Dieter Cunz
| Dieter Cunz | |
|---|---|
| Born |
August 4, 1910 Höchstenbach Germany |
| Died | February 17, 1969 (aged 58) Columbus, Ohio United States |
| Resting place | Walnut Grove Cemetery, Worthington, Ohio |
| Nationality | German, U.S. |
| Occupation | Professor of German |
| Years active | 1939–1969 |
| Notable work | The Maryland Germans: A History (1948) |
| Partner(s) | Oskar Seidlin |
| Awards |
Officer's Cross of the Federal Republic of Germany (1959) Alfred J. Wright Award of Ohio State University (1964) |
Dieter Cunz (August 4, 1910 – February 17, 1969) was an emigre from 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 Paul and Hedwig (née Silbersiepe) 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. He 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 into the defensive by the growing Nazi Students League.
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