Richard Plant born 22 July 1910 (d. 1998)Richard Plant was a German-American writer. He is said to have written, in addition to the works published under his own name, several detective novels or Kriminalromane, on which he collaborated with Dieter Cunz and Oskar Seidlin, and which were published under the collective pen-name of Stefan Brockhoff.
Richard Plant was born Richard Plaut in Frankfurt am Main to the family of the town councillor Theodor Plaut. Upon the accession of the Nazis to power in Germany in 1933 and the zealous enforcement of the provisions of Paragraph 175 of the criminal code against homosexuality, he was obliged to leave Germany for Switzerland in concert with his partner, Oskar Seidlin. Here he obtained a doctorate from the University of Basle (Universität Basel) in 1935 with a dissertation on Arthur Schnitzler.
His first non-academic book seems to have been a children’s tale, Die Kiste mit dem großen S., published in 1936. This was followed in 1938 by his Taschenbuch des Films. In the same year, Richard Plaut arrived in the United States, where he eventually adopted the name Richard Plant. Here another children’s book, S.O.S. Geneva, co-authored with Oskar Seidlin, was published in October 1939. His next book had to await the end of the Second World War, when The Dragon in the Forest appeared in 1948.
From 1947 to 1973 Plant taught at the City University of New York, and discontinuously also at the New School for Social Research.
He is the author of The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War against Homosexuals (1986; German translation, 1991).
Richard Plant died in New York City on March 3, 1998.