He was a professor of German Literature first at Smith College[1] and then, from 1967 to 1991, at the University of California, San Diego.
He gave incendiary speeches at the Free University of Berlin denouncing the Springer Press.
His provocative behavior continued in the US: In 1972, he was suspended from teaching, without pay, at UC San Diego after hitting a Marine Corps officer on the head with a rolled-up newspaper.
[4] In addition to his academic writing, Lettau was "critically recognized as a major twentieth-century prose stylist.
His third wife was Dawn Teborski; they married in 1979 and returned to Berlin in 1991 after Lettau took early retirement at UC San Diego because of health problems.