In their fifties and sixties, John and Caroline decided to follow their children across the Atlantic, and they immigrated to the Lincoln–Fall Creek area of Wisconsin, where they had Posen connections, in the 1880s.15 Immigration officials struck the “von” from the Plath surname when John landed in New York. When he protested that the prefix was a matter of “family pride,” the immigration official replied, “there is no aristocracy in America!”16
John and Caroline were uneducated: neither could read, write, nor speak fluent English even after living in America for two decades.17 “They were poor people when they came to Fall Creek,” a resident said.18 Yet by farming and taking in boarders such as the local public school teacher, they were able to buy a house and eventually help their grandson Otto come to America. Caroline, who had “deep-set intense eyes,” died in Fall Creek in November 1913.19 John died two years later, in June 1915, the year his grandson Otto turned thirty. They were hearty people who lived into their eighties at a time when life expectancy was much shorter. An undated photograph shows John and Caroline seated on stools outdoors, probably in their yard, while a young Otto and his aunt Emilie stand stiffly behind. Otto, with his jacket, vest, tie, and neatly combed hair, embodies the grandson made good. John, however, wears a dark, rumpled suit, while Caroline and Emilie are in plain, faded housedresses. The grandparents’ stern, weathered faces look straight out of American Gothic.
John and Caroline’s eldest child, Theodore Friedrich Plath, married Ernestine Kottke (b. 1853) in a Protestant church in Posen Province in 1882. He was thirty-two, and she was twenty-nine—a rather late marriage for the time.20 Ernestine was Otto’s mother and Sylvia Plath’s grandmother. Otto remembered his mother as “a rather melancholy person…weighed down with the care of six children and an ulcer on her leg that never wholly healed.” He described Theodore, however, as “energetic, jovial, inventive.”21 Ernestine and Theodore had six children: Otto, Paul, Max Theodore, Hugo, Martha, and Frieda, all born between 1885 and 1896.22 Another child, born when Ernestine was just nineteen and possibly out of wedlock, died. Ernestine raised the children on her own for long stretches of time while her husband sold equipment for the McCormick company in Germany, Poland, France, and Russia. Theodore picked up several languages during his travels and was able to converse easily with his clients; his son Otto would inherit his linguistic talents.
Theodore’s job in Germany was steady and well paid, but around the turn of the century McCormick was restructured, and family members later speculated that Theodore had been laid off or was unhappy with the changes in the company.23 Theodore left Hamburg on March 3, 1901, on the Batavia and arrived in New York sixteen days later. He listed his occupation in the ship’s log as “master blacksmith.” At fifty, he was the last of the Plath siblings to emigrate. He arrived with $125, no contract of employment, and plans to stay with his sister Mathilde and her husband in Chicago. Ernestine sailed from Liverpool to St. John, Canada, on the RMS Lake Ontario in December 1901 with five of her six young children.24 She moved first to Maza, North Dakota, where Theodore’s brother Emil worked as a blacksmith, and where at some point she reunited with her husband. They lived in Maza until 1906 or 1907.25 By 1907, the couple was living in Harney, Oregon, and by 1912, Oregon City. Theodore worked as a blacksmith and farmer.
From this time on Ernestine vanishes both from the general record and from family anecdote. Sylvia’s mother Aurelia said that after Sylvia’s suicide attempt in 1953, Otto’s sister Frieda wrote to her confiding that their mother Ernestine had been hospitalized for depression, and that a sister and niece had also suffered from the illness. According to Frieda, they had “all made some sort of recovery.”26 Yet this was not quite true. Ernestine Plath died in September 1919 at the Oregon Hospital for the Insane.
Theodore had committed her to the Salem asylum in October 1916. She was sixty-three. According to the admission form he filled out, her physical and mental health had been “normal” until 1905, when she suffered her first episode of “insanity” in North Dakota. The symptoms then had consisted of “head-ache, sleep and appetite loss, and anxious as persecution [sic].” Theodore stated that Ernestine had received treatment for this condition in Jamestown, North Dakota, in 1905, but that the same symptoms had recently reappeared. His wife had no previous history of suicidal thoughts or attempts, he wrote—no seizures or fits, no history of alcohol or drug abuse, and no hint of violent temperament. Her general disposition was, according to court records, “Good when well.”
The admitting doctor found Ernestine reluctant to speak with him, and “much depressed & fearful….Appears to be hallucinated but will not converse.” The admitting nurse further noted that she was “well nourished, clean but helpless.” She was also, the nurse thought, depressed. Another set of hospital admission notes observed that the brown-haired, blue-eyed, five-foot-five-inch, 130-pound woman “Gets out of bed at unreasonable periods…Thinks someone might kill her, begs to stay with us. Worrys [sic] for fear we will send her away.” The admitting doctor’s provisional diagnosis was “senile dementia.”
Ernestine Plath’s fear may have been pathological. Or it could have been a terrified reaction to an involuntary commitment to a mental hospital whose decrepit wards were later used as the film set for One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. By January 1918, fourteen months after her admission, her notes read that she was “old, very quiet, causes no trouble, has to be cared for, physical health good, appetite fair, sleeps well.” Another doctor wrote that month that she was “depressed. Refuses to converse tho she comprehends fairly well what was said.” By September 1919, after steady weight loss, she was down to eighty-six pounds. She died of tuberculosis on September 28.
After Sylvia’s suicide in 1963, her mother told a friend, “Sylvia’s tendency to depression was experienced by members of her father’s family, stretching to three generations.”27 Indeed, in 1988 Otto’s great-niece Anita Helle confirmed that “Plath was not the only woman in her family to have undergone shock treatments, institutionalization, or prolonged and apparent bouts of depression.”28 Aurelia never told her daughter that depression ran in Otto’s family, because Sylvia “so revered her father’s memory.”29 But the medical records suggest that Ernestine probably suffered from age-related dementia rather than severe, debilitating depression. She was not a threat to herself or others, and was, apart from some memory loss, coherent, “tidy,” quiet, and—after her initial admission—cooperative. She did not enter the asylum—or remain there—in a state of raving lunacy. A doctor reiterated her initial diagnosis in October 1918: “This old lady a case of senile dementia.”30 Theodore may just not have had the means or the will to take care of her.
Ernestine Plath was cremated at the asylum in 1919, and her ashes were stored on a dark basement shelf in a copper canister for nearly a century. None of her six children ever retrieved her remains. Otto’s great-niece claimed that Ernestine had emotionally abandoned her family long before she ended up in an Oregon psychiatric hospital. She had “reluctantly followed her husband westward…her reaction was long-term silence, the communication to her children of exactly nothing in the last thirty years of her life.” Otto’s “hard-bitten anguish” over his mother’s neglect remained “well hidden,” Helle wrote, from his wife and children.31 Silence would also mark Ernestine’s afterlife. Sylvia Plath, one of the twentieth century’s greatest chroniclers of mental illness, never knew that her grandmother died forgotten and abandoned in an insane asylum.
* * *
BORN IN GRABOWO, Posen Province, Germany, on April 13, 1885, Otto Emil Plath was the oldest of Ernestine and Theodore Plath’s children. Otto later moved with his family to Budsin. From an early age, Otto exhibited a rarefied intelligence. He earned extremely high grades in school and was an amateur entomologist, studying the habits of local honeybees. When Otto’s grandparents in Wisconsin heard of his academic success, they offered to pay his tuition at both the Northwester
n Preparatory School and Northwestern College, the latter a small Wisconsin college that prepared Lutheran ministers. Before he immigrated to the United States, his parish held a going-away party for him; the members of his community agreed that he was likely to go far in America.32 They were not wrong: he would eventually earn a doctorate at Harvard and become a full professor at Boston University.
In 1900, at age fifteen, Otto arrived in Manhattan, where he worked in a relation’s shop and learned English by auditing local classes. In just one year, he progressed through eight grade levels, mastering the language.33 After joining his Plath grandparents in Wisconsin, he spent 1903–1906 at the Northwestern Preparatory School and then entered Northwestern College in Watertown in late August 1906. There, one friend remembered him as a “clean-cut, neat, well-dressed young man” who played tennis, played clarinet in the school band, and took piano lessons.34
Many of the professors during Otto’s time had earned their PhDs in Germany. Some had worked formerly as missionaries, and, indeed, the college prepared German American farm boys for the Wisconsin Synod with missionary zeal. Northwestern offered reduced tuition to those who intended to join the Lutheran clergy or teach in a religious school. These special terms allowed John and Caroline to send their bright grandson to college—an unlikely prospect in Posen. The college’s civic and religious mission was to give its students “moral stamina and nobleness of character and prepare them for the higher and better ideals of life.”35 Though Otto would never enter the ministry, he would remain committed to the idea of “moral stamina”—a vow that may have cost him his life.
Northwestern’s curriculum was conservative, with an emphasis on Latin, Greek, religion, and history rather than math and science.36 Instruction was modeled on the German Gymnasium system and delivered in both German and English. Otto would have read the standard canon in his English classes: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, Bacon, Wordsworth, Dickens, Macaulay, and Burke. American literature was given short shrift, however. Only a “brief outline” was offered at the end of senior year: Hawthorne’s House of the Seven Gables, The Scarlet Letter, and The Blithedale Romance.37 Hawthorne, with his intense interest in sin, probably seemed a safe choice, though an observant reader would also find a dark reflection of the puritanism Northwestern avowed. It was a message perhaps not lost on Otto Plath, who began to doubt the religious path laid out for him midway through his college years. He later told Aurelia that in 1907 he wrestled for six months with questions about his own faith, “miserable months of agonizing doubt and self-evaluation.”38 He graduated with an honors BA in classical languages in 1910 and reluctantly began his studies at the Wisconsin Lutheran Seminary in Milwaukee that fall.
Otto had always shown an interest in science, particularly entomology; as a young boy in Germany he had spent much of his free time observing the habits of bumblebees. At Northwestern, he read Darwin, whose work increased his passion for biology. Darwin became his “hero” in college, and he was upset to find that the biologist’s work had been banned at the seminary.39 He eventually came to the conclusion that he did not have a calling and left the seminary shortly before Christmas in 1910, “without the consent of the faculty,” as the registrar noted.40 He would preach not the gospel of Luther, but of secular humanism. He would become a college professor—a profession he felt was nearly as respectable as the ministry. His grandparents, however, were crushed, and threatened to disown him. In the end, he did not bow to pressure from his family, teachers, or his small, midwestern, German Lutheran community. He would follow his vocation, whatever the cost. His daughter would do the same. Otto enrolled in a master of arts program in German at the University of Washington, and his grandparents struck his name from the family Bible.
John and Caroline’s actions shocked Otto, but he remained resolved. “He was on his own for the rest of his life,” Aurelia later wrote.41 His father died at the age of sixty-eight in November 1918 from an abscess on the lung; Ernestine died eleven months later at the asylum. Otto visited infrequently with his parents and siblings after they had settled in America, and by the time he married Aurelia in 1932 he seems to have severed most family connections—though Aurelia would later become friendly with his sister Frieda Plath Heinrichs in California, and Otto’s niece (Martha Plath Johnson’s daughter), June Helle. He would cut all ties with the Lutheran Church, too. In The Bell Jar, Esther Greenwood described her father, based on Otto: “My father had been a Lutheran in Wisconsin, but they were out of style in New England, so he had become a lapsed Lutheran and then, my mother said, a bitter atheist.”42 Otto eventually became a member of the Society for Ethical Culture in Boston.43
One of Otto’s closest friends at Northwestern was Hans Gaebler, the only other student in Otto’s year who did not become a Lutheran minister.44 This friendship may have played a key role in Otto’s decision to pursue academia rather than the ministry, for after graduation Gaebler decamped to the University of Washington in Seattle, where Otto followed. There he served as an assistant instructor while studying German literature, in which he earned an MA in 1912. He was active in the German Club and performed in at least one play, the eighteenth-century comedy Minna von Barnhelm, put on by the group in April 1911.45 He wrote his thesis in German on the influence of Washington Irving (author of “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle”) on Wilhelm Hauff, a nineteenth-century southern German poet and novelist.46 Hauff, who died at twenty-five, was a contemporary of Goethe’s and part of the German Romantic movement. Otto was drawn, like his daughter, to dark Romanticism.
On August 7, 1912, in Spokane, Washington, Otto married Lydia Clara Bartz, a second-generation German American born in Fall Creek in 1889 and the sister of Otto’s Wisconsin friend Rupert Bartz. The marriage was short-lived; the childless couple separated after two years and never saw each other again.47 They finally divorced on January 4, 1932, in Ormsby County, Nevada, on the grounds that they had not cohabitated in more than five years. Lydia, represented by an attorney, was not present. Lydia never remarried, and she worked as a nurse at various midwestern hospitals until her retirement. She died in Fall Creek on February 22, 1988. Aurelia describes this mysterious first wife as nothing more than a footnote in Otto’s young life. But she was part of the fabric of his close-knit German American community.
After graduating from the University of Washington, Otto taught German at the nearby University Heights School in Seattle before moving to Berkeley, California. There, he worked as a research assistant for a professor in UC Berkeley’s German department, Dr. Schilling, and was a teaching fellow and PhD candidate in German from 1912 to 1914.48 Lydia lived with him during these years and was registered as a “special student” at Berkeley’s College of Social Sciences from 1913 to 1914. The marriage deteriorated—Otto lost a large sum of his wife’s money in land speculation, and she refused to allow his ill brother to live with them in Berkeley. By this time, Otto’s professional reputation was such that when he visited relatives in Reno, Nevada, in September 1914, his presence was reported in the “Comings and Goings” section of the local newspaper.49 But when the First World War began, he was passed over for a permanent instructorship at Berkeley—on account of his German background, he suspected.50 In August 1914, the Oakland Tribune reported that many German professors at the university would be forced to return to Germany; Otto was mentioned as one of the instructors whose status was in doubt.51 While some German professors did decide to return to Germany to fight, many, including Otto, wanted to stay in America. The university later passed an edict barring German citizens from the faculty during the war.
Otto headed east, telling Lydia he would send for her when she finished her degree at Berkeley. An angry Lydia instead moved back to Fall Creek; Otto never sent for her. A Fall Creek resident remembered older people in town telling her that Otto had thought Lydia, though “very pretty,” was “not good enough” for him because she was uneducated.52 In 1914–15 h
e spent a year as the Carl Schurz Fellow at Columbia University, where he began, but abandoned, a PhD in German Language and Literature; he then taught modern languages at MIT from 1915 to 1918 before considering changing his field of studies altogether.
When the United States entered the war in 1917, teaching German was no longer a practical or even safe way to make a living. By the fall semester of 1918, Otto was back at UC Berkeley, now taking biology classes. He lived in a boarding house, worked part-time at a local market during the day, and ran an elevator at night.53 His German citizenship barred him from the lectern, and he did not receive any financial help from his father, who died that year in an Oregon City hospital. Cemetery records reveal there was no money for a headstone for Theodore Plath, who was buried in a pauper’s lot.54 At least two of Otto’s siblings had also fallen on hard times by 1917: draft records show that Max Theodore was an unemployed auto mechanic in Oregon City, while Paul worked as a mechanic in San Francisco. He eventually returned to Oregon and died relatively young, at age forty-six. Otto had been lucky to receive a college education.
More challenges lay ahead. Otto was reported to the FBI by one Mr. McCay, who stated in his initial FBI report that Otto “seems to have assumed a rather pro-German attitude towards the War on account of losing his positions.”55 McCay also claimed that Otto had told him he would return to Germany when the war was over. The investigator, Armin Nix, questioned the young academic. When Nix showed up at Otto’s listed address, his suspicions were roused, for Otto no longer lived at that address and had not reported the change to the police as required by all enemy aliens. Nix stopped by Otto’s employer, Sills Grocery Store, and was told that Otto had been fired for “refusing to buy Liberty Bonds.”56
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