College Record 2013

Gertrud Seidmann
(1919–2013)
Gertrud Seidmann, who has died at the age
of 93, was a leading advocate of the teaching
of German in British schools and universities
and an internationally recognised scholar of
Neoclassical gemstone carvings.
She was born in Vienna on 16 September 1919 and was educated there, which
included six years of music and Germanistik at the University of Vienna (1932–38).
A sense of the ever-increasing threat to Jewish people like herself led to her flight
to England when still in her teens in August 1938, a few months after the Nazi
annexation of Austria. Her businessman father, Ludwig Seidmann, managed to
follow her to England some months later (only to be interned in the Isle of Man),
but the rest of her family perished in the Holocaust.
In October 1940 she enrolled at Queen’s University, Belfast, as a student of Modern
Languages. With a mixture of modesty and pride, she was later to say that she had
talked the Vice-Chancellor into admitting her. She graduated in 1943 with a First
Class degree in French and German, and then took an MA, writing a dissertation
in German (1943) on the Austrian playwright Johann Nestroy.
It might be said that she had two and a half careers. In each she began at the
bottom and by dint of hard work and ability gradually worked her way up. The first
career, which kept her employed for over thirty years, was as a teacher, principally
of German. Beginning in secondary schools in London, she rose to become a chief
examiner at A-level, a school governor, and a founder of the British Association of
Teachers of German. As early as 1950 she also began her lifelong outpouring of
books and articles, with a collection of German conversation-dialogues, the first of
a dozen books of hers that were all aimed at the schoolchild or university student.
28