Seidel, Ina

(1885-1974)

   poet and novelist; best known for Das Wunsch-kind (The wish child), the 1930 story of the relationship between a boy and his widowed mother during the Prussian Wars of Liberation. Born in Halle to a well-known literary family, she cultivated an interest in literature. She was raised in Braunschweig, Marburg, and, after her father's early death, Munich. The trauma of her father's 1897 suicide is reflected in much of her later work. In 1907, after marrying her pastor cousin Heinrich Seidel (also a writer), she moved to Berlin.* Her first poetry collection appeared in 1914, a second (Neben der Trommel her [Alongside the drum]) the next year, and her first novel (Das Haus zum Monde) in 1917. Although her early work was derivative and subjective, she overcame a purely personal focus in favor of eternal themes. She wrote extensive verse, but her prose received more recognition. From the 1920s her writing exhibited an empathy for cultural and psychological issues.

   During 1914-1923 the Seidels lived in a rural setting near Eberswalde. They returned to Berlin in 1923, where Heinrich assumed pastoral duties at the Berlin Cathedral. Ina's breakthrough came in 1922 with publication of Das Labyrinth, a somber Freudian study of the eighteenth-century naturalist Georg Forster; the novel's main character, despite immense talent, dies in misery as he gropes through life's labyrinth. The psychological problems resulting from World War I are the theme of a 1928 novel, Bromseshof, in which a returning officer is incapable of maintaining the family estate. Das Wunschkind exposes the emotion attached to motherhood during war while investigating an endangered national inheritance.

   In 1934, upon Heinrich's retirement, the Seidels moved to Starnberg, Ba-varia*; thereafter Ina wrote essays, poetry, and novels, the most noted being Lennacker, a complex history of a Lutheran vicarage. During the Nazi era she completed an autobiography as well as biographies of Clemens von Brentano, Bettina Armin (nee Brentano), and Achim von Armin. Although she was an early adherent of Hitler*, her final novel, Michaela (published in 1959), treated the guilt of middle-class, Christian Germans who had supported the Third Reich.

   REFERENCES:Benz and Graml, Biographisches Lexikon; Bithell, Modern German Lit-erature; Buck, Bloomsbury Guide; Ferber, Seidels; Garland and Garland, Oxford Com-panion to German Literature.