This essay reviews a newly published book of the German art historian Ingo Herklotz on the beginning of the academic career of Richard Krautheimer (1897-1994). Its focus is on the German years of this outstanding German-Jewish art historian (1923-1933), who had to leave Germany in 1933 and lived afterwards in Italy and in the USA. Herklotz shows how Krautheimer’s German years were crucial for his intellectual development and his later achievements, the most important of which was the monumental Corpus Basilicarum Christianarum Romae.