Koch, Richard, 1882-

The Richard Koch Collection documents the work of Richard Koch, a physician and professor active from the 1910s to the 1940s. The papers include a collection of his poetry as well as documents reflecting his legacy and contribution to the field of medical theory. The collection is arranged in two series and includes poetry, biographical notes, newspaper and journal articles, genealogical materials, and scans of books.

This collection contains the writings and correspondence of Eduard Strauss. Strauss was a chemist and philosopher who taught at the Freies Juedisches Lehrhaus in Frankfurt am Main and later immigrated to New York, where he helped establish a new Lehrhaus.

Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929), philosopher and theologian, belonged to the important personalities of the German Jewish intellectual life after the First World War. Franz Rosenzweig started the Freie Juedische Lehrhaus, where he tried to teach Jewish tradition and culture as part of real life experience and in this way bring it closer to assimilated German Jewry. He wrote several philosophical works and translated the Hebrew Bible with Martin Buber. The Franz Rosenzweig collection contains manuscripts of many of Franz Rosenzweig’s smaller works, some of his personal items, and correspondence with his parents and with more than fifty of his friends and colleagues. The collection contains other correspondence, and a great number of newspaper clippings, photographs, and some objects.

This collection contains material by and about the family of German-Jewish physician Richard Koch, collected by his daughter Naomi Laqueur. In the 1930s Richard and Maria Koch and their five children left Germany for the Soviet Union, Israel, England, and the United States. The bulk of the collection consists of correspondence sent to Laqueur from her parents and her siblings. Spanning the 1930s to the 1970s, the letters paint a rich portrait of the differences in mid 20th-century life in the Soviet Union, Israel, England, and the United States. Additional correspondence includes letters from Laqueur’s friends and extended family, and correspondence between other family members. The collection also documents Richard Koch’s professional activities as a physician, and additionally contains some of his poems and portions of a memoir. It also has materials about friends and relatives, a collection of Alfred Koch’s love poems from the 1910s, and photographs.