|
Oskar Seidlin; German-born American literary scholar, poet, and writer of children’s stories. He is also said to have co‑authored several detective novels or Kriminalromane in collaboration with Dieter Cunz and Richard Plant under the collective pen‑name of Stefan Brockhoff.
Born Oskar Koplowitz to a Jewish family in Königshütte in the Upper Silesia Basin of Germany, Seidlin emigrated to Switzerland in 1933, where he supported himself by freelancing for Swiss newspapers. In 1936 he received a doctorate from the University of Basle with a dissertation on Otto Brahm, written under the supervision of Franz Zinkernagel and Eduard Hoffmann‑Krayer. In 1938 he left Switzerland for the United States, where a year later, in 1939, he obtained a lectureship at Smith College for women in Northampton, Massachusetts, a post which he held discontinuously until August 1946 – with a hiatus between 1942 and 1946 for his war‑time service in the U.S. Army Intelligence Division. At Smith he is said to have had a relationship with Newton Arvin. While teaching at the German Summer School of Middlebury College in Vermont in the summer of 1946 he made the acquaintance of Bernhard Blume, then chairman of the Department of German at the Ohio State University, who offered him a position at his institution. Thereupon, from the autumn of 1946 onwards, Seidlin taught at the Ohio State University, eventually moving to the Bloomington campus of Indiana University where in August 1972 he became professor of Germanic languages, an appointment he retained 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.
|
