The German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina (German: Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina – Nationale Akademie der Wissenschaften), short Leopoldina, is the national academy of Germany, and is located in Halle (Saale). Founded on January 1, 1652, based on academic models in Italy, it was originally named the Academia Naturae Curiosorum until 1687 when Emperor Leopold I raised it to an academy and named it after himself. It was since known under the German name Deutsche Akademie der Naturforscher Leopoldina until 2007, when it was declared to be Germany’s National Academy of Sciences. The Leopoldina has a claim to be the oldest continuously existing learned society in the world. The validity of the claim depends in part on how certain definitional and historical questions are answered. read more…
(Latest update: 4 April 2022) After ChancellorAngela Merkel announced her voluntary retirement from office after 16 years and that with approval ratings that other heads of government may only wish for, the CDU suffered a severe setback with a drop in votes of 9% compared to the 2017 federal election. The Chancellor candidate Armin Laschet got the worst election result of the party of all time and he owes that to himself. After many years in government responsibility, it would certainly not be bad for the CDU not to work in this role for a while, but instead to be a opposition party in order to reorganize itself and counteract incrustations and obvious nepotism. read more…
The New Garden (German: Neuer Garten) in Potsdam is a park of 102.5 hectares located southwest of Berlin, Germany, in northern Potsdam and bordering on the lakes Heiliger See and Jungfernsee. Starting in 1787, Frederick William II of Prussia (1744-1797) arranged to have a new garden laid out on this site, and it came to be known by this rather prosaic name. The New Garden is one of the ensembles comprising the UNESCO World Heritage Site “Palaces and Parks of Potsdam and Berlin,” a status awarded in 1990. read more…
Annaberg-Buchholz is a town in the Free State of Saxony, Germany. Lying in the Ore Mountains, it is the capital of the district of Erzgebirgskreis. The previously heavily forested upper Ore Mountains were settled in the 12th and 13th centuries by Franconian farmers. Frohnau, Geyersdorf, and Kleinrückerswalde—all now part of present-day town—are all attested from 1397. The most well-known personalities associated with Annaberg-Buchholz include Adam Riese, the “father of modern arithmetic”. read more…
The German Unity Day (German: Tag der Deutschen Einheit) is the National Day of Germany, celebrated on 3 October as a public holiday. It commemorates the anniversary of German reunification in 1990 when the Federal Republic of Germany (West Germany) and the German Democratic Republic (East Germany) were unified, so that for the first time since 1945 there existed a single German state. The German Unity Day on 3 October has been the German National Holiday since 1990, when the reunification was formally completed. An alternative choice to commemorate the reunification could have been the day the Berlin Wall came down: 9 November 1989, which coincided with the anniversary of the proclamation of the German Republic in 1918, and the defeat of Hitler’s first coup in 1923. However, 9 November was also the anniversary of the first large-scale Nazi-led pogroms against Jews in 1938 (Kristallnacht), so the day was considered inappropriate as a national holiday. (November 9 in German history.) Therefore, 3 October 1990, the day of the formal reunification, was chosen instead and replaced the “Day of German Unity” on 17 June, the national holiday of the Federal Republic of Germany from 1954. read more…
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