and Heinrich Koplowitz (1872–1938), 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 and member of the Jewish community.
In a seminar on baroque literature taught by Martin Sommerfeld,[2] 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.
Hard pressed financially and constrained in employment by their Swiss student visas, Koplowitz and Plaut relied on writing under pseudonyms as their primary source of income.
[4] Contemporaries of Friedrich Glauser, Koplowitz et al. are recognized as pioneers of the Swiss crime story genre (distinguished by setting and the occasional use of Helvetisms).
[5] In 1936, Koplowitz completed a Ph.D. with a summa cum laude dissertation on the Naturalistic theater work of the leftist German Jewish director Otto Brahm, written under the supervision first of Franz Zinkernagel, who died in 1935, and then Eduard Hoffmann-Krayer.
A second lieutenant, he served under Hans Habe in Germany, and he coauthored the screenplay of Death Mills (Die Todesmühlen), a documentary film about Nazi concentration camps that was directed by Billy Wilder.
[9] While his father died in 1938 and his sister Ruth was imprisoned at hard labor from 1935 to 1940 for political activities before emigrating first to the Shanghai Ghetto and then to Australia, his mother was killed in Auschwitz, probably in 1943.
Following World War II, Seidlin made the acquaintance of Bernhard Blume while teaching at the German Summer School of Middlebury College in Vermont.
[10] Also an emigre who had left Nazi Germany in 1936, Blume chaired the Department of German at Ohio State University beginning in 1945, and he offered Seidlin an assistant professorship there.
[11] This signaled a growing shift in Seidlin's scholarly focus from the politically and socially informed studies of his Frankfurt and Basel years to the canonical works of Weimar Classicism and German Romanticism favored in Germanistics during the Cold War period.
[13] He was criticized by some within the profession as an ivory tower conservative at pains to conceal both his gay and Jewish identities,[14] and he resigned from the Modern Language Association, regarding it as overly politicized.
[16] Written between 1947 and 1984, these letters document that Seidlin was increasingly tormented by self-doubts about his teaching performance and needed the tranquilizers Miltown and Valium to enter the classroom.
His 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.
In 1968, he was conferred an honorary doctorate by the University of Michigan and awarded the Prize for Germanic Studies Abroad by the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung.
In 1975, he received the Culture Prize of Upper Silesia awarded by the state of North Rhine-Westphalia and on this occasion delivered an address describing his Silesian boyhood, including the everyday anti-Semitism he had experienced there.
[19] That year, he also received the Friedrich Gundolf Prize for Conveying German Culture Abroad from the Deutsche Akademie für Sprache und Dichtung.