With a PhD in German literature, Fritz Landshoff began his publishing career at the Gustav Kiepenheuer Verlag in Potsdam, where he worked with many up-and-coming literary authors. After the dissolution of the house in 1933, Landshoff fled to Switzerland, and eventually to Amsterdam, joining the firm of Emanuel Querido, where he became director of the German-language imprint Querido Verlag, dedicated to publishing titles by German exile authors. In May 1938, he traveled to New York to visit the exile book club he had co-founded with Gunter Koppell, associated with Koppell's Alliance Book Corp. Until 1940 he published many important books in Amsterdam, to name two of the most well-known: Heinrich Mann's Die Jugend des Königs Henri Quatre and Lion Feuchtwanger's Jud SüB. Following difficulties obtaining a visa in England and months in internment, he finally arrived in New York in early 1941. There he met the former publisher of S. Fischer Verlag, Gottfried Bermann Fischer, and in 1942 they opened together L.[andshoff] B.[ermann] Fischer Verlag to try to recoup some of their lost momentum.