Portal:Germany

Adelheid Luise "Adele" Spitzeder ([ˈaːdl̩haɪt ʔaˈdeːlə ˈʃpɪtˌtseːdɐ]; 9 February 1832 – 27 or 28 October 1895), also known by her stage name Adele Vio, was a German actress, folk singer, and con artist. Initially a promising young actress, Spitzeder became a well-known private banker in 19th-century Munich when her theatrical success dwindled. Running what was possibly the first recorded Ponzi scheme, she offered large returns on investments by continually using the money of new investors to pay back the previous ones. At the height of her success, contemporary sources considered her the wealthiest woman in Bavaria.

Opening her bank in 1869, Spitzeder managed to fend off attempts to discredit her for a few years before authorities were able to bring her to trial in 1872. Because Ponzi schemes were not yet illegal, she was convicted instead of bad accounting and mishandling customers' money and sentenced to three years in prison. Her bank was closed and 32,000 people lost 38 million gulden, the equivalent of almost 400 million euros in 2017 money, causing a wave of suicides. Her personal fortune in art and cash was stripped from her. (Full article...)

---

---

---

• 1497 – Birth of theologian Philip Melanchthon (pictured), a key leader of the Lutheran Reformation
• 1821 – Birth of explorer Heinrich Barth
• 1826 – Birth of poet Joseph Victor von Scheffel

• ... that Stephen Gould performed three roles at the 2022 Bayreuth Festival: Tannhäuser, Siegfried and Tristan, earning him nicknames such as "Iron Man"?
• ... that Carmen Scheibenbogen was awarded the German Cross of Merit for her work on ME/CFS at the suggestion of patients and relatives?
• ... that addicts imprisoned in Wormwood Scrubs named the prison football team "Glatt Dynamos", after their psychotherapist Max Glatt, a former Nazi concentration-camp inmate?
• ... that the Late Gothic appearance of the church of St. Martin in Oestrich was destroyed in the Thirty Years' War and restored only in 1894?
• ... that comedian Şenay Duzcu was awarded the German–Turkish Friendship Prize?
• ... that before the age of thirty, Anna Nekhames performed the dual role of Venus and Chief of the Gepopo in Ligeti's Le Grand Macabre, one of opera's most demanding coloratura soprano roles?
• ... that Vivi Vassileva, a percussionist who was the youngest member of the German national youth orchestra, has played Gregor Mayrhofer's Recycling Concerto on instruments derived from garbage?
• ... that St. Joseph, a 1909 Catholic church in the Romanesque Revival style in Berlin-Wedding, has served as an interim cathedral since 2018?

German wine is primarily produced in the west of Germany, along the river Rhine and its tributaries, with the oldest plantations going back to the Roman era. Approximately 60 percent of German wine is produced in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate, where 6 of the 13 regions (Anbaugebiete) for quality wine are situated. Germany has about 103,000 hectares (252,000 acres or 1,030 square kilometers) of vineyard, which is around one tenth of the vineyard surface in Spain, France or Italy. The total wine production is usually around 10 million hectoliters annually, corresponding to 1.3 billion bottles, which places Germany as the eighth-largest wine-producing country in the world. White wine accounts for almost two thirds of the total production.

As a wine country, Germany has a mixed reputation internationally, with some consumers on the export markets associating Germany with the world's most elegant and aromatically pure white wines while other see the country mainly as the source of cheap, mass-market semi-sweet wines such as Liebfraumilch. Among enthusiasts, Germany's reputation is primarily based on wines made from the Riesling grape variety, which at its best is used for aromatic, fruity and elegant white wines that range from very crisp and dry to well-balanced, sweet and of enormous aromatic concentration. While primarily a white wine country, red wine production surged in the 1990s and early 2000s, primarily fuelled by domestic demand, and the proportion of the German vineyards devoted to the cultivation of dark-skinned grape varieties has now stabilized at slightly more than a third of the total surface. For the red wines, Spätburgunder, the domestic name for Pinot noir, is in the lead. (Full article...)