L.’s work has rightly been hailed as pioneering in its efforts to bring to light the ideological distortions and academic opportunism to which Classical and ancient historical scholarship were subjected during the Third Reich. L.’s doctoral dissertation, completed under the supervision of Karl Christ (1923–2008) at Marburg and published in 1977 under the title Nationalsozialismus und Antike. Studien zur Entwicklung des Faches Alte Geschichte 1933–1945, was groundbreaking in ways that many German scholars found deeply uncomfortable, at a time when the process of Vergangenheitsbewältigung in German universities had barely begun. One of the great strengths of this collection of essays, brought together here for the first time, is the self-reflexive insight that it brings to our understanding of the history of the discipline: L. does not shrink from discussing some of the ‘grotesque’ difficulties, or even censorship, which he and other like-minded colleagues faced when pursuing their research on the history of Altertumswissenschaft under National Socialism. As a case in point, the rejection of Christ's funding application for a major grant from the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft on this topic in the late 1960s was instant and unequivocal; the proposal was turned down within a week. L. was able to deduce from his own personal research at a later juncture that the grant proposal must have been the subject of heated oral discussion, due to the lack of written documentation surrounding its unconscionably swift rejection (p. 168).

Although the two encomiastic prefaces by H.-J. Drexhage and the editors, C. Deglau, P. Reinard and K. Ruffing, constitute the only completely new material in the volume, its service lies rather in the fact that it draws together a corpus of L.’s most seminal essays, many of which were originally published in fairly obscure journals or edited volumes, as well as providing a complete bibliography of his scholarly output. Chapters representing all of L.’s most prominent research interests are included, from the Nazi reception of Sparta and Karl Otfried Müller's Die Dorier, and the treatment of Arminius and the Germanic tribes in German nationalist and memorial discourse, to the organisation and role of the National Socialist Dozentenlager (indoctrination camps for aspiring academics). In this fashion, L.’s work can be viewed more holistically (although it might have been helpful if the editors had included short reflections on the genesis of each piece, or updated some of the references, where appropriate). Even those essays that were first published nearly half a century ago are still worthy of appreciation, both in their own right, since the findings contained therein remain unsuperseded, and as key texts in the construction of contemporary Wissenschaftsgeschichte.

From this perspective, two of the most significant contributions are Chapters 1 and 8, ‘Programme deutscher Althistoriker in der “Machtergreifungsphase”’, first published in Quaderni di Storia in 1980, and ‘Nationalsozialismus und Antike: Bemerkungen zur Forschungsgeschichte’, which originally appeared in B. Näf's edited volume Antike und Altertumswissenschaft in der Zeit von Faschismus und Nationalsozialismus (2001). Both these essays engage in telling detail with the accommodations which many Classicists were prepared to make with the Nazi regime – partly due to the general prevalence of German nationalist sympathies in the academic milieu after the First World War. Even scholars who were later persecuted, or forced to emigrate on racial grounds, were often initially willing to swear allegiance to National Socialist ideals. In part, this can also be ascribed to the growing sense of existential threat experienced by adherents of the discipline since the late nineteenth century – exacerbated by the loss of the humanistic gymnasiums’ monopoly over higher education, as enforced by the Wilhelmine educational conferences at the turn of the twentieth century.

After the Second World War, there was a widespread and longstanding unwillingness to discuss the ‘unfortunate errors’ which many professors of Altertumswissenschaft had engaged with or published in the form of highly ideological scholarship; a fact that was aggravated by the successful ‘second careers’ that scholars such as Helmut Berve (1896–1979) and Josef Vogt (1895–1986) were able to enjoy in the Federal Republic of Germany. It was only after the death of this generation of ‘Doktorväter’ that more radical research questions could be posed, and even in the 1980s and 1990s, some former disciples sought to uphold unblemished the reputations of their academic patrons through skulduggery and subterfuge, such as the acolytes of the Berlin ancient historian Wilhelm Weber (1882–1948), who demanded that professors’ elderly widows return all the letters that Weber had once sent to their husbands during the Third Reich (cf. H.B.E. Roche, ‘Eine Vergangenheit, die lieber vergessen wird? Scholarly Habitus-forming, Professional Amnesia, and Postwar Engagement with Nazi Classical Scholarship’, History of Humanities 4 [2019], forthcoming).

All in all, then, despite containing no new or revised material by L., this volume will be of great value to all scholars with an interest in disciplinary history, twentieth-century intellectual history or the history of higher education. It is likely to remain an important contribution to the history of Altertumswissenschaft for many years – or even decades – to come.