Adam Clayton Powell Jr.

Adam Clayton Powell Jr. was an American Baptist pastor and politician who represented the Harlem neighborhood of New York City in the United States House of Representatives from 1945 until 1971. He was the first African American to be elected to Congress from New York, as well as the first from any state in the Northeast. Re-elected for nearly three decades, Powell became a powerful national politician of the Democratic Party, and served as a national spokesman on civil rights and social issues. He also urged United States presidents to support emerging nations in Africa and Asia as they gained independence after colonialism.

In 1961, after 16 years in the House, Powell became chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, the most powerful position held by an African American in Congress. As chairman, he supported the passage of important social and civil rights legislation under presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson. Following allegations of corruption, in 1967 Powell was excluded from his seat by Democratic Representatives-elect of the 90th United States Congress, but he was re-elected and regained the seat in the 1969 ruling by the Supreme Court of the United States in Powell v. McCormack. He lost his seat in 1970 to Charles Rangel and retired from electoral politics.

John Silkin

John Ernest Silkin was a British left-wing Labour politician and solicitor.

Silkin was the third son of Lewis Silkin, 1st Baron Silkin, and a younger brother of Samuel Silkin, Baron Silkin of Dulwich. He was educated at Dulwich College, the University of Wales and Trinity Hall, Cambridge. Silkin served in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve from 1942 to 1946. He was commissioned as a sub-lieutenant in 1943, serving in the East Indies Fleet, Eastern Fleet and Pacific Fleet aboard HMS King George V and HMS Formidable, and ashore at Anderson, Ceylon (FECB). He was later promoted lieutenant. He was demobilised in 1946 and returned to Cambridge.

Silkin was admitted as a solicitor in 1950 and worked for his father's law practice in London.

He contested the seat of St Marylebone for the Labour Party at the 1950 general election, West Woolwich in 1951 and South Nottingham in 1959. He served as a councillor in the Metropolitan Borough of St Marylebone (1962–63) and was elected to the House of Commons for the first time in July 1963. He served as the Labour Member of Parliament for Deptford (1963–74) and for Lewisham, Deptford (1974–87).

He was appointed to the Privy Council in 1966. He served as a Government Chief Whip (1966–69) and as the deputy leader of the House of Commons (1968–69). He was appointed as the Minister of Public Buildings and Works (1969–70) and the Minister for Planning and Local Government in the Department for the Environment (1974–76). He served as the Minister of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food (1976–79).

In opposition, Silkin was an unsuccessful candidate in the 1980 Labour leadership election following the resignation of James Callaghan and in the deputy leadership election in 1981. He served as Opposition Spokesman on Industry (1979–80), Shadow Leader of the House of Commons (1980–83), Shadow Defence Secretary (1981–83) and the Dairy Industry Arbitrator (1986–87).

Silkin's publication, Changing Battlefields: The Challenge to the Labour Party appeared posthumously. His papers were given to the Churchill Archives Centre by his widow in February 1990. These cover his Parliamentary and Ministerial career, as well as his other public interests, such as the Channel Tunnel, the European Economic Community and the dairy industry. There is material of particular interest concerning his relationship with his Constituency Labour Party in Deptford and on the Labour Party Leadership and Deputy Leadership Elections in 1980 and 1981.

He was married to the actress Rosamund John from 1950 until his death in 1987.

Otto Sverdrup

Otto Neumann Knoph Sverdrup was a Norwegian sailor and Arctic explorer.

Sverdrup was born in Bindal as a son of farmer Ulrik Frederik Suhm Sverdrup (1833–1914) and his wife Petra Neumann Knoph (1831–1885). He was a great-grandnephew of Georg Sverdrup and Jacob Liv Borch Sverdrup, first cousin twice removed of Harald Ulrik and Johan Sverdrup, second cousin once removed of Jakob, Georg and Edvard Sverdrup, third cousin of Georg Johan, Jakob, Mimi, Leif and Harald Ulrik Sverdrup. He was a brother-in-law of Johan Vaaler, and Otto himself married his own first cousin, Gretha Andrea Engelschiøn (1866–1937), in October 1891 in Kristiania. Their daughter Audhild Sverdrup (1893–1932) married Carl Johan Sverdrup Marstrander.

His father was born on Buøy in Kolvereid municipality. As oldest son Otto was heir to the Sverdrup properties at Buøy. However, he left it all to his younger brothers and went to Åbygda in Bindal, to the farm named Hårstad, where Otto Sverdrup was born. In 1872, at the age of 17, Otto Sverdrup returned to Nærøy, to Ottersøy where his uncle Søren worked in transportation with his own vessels. Here Sverdrup started his career as a seaman and after a while he was sailing abroad. In 1875, he passed his mate's examination, and some years later the shipmaster's examination.

In 1877 Sverdrup's parents moved from Bindal to the farm Trana outside Steinkjer. At this time O. T. Olsen, a teacher and employee in the bank at Kolvereid and a relative of his mother, had purchased the steamboat TRIO. Sverdrup was employed as captain. Around this time Sverdrup also met the lawyer Alexander Nansen who lived in Namsos. He was the brother of Fridtjof Nansen and through him Sverdrup and Fridtjof Nansen learned to know each other.

Sverdrup joined Fridtjof Nansen's expedition of 1888 across Greenland. In 1892 he was an advisor to Fridtjof Nansen when the ship Fram was built. In 1893 Sverdrup was given command of the ship, and in 1895 he was left in charge of it while Nansen attempted to reach the North Pole. Sverdrup managed to free the ship from the ice near Svalbard in August 1896 and sailed to Skjervøy, arriving just 4 days after Nansen had reached Norway.

In the summer of 1897 Sverdrup worked as the shipmaster of Lofoten, a passenger ship to and from Svalbard. In 1898 he embarked on another expedition with Fram. Sverdrup attempted to circumnavigate Greenland via Baffin Bay but failed to make it through the Nares Strait. Forced to overwinter on Ellesmere Island, he and his crew explored and named many uncharted fjords and peninsulas on the western shores of the island, explaining the Norwegian names, such as Hoved Island ("main island") and Prince Gustav Adolf Sea (after the Swedish king Gustav VI Adolf) in the Canadian Arctic.

Between 1899 and 1902, he overwintered three more times on Ellesmere Island in the Canadian Arctic with the Fram, continuing to explore and map, culminating in the discovery of the islands to the west of Ellesmere Island, namely Axel Heiberg, Amund Ringnes and Ellef Ringnes, collectively known as the Sverdrup Islands. In adopting Inuit methods, Sverdrup and his crew were able to chart a total of 260,000 square kilometers - more than any other polar exploration. The area was famously mapped by his topographer, Gunnar Isachsen, and 35 academic publications were penned as a result of the expedition. Upon Sverdrup's return in Norway, he was treated as a national hero. However, he remains relatively unknown in North America, and relatively unknown for his Canadian exploration in Norway.

Sverdrup officially claimed all three islands he discovered for Norway in 1902, setting off a sovereignty dispute with Canada, which claimed sovereignty over all land, discovered or undiscovered in what is now the Canadian Arctic. The dispute was not settled until 1930 when Norway ceded the islands to Canada. In that year Sverdrup signed a deal with the Canadian Government, who would buy the records of Sverdrup's expeditions for $67,000 Canadian dollars. Sverdrup died just two weeks after the deal was signed, but the money secured the future of his family. The records were archived in the National Archives of Canada, but were later returned to the National Library of Norway.

One of Sverdrup's lesser known exploits was a search-and-rescue expedition aboard ship Eklips in the Kara Sea in 1914–1915. His aim was to search for two missing Arctic expeditions, that of Captain Georgy Brusilov on the St. Anna and that of Vladimir Rusanov on the Gerkules. Sverdrup's fourth and last expedition in Arctic Siberian waters was in 1921, when, from the bridge of the Soviet Icebreaker Lenin, he commanded a convoy of five cargo ships on an experimental run through the Kara Sea to the mouths of the Ob and Yenisei. The ships reached their destinations and returned safely. This was considered an important step in the development of the Kara Sea sector of the Northern Sea Route. Sverdrup also has an unsuccessful business venture in Cuba, a plantation project in the Oriente Province in 1904.

The last years of his life he lived in Sandvika, at the property Homewood on a hill overlooking the town. He died in November 1930.

William Dubilier

William Dubilier was an American inventor in the field of radio and electronics. He demonstrated radio communication at Seattle's Alaska–Yukon–Pacific Exposition on June 21, 1909; ten years before the first commercial station operated. A graduate of Cooper Union, he was the first to use sheets of naturally occurring mica as the dielectric in a capacitor. Mica capacitors were widely used in early radio oscillator and tuning circuits because the temperature coefficient of expansion of mica was low, resulting in very stable capacitance – mica capacitors are still used where exceptional temperature stability is needed.

He founded the Dubilier Condenser Company in New York in 1920. His son Martin H. Dubilier also became a prominent inventor and company founder.

Lord Belhaven and Stenton

Robert Belhaven and Stenton was appointed a Knight of Justice of the Sacred Military Constantinian Order of St George by decree of HRH Prince Ferdinand of Bourbon Two Sicilies, Duke of Castro and Grand Master on 5 June 2000.  He succeeded Lord Mowbray, Segrave and Stourton as British and Irish Delegate of the Constantinian Order in 2000 by special decree of the Grand Master and served a full term in office until June 2003.

Lord Belhaven and Stenton was born in February 1927 and succeeded his father, the 12th Lord Belhaven and Stenton in 1961. He was educated at Eton College before serving from 1946-1948 as a Lieutenant in The Cameronians (Scottish Rifles). Lord Belhaven and Stenton married Elizabeth Moseley in 1952 and had one son and daughter. This marriage was dissolved in 1973. In the same year Lord Belhaven and Stenton married Rosemary, Lady McTaggart who subsequently died.

In 1986 Lord Belhaven married Malgorzata Maria Hruzik-Mazurkiewicz, from Krakow, Poland from which they have one daughter. From the moment of his elevation to the House of Lords until the 1999 abolition of the rights of hereditary peers to sit in the Upper Chamber, Lord Belhaven and Stenton was an active Conservative Peer and served on numerous committees including the British-Polish Group, British-Slovenian Group and the British-Slovakian Group. In 1995 he was decorated with the Commander Cross of the Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland in recognition of his longstanding championing of British-Polish relations.

Lord Belhaven and Stenton died on December 2, 2020 at the age of 93.

Mike Hawthorn

John Michael Hawthorn was a British racing driver. He became the United Kingdom's first Formula One World Champion driver in 1958, whereupon he announced his retirement, having been profoundly affected by the death of his teammate and friend Peter Collins two months earlier in the 1958 German Grand Prix. Hawthorn also won the 1955 24 Hours of Le Mans. Hawthorn died in a road accident three months after retiring. With a total of three career World Championship Grand Prix wins Hawthorn has the lowest number of Grand Prix wins scored by any Formula One World Champion.

Joël Le Tac

Joël Andre Le Tac was a member of the Free French Forces (FFF) during the Second World War.

Le Tac played a prominent role in Operation Savanna and then in Operation Josephine B. He set up the Overcloud network in Brittany and carried out a number of operations. Le Tac, along with members of his family, were captured, interrogated and imprisoned in a succession of concentration camps.

He served in a French UN battalion during the Korean War.

He later had a career as a journalist and as a politician.

George Weidler

George William Weidler was an American saxophonist and songwriter. He was the second husband of singer-actress Doris Day (married 1946–1949) and older brother of former child actress Virginia Weidler.

As sideman, Weidler recorded with Freddie Slack, Les Brown, Charlie Barnet, Ike Carpenter, The Delta Rhythm Boys, Stan Kenton, and the Metronome All-Stars. He is credited as having performed on over 57 jazz recordings between 1943 and 1948.

While with Charlie Barnet, his two brothers, Warner (born Werther; 1922–2010) and Walter (born Wolfgang; 1923–2002), both saxophonists, were with the band. From the early 1940s, the three also performed as the Weidler Brothers Orchestra until 1952, when they signed with Capitol Records as "The Wilder Brothers."

Jean-Michel Delacomptée

Jean-Michel Delacomptée is a French writer, author of essays, literary portraits and novels.

Writer and essayist, Jean-Michel Delacomptée worked for twenty years in the field of cultural diplomacy in Paris and abroad (Laos, Japan, Jerusalem). He then taught French literature at Bordeaux-Montaigne University in Bordeaux , then, from 2001 to 2012, at Paris-VIII University . He directed the “Nos vies” collection at Gallimard.

His production as a writer consists mainly of literary portraits of historical figures and men of letters. Historical figures: Henrietta of England with Madame la Cour la Mort (1993), François II with Le Roi Miniature (2000), Ambroise Paré with Ambroise Paré La main savante (2007). Gens de lettres: La Boétie and Montaigne with And only one be the friend (1995), Racine with Racine en majesté (1999), Ms. de Motteville with I will only be a painter for her(2003), Bossuet with Dead Language, Bossuet (2009), Saint-Simon with La grandeur, Saint-Simon (2011).

With the exception of Racine published by Flammarion, these works have all been published by Gallimard in the “L'un et l'autre” collection created and directed by Jean-Bertrand Lefèvre-Pontalis .

These are indeed literary portraits, not biographies. These portraits indeed use a narrative writing which, without recourse to fiction, tends to erase the conventional border between the romantic narrative, biographical erudition and the spirit of analysis proper to the essay. External to any specific genre, not entering into any predefined classification, they belong to general literature both by the freedom of their composition and by the importance given to style, without which, according to Delacomptée, "a work cannot claim to be literary.

To these portraits was added in 2014 Écrire pour somebody , the last book published in “L'un et l'autre”, the collection ending with the death of Jean-Bertrand Pontalis. In this book, Jean-Michel Delacomptée revisits his own past through the evocation of his parents, while exploring the question of the father (what is a father?), with descriptions and comments about the suburbs, literature, gratitude, in an intertwining of themes intended to open the story to broader horizons than a personal adventure.

Jean-Michel Delacomptée also published with Gallimard, in the "Le Promeneur" collection, a commentary on Montaigne's Letter to his father on the death of Étienne de La Boétie , a preface to the Discours de la Mummy et de la Licorne d 'Ambroise Paré, as well as a Petit eulogy of lovers of silence in the Folio collection.

He has published with Arlea Passions. La Princesse de Clèves , deeply renewing the reading of Madame de Lafayette's novel (2012). In 2015, he published with Fayard Adieu Montaigne , which questions the still current success of the author of Essays , of which he offers an approach that is eminently respectful of the time when Montaigne wrote. In 2016, he published with Robert Laffont a Letter of consolation to a writer friend where, asking the question of the reception of the works, he is surprised with humor and seriousness of the obscurity from which many high-flying novels suffer, unlike the hype around minor works. In 2018, again at Fayard, he published Notre langue française, an ardent and worried reflection on the evolution of our idiom, whose written and poetic origin he underlines, before insisting on the damage that threatens it, in particular the uniformity of the media, inclusive writing, or technical and managerial newspeak.

In addition, he published two novels with Calmann-Lévy, Jalousies in 2004, the story of two obsessively jealous people, and in 2006 La vie de bureau , a novel whose hero, employed in a law firm and in love with an American intern, abhors noise as much as he loves the art of kissing, of which he gives burning praise.

He also published a very different novel, under the pseudonym of Jacques Sarthor, Les Affreux , published by Robert Laffont (2016), where he predicts, in lyrical slang, the activism of ultra-rightists against a backdrop of terrorism Islamic. He then published in 2017, under his name, with Robert Laffont, Le sacrifice des dames , a novel devoted to a purely fictional heroine in a largely imaginary 16th century Hungary, and which, placed under the sign of Machiavelli and the game of chess, raises the question of whether a moral law can limit the use of violence in the defense of the fatherland.

InAugust 2019, he published a portrait of La Bruyère at Robert Laffont, in the collection Le Passe-murailles, entitled La Bruyère, portrait of ourselves, which sheds light on the life of the moralist and his work, Les Caractères , in a style that is both dense and clear, with a concern for the narration that brings this portrait closer to a real novel.

Several of these works have been nominated for the main literary prizes (Fémina prize, Renaudot prize, Médicis essay prize, December prize, style prize, in addition to the prizes awarded by the French Academy).

He participated in the program Secrets d'Histoire devoted to the King of France Henri III , entitled Et si Henri III n'éta pas mignon? broadcast on January 19, 2016 on France 2 3.

Christian Delporte

Christian Delporte is a French historian specialized in political and cultural history of France in the twentieth century, including the history of media, image and political communication.

Delporte earned his PhD from Sciences Po, where he was a student of René Rémond and Serge Berstein. Formerly a lecturer at François Rabelais University, he is, since 1998, professor of contemporary history at Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines University, where he manages the Centre d’histoire culturelle des sociétés contemporaines (Center for cultural history of contemporary societies, CHCSC). Director of the Institut d'études culturelles (Institute of Cultural Studies, IEC), from 2010 to 2012, he is now vice president of the Scientific Council for research and scientific development. He also teaches media history at Sciences Po. President of the Société pour l'histoire des médias (Society for the History of Media, SPHM), he is the director of Le Temps des médias (journal specialized in History and Science Information and Communication) and member of the editorial board of the Vingtième siècle : Revue d'histoire (quarterly diary of political and cultural history founded in 1984).

Petitioner of Liberté pour l'histoire (Freedom for history), he is a member of the Board of Directors of the "éponyme" association.

Reverend Bruckberger

Raymond Léopold Bruckberger was a French Dominican priest, Résistance member, writer, translator, screenwriter and director of Austrian heritage.

He was elected member of the Académie des Sciences Morales et Politiques in 1985.

Reverend Bruckberger  died on January 4, 1998, in Fribourg.

Michel Simon

Michel Simon was a Swiss-French actor. He appeared in many notable French films, including La Chienne (1931), Boudu Saved from Drowning (1932), L'Atalante (1934), Port of Shadows (1938), The Head (1959), and The Train (1964).

Simon was born on 9 April 1895 in Geneva, Switzerland to a Catholic butcher and a Protestant mother. He left his family and moved to Paris, where he first lived at the Hotel Renaissance, Saint-Martin Street, then in Montmartre. He worked many different jobs to survive, such as giving boxing lessons and peddling smuggled lighters.

His career began modestly in 1912, working as a magician, clown, acrobat, and stooge in a dancers' show called "Ribert's and Simon's", in the Montreuil-sous-Bois Casino.

Conscripted into the Swiss Army in 1914, he spent time in the stockade. He also contracted tuberculosis.

In 1915, while on leave, he saw Georges Pitoëff's early work in the French language, at the Theatre de la Comédie of Geneva, acting in Hedda Gabler, and was inspired to become an actor himself. In 1920 he made his first brief appearance on stage, with Pitoëff's company, speaking three lines in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. He also worked at this time as the company's photographer. One of his early successes was a supporting role in George Bernard Shaw's Androcles and the Lion. In 1922, Pitoëff's company moved to Paris at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées.

Simon quit the company in 1923 to become a light comedy actor in plays by Tristan Bernard, Marcel Achard and Yves Mirande. Achard presented him to Charles Dullin, in whose company he acted in Je ne vous aime pas with Valentine Tessier.

Louis Jouvet, who had replaced Pitoëff, hired Simon at the Comédie des Champs-Élysées. Simon then gave a successful performance in Archard's Jean de la Lune as Cloclo.

In the 1930s, Simon's theatrical career rose to prominence with performances in works by Shakespeare, Bernard Shaw, Pirandello, Oscar Wilde, Bourdet, and Henri Bernstein. However, it was film that brought him stardom and international recognition.

Simon's first film appearance was in the 1925 silent film, Feu Mathias Pascal, adapted from a Pirandello novel and directed by Marcel L'Herbier. In the same year, he starred in the modestly budgeted The Vocation of André Carel, directed by Jean Choux. As the silent era ended, he appeared in Carl Theodor Dreyer's The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928).

Simon's film career was boosted with the advent of talking pictures. People remarked[by whom?] that his elocution and gravelly voice were as original as his appearance. These features were exploited by notable 1930s French directors, including Jean Renoir (La Chienne, Boudu Saved From Drowning), Jean Vigo (L'Atalante) and Marcel Carné (Port of the Shadows, Bizarre, Bizarre).

He appeared in 55 plays from 1920 to 1965, and 101 from 1965 to 1975.

In the 1950s, Simon reined in his activities following an accident involving a makeup dye that left part of his face and body paralyzed.

In 1967, he won the Silver Bear for Best Actor at the 17th Berlin International Film Festival for his role in The Two of Us.

He died at 80 years of age from a pulmonary embolism and is buried in the Grand-Lancy Cemetery of Geneva.

Wolfgang Preiss

Wolfgang Preiss was a German theatre, film and television actor.

The son of a teacher, Preiss studied philosophy, German, and drama in the early 1930s. He also took private acting classes with Hans Schlenck, making his stage début in Munich in 1932. He appeared in various theatre productions in Heidelberg, Königsberg, Bonn, Bremen, Stuttgart and Berlin.

In 1942, he made his film début – he was specifically exempted from military service – in the UFA production Die grosse Liebe with Zarah Leander. After the end of the Second World War, Preiss returned to the theatre, and from 1949 worked extensively dubbing films into German.

In 1954, he returned to film acting, appearing in Alfred Weidenmann's Canaris. The following year, Preiss played the lead role of Claus von Stauffenberg in Falk Harnack's film The Plot to Assassinate Hitler, which dramatised the 20 July plot. This role brought Preiss to popular attention and also the 1956 Federal Film Award.

From then on, Preiss was largely typecast in the role of the upright and obligation-conscious German officer to the other A-list actor playing the fanatic (i.e. Paul Scofield in The Train), a part he played in many films, later reprising it in numerous international productions, predominantly in Italy and the USA, while occasionally playing a more typically cynical or brutal Nazi officer.

Preiss appeared in such productions as The Longest Day (1962), Otto Preminger's The Cardinal (1963), and with Jean-Paul Belmondo in Is Paris Burning? (1966). He starred alongside Burt Lancaster in John Frankenheimer's The Train (1964), Frank Sinatra in Von Ryan's Express (1965), Robert Mitchum in Anzio (1968), with Richard Burton, in the title role of Erwin Rommel in Raid on Rommel (1971), and The Boys From Brazil (1978) with Gregory Peck. Preiss played Field Marshal Von Rundstedt in Richard Attenborough's all-star war epic A Bridge Too Far (1977). From 1968–1988 he played in American film and television productions five different German field marshals, having already played a fictional Afrika Korps general in an episode of The Rat Patrol (1966).

In addition, for the cinema-going public of West Germany, he became the epitome of the evil genius in his role as Doctor Mabuse, a role he first played in 1960 (following Rudolf Klein-Rogge) in Fritz Lang's The Thousand Eyes of Dr. Mabuse. He went on to play the role four more times.

In the 1980s, Preiss turned to television, notably playing General Walther von Brauchitsch in the American TV miniseries Winds of War and War and Remembrance, based on the books of Herman Wouk.

In 1987, Preiss received a second Federal Film Award for his outstanding work in film.

In film dubbing, Preiss provided the voice for such actors as Lex Barker, Christopher Lee, Anthony Quinn, Claude Rains, Richard Widmark and Conrad Veidt as "Major Strasser" in the 1975 remastered version of Casablanca.

Veit Relin

Veit Relin was an Austrian actor , screenwriter and director .

The son of a police officer first appeared on stage at the age of twelve as an extra at the Landestheater Linz . After high school he attended the Max Reinhardt Seminar in Vienna . At the same time he studied painting at the Vienna Art Academy . He made his debut at the Landestheater Innsbruck in 1945 as game announcer in a performance of Jedermann .

This was followed by engagements at the Landestheater Linz (1945/46), at the Insel in Vienna (1946/47), Burgtheater (1947/48), Theater in Chur and Sommertheater in Winterthur (1949/50), Scala Vienna (1950 to 1952) , Landestheater Salzburg (1952/53), Bavarian State Theater in Munich (1953), Staatstheater Kassel (1953 to 1955) and the Municipal Theater in Frankfurt (1956/57), where he first worked as a stage designer.

From 1960 to 1962 he played again at the Burgtheater. In 1960 he founded the Ateliertheater am Naschmarkt in Vienna , which he directed until 1967. There he staged, among other things, Oskar Kokoschka 's Orpheus and Eurydice and the premiere in Austria (1962) of Picasso's How to grab wishes by the tail .

From 1964 Relin went on tour with his future wife, the actress Maria Schell (1926-2005), and worked as an actor and director for television. In 1976 he took over the Sommerhausen Torturmtheater in Sommerhausen near Würzburg, which was founded in 1950 by Luigi Malipiero in a small tower above an old city gate. There he staged some world premieres such as Fred Viebahn's blood sisters and Hans Krendlesberger 's I've had enough, I stay in bed and in 1985 the German premiere of Edward Albee's The Man Who Had Three Arms .

In 1981 he launched the open-air theater in Sommerhausen. Because the municipal council did not agree with his plans, he moved with his theater and his ideas to Brattenstein Castle near Röttingen , which was then half in ruins . The first play he performed there in 1984 was Earlier Relationships in a proscenium stage and, like in 1985, played the role of Muffl. He was director there until 1987. Plays by the Viennese Volkstheater were performed under his direction.

Since then he has lived mainly in Sommerhausen and Winterhausen . From 1950 he emerged as a painter, took part in exhibitions and used the Torturmtheater as a gallery for his pictures. Relin was married to Maria Schell from 1966 to 1986. Marie-Theres Relin (* 1966) came from this marriage .

Veit Relin, who died on January 23, 2013 at the age of 86 in Ochsenfurt, near Würzburg, was buried on February 1, 2013 in the Sommerhausen cemetery.

Wolfgang Völz

Wolfgang Otto Völz was a German actor. He is known for his roles in theatre plays, TV shows, feature films (especially German films based on Edgar Wallace works) and taped radio shows. He was also a very prolific voice actor.

Völz studied acting and consequently worked as a stage actor. After more than ten years of acting including a great deal of supporting roles in feature films and TV shows he became a popular cast member ("Lt. Mario de Monti") of Space Patrol – The Fantastic Adventures of the Spaceship Orion. He continued being successful on the TV screen by playing Ioan (German: Johann), the driver and bodyguard of Graf Yoster (and afterwards many other characters).

As a voice actor he dubbed American stars such as Walter Matthau, Peter Falk and Mel Brooks and people or animals in animated films like Impy's Island.

Franz Zadrazil

Franz Zadrazil was an Austrian painter .

Zadrazil initially worked at the Austrian Post from 1961 . In 1966 he spent a year in Crete and began to work as an artist there. From 1968 he attended Rudolf Hausner 's master class at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna for four years. In 1969 he created his first facade painting in Vienna . In 1971 he was a founding member of the group "Zötus" and a member of the group "Der Kreis". From 1977 he worked intensively on the technique of etching . Zadrazil remained full-time at the post office until 1979, but took six years of unpaid leave during his time there. In addition to Vienna, Paris and New York City countedto the cities he prefers to portray . Zadrazil was buried at the Döblinger Friedhof .

Zadrazil became known for his photorealistic depictions of Viennese house facades, shop portals and light rail stations . The signs of post-war decline registered by Zadrazil are captured in his pictures and also contain hidden humorous aspects. Zadrazil does not deal with famous magnificent buildings, but with the facades of buildings that are embedded in the everyday life of the population. These are often dirty, stale and imperfect, but these are precisely the qualities that interested Zadrazil in his paintings and distinguish his motifs from other cityscapes. "The content is primarily a means of transport for my painting." Despite the very realistic painting, the pictures are not true-to-detail copies, but are already subject to a process of change from the creative phase. The actual act of painting is preceded by the projection of black and white negatives onto Novopan-Plates ahead, from which the artist often takes over entire areas but also only individual points. As a result, he is more or less free with the application of paint, or consciously adds or omits details. Images of closed, morbid-looking house fronts are created, where the viewer cannot see behind the facade. The pictures also lack the representation of living people, since these only appear as pictorial existences on advertising posters. The viewer is thus forced into the role of a "storyteller" who has to create his own associations based on the composition of the image. 

In the years 1975 to 1978 Peter Dressler and Franz Zadrazil made the black and white film Sonderfahrt ; the result was an audiovisual mosaic as a mixture of what was found and what was played associatively.  He was buried at the Döblinger Friedhof .

Hermann Broch

Hermann Broch was an Austrian writer, best known for two major works of modernist fiction: The Sleepwalkers (Die Schlafwandler, 1930–32) and The Death of Virgil (Der Tod des Vergil, 1945).

Broch was born in Vienna, Austria-Hungary, to a prosperous Jewish family and worked for some time in his family's factory, though he maintained his literary interests privately. As the oldest son, he was expected to take over his father’s textile factory in Teesdorf; therefore, he attended a technical college for textile manufacture and a spinning and weaving college.

In 1909 he converted to Roman Catholicism and married Franziska von Rothermann, the daughter of a knighted manufacturer. The following year, their son Hermann Friedrich Maria was born. His marriage ended in divorce in 1923. In 1927 he sold the textile factory and decided to study mathematics, philosophy and psychology at the University of Vienna. He embarked on a full-time literary career around the age of 40. At the age of 45, his first major literary work, the trilogy The Sleepwalkers, was published by Daniel Brody for the Rhein Verlag in Munich in three volumes from 1930 to 1932.

He was acquainted with many of the writers, intellectuals, and artists of his time, including Robert Musil, Rainer Maria Rilke, Elias Canetti, Leo Perutz, Franz Blei and writer and former nude model Ea von Allesch.

After the annexation of Austria by the Nazis on 12 March 1938, Broch was arrested in the small Alpine town of Bad Aussee for possession of a socialist magazine and detained in the district jail from the 13th to the 31st of March. Shortly thereafter, a movement organized by friends – including James Joyce, Thornton Wilder, and his translators Edwin and Willa Muir – managed to help him emigrate; first to Britain and then to the United States, where he published his novel The Death of Virgil and his collection of short stories The Guiltless. While in exile, he also continued to write on politics and work on mass psychology, similar to Elias Canetti and Hannah Arendt. His essay on mass behaviour remained unfinished. Broch's work on mass psychology was intended to form part of more ambitious project to defend democracy, human rights, and human dignity as irreducible ethical absolutes in a postreligious age.

From the 15th of August to the 15th of September 1939, Hermann Broch lived at the Albert Einstein House at 112 Mercer Street Princeton, New Jersey when the Einsteins were on vacation. From 1942 to 1948 Broch lived in an attic apartment in Eric and Lili Kahler's house at One Evelyn Place in Princeton, New Jersey. Broch died in 1951 in New Haven, Connecticut. He is buried in Killingworth, Connecticut, in the cemetery on Roast Meat Hill Road. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1950.

Jean Claude Drouot

Jean Claude Drouot is a Belgian actor whose career has lasted over a half-century. At the age of twenty-five, he gained widespread fame in the French-speaking world as a result of portraying the title role in the popular television adventure series, Thierry la Fronde.

Born in the Belgian municipality of Lessines, Jean Claude Drouot learned his stagecraft with the Young Theater of the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB). Later (date unknown) he moved from Brussels to Paris. In Paris he followed courses with Charles Dullin. Until his departure from Dullin's troupe in 1962, he interpreted the great tragedies and plays of Molière. From 1963 until 1966 he starred as Thierry La Fronde for the TV series Thierry La Fronde. He made his first film in 1965 with The Devil's Tricks of Paul Vecchiali. This was followed by Happiness. He then played in British and American films such as: Laughter in the Dark (1969), Mr. Freedom (1969), and Nicholas and Alexandra (1971). In 1984, he became director of the National Dramatic Center of Reims and, from 1985 to 1989, he was director of the National Theatre of Belgium. In 1999, he joined the Comédie-Française.

Sir Terence Shone

Sir Terence Allen Shone KCMG was a British diplomat who served as the United Kingdom's Minister to Syria and Lebanon from 1944, High Commissioner to India from 1946 and deputy Permanent Representative to the United Nations from 1948.

He was the son of Lieutenant-General Sir William Shone and Janet FitzGibbon, daughter of Gerald Fitzgibbon, Lord Justice of the Court of Appeal in Ireland. He was educated at Winchester College and University College, Oxford.

Herbert Tichy

 

Herbert Tichy was an Austrian writer, geologist, journalist and climber.

Nevil Shute

Nevil Shute Norway was an English novelist and aeronautical engineer who spent his later years in Australia. He used his full name in his engineering career and Nevil Shute as his pen name, in order to protect his engineering career from inferences by his employers (Vickers) or from fellow engineers that he was '"not a serious person" or from potentially adverse publicity in connection with his novels, which included On the Beach and A Town Like Alice.

Shute was born in Somerset Road, Ealing (which was then in Middlesex), in the house described in his novel Trustee from the Toolroom. He was educated at the Dragon School, Shrewsbury School and Balliol College, Oxford; he graduated from Oxford in 1922 with a third-class degree in engineering science.

Shute's father, Arthur Hamilton Norway, became head of the Post Office in Ireland before the First World War and was based at the General Post Office, Dublin in 1916 at the time of the Easter Rising. Shute himself was later commended for his role as a stretcher-bearer during the rising.

Shute attended the Royal Military Academy, Woolwich, and trained as a gunner. He was unable to take up a commission in the Royal Flying Corps in the First World War, which he believed was because of his stammer. He served as a soldier in the Suffolk Regiment, enlisting in the ranks in August 1918. He guarded the Isle of Grain in the Thames Estuary and served in military funeral parties in Kent during the 1918 flu pandemic.

An aeronautical engineer as well as a pilot, Shute began his engineering career with the de Havilland Aircraft Company. He used his penname as an author to protect his engineering career from any potentially adverse publicity in connection with his novels.

Dissatisfied with the lack of opportunities for advancement, he took a position in 1924 with Vickers Ltd., where he was involved with the development of airships, working as Chief Calculator (stress engineer) on the R100 airship project for the Vickers subsidiary Airship Guarantee Company. In 1929, he was promoted to deputy chief engineer of the R100 project under Barnes Wallis. When Wallis left the project, Shute became the chief engineer.

The R100 was a prototype for passenger-carrying airships that would serve the needs of Britain's empire. The government-funded but privately developed R100 made a successful 1930 round trip to Canada. While in Canada it made trips from Montreal to Ottawa, Toronto, and Niagara Falls. The fatal 1930 crash near Beauvais, France, of its government-developed counterpart R101 ended British interest in dirigibles. The R100 was immediately grounded and subsequently scrapped.

Shute gives a detailed account of the development of the two airships in his 1954 autobiographical work, Slide Rule. When he started, he wrote that he was shocked to find that before building the R38 the civil servants concerned '"had made no attempt to calculate the aerodynamic forces acting on the ship"' but had just copied the size of girders in German airships. The calculations for just one transverse frame of the R100 could take two or three months, and the solution '"almost amounted to a religious experience." But later he wrote that '"the disaster was the product of the system rather than the men at Cardington"; the one thing that was proved is that "government officials are totally ineffective in engineering development" and any weapons (they develop) will be bad weapons. The R101 made one short test flight in perfect weather and was given an airworthiness certificate for her flight to India to meet the minister’s deadline. Norway thought it probable that a new outer cover for the R101 was taped on with rubber adhesive which reacted with the dope. His account is very critical of the R101 design and management team, and strongly hints that senior team members were complicit in concealing flaws in the airship's design and construction. In The Tender Ship, Manhattan Project engineer and Virginia Tech professor Arthur Squires used Shute's account of the R100 and R101 as a primary illustration of his thesis that governments are usually incompetent managers of technology projects.

In 1931, with the cancellation of the R100 project, Shute teamed up with the talented de Havilland-trained designer A. Hessell Tiltman to found the aircraft construction company Airspeed Ltd. A site was available in a former trolleybus garage on Piccadilly, York. Despite setbacks, including the usual problems of a new business, Airspeed Limited eventually gained recognition when its Envoy aircraft was chosen for the King's Flight. With the approach of the Second World War, a military version of the Envoy was developed, to be called the Airspeed Oxford. The Oxford became the standard advanced multi-engined trainer for the RAF and British Commonwealth, with over 8,500 being built.

For the innovation of developing a hydraulic retractable undercarriage for the Airspeed Courier, and his work on R100, Shute was made a Fellow of the Royal Aeronautical Society.

On 7 March 1931, Shute married Frances Mary Heaton, a 28-year-old medical practitioner. They had two daughters, (Heather) Felicity and Shirley.

By the outbreak of the Second World War, Shute was a rising novelist. Even as war seemed imminent, he was working on military projects with his former boss at Vickers, Sir Dennistoun Burney. He was commissioned into the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve (RNVR) as a sub-lieutenant, having joined as an 'elderly yachtsman' and expected to oversee a drifter or minesweeper, but after two days he was asked about his career and technical experience. He reached the "dizzy rank" of lieutenant-commander, knowing nothing about "Sunday Divisions" and secretly afraid when he went on a little ship that he would be the senior naval officer and "have to do something".

He ended up in what became the Directorate of Miscellaneous Weapons Development. There he was a head of engineering, working on secret weapons such as Panjandrum, a job that appealed to the engineer in him. He also developed the Rocket Spear, an anti-submarine missile with a fluted cast iron head. After the first U-boat was sunk by it, Charles Goodeve sent him a message concluding "I am particularly pleased as it fully substantiates the foresight you showed in pushing this in its early stages. My congratulations."

His celebrity as a writer caused the Ministry of Information to send him to the Normandy Landings on 6 June 1944 and later to Burma as a correspondent. He finished the war with the rank of lieutenant commander in the RNVR.

Shute's first novel, Stephen Morris, was written in 1923, but not published until 1961 (with its 1924 sequel, Pilotage).

His first published novel was Marazan, which came out in 1926. After that he averaged one novel every two years through the 1950s, except for a six-year hiatus while he was establishing his own aircraft construction company, Airspeed Ltd. Sales of his books grew slowly with each novel, but he became much better known after the publication of his third to last book, On the Beach, in 1957.

Shute's novels are written in a simple, highly readable style, with clearly delineated plot lines. Where there is a romantic element, sex is referred to only obliquely. Many of the stories are introduced by a narrator who is not a character in the story. The most common theme in Shute's novels is the dignity of work, spanning all classes, whether a Spanish bar hostess in the Balkans (Ruined City) or brilliant boffin (No Highway). His books are in three main clusters, early pre-war flying adventures; Second World War; and Australia.

Another recurrent theme is the bridging of social barriers such as class (Lonely Road and Landfall), race (The Chequer Board), or religion (Round the Bend). The Australian novels are individual hymns to that country, with subtle disparagement of the mores of the United States (Beyond the Black Stump) and overt antipathy towards the post-World War II socialist government of Shute's native Britain (The Far Country and In the Wet).

Shute's heroes tended to be like himself: middle-class solicitors, doctors, accountants, bank managers, and engineers—generally university graduates. However (as in Trustee from the Toolroom), Shute valued the honest artisans and their social integrity and contributions to society more than the contributions of the upper classes.

Aviation and engineering provide the backdrop for many of Shute's novels. He identified how engineering, science, and design could improve human life and more than once used the anonymous epigram, "It has been said an engineer is a man who can do for ten shillings what any fool can do for a pound."

Several of Shute's novels explored the boundary between accepted science and rational belief, on the one hand, and mystical or paranormal possibilities, including reincarnation, on the other hand. Shute did this by including elements of fantasy and science fiction in novels that were considered mainstream. They included Buddhist astrology and folk prophecy in The Chequer Board; the effective use of a Planchette in No Highway; a messiah figure in Round the Bend; reincarnation, science fiction, and Aboriginal psychic powers in In the Wet.

Twenty-four of his novels and novellas have been published. Many of his books have been adapted for the screen, including Lonely Road in 1936; Landfall: A Channel Story in 1949; Pied Piper in 1942 and again in 1959, and as Crossing to Freedom, a CBS made-for-television movie, in 1990; On the Beach in 1959 and again in 2000 as a two-part miniseries; and No Highway in 1951. A Town Like Alice was adapted into a film in 1956, serialized for Australian television in 1981, and broadcast on BBC Radio 2 in 1997 starring Jason Connery, Becky Hindley, Bernard Hepton and Virginia McKenna. Shute's 1952 novel The Far Country was filmed for television as six one-hour episodes in 1972, and as a two-part miniseries in 1987.

Shute's final work was published more than 40 years after his death. The Seafarers was first drafted in 1946–47, rewritten, and then put aside. In 1948, Shute again rewrote it, changing the title to Blind Understanding, but he left the manuscript incomplete. According to Dan Telfair in the foreword of the 2002 edition, some of the themes in The Seafarers and Blind Understanding were used in Shute's 1955 novel Requiem for a Wren.

In 1948, Shute flew his own Percival Proctor aeroplane to Australia and back, accompanied by the writer James Riddell, who published a book, Flight of Fancy, based on the trip, in 1950.

On his return, concerned about what he saw as he "felt oppressed by British taxation", he decided that he and his family would emigrate to Australia. In 1950, he settled with his wife and two daughters on farmland at Langwarrin, south-east of Melbourne. Remembering his 1930 trip to Canada and his decision to emigrate to Australia, he wrote, in 1954, "For the first time in my life I saw how people live in an English-speaking country outside England." Although he intended to remain in Australia, he did not apply for Australian citizenship, which was at that time a mere formality because he was a British subject. In the 1950s and 1960s he was one of the world's best-selling novelists. Between 1956 and 1958 in Australia, he took up car racing as a hobby, driving a white Jaguar XK140. Some of this experience found its way into his book On the Beach.

Shute died in Melbourne in 1960 after a stroke.