Oskar Seidlin
Oskar Seidlin, maiden name Oskar Koplowitz, pseudonym Stefan Brockhoff, ( born February 17, 1911 in Chorzów, Upper Silesia, † December 11, 1984 in Bloomington ( Indiana)) was an American author and specialist in German German origin.
Life
Born as Oskar Koplowitz, the son of a Jewish family in Chorzow, Seidlin studied literature and philosophy in Freiburg, Frankfurt am Main (including as a listener one of the first lectures Theodor W. Adorno ) and Berlin. In 1933 he emigrated to Switzerland, where he lived as a freelancer for various magazines about water. In 1936 he received his doctorate in Franz Zinkernagel and Eduard Hoffmann- Krayer at Basel University with a thesis on Otto Brahm.
In 1938 he left Switzerland and emigrated to the United States to take up a visiting professorship at Smith College for women in Northampton (Massachusetts ). This position he resigned in 1942 to serve as a German native speakers in the U.S. Army Intelligence Division. This was involved in the initial stages of the invasion of Europe. In 1946 he resigned from the military service.
During a teaching career at Middlebury College in Vermont in 1946 Seidlin made the acquaintance of Bernhard Blume, chairman of the German department of the Ohio State University ( Columbus, Ohio), himself a refugee from Nazi Germany. Flower offered him a job at his institute, and here taught Seidlin from 1946 as a professor of German language and literature. At Ohio State University also taught German scholar who emigrated Dieter Cunz (1910-1969), the Seidlins life partner was. In 1972 Seidlin appointed professor at the Indiana University ( Bloomington, Indiana), where he taught as a professor of German studies until his retirement in May 1979.
On his 65th birthday in 1976, he was honored by a Festschrift entitled tradition and renewal.
Seidlin was twice winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship, 1962 and 1976., 1968 honored the German Academy for Language and Poetry Seidlin with the Friedrich Gundolf Prize for the promotion of German culture abroad. Several semesters he also served in an advisory board for the Princeton University.
Works
Seidlin has published numerous publications in German and in English, in the field of German literature, beginning with his dissertation Otto Brahm as a theater critic, which appeared in 1936 under his birth name Oskar Koplowitz. In 1947 he established his scientific reputation in the United States by publishing a 29 -page essay on Goethe's Faust in the prestigious philological journal PMLA. Together with Werner Paul Friederich he made an overview of the history of German literature (An Outline History of German Literature, 1948). In 1963, he published studies collected in From Goethe to Thomas Mann. Twelve trials, and in 1972 he published further studies in the anthology Classic and modern classics: Goethe, Brentano, Eichendorff, Gerhart Hauptmann, Thomas Mann. In 1975 he published the correspondence Arthur Schnitzler, Otto Brahm. When his most important publications Seidlin considered myself his studies on the poetry of German Romanticism: Essays on Eichendorff, Göttingen 1965; 2nd edition, 1968, as well as the awakening of consciousness and the Fall: Brentano, Schiller, Kleist, Goethe, published in 1979.
A collection of his letters to the German scholars William Henry Rey from the period 1947-1984 was published posthumously in 2001 under the title " Pray for me, my dear ... ".
Under the joint pseudonym Stefan Brockhoff is attributed together with the two U.S. Germanists Dieter Cunz and Richard Plant different detective stories and crime novels.
Seidlins children's book Pedronis must be helped! appeared 1937. was followed in 1939 another children's book, SOS Geneva, which Seidlin wrote with Richard Plant. Seidlins The Golden Apple, published during the Second World War in the United States, also belongs to the category of children 's literature.
A collection of poems, titled My picture book, published in 1938.