In a lecture to a group of Munich students in 1933, "Der Dichter und sein Volk"(The Poet and His People), Ina Seidel compared the poet to a priest: like the priest, the poet not only bears the suffering of others but is also a guardian of a culture's most sacred inheritance: language. Despite the cultural, political, and intellectual turmoil of her time, Seidel reveals in this lecture, as in all her works, both confidence in the power of the written word and reverence for the task of the writer to preserve the language, culture, and values of his people. For Seidel, who is often viewed as a representative Protestant writer, these values were not merely the tenets or dogma of any one religious, political, or intellectual movement; they were the inherent connections of man to nature, mother to child, brother to sister, and generation to generation. The task...