Richard Plant (writer)

Richard Plant (July 22, 1910 – March 3, 1998) was a gay Jewish emigre from Nazi Germany first to Switzerland and then to the U.S. who became a professor at the City University of New York, where he taught German language and literature from 1947 to 1973. He authored a number of fictional and non-fictional works as well as an opera scenario.

Richard Plant was born Richard Plaut in Frankfurt am Main to Meta and Theodor Plaut, a practicing physician who served for many years as a Social Democratic city council alderman. While his parents were religiously non-observant and largely assimilated, his grandfather, Dr. Rudolf Plaut, was a Reform rabbi. Despite his parents' secular outlook, he was briefly involved as a 16-year-old with Kadimah, a Zionist youth organization, where he experienced his first sexual encounters. His godfather was Kurt Goldstein, a professor of neurology at the recently founded University of Frankfurt, which had a reputation as Germany's most left-wing university and also had the highest percentage of Jewish students and professors of any German university. Goldstein, a Gestalt therapist, helped the youngster overcome his stuttering to a large extent and also counseled his parents to accept his sexual orientation.

Following his secondary schooling at Frankfurt's noted Goethe Gymnasium, Plaut enrolled in 1929 at the University of Frankfurt, where he studied German literature and European history. In a seminar on baroque literature taught by Martin Sommerfeld, he made the acquaintance of Oskar Koplowitz, beginning a friendship they maintained when they later emigrated from Germany to Switzerland and the U.S. He attended courses taught by the philosopher and Protestant theologian Paul Tillich and through him became acquainted with the sociologists Theodor Adorno and Norbert Elias. Literature, theater, and the cinema were his primary interests, and his earliest publications, film reviews edited by Siegfried Kracauer, appeared in the left-liberal daily Frankfurter Rundschau. He also appeared on stage as an extra in Schauspielhaus productions of plays by Fritz von Unruh and Carl Zuckmayer. In the fall of 1930, Plaut briefly transferred to the University of Berlin, where in addition to continuing his studies for one semester he wrote cultural commentaries for various newspapers and worked as an extra in UFA films, including The Threepenny Opera. In Berlin he was introduced to Klaus Mann, whose openly gay novel Der fromme Tanz (1925) he greatly admired. Returning to the University of Frankfurt in 1931, he remained active as a journalist and theater extra at a time when courses taught by Jewish professors, including Sommerfeld, were increasingly disrupted by Nazi students. Plant hoped to write a doctoral dissertation on the formula novelist Hedwig Courts-Mahler, but when Sommerfeld rejected his proposal, he decided to transfer again, this time to Basel.

...
Wikipedia