Heinrich Wolfgang Seidel

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Heinrich Wolfgang Seidel (born August 28, 1876 in Berlin , † September 22, 1945 in Munich ) was a Protestant pastor and writer . He was the son of the engineer and writer Heinrich Seidel and his wife Agnes geb. Becker. Seidel's cousin and future wife Ina Seidel was also a writer.

Life

Seidel grew up in Berlin. In 1895 his parents bought a house in Groß-Lichterfelde, at that time "near Berlin". Seidel passed his Abitur at the high school there and studied Protestant theology mainly at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität in Berlin . He also took some literary lectures. He spent one semester each at the universities of Marburg and Leipzig . He was lastingly shaped by his theological teachers Hermann Gunkel , Adolf von Harnack , Julius Kaftan , Otto Pfleiderer and Bernhard Weiß . In 1901 he passed the first theological exam. He then spent the year 1902 as a vicar in the Protestant parish Boitzenburg / Uckermark (today the municipality of Boitzenburger Land ). The letters addressed to the parents in Lichterfelde originate from this year; they have been published several times since 1951 under the title Three Hours Behind Berlin and published by Klaus Goebel in a newly annotated edition in 2015. This collection of letters prompted Albert von Schirnding to characterize Seidel as a “born narrator” ( Süddeutsche Zeitung 1998). As vicar and assistant preacher (2nd exam in 1904), Seidel was a private tutor, several times deputy pastor, a. a. at the Lutherstift Frankfurt (Oder) , and one year of advanced training at the Berliner Domkandidatenstift before he was elected pastor of the Lazarus Hospital and Deaconess House Berlin, Bernauer Strasse, in 1907 . Now the basis for an economic existence was laid. He was able to marry Ina Seidel, to whom he had been engaged since 1905. She was his cousin, daughter of the medicine professor Hermann Seidel , a brother of his father Heinrich.

Seidel worked for the deaconesses on Bernauer Strasse for seven years. The chapter The tenth night and the tenth man from twelve: Wilhelm Traugott Lennacker , one of the stories from Ina Seidel's successful book Lennacker , contains motifs from this deaconess house. After the difficult birth of her first child Heilwig in 1908, Ina was bedridden for many months and became a writer during this time. Heinrich Wolfgang Seidel practiced his life as an author, but only worked on several novels and a number of short stories in his spare time. In 1914 he was elected pastor of the evangelical parish of Eberswalde . In 1923 he moved to his native Berlin, where the parish council had appointed him to the New Church on Gendarmenmarkt, known as the Deutscher Dom . There he worked until 1934 and gained a "personal congregation" through his sermons all over Berlin. The early retirement he was granted in 1934 was primarily due to health reasons. His wife, who had meanwhile been able to build a house in Starnberg on Lake Starnberg with the proceeds of her successful book Das Wunschkind , also urged him to move. The decisive factor, however, was the church political situation. After the Nazis came to power, the internal church movement of the German Christians , which was influenced by Nazi ideology, temporarily conquered important church positions. Seidel joined the counter-movement of the Confessing Church and offered resistance to the German Christians, but soon gave up. He remained an anti-Nazi opponent, refused to join a Nazi-dominated organization and continued to work on stories and spiritual writings in the last years of his life. Above all, however, he wrote letters, which he kept in transcripts in an extensive diary of the letters and notes . Ina Seidel also refused to join the NSDAP, but made a distinction between the party and the state, to whose “Führer” she dedicated a poem in 1939 with other German poets. She bitterly lamented this “folly” after the Second World War. Her husband Heinrich Wolfgang Seidel recently published a short biography of Theodor Fontane and edited the poems of the poet he admired and whom he had met personally in his youth. Seidel fell ill with cancer in the early 1940s, which he succumbed to in 1945 in a Munich clinic.

rating

In a posthumous critical discussion, Werner Bergengruen wrote that Seidel succumbed to the lure of National Socialist glory after the “ seizure of power ” by the National Socialists . However, there is no evidence for this judgment in the biography.

family

The son of Heinrich Wolfgang and Ina Seidel, Georg , born in 1919 , became a reporter, critic and essayist. His pseudonym was Christian Ferber .

Works (in selection)

  • Three hours behind Berlin. Letters from the Vicariate . Husum: Husum-Verlag 2015 (first 1951)
  • Letters 1934-1944 . Witten, Berlin: Eckart-Verlag 1964
  • Around the turn of the century. Youth letters . Gütersloh: Bertelsmann 1952
  • Elk . Gütersloh: Bertelsmann 1950
  • Evening and morning . Gütersloh: Bertelsmann 1950
  • The face before God . Hamburg: Hoffmann and Campe 1947
  • From the diary of thoughts and dreams . Munich: Piper 1946
  • Theodor Fontane . Stuttgart: Cotta 1940
  • The sea lady . Berlin: Grote 1942
  • Krüsemann. A post-war novel . Berlin: Grote 1942
  • The barred window . Berlin: Book Community 1941
  • The imperishable . Munich: Piper 1937
  • Evening and morning . Berlin: Grote 1934
  • The man in the Alang . Stuttgart, Berlin and Leipzig: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt 1924
  • George Palmerstone . Berlin: Grote 1922
  • The Barnholzer . Berlin: G. Grote'sche Verlagbuchhandlung 1920
  • The bird tolidan . Berlin: Grote 1913
  • Memories of Heinrich Seidel . Stuttgart: Cotta 1912. Digitized from the Internet Archive

literature

Web links

Wikiquote: Heinrich Wolfgang Seidel  - Quotes

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Quotation from Ernst Klee : Das Kulturlexikon zum Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 564.
personal data
SURNAME Seidel, Heinrich Wolfgang
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Pastor and writer
DATE OF BIRTH August 28, 1876
PLACE OF BIRTH Berlin
DATE OF DEATH September 22, 1945
Place of death Starnberg , Bavaria