1899: Leo Strauss is born to Jewish parents in the German town of Kirchhain, near Marburg, in the province of Hesse.

c. 1916: At the age of 17, Strauss is converted to “straightforward, political” Zionism.

1917: Strauss begins his university education, but it is interrupted by his conscription for military service as a translator in occupied Belgium.

1919: Strauss resumes his university education at the University of Marburg, because of its proximity.

1920: Strauss first meets his three lifelong friends Jacob Klein, Hans-Georg Gadamer, and the emigré Russian, Alexandre Vladimirovitch Kojevnikov (1902-1968), later known as “Kojeve,” who has just left Russia to study under Karl Jaspers in Heidelberg.

1921: Strauss receives his PhD. His dissertation, which praises the irrationalism of F.H. Jacobi, was supervised by Ernst Cassirer, the successor of Hermann Cohen as leader of the Marburg neo-Kantian school. By now, Strauss has also studied at the Universities of Frankfurt am Main, Berlin, and Hamburg. Later, Strauss said that Nietzsche so dominated and bewitched him between his 22nd and 30th years, that he literally believed everything that he understood of him.

1922: Strauss studies under Martin Heidegger, who impressed him deeply.

1920s: Strauss does research and writing principally on Jewish topics. Also during the 1920s, Strauss met several time with Vladimir Jabotinsky, the fascist leader of “revisionst” Zionism, whom David Ben-Gurion later called “Vladimir Hitler.”

1925-31: Strauss is a researcher and writer for the Academy for the Science of Judaism in Berlin. Between 1925 and 1930, he writes his first two books, which are on Spinoza.

1931: Strauss applies for a Rockefeller Fellowship. Strauss's research on Thomas Hobbes brought him in contact with the future “Crown Jurist” of the Nazis, Carl Schmitt. Schmitt was shown Strauss's unfinished book on Hobbes. Strauss wrote a review of Schmitt's little book, The Concept of the Political, which so pleased Schmitt that he got it published in the same journal in which his book has been published. Schmitt's recommendation obtained for Strauss a Rockefeller Fellowship to study in France and England.

1932-33: Strauss studies in Paris, associates with Kojeve there.

1933: In Paris, Strauss marries a recently divorced German Jewish woman, Marie (Mirjam) Bernsohn, whom he had met in 1930, and acquires a stepson, Thomas Petri.

1934: Strauss and his family move to London. Studies Hobbes in the British Museum.

1937: Strauss is appointed Research Fellow in the Department of History at Columbia University, New York, and leaves his wife and stepson behind in Britain.

1938-48: Strauss is brought onto the graduate faculty of the New School in New York, on the basis of a strong recommendation of Harold Laski, and a subsidy from Laski. Strauss's wife and stepson join him in New York in 1939.

1948-73: Hans Morgenthau, acting chairman of the Political Science Department at the University of Chicago, brings Strauss over to President Robert Hutchins' office, and leaves him there. When they come out, half an hour later, Hutchins has appointed Strauss a full professor, with a salary greater than anyone else in the department is getting.

1953: Strauss is a visiting professor at Berkeley. Offered a tenured position there, but declined.

1954-55: Strauss is visiting professor at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Visits Germany.

1956: Strauss suffers a heart attack.

1967: Kojeve, since the war a top official in the French Economics Ministry, suffers a heart attack on June 3, after having just addressed the delegates to a GATT negotiation. At the same time, Strauss retires from Chicago at the end of the academic year.

1968: Kojeve dies.

1968-69: Strauss is a professor of political science at Claremont Men's College in California.

1968-73: Until his death, Strauss is Scott Buchanan Distinguished Scholar in Residence, St. John's College, Annapolis, Md.

(Source is [email protected], but note that many items come from accounts of Strauss himself, and have not been cross-checked.)

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