page_title: Richard Plant (writer)
section_title: Studies in Switzerland (1933–1938)
hierarchical_section_title: Richard Plant (writer) / Studies in Switzerland (1933–1938)
caption_attribution_description: English: Stolperstein ("stumbling block") memorial for Elli Plaut located at Am Forsthof 21, Wuppertal, Germany. The text reads: "Here lived Elli Plaut, nee Friedländer, widowed as Katzenstein, born 1884. Humiliated / disenfranchised, escape into death [by suicide] 15 November 1938." Ella Plaut's second marriage was to Dr. Theodor Plaut, a physician specializing in gastroenterology who served as a Social Democratic alderman in the city council of Frankfurt am Main until the Nazi seizure of power. Additional information on the family appears in the Wikipedia article on Elli Plaut's stepson, Richard Plant.
context_page_description: Richard Plant 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 an opera scenario as well a number of fictional and non-fictional works, notably The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals.
context_section_description: On February 28, 1933, coincidentally the day following the Reichstag fire, Plaut departed by train for Switzerland, where he was joined a few months later by Koplowitz. They initially regarded the move as a temporary transfer, not a permanent emigration, and expected to return to Frankfurt once the Nazis were turned out of office. Plaut's father was arrested as a socialist in February 1933 but soon released from custody, and his parents emigrated to California, where they had relatives. Suffering from breast cancer, his mother wanted to spend her final days in her homeland, so his parents returned to Frankfurt, where she died in 1934. Plaut's father entered a second marriage with the widow Elli (née Friedländer) Katzenstein (1884–1938) and, reckoning with protection in Nazi Germany from former patients who were now highly placed officials, made the fateful decision to remain in Germany. Theodor and Elli Plaut committed suicide shortly after the Kristallnacht in November 1938.
  While Plaut and Koplowitz enrolled at the University of Basel in 1933, Koplowitz's partner Dieter Cunz, a gentile, initially remained in Frankfurt but after completing his Ph.D. in 1934 also relocated to Switzerland. Hard pressed financially and constrained in Swiss employment by their student visas, Plaut and Koplowitz, along with Cunz, relied on writing as their primary source of income. Under the collective pen-name Stefan Brockhoff, they coauthored three highly successful detective novels that were published in Nazi Germany. Contemporaries of Friedrich Glauser, Plant et al. are recognized as pioneers of the specifically Swiss crime story genre (distinguished by setting and the occasional use of dialect). In addition, Plaut authored under his own name  a young readers’ book, Die Kiste mit dem großen S. (1936), which was published in Switzerland and also appeared in Dutch translation.  He wrote numerous film reviews for Basel's National-Zeitung, and using the pseudonym Richard Plant he even authored some articles published in newspapers in Nazi Germany.
  Plaut and Koplowitz both completed the Ph.D. in German literature at Basel with dissertations written under the supervision first of Franz Zinkernagel and then, following his death in 1935, Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer. Koplowitz's 1936 dissertation analyzed the Naturalistic theater work of the leftist German Jewish director Otto Brahm, while Plaut's 1937 dissertation examined the sexually charged themes and psychological narrative style of the recently deceased Austrian Jewish physician and author Arthur Schnitzler. Following his dissertation, Plaut's next non-fiction book was a compact introduction to the cinema, including formal analysis as well as an international survey of films, entitled Taschenbuch des Films (1938), based on a course he taught at the Basel Volkshochschule. Since their student visas lapsed with the completion of the Ph.D. and they were not granted work permits or immigrant status, Plaut and Koplowitz found it increasingly untenable to remain in Switzerland. Together with Cunz, they decided to seek to emigrate to the U.S. This required mobilizing all available resources and connections, including affidavits of sponsorship by relatives in the U.S. and letters of recommendation written by Paul Tillich and Martin Sommerfeld, both recent emigres now teaching at U.S. universities.
caption: Stolperstein memorials for Theodor and Elli Plaut
exif: {"Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "44", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6151"}