Letter from Siegfried Landshut to Heinrich Landahl, August 29, 1948

Siegfried Landshut's letter to Heinrich Landahl, the Hamburg school senator, who was also politically responsible for Hamburg University, can be understood as a disguised letter of application. After a brief reference to the personal acquaintance between the letter's author and addressee, Landshut describes his current availability on the job market, the persecution-related reasons for not habilitating in 1933, his basic academic orientation along with the most important works from his oeuvre and names reference persons. At the time the letter was written, Landshut had just finished his work with the German prisoners of war in Egypt and was about to leave for England, for which he gave a new correspondence address in the letter. The letter therefore dates from a time of professional upheaval and a lack of career prospects. The core of the letter is his self-image as a scientist. The part referring to a claim for compensation is very short and is not even explicitly mentioned. However, this partial sentence, according to which Landshut's habilitation had been “interrupted by political events in 1933,” was underlined in red by the Hamburg school senator or another person from the Hamburg school administration and thus marked as particularly significant. This statement made it necessary for the administration to act in Landshut's favor.