It was from Heidelberg University that in 1923 he received his doctorate, with a dissertation on Medieval love songs ("Untersuchungen über das Hohelied in Minneliedern").
[3] After several years during which politics had become ever more polarised and parliament gridlocked, the National Socialists took power in January 1933 and lost little time in transforming Germany into a one-party dictatorship.
The so-called Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service ("Gesetz zur Wiederherstellung des Berufsbeamtentums") passed in April 1933 provided expressly for the immediate dismissal of "non-Aryans" from a wide range of public-sector jobs.
[3] That same year he accepted an invitation from Leo Baeck, president of the "Reichsvertretung der Deutschen Juden" (loosely, "National representation of German Jews"), to work as an organiser of Jewish education.
He himself authored booklet 10: "Das Judentum im Weltbild des Mittelalters" ("Judaism in the late medieval context"), published in 1935.
[3] They moved on in 1940 to the United States where Leschnitzer immediately set about creating and organising the "American Institute of Modern Languages" in New York.
[2] From 1940 till 1952, with backing vfrom the "New World Club", he directed what was in effect a private language school for newly arrived immigrants, most of whom were refugees, often from political and/or race-based persecution in Germany and central Europe more generally.
The western two thirds of Germany were now divided into four military occupation zones, with the United States taking on control of most of the southern part of the country.
[1] Starting in 1952 he also taught a succession of summer courses as a guest professor at the US-sponsored Free University of (West) Berlin (FU).
[1] The Shoah was still a recent trauma for millions of survivors, and during the 1950s only very few Jews, of whom Adolf Leschnitzer was one, felt able and willing to work regularly – albeit not permanently – in Berlin.