Das Wunschkind

Wunschkind, Das, a novel by Ina Seidel published in 1930. The action spans the short life of Christoph von Echter from his conception at Mainz in 1792 during preparations for war against the French to his death in action in 1813 in the Wars of Liberation. The background of the Napoleonic Wars is used to show human emotions under stress and to scrutinize the cultural and national heritage, which is in danger of destruction.

The central figure is Christoph's Prussian mother, Cornelie von Echter, née von Tracht, widow of Hans Adam Echter von Mespelbrunn, of similarly ancient but South German lineage. Cornelie loves Christoph unselfishly and intensely, for he is ‘das Wunschkind’, conceived after the death of her first child, and in the very last night spent with her husband, who is killed in the campaign of 1792. Christoph is brought up with his orphan cousin, the half-French Delphine Loriot. After fighting as a boy of 16 at Jena in 1806, Christoph becomes a student. He falls passionately in love with Delphine, who goes off with an actor, though by his early death Christoph is spared the knowledge of her defection. Cornelie, the image of maternal care and solicitude, does not marry again despite the inclination to do so. She survives alone, looking after the older generation of her husband's and her own family and after children orphaned through the war.

The character of Delphine recurs in Ina Seidel's later novel, Das unverwesliche Erbe, as the mother of Charlotte Dornblüh. Her death in early womanhood in the later novel is hinted at in Das Wunschkind by her name and character, representing the innocent and yet evil elemental spirit (Elementarwesen), a Romantic motif, described as ‘schuldlos, wie auch die Natur schuldlos ist, … böse, wie die Natur böse ist’. She supports the novel's remarkable interplay of opposites. Cornelie, who disciplines the emotions by her spirituality which nurtures her compassion, illustrates through her conversion to the Roman Catholic Church for the sake of marriage, and her return to her Prussian home and to her Protestant heritage, the main theme to which the work is dedicated; for she emerges as a figure of reconciliation. This is based on hard experience and on the conviction that faith must be sustained and conceived in a heritage of conflict into which her son was born.