Oskar Seidlin
| Oskar Seidlin | |
|---|---|
| Born |
Salo Oskar Koplowitz February 17, 1911 Königshütte, Silesia Germany |
| Died | December 11, 1984 (aged 73) Bloomington, Indiana United States |
| Resting place | Walnut Grove Cemetery, Worthington, Ohio |
| Nationality | German, U.S. |
| Alma mater | University of Basel |
| Occupation | Professor of German, author |
| Years active | 1939–1979 |
| Partner(s) |
Dieter Cunz Hans Høgel |
| Awards | Goethe Medal in Gold (1963) Friedrich Gundolf Prize (1976) Georg Dehio Prize (1983) |
Oskar Seidlin (February 17, 1911 – December 11, 1984) was an emigre from Nazi Germany first to Switzerland and then to the U.S. 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 Salo Oskar Koplowitz to Johanna and Heinrich Koplowitz, a lumber dealer in Königshütte in the Upper Silesia Basin of Germany (now Chorzów in southwestern Poland) who served for many years as a city council alderman and was an active Zionist. After completing secondary schooling at the humanities-focused Realgymnasium in Beuthen (now Bytom) in 1929, he enrolled for one semester at the University of Freiburg and then transferred to the recently founded University of Frankfurt, which enjoyed a reputation as Germany's most progressive university and also had the highest percentage of Jewish students and professors. Here he was joined by his seven-year-older sister Ruth and attended courses on German literature (taught by Wolfgang Pfeiffer-Belli, Julius Schwietering, Franz Schultz, Max Herrmann), French literature, philosophy (Paul Tillich), and history. He also audited courses in sociology (Theodor Adorno, Norbert Elias, Karl Mannheim). In a seminar on baroque literature taught by Martin Sommerfeld (1894-1939), he made the acquaintance of the gay Jewish student Richard Plaut, beginning a friendship they maintained when they later emigrated to Switzerland and the U.S. In the fall of 1930, he transferred with Plaut for one semester to the University of Berlin, where they became acquainted with the Kattowitz editor Franz Goldstein and through him with Klaus Mann, both of whom were infatuated with 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 (1909-1998), who became a lifelong friend, despite Emrich's later accommodation with the Nazi regime and authorship of a doctrinaire anti-Semitic essay in 1943. In the closing years of the Weimar Republic, Koplowitz, Cunz, Plaut, and Emrich sympathized with Frankfurt's leftist student political group that was increasingly on the defensive when Nazi students felt emboldened to disrupt courses taught by Jewish professors, including Sommerfeld. Koplowitz's primary interest was theater directing, and with student friends he mounted a production of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera in 1932.
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