (1449-1478); Johann Wilhelm Ludwig Gleim, German poet (1719-1803); Frank Costello (aka Francesco Castiglia), Italian-US-Amer. crime boss (1891-1973); Isser Harel, Director of Mossad (1912-2003); Alain Robbe-Grillet, French writer (1922-2008); Otfried Preußler, German children’s book author (1923-2013); Günter Blobel, German-US cell and molecular biologist; Nobel Prize 1999 (1936-2018).
name days: Simon, Susanne, Bernadette, Konstantia, Simeon, Florian, Engelberta, Angelikus, Concordia, Leo, Agatha.
