Liebau was born on 31 May 1926, in
Berlin. He grew up as the son of the upholsterer Otto Liebau and his wife Anna Liebau, née Hecklau, along with two sisters in Berlin. After graduating from high school, he was called up for military service and served in the war from 1944 to 1945. He experienced the end of the war with gunshot wounds in the hospital and thus escaped a longer period of imprisonment in
Siberia. After
World War II, Liebau studied chemistry at the
Humboldt University of Berlin and later at the
German Academy of Sciences at Berlin. He worked the supervision of Erich Thilo and received his diploma in 1951 with the thesis "
Über das Na2BeF4 und seine Beziehung zum Ca2SiO4", and followed by his doctorate in 1956 with the doctoral thesis "
Über die Kristallstrukturen des (NaAsO3)x, der Hochtemperaturmodifikation des Maddrellschen Salzes (NaPO3)x(l), des β-Wollastonits CaSiO3 und einiger strukturell verwandter wasserhaltiger Calciumsilicate.” In 1960, Liebau fled
East Berlin to
West Germany. Here he worked as a research assistant at the Max Planck Institute for Silicate Research in
Würzburg and habilitated in 1964 at the
University of Würzburg with work on the crystal chemistry of silicates. In 1965, Friedrich Liebau became a professor for mineralogy and crystallography at the
Christian-Albrechts University in
Kiel. There he continued to research the crystal structure of silicates and derived a classification scheme for it. His book "
Structural Chemistry of Silicates", published on this subject in 1985, is now the generally accepted textbook on the chemical structure of silicates, which make up most of the rocks on earth. From 1973 to 1974 he was Dean of the Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences. In the 1980s, Liebau worked on the construction and synthesis of
clathrates, silicate structures with cavities in which organic or inorganic molecules are embedded, and
zeolites,
aluminum silicate structures with cavities in which cations are embedded. The latter are used industrially in large quantities, such as in an
ion exchanger for
water softening. In 1991, he retired and continued to be active in research. Until his death in
Kiel, on 11 March 2011, aged 84, he worked on an extension of the
bond valence theory, with which certain material properties, such as
high-temperature superconductivity can be described. == Personal life ==