Baby Sylvia with her parents Aurelia Schober and Otto Emil Plath.

Sylvia Plath was born into German culture. Her father, Otto Emil Plath, was born in Grabow, northeast Germany, soon after Otto von Bismarck became chancellor of the modern German Empire. The son of Ernestine Kottke and Theodore Plath, a farmer and blacksmith, Otto emigrated to America in 1901, when he was sixteen. A tall, erect, handsome man, he had blue eyes, ruddy complexion, high-parted hair, neat brush mustache, and cleft chin. He was educated at Northwestern College in Wisconsin, where all the instruction was in German, received a master’s degree at the University of Washington in 1912, and had an unfortunate three-week marriage. He taught at Berkeley, Columbia, MIT, Harvard, and Johns Hopkins, from 1912 to 1921, and earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in zoology from Harvard in 1925 and 1928. After finally securing a permanent position, he taught science and German at Boston University for the rest of his life. He married Aurelia Schober, who had been his German student and was twenty-one years younger, in Carson City, Nevada, in January 1932. Two years later he published Bumblebees and Their Ways, which, along with her own beekeeping, influenced Sylvia’s poems about bees.

Otto, who admired the regimented nature of insect societies, was a rigid, short-tempered, domestic tyrant who ruled the household through the German concept of Ordnung. Fearful of doctors and surgery, the fifty-one-year-old scientist refused to recognize his