Liselotte Dieckmann

Liselotte Dieckmann (born Liselotte Neisser: 1902–1994) was a German-American art historian and scholar of comparative literature.

Life Background and early years Charlotte "Liselotte" Dieckmann was born in Frankfurt on October 31, 1902. Max Neisser (1869–1938), her father, was an experimental bacteriologist who in 1909 accepted a professorship at the Goethe University in Frankfurt. Max Neisser later became Frankfurt University's first ever Professor of Hygiene. Liselotte Neisser embarked on her university career in 1922, when she enrolled at Freiburg to study Philosophy, along with German and Latin Philology: at Freiburg she was taught by the mathematician-philosopher Edmund Husserl, the classical philologist Otto Immisch and the Germanistics professor Ludwig Sütterlin (Germanist). In 1923 she switched to Berlin where she studied Germanistics with the classical philologist Eduard Norden and the literature scholar Julius Petersen. She transferred again in 1924, this time to Frankfurt university, where her teachers included the philosopher Hans Cornelius, the philologist-historian Hans Naumann, the classical philologist Walter F. Otto and the philologist Franz Schultz (Philologe). In 1925 she moved on to Heidelberg where she studied Greek philology with Friedrich Gundolf and Karl Jaspers, Latin Philology with Karl Meister and German philology with Friedrich Panzer.

Higher education and marriage She gained her doctorate at the University of Heidelberg in 1927. Her doctoral dissertation concerned Christian Thomasius and his close association with the pietist movement: the work was supervised by Max Freiherr von Waldberg. After a period of further study, this time at the University of Cologne she passed the national university-level teaching exams in 1930. It was also in 1930 that Liselotte Neisser married Herbert Dieckmann. The marriage was followed by the birth of the couple's daughter and, some years later, of their son Martin, but would end in separation in 1950. An amicable divorce took place in 1955.

Escaping Hitler The Hitler government took power in January 1933 and quickly transformed Germany into a one-party dictatorship. Antisemitism became a core underpinning of government strategy. Liselotte's father, Max Neisser, was forced to take early retirement from the university in April 1933, notwithstanding his protestations that the whole family had been Protestant for two generations. The Dieckmanns escaped Nazi Germany to Rome in August 1933 and moved on again, in August/September 1934, to Turkey, where Herbert Dieckmann had been offered (and accepted) a lectureship at the university following an intervention by Philipp Schwartz and his newly established office of the Notgemeinschaft der Deutschen Wissenschaft in Zürich. Having crossed to western Turkey through Switzerland, Italy and Yugoslavia, with few possessions beyond the clothes they were wearing, Herbert and Liselotte Dickmann lived for "three uneasy years" in Istanbul, during which time their home was in the same apartment block as the apartment of the exiled German philologist Erich Auerbach.

America In September 1938, having negotiated the necessary quota restriction, Herbert and Liselotte Dieckmann emigrated to the United States of America, where Herbert Dieckmann accepted an assistant professorship at the Washington University in St. Louis, Missouri. He was a member of the university faculty between 1938 and 1949. Liselotte also resumed her teaching career, although she would only become a member of the university faculty in 1944.

Her first employment at the university, coming a few years after the birth of the Dieckmann's son Martin, was probably in connection with the Army specialized training program (ASTP). In the words of one obituarist, writing half a century later, "she taught the future occupation troops at the University during World War II". Back at St. Louis, she chaired the university Committee on Comparative Literature between 1957 and 1967.

Dieckmann became a full "ordinary" professor of German and comparative literature in 1958 or 1959,

She died on 28 October 1994.

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