Dieter Cunz (August 4, 1910 – February 17, 1969), German-born American historian, writer, educator, and occasional journalist. He is also said to have co‑authored several detective novels or Kriminalromane in collaboration with Oskar Seidlin and Richard Plant (1910–1998) under the collective pen‑name of Stefan Brockhoff (q.v.).[1]
Cunz was born in the rural area of the Westerwald, and grew up in Schierstein (in Hesse), a suburb of Wiesbaden. He studied history, history of religion, and German literature at several places in Germany, ending with the University of Frankfurt (Johann Wolfgang Goethe-Universität Frankfurt am Main), where in 1934 he submitted a historical dissertation on Johann Casimir of Simmern.[2] He subsequently emigrated to Switzerland. In 1936 appeared his study in European constitutional history, Europäische Verfassungsgeschichte der Neuzeit,[3] followed the next year by a monograph on Zwingli.[4] His Um uns herum: Märchen aus dem Alltag appeared in 1938.[5] In the same year Cunz emigrated to the United States; here his first publication seems to have been a historical study of the German-Americans settled in the state of Maryland, issued in 1940,[6] a precursor to his The Maryland Germans: A History (1948).[7] He was a beloved professor of German at the University of Maryland, and from 1956 at the Ohio State University, which now has a building named after him (Dieter Cunz Hall of Languages, at 1841 Millikin Road in Columbus, Ohio).
To the genre of children’s literature belongs his They Came from Germany: The Stories of Famous German-Americans, published in 1966.[8] He also co‑authored German language textbooks.
He died unexpectedly on February 17, 1969, at the age of 58.