Dieter Cunz

Who was Dieter Cunz?

Dieter Cunz, 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 under the collective pen‑name of Stefan Brockhoff.

Cunz was born in the rural area of the Westerwald, and grew up in Schierstein, a suburb of Wiesbaden. He studied history, history of religion, and German literature at several places in Germany, ending with the University of Frankfurt, where in 1934 he submitted a historical dissertation on Johann Casimir of Simmern. He subsequently emigrated to Switzerland. In 1936 appeared his study in European constitutional history, Europäische Verfassungsgeschichte der Neuzeit, followed the next year by a monograph on Zwingli. His Um uns herum: Märchen aus dem Alltag appeared in 1938. 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, a precursor to his The Maryland Germans: A History.