Siegfried Lichtenstaedter was born in Baiersdorf in Franconia on January 8, 1865, the youngest of five children of leather merchant Wolf Lichtenstaedter and his second wife, Sophie, née Sulzberger. Following the death of his father, his education was undertaken by his mother and the Baiersdorf district rabbi, Wolf Cohn. In 1882, Siegfried Lichtenstaedter took his school-leaving examination at the Fridericianum, a humanist grammar school in Erlangen. He attended universities in Erlangen, Berlin and Munich, studying first Oriental Studies, Classical Philology, Comparative Grammar of the Indo-European Languages and History of the German State and Law. Siegfried Lichtenstaedter finally decided for the law, and took his first State Examination in Munich in 1886. He did part of his practical traineeship with the Munich municipal authorities. From 1890, Siegfried Lichtenstaedter worked in the Bavarian Fiscal Administration, where he made a career as a Royal Bavarian senior counsellor (Oberregierungsrat). He retired at the end of 1932, aged 67. Aside from his professional career, he wrote satires and political texts under various pseudonyms, including ‘Culture and Humanity: Studies in Politics and the Psychology of Peoples’ in 1897. Siegfried Lichtenstaedter indulged his love of the Orient by going on journeys to Thessaloniki, at the time in Ottoman hands, and Serbia.
His life underwent radical changes with the Nazi seizure of power. As a Jew, Siegfried Lichtenstaedter was now exposed to exclusion and discrimination. In 1936, he visited his sister in Palestine, but returned, however, to Germany. Because of the Nazi name change decree, under which Jewish men were forced to take Israel as their second forename, he relinquished his German forename of Siegfried and called himself Sami. In late 1938, he published a desperate plea to the free world, especially the United States, entitled ‘Perish or change? A memorandum about the Jewish distress’. Siegfried Lichtenstaedter had already in March 1938 been forced to leave the flat at Arcisstr. 39 that had been his home for many years and move to a guest house at St.-Pauls-Platz 6. From the summer of 1939 he lived in a “Jew flat” at Maximilianstrasse 9. On February 1, 1942, Siegfried Lichtenstaedter had to move to the "Judensiedlung" ("JewishQuarter") Milbershofen, a barrack camp in Knorrstrasse. Just under six months later, on June 23, 1942, the Gestapo (secret state police) deported him to the Theresienstadt ghetto. Siegfried Lichtenstaedter died there on December 6, 1942 as a result of the catastrophic living conditions. (text Ellen Presser, editor C. Fritsche, translation C. Hales)
