Oskar Seidlin

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"Seidlin" redirects here. For the U.S. judge, see Larry Seidlin.

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Oskar Seidlin
Born Oskar Koplowitz
(1911-02-17)February 17, 1911
Königshütte, Silesia
Poland
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United States
Occupation Professor


Oskar Seidlin (February 17, 1911 – December 11, 1984) was a gay Jewish emigre from Nazi Germany to the United States who taught German language and literature as a professor at Smith College, Middlebury College, Ohio State University, and Indiana University from 1939 to 1979. He authored a number of fictional and non-fictional works.

He was born Oskar Koplowitz to a respected, well-to-do Jewish merchant's family in Königshütte in the Upper Silesia Basin of Germany (now Chorzów in southwestern Poland). He and his sister Ruth chose to study at the recently founded University of Frankfurt, which enjoyed a reputation as a Germany's most progressive university and also as the one with the highest percentage of Jewish students and professors. Here he attended classes on German literature, sociology (Theodor Adorno, Norbert Elias, Karl Mannheim), and philosophy (Paul Tillich). In a seminar on baroque literature taught by Martin Sommerfeld, he made the acquaintance of the gay Jewish student Richard Plaut, beginning a friendship they maintained when they later emigrated from Germany to Switzerland and the U.S. With Plaut he transferred to the University of Berlin for one semester in the fall of 1930, where they became acquainted with the Kattowitz editor Franz Goldstein and through him with Klaus Mann, both of whom were erotically drawn by Koplowitz. Upon returning to Frankfurt in 1931, he met the history student Dieter Cunz, who became his lifetime partner. He also met the literature student Wilhelm Emrich, who became a lifelong friend, despite Emrich's later accommodation with the Nazi regime.

In February 1933, following Hitler's rise to power, Plaut left Germany for Switzerland, where he was joined a few months later by Koplowitz. They initially regarded the move as a temporary transfer, not a permanent emigration, and expected to return to Frankfurt once the Nazis were turned out of office. While Plaut and Koplowitz enrolled at the University of Basel in 1933, Cunz, a gentile, initially remained in Frankfurt but after completing his Ph.D. in 1934 also relocated to Switzerland. Hard pressed financially and constrained in Swiss employment by their student visas, Koplowitz and Plaut, along with Cunz, relied on writing as their primary source of income. Under the collective pen-name Stefan Brockhoff, they coauthored three detective novels that were published in Nazi Germany.[1] In 1936 Koplowitz received a doctorate with a dissertation on the Naturalistic theater work of the leftist German Jewish director Otto Brahm (1856–1912), written under the supervision of Franz Zinkernagel (1878–1935) and Eduard Hoffmann‑Krayer (1864–1937). Since their student visas had lapsed with the completion of the Ph.D. and they could not even publish works for income under their own names, Plaut and Koplowitz found it increasingly difficult to remain in Switzerland. In 1937, Koplowitz used the pseudonym Oskar Seidlin (possibly chosen because of its similarity to Hölderlin} for his children’s tale Pedronis muss geholfen werden!.[2] A collection of his poems, entitled Mein Bilderbuch, was published under the same pseudonym in 1938.[3] Together with Plaut, Koplowitz and Cunz decided to emigrate from Switzerland to the U.S.

In 1938 they left Switzerland for the United States. Upon his arrival in New York, Koplowitz changed his name to Seidlin, and Plaut Americanized his name to Richard Rene Plant. An English-language young readers' book with a cosmopolitan and pacifistic theme, S.O.S. Geneva, co-authored by Plant and Seidlin, was published in October 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II.[4] Cunz quickly received a grant to conduct historical research in Maryland, and in 1939, he received a teaching appointment at the University of Maryland, where he rose through the ranks and long chaired the Department of German. In 1939, Seidlin obtained a lectureship in German language and literature (in 1941 elevated to assistant professorship) at Smith College for women in Northampton, Massachusetts. Here he authored and edited a tale, Der goldene Apfel, for use in language instruction.[5] At Smith he is said to have had a relationship with Newton Arvin.[6] He took leave from his position at Smith College between 1942 and 1946 for service in the U.S. Army Intelligence Division, and he participated in the early stages of the invasion of Europe. While teaching at the German Summer School of Middlebury College in Vermont in the summer of 1946, he made the acquaintance of Bernhard Blume (1901–1978), then chairman of the Department of German at the Ohio State University. Blume was himself a Jewish emigre from Nazi Germany in 1936), and he offered Seidlin a position in his department. Thereupon, from the autumn of 1946 onwards, Seidlin taught at the Ohio State University. In 1957, Cunz accepted an offer to chair the German Department at Ohio State University, and here he and Seidlin built a house in the suburb Worthington. Seidlin, Cunz, and Plant spent summer holidays in the mountains at Mallnitz, Austria, or on the beach at Manomet, Massachusetts, where they hobnobbed with the vacationing Hannah Arendt.

Following the death of Cunz in 1969, Seidlin was increasingly unhappy at Ohio State University, and in 1972 he accepted an offer from Indiana University, where he taught as a professor of Germanic languages and literatures until his retirement in May 1979. Seidlin also served on the Advisory Council of Princeton University for several terms. He was twice the recipient of Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1962 and 1976.

Seidlin had several publications, primarily in German but also in English, in the field of (German) literary studies, beginning with his doctoral dissertation, Otto Brahm als Theaterkritiker, published under his birth-name (Oskar Koplowitz) in 1936,[7] and the 29-page essay on Goethe published in the United States in 1947, Helena: vom Mythos zur Person.[8] He collaborated with Werner Paul Friederich (b. 1905) on the latter’s An Outline‑History of German Literature (1948). He considered his study of the German Romantic poet Joseph Eichendorff (Versuche über Eichendorff, Göttingen, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1965; 2nd ed., 1968) to be his most important work. His last major publication seems to have been Von erwachendem Bewusstsein und vom Sündenfall, issued in 1979.[9]

On his sixty-fifth birthday in 1976, Seidlin was honored with a commemorative volume or Festschrift entitled tellingly Herkommen und Erneuerung.[10]

A collection of his letters addressed to William Henry Rey (b. 1911), sometime professor of Germanic languages and literature at the University of Washington in Seattle, and written between 1947 and 1984, was published posthumously under the title “Bete für mich, mein Lieber...” in 2001.[11]

See also

Notes

  1. ↑ Cf. Stefan Brockhoff, Schuß auf die Bühne (Leipzig: Wilhelm Goldmann, 1935); id., Musik im Totengässlein (Leipzig: Wilhelm Goldmann, 1936); id., Drei Kioske am See (Leipzig: Wilhelm Goldmann, 1937). These novels were also reprinted in postwar Germany. A fourth novel, entitled Verwirrung um Veronika, is said to have been serialized in the Zürcher Illustrierte in 1938. Cf. Angelika Jockers and Reinhard Jahn, eds., Lexikon der deutschsprachigen Krimi-Autoren (2nd ed., rev.; Munich: Verlag der Criminale, 2005). Finally, the three authors published a fifth novel in postwar Germany: id., Begegnung in Zermatt (Munich: Goldmann, 1955). Some of their work was reprinted in Wachtmeister Studers erste Fälle (Zurich: Arche, 1969).
  2. ↑ Oskar Seidlin, Pedronis muss geholfen werden!... (Aarau: H.R. Sauerländer, 1937), with illustrations by Felix Hoffmann. This appeared in an American translation by Senta Jonas Rypins under the title Green Wagons... (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), and was reissued in Switzerland in 1969 under the title Waldwyl und die Theaterleute (Aarau: H.R. Sauerländer, 1969), illustrated by Felix Hoffmann.
  3. ↑ Oskar Seidlin, Mein Bilderbuch: Gedichte (Zurich, Verlag Oprecht, 1938).
  4. ↑ Richard Plant and Oskar Seidlin, S.O.S. Geneva (New York: Viking Press, 1939), with drawings by William Pène du Bois. This was issued in Switzerland as S.O.S. Genf. Ein Friedensbuch für Kinder (Zurich: Humanitas, 1940), with illustrations and dust-jacket design by Susel Bischoff.
  5. ↑ Oskar Seidlin, Der goldene Apfel: Eine Erzählung für die Jugend, edited with questions, exercises, and vocabulary by Ann Elizabeth Mensel (New York, F.S. Crofts & Co., 1942).
  6. ↑ John Leonard, ‘Music for Chameleons’, The Nation (New York), July 23, 2001.
  7. ↑ Originally published as: Oskar Koplowitz, Otto Brahm als Theaterkritiker: mit Berücksichtigung seiner literarhistorischen Arbeiten (Zurich, etc., Max Niehans Verlag, 1936); 2nd ed. published as: Oskar Seidlin, Der Theaterkritiker Otto Brahm (Bonn, Bouvier, 1978).
  8. ↑ Oskar Seidlin, Helena: vom Mythos zur Person: Versuch einer Neu‑Interpretation des Helena‑Aktes, Faust II (New York, Modern Language Association of America, 1947) [reprinted from: Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, vol. 62, no. 1 (1947), pp. 183–212].
  9. ↑ Oskar Seidlin, Von erwachendem Bewusstsein und vom Sündenfall: Brentano, Schiller, Kleist, Goethe (Stuttgart, Klett-Cotta, 1979).
  10. ↑ Herkommen und Erneuerung: Essays für Oskar Seidlin, ed. Gerald Gillespie and Edgar Lohner (Tübingen, Niemeyer, 1976).
  11. ↑ “Bete für mich, mein Lieber...”: Oskar Seidlin – Willy Rey Briefwechsel (Oldenburg, Igel-Verlag, 2001).

External links

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