Rolf Landsberg

Rolf Landsberg ( – ) was a German Professor of Physical Chemistry.

Life Rolf Landsberg was the elder of two sons born to the architect Max Landsberg and his wife, the doctor Hedwig Landsberg. Theirs was a prosperous Berlin family. However, Max Landsberg, who had been diagnosed with epilepsy in 1890, died young, in 1930. Rolf began his schooling in Berlin, starting his secondary education at the Heinrich-Kleist-Gymnasium. However, in January 1933 there had been a change of government, and it became increasingly apparent that antisemitism, which had been a prominent feature of Nazi rhetoric in opposition, was entering the political mainstream. The Landsbergs were Jewish. In 1934 Rolf Landsberg was sent to school in England, where he attended the progressive St Christopher School in Letchworth, to the north of London between 1934 and 1937. Sources differ as to whether his mother and brother accompanied him to England at this stage, but by 1939 all three had emigrated to Britain. Rolf and his brother were both arrested by the British government in 1940, and while his younger brother was interned on the Isle of Man, Rolf was sent to Canada for his internment. In Canada he became associated with the (exiled) German Communist Party. and became a co-founder of an exiled London based version of the anti-Nazi Free German Youth (FDJ / Freie Deutsche Jugend) movement.

After three years, in 1950, Ralf Landsberg received his doctorate from the Humboldt for a dissertation supervised by Karl Friedrich Bonhoeffer and entitled "Potentials in the creation of precipitate membranes" The next step in his career involved a move, in 1952, to the Ernst Moritz Arndt University (Greifswald), in the north-east of the country, where he lectured on physical chemistry. In 1959 he became a professor at the same institution.

Just two years later, in 1964, he returned to the Humboldt University of Berlin, accepting the chair for Physical Chemistry, also becoming Director of the Humboldt's Physical Chemistry Institute. His predecessor's academic career (followed a few months later by his party membership) had been abruptly terminated following a series of lectures in 1963/64 which had been interpreted as a call to remove political dogma from science teaching. In this instance Landsberg's dissident predecessor was Robert Havemann who subsequently gained prominence in various sources on account of the persecution he suffered at the hands of the East German authorities.

A particular focus of Landsberg's career in terms of research involved surfaces. That is what he now concentrated on at the Humboldt Physical Chemistry Institute until his retirement in 1985.

He continued to play an active role in scientific life after his retirement, and was a board member of the Leibniz Society in Berlin which he had joined in 1993. He was also a member of the German Academy of Sciences.

Awards and honours Patriotic Order of Merit