Benno Landsberger
Benno Landsberger was a German-American Assyriologist.
Biography
Benno Landsberger was born on 21 April 1890 in Friedek, then part of Austrian Silesia, and from 1908 studied Oriental Studies at Leipzig. Amongst his teachers were August Fischer in Arabic and Heinrich Zimmern in Assyriology.In 1914, Landsberger joined the Austro-Hungarian Army, where he fought with distinction on the Eastern Front, winning a golden Distinguished Service Cross. He returned to Leipzig after the war and was appointed to the position of 'extraordinary professor" in 1926. In 1928, he was appointed successor to Peter Jensen at Marburg, but returned to Leipzig in 1929 as Zimmern's successor.
Landsberger was dismissed in 1935 as a result of the Nazi-era Nuremberg Laws which stripped Jewish people of citizenship, having been allowed to stay in Germany after the Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service in 1933 due to the fact he served in WW1. Landsberger accepted a post at the new Turkish University of Ankara, working especially in the area of languages, history and geography. After 1945 he was appointed to the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, where he worked until 1955. During this period he became a naturalized American citizen. He was elected to the American Philosophical Society in 1959.