[3] Liselotte's mother, Emma Eleonore Hallgarten-Neisser (1878–1939), was youngest of the four recorded children of the banker-philanthropist Charles Hallgarten and his wife Elise.
[4] 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.
Her doctoral dissertation concerned Christian Thomasius and his close association with the pietist movement: the work was supervised by Max Freiherr von Waldberg.
[9] In the more immediate term she accepted an appointment as a languages teacher at the John Burroughs (High) School on the edge of St.
[12][13] 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).
[14] In the words of one obituarist, writing half a century later, "she taught the future occupation troops at the University during World War II".
[13] During her most productive and creative years in the U.S., Dieckmann taught eighteenth and nineteenth century English, French and German Literature.
Her research work focused, in particular, on Goethe, Friedrich Schlegel and the romanticist conception of poetry including, in particular, its use of symbolism.