Ina Seidel

Johanna Mathilde "Ina" Seidel was born in Halle, the eldest of her parents' three recorded children. Half a year later the family relocated to Braunschweig which is where for approximately ten years she grew up. Her father, Hermann Seidel, was a senior surgeon at the city's main hospital. Hermann Seidel's suicide in 1895 left his widow and her children to live in seriously reduced circumstances. It is thought that he was driven to kill himself by the ferocity of the "office politics" in play at the hospital where he worked.[4] There was also an uncle, Heinrich Seidel, a larger than life engineer who in addition made his mark as a poet-novelist. Ina Seidel's mother, born Emmy Loesevitz (1861–1945), came from a northern family. At the time of his death Emmy Loesevitz's father, Wilhelm Loesevitz (1828–1861), had been working as a businessman in Riga. As a result of Emmy's remarriage, Ina Seidel acquired as a step grandfather the distinguished Egyptologist and author Georg Ebers (1837–1898) After her father's suicide her mother took the children to live in Marburg in 1896 and then to Munich in 1897. As a teenager, around the turn of the century Ina Seidel became involved with the exuberant arts scene focused in Munich's Schwabing quarter.[1]

Ina Seidel's brother, Willy Seidel (1887–1934), also became a writer. Annemarie Seidel (1894–1959), her younger sister, became an actress and married a Dutchman.[1]

In 1907 Ina Seidel married her cousin, the evangelical minister and author Heinrich Wolfgang Seidel (1876-1945). The genealogical intricacies of their kinship meant that her family name remained the same as before. The couple moved to Berlin where Heinrich had been assigned a parish to look after. The next year, following the birth of her first child, Heilwig, she became ill with childbed fever. She was able to live a conventional life as a minister's wife, house wife and mother, but the very slow rate of her recovery meant that she was stuck at home for much of the time. She never fully recovered.[5] Writing, which till that point had been a "private sideline" for her, became a more prominent part of her life.[2] She wrote poems and linked up with the aristocratic literati around Börries von Münchhausen (1874–1945) and the Göttinger Musenalmanach set, which included Lulu von Strauß und Torney (1873–1956), and Agnes Miegel (1879–1964).[1]

The couple moved with their child to Eberswalde (between Berlin and Stettin) in 1914. Ina's son, Georg Seidel, was born in 1919. He later built a career as a reporter, critic and essayist using the pseudonyms "Christian Ferber" und "Simon Glas".[1][6]

Like many of her social background in Germany and England, Ina Seidel's initial reaction to the outbreak of war in July 1914 was to welcome it.[1] She also shared with her friends the belief that her poetry deserved a wider readership. Börries von Münchhausen had recommended her to his own publisher. Between 1914 and 1933 Ina Seidel published five volumes of lyric poetry.[2] Her volume of war poetry, "Neben der Trommel" (loosely, "Beside the drum") followed in 1915. "Das Haus zum Monde" (loosely, "The House on the Moon"), her first novel, appeared in 1916.[1]

Further works appeared during the republican years. In "Das Labyrinth" (1922) Seidel told the life story of a protagonist called "Georg Forster" who resolves the conflict between his unfulfilled life's ambitions and an unmanageable wider world through recourse to Christian sacrifice. During this period she also became involved with the women's rights movement.[1] The family returned to Berlin in 1923 when accepted a posting to take charge of the parish duties at the Neue Kirche, Berlin.[1] Seidel's work during her "second Berlin period" reflected the wider literary trends of the 1920s, displaying a new willingness to experiment. In her historical novel "Die Fürstin reitet" (loosely, "The Princess rides out", 1926) she intertwines known historical events with imagined scenes of her own devising in order to outline a narrative for the remarkable rise to power of the German-born Russian empress, Catherine the Great. In the view of at least one commentator, there is something curiously contemporary in Seidel's portrayal of a "patriarchal society without men", reflecting the realities of postwar Germany diminished through the slaughter of a generation of young men on the battle fields during the previous decade. Her rural novel "Brömseshof" (1927) represents a remarkable contrast, showing how closely the author was able to orient herself around traditional social precepts. During the 1920s she also published essays and undertook work as an editor.[5] In commercial terms Seidel's break-through novel was "Das Wunschkind", which appeared in 1930, and on which she had been working since 1914. The novel traces the experiences a mother during the Napoleonic Wars. This character's individual fate is so closely entwined with the destiny of the nation that in the end she sacrifices her son to it.[1] Despite appearing during the final part of the so-called Weimar period sales of "Das Wunschkind" really took off only after the Hitler government took power in 1933. In the view of at least one scholar book enjoyed official approval because of the extent to which it provides a "model for subsequent literary representations of motherhood that embraced Nazi ideology".[7] Through the violent shifts in German history that took place during the next couple of decades, "Das Wunschkind" continued to find plenty of readers.[2]

On 29 January 1932 Ina Seidel was admitted to membership of the Prussian Academy of Arts. She was only the second woman to receive this honour:[2] the first had been Ricarda Huch. Her (politically right-wing) friend Börries von Münchhausen criticised her for accepting an honour conferred by republican political establishment, but in the end the friendship and political alignment between the two of them appears to have survived longer than the German "Weimar" republic.[8]

After several years of renewed austerity, intensifying political polarisation and parliamentary deadlock, the National Socialists took power in January 1933 and lost little time in transforming the country into a one-party dictatorship. The Hitler government accelerated the cyclical economic recovery already under way, and unemployment finally began to fall rapidly. Antisemitism now became an underlying pillar of government strategy, and those with a Communist past encountered a new level of thuggishness from the security services, but the full horrors of the Nuremberg Laws, the disastrous war and the holocaust still lay on the future, and there were many who were neither left-wing political activists nor Jewish, who welcomed a return to what looked like political stability and economic prosperity. Ina Seidel herself was one of many who quickly demonstrated a robustly patriotic level support for National Socialist ideology, as did her ultra-conservative friend Börries von Münchhausen. In October 1933 she was one of 88 high-profile authors who signed the subsequently infamous Vow of Total Loyalty ("Gelöbnis treuester Gefolgschaft") to the leader, Adolf Hitler.[9] Seidel's public support for the Hitler government would remain steady till the regime's collapse. In 1934 she moved out of Berlin and settled in Starnberg, a Bavarian lakeside resort town located between Munich and The Alps. In 1938 her second blockbuster novel, "Lennacker", was published. Hans Jakob Lennacker, orphaned and returning from the war in 1918, becomes ill with influenza while visiting his aged and religious aunt. He experiences twelve feverish dreams during the twelve nights between Christmas and Epiphany. He revisits twelve generations of his German forebears, each one a protestant pastor. In this way the book provides a vision of the rise and, some said, decline of Protestantism in Germany.[10] Many National Socialist true believers would have seen the novel as an implicit acknowledgement of the importance of Christian values and traditions which the authorities were always keen to try and invoke in support of their own quasi-religious political project.[1]

Seidel's continuing faith in the "Cult of the Leader" resurfaces in her poem "Lichtdom" which appeared in 1941 in the volume "Anthologie Dem Führer" ("Anthology to the Leader"). The final two lines of her tribute read, "Hier stehn wir alle einig um den Einen, und dieser Eine ist des Volkes Herz" (loosely, "Here we all stand united around the one [man], and that one man comes from the heart of the people").[11] The poem was one she had originally presented to Adolf Hitler two years earlier on the occasion of the leader's (widely celebrated) fiftieth birthday.[3] She had also marked the occasion by sending Hitler a personal telegramme of congratulation.[1] Seidel's romantic novel "Unser Freund Peregrin" appeared in 1940. In 1942 she teamed up with Hans Grosser to produce "Dienende Herzen, Kriegsbriefe von Nachrichtenhelferinnen des Heeres", a series of biographical essays which glorified the women supporting the army through war work. Other war-time publications included biographical essays on the icons of German romanticism, Clemens Brentano and Achim von Arnim, which appeared in 1944.[1]

During the closing phase of the war Ina Seidel was one of 1041 artists listed on the 36 page so-called List of those Gifted by God ("Gottbegnadeten list"). The list was compiled by Joseph Goebbels and Adolf Hitler: it featured those whose artistic contributions the National Socialists valued most highly.[12]

War ended in May 1945 and the twelve year National Socialist nightmare ended with it. Ina Seidel immediately resigned her membership of the Prussian Academy of Arts, which by this time would have been discredited by its close links with the pre-1945 government. She herself faced strong criticism because of her record of strong public support for the Hitler government. However, within the American, British and French occupation zones her books very soon returned to favour with the reading public, and they continued to find plenty of buyers and readers till well into the 1960s. During the 1950s she produced two further major novels with which she sought to rescue her reputation. In "Das unverwesliche Erbe" (1954: loosely, "The inalienable legacy") the expanded on the Christian aspects of her work. In her final novel, "Michaela" she expressly accepted, on behalf of herself and of the upper-middle class more widely, a share in the responsibility for National Socialism. Despite fierce rejection by mainstream literary critics in West Germany (as the western occupation zones had become in 1949), her last novel was another major success with readers. As a result of the postwar division of Germany the old Prussian Academy of Arts was effectively replaced by two institutions. In 1955 Ina Seidel was admitted to membership of the western Academy of Arts in West Berlin.[1] Long before she died, in 1974, her principal works had been translated into a number of foreign languages. A less than flattering obituary in Die Zeit nevertheless described the report of her demise as one of those to which one's first reaction is surprise that the deceased had not already died many years earlier ("Ja, hat sie noch gelebt?").[2]