ARMY AND NAVY NEWS.
Date: 02 February 1885
August Friedrich Kellner (1 February 1885 – 4 November 1970) was a German mid-level official and diarist who worked as a justice inspector in Laubach from 1933 to 1945.
Kellner was an infantryman in a Hessian regiment during the First World War. After the war, he became a political organizer for the Social Democratic Party of Germany, one of the leading political parties during the time of the turbulent and short-lived Weimar Republic, Germany's first period of democracy. Kellner and his wife, Pauline, campaigned together as Social Democrats against Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
During World War II, working as a civil servant at a small court house, Kellner wrote a diary to record his observations of the Nazi regime. Based on conversations and attentive reading of newspapers, he described the various crimes of that regime. He titled his work Mein Widerstand, meaning "My Opposition". After the war Kellner served on denazification boards, and he also helped to reestablish the Social Democratic Party. In 1968, he gave his diary to his American grandson, Robert Scott Kellner, to translate into English and to bring it to the attention of the public.
Kellner's diary is voluminous – consisting of 10 notebooks – and all the entries were handwritten in the Old German style Sütterlin script. As a result, the amount of material and possible transcription efforts dissuaded publishers from the project for many years. German and English publishers were not interested in publishing the diary initially, until in 2005, when former US president George H. W. Bush, who had been a combat pilot in World War II, arranged for the diary to be exhibited in his presidential library, which brought the diary to the public. A Canadian film company produced a documentary about Kellner and his diary in 2007; Robert Scott Kellner edited and translated the diary, and it was eventually published in German in 2011 and in English in 2018.
Kellner explained his purpose for writing the diary:
1. února 1885 bylo neděle pod hvězdičkou ♒. Byl 31 den v roce. Prezidentem Spojených států byl Chester Arthur.
Pokud jste se narodili v tento den, je vám 141 let. Vaše poslední narozeniny byly neděle 1. února 2026 před 118 dny. Vaše další narozeniny jsou pondělí 1. února 2027, za 246 dní. Žili jste 51 617 dní nebo přibližně 1 238 817 hodin nebo přibližně 74 329 041 minut nebo přibližně 4 459 742 460 sekund.
Date: 02 February 1885
Date: 02 February 1885
Date: 01 February 1885
By Mackay-Bennett Commercial Cable from Our Own Correspondent
Mackay-bennett Cable