16 Facts About Oskar Seidlin

Oskar Seidlin was a Jewish emigre from Nazi Germany first to Switzerland and then to the US He taught German language and literature as a professor at Smith College, Middlebury College, Ohio State University, and Indiana University from 1939 to 1979.

Oskar Seidlin authored a number of fictional and non-fictional works.

Oskar Seidlin was born Salo Oskar Koplowitz to Johanna and Heinrich Koplowitz, a lumber dealer in Konigshutte in the Upper Silesia Basin of Germany who served for many years as a city council alderman and was an active Zionist and member of the Jewish community.

Oskar Seidlin met the students Wilhelm Rey and Wilhelm Emrich who became lifelong friends and eventually colleagues, despite their later accommodation with the Nazi regime; Rey served in the Wehrmacht, and Emrich authored a doctrinaire anti-Semitic essay in 1943.

Oskar Seidlin then relocated with Cunz to Lausanne, where he pursued postgraduate studies in French language and literature.

In 1946, Oskar Seidlin recorded his religion as Lutheran on a personnel information form.

Oskar Seidlin moved to Columbus in the autumn of 1946, and he solidified his credentials with an essay on Goethe's Faust that appeared in the Publications of the Modern Language Association.

In rapid order, Oskar Seidlin was promoted to an associate professorship in 1948 and to a full professorship in 1950.

Oskar Seidlin revisited the subject of his doctoral dissertation by editing the correspondence of Otto Brahm with Arthur Schnitzler.

Oskar Seidlin authored the essay collection Klassische und moderne Klassiker.

Oskar Seidlin was alarmed by the leftist turn of literary studies in West Germany and the US in the late 1960s and 1970s and vehemently declined professorships proffered by the University of Mainz in 1966 and the University of Munich in 1968 because of widespread student unrest at West German universities, which he found reminiscent of the events one generation earlier, leading up to totalitarian dictatorship in Nazi Germany.

Oskar Seidlin was criticized by some within the profession as an ivory tower conservative at pains to conceal both his gay and Jewish identities, and he resigned from the Modern Language Association, regarding it as overly politicized.

Oskar Seidlin published a second, expanded edition of the Brahm-Schnitzler correspondence, and he reissued his doctoral dissertation on Brahm in a new printing.

Internationally acclaimed for his adeptness at close reading and text-immanent literary interpretation, Oskar Seidlin lectured widely in the US and West Germany.

Oskar Seidlin's broadly informed and thorough essays cunningly revealed how seemingly minor details and apparent coincidences meld seamlessly into the higher order of a literary artwork, and his writing aspired to an expository virtuosity that matched the dignified elegance of his public presentations.

Oskar Seidlin was twice the recipient of Guggenheim Fellowships, in 1962 and 1976.