Author: penwithlit

Portrait of Rudolf Virchow, 1885 (author unknown).

Prof. Rudolf Virchow, who was born on October 13, 1821 in Schivelbein (today Świdwin in Poland), was a renowned physician, pathologist, biologist, anthropologist, writer as well as a highly respected member of the Prussian Parliament and later of the Reichstag (Imperial Diet), whose list of achievements is simply too long to give here in detail.

Suffice to say that Prof. Virchow was not only the first person to precisely describe and name leukaemia, embolism, thrombosis and chordoma (among others) but he was also the first to both notice AND prove the existence of animal infectious diseases which could be passed onto humans. His work on Trichinella spiralis, or “pork worm”, showed without any doubt that the parasite causing trichinosis in both animals and humans was originally carried by the former and passed onto the latter. Virchow´s recommendation that meat, before eating, should…

Warenhaus Tietz in Leipziger Straße 46-49 opened on September 26, 1900 (exactly 116 years ago) as the first Tietz department store in Berlin.

Designed by the architect bureau of Lachmann & Zauber, with the facade created by Bernhard Sehring, it was an oversized gauntlet thrown to its biggest competitor, Wertheim, whose largely successful and then biggest department store in Europe stood at the other end of the street, at Leipziger Platz.

Soon the conflict between the two stores escalated and took on what can be described as a comical dimension: it was about the globe. Both companies used a globe as the symbol of their commercial success and both chose to install one on top of the building right over the entrance. Now both sought to win the exclusive right to the said globe as their symbol. Berlin press as well as the readers had splendid time following the developments…