Benita Luckmann (22 December 1925 - 3 December 1987)
Born and raised in Riga, she lived her last years in the Latvian capital under the hardship of the Soviet and then the German occupation. In the winter of 1944 she fled and proceeded to work as a nurse in military hospitals in Vienna and Salzburg. After the end of the war she started her studies at the Faculty of Theology Salzburg, and later at the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Innsbruck. At the same time, she was involved in refugee work at World’s YM/YWCA. In 1950, shortly before immigrating to the USA, she married Thomas Luckmann. Until 1956 she studied at the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Science in the New School for Social Research. She then taught at Hobart College in Geneva, N.Y. until 1961. With the help of the DAAD she studied at the University of Freiburg for a year (with Arnolf Bergstraesser and Eugen Fink in particular) and earned her doctorates degree there in 1962, with a thesis on Russia as a developing country. After that she taught at Rutgers University in New Brunswick (N.J.) und occasionally at the University of Freiburg. When her husband was offered a chair at the University of Frankfurt am Main in 1965, they moved to Germany. In 1971, when he was offered a chair at the University of Konstanz, they moved to Switzerland. She theoretically approached the issue of “small life worlds” and increasingly concerned herself with exile research, in particular with the University in Exile which was later to become the Graduate Faculty of the New School in New York. In line with this work she and her husband went to the USA for research purposes, however they did not succeed in publishing the final summary of this work. In 1987 she died of a severe illness. The majority of materials Benita Luckmann acquired throughout her studies can be found in the Archive. An index is available. Papers Benita Luckmann.PDF