In 1949 Liselotte Welskopf-Henrich applied to join a scheduled course in Ancient History at the Humboldt University of Berlin. Despite her background as a government economist, she was accepted. Between 1952 and 1960 she was employed as a research assistant at the Humboldt, and was mandated to supervise lectures. She received hr habilitation in 1959 for work on the theme of Leisure as a Problem in the Lives and Thoughts of the Hellenes, from Homer to Aristotle. Intriguingly, the dissertation which she had originally intended to submit was rejected because of its poor quality. It had been based on a collection of quotations from Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin on ancient history. The rejected dissertation was nevertheless later published. It is apparent from the rejected text that when she submitted it Welskopf-Heinrich had already moved on from a Stalinist standpoint. Her son, writing much later in the foreword to an edition of "Bertholds neue Welt", another book of hers that was published only posthumously, identified the 1956 Soviet invasion of Hungary as a turning point in his mother's ideological position, although her analytical mindset ensured that even before this she was unable to be as uncritical of Soviet-style state "socialism" as her husband.