Born on April 29, 1929, in Leipzig, he died in Cleveland, Ohio, on September 19, 2018.
[1][2] 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.
[3] He specialized in East Asian historiography, particularly Chinese and Japanese history.
Schirokauer is the author of books including: With Robert P. Hymes, he is the co-editor of: He is also the translator of a book by Ichisada Miyazaki: Andreas W. Daum, "Refugees from Nazi Germany as Historians: Origins and Migrations, Interests and Identities," in The Second Generation: Émigrés from Nazi Germany as Historians.