in 1932 he mounted a production of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera with student friends. Studies in Switzerland In February 1933, following Hitler's rise to power, Plaut left Germany for Switzerland, where he was joined in April by Koplowitz. They initially regarded the move as a temporary transfer, not a permanent emigration, and expected to return to Frankfurt once the Nazis had been turned out of office. While Plaut and Koplowitz enrolled at the University of Basel in 1933, Cunz, a gentile, remained in Frankfurt but after completing his Ph.D. in 1934 also relocated to Switzerland. Hard pressed financially and constrained in employment by their Swiss student visas, Koplowitz and Plaut relied on writing under pseudonyms as their primary source of income. Together with Cunz, they coauthored three detective novels under the collective pen name Stefan Brockhoff that were published in Nazi Germany. Contemporaries of Friedrich Glauser, Koplowitz et al. are recognized as pioneers of the Swiss crime story genre (distinguished by setting and the occasional use of dialect). In 1936, Koplowitz completed a Ph.D. with a summa cum laude dissertation on the Naturalistic theater work of the leftist German Jewish director Otto Brahm, written under the supervision first of Franz Zinkernagel, who died in 1935, and then Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer. He then relocated with Cunz to Lausanne, where he pursued postgraduate studies in French language and literature. One year later Plaut also finished his doctorate. Since their student visas were no longer extended following the completion of the Ph.D., Plaut and Koplowitz were under increasing pressure to leave Switzerland. In 1937, Koplowitz used the pen name Oskar Seidlin (possibly devised because of its similarity both to his mother's maiden name, Seidler, and to Hölderlin) for his young readers' tale Pedronis muss geholfen werden! A collection of his poems entitled Mein Bilderbuch was published under the same nom de plume in 1938. Together with Plaut, Koplowitz and Cunz decided to emigrate to the U.S. Emigration to the U.S. In 1938, the three left Switzerland for New York, where within a year their paths diverged. Koplowitz worked briefly as a dishwasher before finding employment as an amanuensis for the emigres Thomas Mann and Erika Mann. In 1939, he obtained a lecturership in German language and literature at Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, where he advanced to an assistant professorship in 1941. Cunz was awarded a grant to conduct historical research in Maryland,