Conrad Schirokauer

Conrad Schirokauer, was a German-American historian and writer. Born on April 29, 1929, in Leipzig, he died in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 19, 2018. His father, Arno Schirokauer, was a German-Jewish literary scholar and philologist.

Schirokauer's family left Germany when he was six years old, in flight from the Nazi regime, and, after three years in Italy, eventually migrated to the United States where they settled in Tennessee in 1938, and eventually moved to Baltimore, Maryland. He graduated high school from Williston Academy in 1946 as the valedictorian.

He completed his Bachelor of Arts in history at Yale College in 1950 and his PhD in history at Stanford University in 1960 with a dissertation on 12th century Chinese political thought. From 1962 to 1991, he taught history, first as an assistant professor, then as an associate and from 1977 as full professor, at the City College of New York. He specialized in East Asian historiography, particularly Chinese and Japanese history.

Conrad Schirokauer married Lore Strich in November 1956. They had met as children in Italy in the mid-thirties.