Plant, Richard b. July 22, 1910; Frankfurt am Main, Prussia d. March 3, 1998; New York City
German American writer and scholar best known for his study of the fate of homosexuals under the Nazis, The Pink Triangle (1986). Plant acted as an interpreter of things German for an English-language audience and also as an interpreter of America for Germans.
In addition to articles in professional journals, he published essays, short stories, and book and film reviews in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Esquire, the Nation, the New Republic, Theater Arts, the gay magazine Christopher Street, the central European emigre newspaper Aufbau, and elsewhere. He collaborated on the successful American opera Lizzie Borden (1965).Born Richard Plaut, he grew up in an assimilated Jewish family and later anglicized his last name by changing the “u” to an “n.” His father was a physician who served as a Social Democratic city councilman in Frankfurt. With the assistance of the film expert Siegfried Kracauer of the Frankfurter Zeitung (Frankfurt News) Plant embarked, while still a school pupil, on a career reviewing films. Soon after he entered the University of Frankfurt, Nazi candidates swept the lists in nationwide German Students’ Association elections in 1930. Plant, who despite tension with his father had become a Social Democrat, attended the university lectures of the Socialist Protestant theologian Paul Tillich. Nazi students disrupted Tillich’s classes even before Adolf Hitler came to power in late January 1933. Within a month Plant departed for Switzerland to continue his studies at the University of Basel. There he completed a doctorate in German literature while expanding his career as a journalist and writer—mostly under pseudonyms. By the time Swiss officialdom’s rising hostility toward German refugees impelled him to move on, he had written many film and book reviews, an excellent guide to cinema, and a children’s book.
He also collaborated on a children’s book and four detective stories.Arriving in New York in May 1938, he found that his experiences in America reinforced his sense of being an outsider. His credentials were of little value in a country still in economic depression. Although he continued to write for German-language publications and within six months began publishing in English, he could not support himself adequately until years after his arrival. After U.S. entry into World War II he worked as a translator for propaganda broadcasts to Germany. Finally, in 1947 he found what became a secure base in the German Department at City College in New York. After retiring in 1973 he gave courses at New York’s New School. Plant influenced the reception of postwar German literature in the United States through popular courses and public lectures, and, on a larger scale, through his editions and published appraisals of major postwar writers such as Heinrich Boll, Ingeborg Bachmann, and Marie Luise Kaschnitz. Plant’s own major contribution to postwar literature was Dragon in the Forest (1948), a semiautobiographical novel distinguished by careful portraits of middle-class youth in pre-Hitler Frankfurt. Soon after retiring from City College, Plant joined the public discussion of the gay liberation movement that developed in the United States beginning in 1969. His distinctive contribution utilized his knowledge of Germany to research the fate of gays in Nazi Germany. By the time his Pink Triangle appeared in 1986, a small body of German publications on the topic had come out. The popularity of Plant’s book, especially its German translation (1991), was due mainly to the personal perspectives its author brought to the story of the maltreatment of homosexuals. For once Plant was an insider. He bore witness in the name of friends, lovers, and acquaintances. He opened the book with a sensitive account of the experiences in Europe of himself and some of his friends, and closed with a compelling description of his agonizing endeavor after 1945 to ascertain what had happened to people from his youth.
He fostered American and German awareness that homosexuals were among the victims of the Third Reich, indeed that surviving gays persecuted by the Nazis received no compensation after the war. Worse, occupation authorities and German officials returned many gays to serve out penal sentences. Although Plant’s critics, particularly in Germany, faulted him for implying that in the Third Reich gays underwent a holocaust similar to the genocide practiced on Jews, Plant was a voice of moderation in the United States, where Martin Sherman’s play Bent (1979) depicted the mistreatment and murder of homosexuals as having occurred on a scale similar to the victimization of Jews. It became Plant’s considered opinion that the Germany of his youth was far more congenial to homosexuals than the United States—at least until the changes that occurred in the wake of the gay liberation movement of the late 1960s and the 1970s. To Plant the biggest obstacle to sexual freedom in the United States was its Puritan heritage; not only were many homosexual practices illegal, as in Europe, but sinful, too. His last major project, unfinished at his death, was a history of antigay ideas in the United States. But he lived long enough to be honored by exhibits and ceremonies in Berlin and Frankfurt for his contributions to gay liberation in Europe and the United States,.Walter Struve
See also Aufbau; Intellectual Exile; Kracauer, Siegfried; Mosse, George Lachmann
References and Further Reading
Klar, Hanna Laura. I Have Two Faces: The New York Author Richard Plant. Beta Video. Frankfurt am Main: Hanna Laura Klar-Produktion, 1998.
Sternweiler, Andreas, ed. Frankfurt, Basel, New York: Richard Plant. Berlin: Verlag Rosa Winkel, 1996.