Dieter Cunz

German American academic (1910 – 1969)

Dieter Cunz (August 4, 1910 – February 17, 1969) was an emigre from Nazi Germany first to Switzerland and then to the U. S. who taught German language and literature as a professor at the University of Maryland from 1939 to 1957 and at Ohio State University from 1957 until his death in 1969. He authored a number of fictional and non fictional works.

Cunz was born to Hedwig (née Silbersiepe) and Paul Cunz in remote Höchstenbach (in the Westerwald). In 1917 the family moved to Schierstein, adjacent to Wiesbaden, where he attended a humanities focused gymnasium from 1920 to 1929. As a young man, he was at loggerheads with his father, an Evangelical Lutheran pastor who admired Adolf Hitler and hoisted the swastika flag at his church well prior to the Nazi takeover in 1933. Cunz began his peripatetic university studies at Munich for one semester in 1929, before transferring to Leipzig, where he enrolled for three semesters and studied political and diplomatic history, the history of religion, and German literature, attending courses taught by Erich Brandenburg, Hans Driesch, Theodor Litt, H. A. Korff and Georg Witkowski. He studied next at the University of Königsberg in the spring of 1931 (where he heard the historian Hans Rothfels) before finally transferring to the University of Frankfurt. Here in the fall of 1931 he met two gay Jewish students of German literature, Richard Plaut and Oskar Koplowitz, and Koplowitz became his life partner. In the closing years of the Weimar Republic, Cunz, Koplowitz, and Plaut sympathized with the leftist student political group that was increasingly forced onto the defensive by the growing Nazi Students League.

Shortly after Hitler came to power in 1933, Koplowitz and Plaut left Germany and enrolled at the University of Basel, Switzerland. Cunz chose to remain in Frankfurt to complete his Ph. D. dissertation on Johann Casimir of Simmern, a staunch Calvinist who was a leader of mercenary troops in the religious wars of the sixteenth century, including the Dutch Revolt. His dissertation director was Walter Platzhoff (1881–1969), a Nazi stalwart who advanced to head the entire university from 1934 to 1945. After receiving his Ph. D. in 1934, Cunz moved from Frankfurt to Königshütte, where Koplowitz's parents lived, and then in 1935 to Switzerland to join Koplowitz, who completed a Ph. D. in German literature in 1936. The two soon relocated from Basel to Lausanne. Hard pressed financially and unable to seek employment under the terms of their Swiss student visas, Koplowitz and Plaut relied on writing under pseudonyms as their primary source of income. Plaut adopted the alias Plant, and Koplowitz made use of the nom de plume Seidlin. In addition, under the collective pen name Stefan Brockhoff, they coauthored with Cunz three detective novels that were published in Nazi Germany. Because he had enrolled in the Nazi Writers' Association in 1934, Cunz was able to use his own name when he published in Germany a study of European constitutional history, Europäische Verfassungsgeschichte der Neuzeit (1936). This was followed a year later by a monograph on the Swiss reformer Ulrich Zwingli, published in Switzerland. His Um uns herum. Märchen aus dem Alltag also appeared in Switzerland in 1938. Whereas Cunz was tolerated by the Swiss authorities and was entitled to work as a freelance journalist, Plaut and Koplowitz found it increasingly difficult to remain in Switzerland after their student visas expired with the completion of their doctorates.