Dieter Cunz was an emigre from Nazi Germany first to Switzerland and then to the US 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.
14 Facts About Dieter Cunz
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Dieter Cunz authored a number of fictional and non-fictional works.
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Dieter Cunz studied next at the University of Konigsberg in the spring of 1931 before finally transferring to the University of Frankfurt.
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Dieter Cunz chose to remain in Frankfurt to complete his Ph.
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Whereas Dieter 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.
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Dieter Cunz, who arrived in New York in August 1938, relocated to Maryland in October 1939 with funding from the Ferdinand Meyer Fund to work up a historical study of the German-Americans settled in the state of Maryland, published in 1940, a precursor to his magisterial The Maryland Germans: A History.
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Dieter Cunz was among the early specialists in German-American studies and authored numerous articles on German immigrants between the colonial period and the Civil War, such as the explorer Johann Lederer and the radical abolitionist Karl Follen.
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In 1939, Dieter Cunz was expelled from the Nazi Writers' Association and appointed to an instructorship at the University of Maryland, College Park, where he advanced to an assistant professorship in 1942.
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Dieter Cunz was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 1947 and to full professor in 1949, and he served as chair of the German Department.
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In 1957, Dieter Cunz accepted an offer to chair the German Department at Ohio State University following the departure of Bernhard Blume for Harvard University.
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Vail of the University of Washington, Dieter Cunz coauthored German for Beginners, a textbook that was widely adopted throughout the US It advanced beyond the traditional "grammar-translation" approach to the more communicative audio-lingual method and made use of language lab tapes.
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Dieter Cunz edited an abridged version of Ricarda Huch's Der letzte Sommer, a "novel in letters set during the fight of the Russian anarchists against the Czarist regime", for use in German language instruction.
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Dieter Cunz edited Heinrich Jung-Stilling's autobiography, a canonical precursor of the Bildungsroman and a classic document of German Pietism.
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Dieter Cunz was in declining health during his final years, suffering from high blood pressure and a heart valve defect.