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Love Across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass, by Maria Diedrich
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In this nuanced, sympathetic interpretation of two extraordinary lives, Maria Diedrich acquaints us with an important and little-known relationship. Ottilie Assing, an intrepid German journalist, met and interviewed Frederick Douglass in 1856, and it was an encounter that transformed the lives of both. Diedrich reveals in fascinating detail their intimate twenty-eight-year relationship, their shared intellectual and cultural interests, and their work together on Douglass's abolitionist writings. Love Across Color Lines is a profound meditation on nineteenth-century racial, class, and national boundaries, and offers new insights into the career of a preeminent American leader.
- Sales Rank: #2014397 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Hill and Wang
- Published on: 2000-09-25
- Released on: 2000-09-25
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.50" h x 1.15" w x 5.50" l, 1.27 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 512 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
Amazon.com Review
Mulatto ex-slave Frederick Douglass and half-Jewish, German-bred journalist Ottilie Assing were unlikely candidates for romance when they met in New York in 1856. But what began as an interview for a biography on the famed African American abolitionist turned into a torrid, extramarital love affair that lasted 28 years. In Love Across Color Lines, Maria Diedrich explores the labyrinthine sexual, social, and racial conventions of 19th-century American society with which these two intelligent people had to contend. Through Douglass and Assing's letters, Diedrich reconstructs the triumph and tragedy of their union. "Douglass was enchanted with his German companion, but he never again forgot that any liaison with a white woman could prove fatal to his political mission," she writes. "Assing," meanwhile, "respected the burden he had taken upon himself. She defied conventional notions of morality and became both intellectually and physically intimate with this extraordinary man, certain that he would marry her." When Douglass's wife died, however, he eventually married another (younger, white) woman--and Assing committed suicide. In addition to uncovering a vital aspect of Douglass's personal life largely overlooked by previous biographers, Diedrich's informative work looks at Assing's remarkable sacrifice, powered by a love that propelled her into America's bewildering racial wilderness. --Eugene Holley Jr.
From Publishers Weekly
Based on admittedly meager sources (a fragment of an 1874 letter from Douglass, Assing's letters to friends and relatives and the preface to her translation of Douglass's autobiography), Diedrich presumes that the 28-year friendship of German journalist Ottilie Assing and married abolitionist leader Frederick Douglass was a love affair. Styling herself as Germany's "Negro expert," Assing "enjoyed the spotlight of scandal," according to Diedrich. She wrote and traveled in the U.S. after having been ostracized in Germany as a "half-breed" whose Jewish father converted to Christianity, believing that her genius would uplift America's underdeveloped cultural scene. Although envisioning herself as egalitarian, Assing told friends she meant to "introduce readers to highly educated darkies"; in writing about Douglass, Diedrich argues, she "carefully avoided any physical feature or character trait that might denote difference," presenting Douglass as "the ideal personification of the classical Western orator." Manuscript revisions in the Douglass Papers in Assing's handwriting indicate she might have served as his secretary, but none of her letters to Douglass survive; she also left instructions that all her letters from Douglass should be destroyed immediately upon her death. When Douglass remarried another woman after becoming a widower, Assing killed herself. Diedrich's at times ponderous prose style may be intended to evoke the rigid class, race and gender conventions of the 19th century, but her expansive rendering of 19th-century Europe and America more than makes up for it. Illustrations not seen by PW. (June)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Diedrich's history resurrects 19th-century prejudice, sexism, morality, and class-consciousness in Europe and the United States while also showing a fallible side of Frederick Douglass, the renowned black abolitionist. It tells the story of the emotional, physical, and intellectual relationship that lasted 28 years between Douglass and a newspaper reporter, Ottilie Assing, who was white, German, and half-Jewish. In captivating detail, Diedrich unveils their shared interests and abolitionist efforts. Diedrich (American studies, Univ. of M?nster) spent years conducting extensive detective work in libraries, museums, and archives in Europe and the United States. The result is intriguing, but because of the complexity of the relationship and the destruction of most of the pair's personal correspondence, it is full of unanswered questions and contradictions. The notes and references are extensive and useful. This probing study should contribute to our understanding of race relations in the late 19th century and will also make a welcome addition to the literature on Frederick Douglass's personal life. For informed lay readers and specialists.AEdward G. McCormack, Univ. of Southern Mississippi Gulf Coast, Long Beach
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Most helpful customer reviews
38 of 39 people found the following review helpful.
Assing & Douglass: Radicalism Beyond Social Taboos
By Christoph Lohmann
A decade ago no one had heard of Ottilie Assing or had a clue that she played an important role not only in shaping European perceptions of the US in the crucial years up to and including the Civil War but in her role as collaborator and lover of Douglass for almost 30 years. Then, Terence Pickett, a scholar of German literature doing research in Poland, stumbled on a folder of letters that revealed an intimate acquaintance and passionate involvement between the German immigrant journalist and the American abolitionist. Pickett cautiously called it a friendship, but when William McFeeley used this information in his 1991 Douglass biography, he strongly suspected that the relationship went beyond friendship. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., choosing his words carefully, has meanwhile also concluded that for "much of Douglass's mature career, Assing was his principal intellectual consort." Maria Diedrich's "Love Across Color Lines" finally gives a detailed and thoroughly researched account of the life of this extraordinary woman, her background, commitment to radical causes, emigration in 1852, involvement in abolitionism, passionate attachment to Douglass, and her courageous but tragic end. It is an amazing story, deeply embedded in the stormy social and political conditions on both sides of the Atlantic. One consistent theme is that Assing's commitment to social revolution, having been frustrated by the botched events of 1848-49 in Germany, plays itself out in her support of radical abolitionism, which she consistently sees in terms of a second American Revolution. Another suggestive argument develops the continuity between Assing's partly Jewish background and her attitude toward slavery and race in the US. Though Assing often expressed typical 19th-century racial attitudes, her experience of belonging to a despised minority in Germany helped her to espouse the cause of black Americans, sometimes with more radical passion than Douglass himself. Most original and interesting, moreover, is Diedrich's carefully argued idea that Assing's imagination was infused with the romanticized representation of a black African prince and a white European woman in a novel by one of her close German friends, who based it on Aphra Behn's "Oroonoko." With all of Assing's emphasis on rational social analysis, much of her relationship with Douglass must be explained in terms of the kind of romantic orientalism that shaped her imagination. As Diedrich makes clear in her narrative, the essential problem of writing this biography was the one-sidedness of the evidence. Assing destroyed all letters (hundreds of them) from Douglass; he destroyed all but 27 from her to him, and he mentions her only in passing in his third autobiography. The story that emerges is largely based on Ottilie's letters to her sister and friends, on her published journalism, and on a handful of manuscripts. But the circumstantial evidence--that Douglass and Assing corresponded more or less weekly for more than 25 years, that during those years Assing spent several months every summer with the Douglasses, and that Douglass often visited and stayed with Assing in Hoboken (seeking refuge there when he was in imminent danger of arrest after John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry)--strongly suggests that her passion was reciprocated and that theirs was an intense intellectual and a fully sexual relationship. Aside from these important and fascinating details (which include the highly probable fact that Assing actually ghost-wrote some of Douglass's journalism in "The New National Era"), one of the great strengths of this book is that it places these personal matters in the larger framework of social and political conditions: the abolitionist movement, women's emancipation, the Civil War, Washington politics, the crusades for the Civil Rights amendments in the 1870s, and much more. Diedrich offers us a profound and nuanced insight into how this complex interracial relationship between two committed social radicals could develop in an America rife with political turmoil as well as racial and sexual taboos. The fact that this compelling story has remained veiled for so long is yet another reminder that these taboos continue to exert their fearful power in our own time. Maria Diedrich deserves everyone's gratitude for lifting the veil so thoughtfully, tactfully, and definitively.
Christoph Lohmann Professor Emeritus of English and American Studies, Indiana University
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Fascinating story of Ottilie Assing, a white German lady and her relationship and love for Frederick Douglass. a runaway slave.
By Amazon Customer
This book took me by surprise as I was not expecting it to be as good as it was. I was doing research on the women in Frederick Douglass' life when I saw this book. Wow! What a find! One of those books that you cannot put down because it is SO well written and so interesting. It is essentially a book about Ottilie Assing, the brilliant, radical, abolitionist German lady who helped make Frederick Douglass an international figure. Her life is described in detail, starting from the time she was born in Hamburg. It follows her through her life journey, arriving in New York, meeting Frederick Douglass and living in his home, with his wife and children, for 22 summers. Diedrich describes in detail the shared intellectual and cultural interests of Ottilie and Frederick, while the reader, like myself, wonder about the difficulty of the black wife who has a white German women living in her home. And there is the mystery that is not understood. Why did Frederick not marry Ottilie after his wife died, instead choosing another white woman, 20 years younger. Fascinating, painful, profound story in 19th century America. A must read!
0 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
I learned a lot from this book! It was ...
By Karen J. Johns
I learned a lot from this book! It was informative and every scholar of Douglas should have this in their collection!
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