3 stories from this place.
The Mensur is a German academic-fraternity fencing tradition in which two combatants stand at fixed distance and exchange controlled blade strokes aimed at the face. The cut — the *Schmiss* — was the substantive point of the exercise. The tradition descends substantially from the 16th-century university dueling culture that cost Tycho Brahe his nose.
Read the story →Michael Maestlin taught mathematics and astronomy at Tübingen from 1583 to 1631. He was the man who privately taught the young Johannes Kepler that the Copernican heliocentric system was probably correct, while officially continuing to teach the Ptolemaic system that the university curriculum required.
Read the story →Between approximately 1560 and 1660 the Duchy of Württemberg in southwestern Germany executed approximately 350 accused witches. The peak years coincided with the Thirty Years' War. Johannes Kepler's mother Katharina was tried during the worst of it; she was acquitted; she died six months later anyway.
Read the story →