Assing, Ottilie b. February 11,1811; Hamburg d.August 12, 1884; Paris, France
German journalist who reported about the United States. Ottilie Assing was a mistress and helpmate to Frederick Douglass and a fiercely independent woman. Her mother Rosa Maria Assing (nee Varnhagen) was an educated woman of respectable middleclass background, a teacher, and a poet; her father came from a well-to-do Jewish family.
When he took up practice as a physician, he preferred to be baptized as a Lutheran. The two sisters Ottilie and Ludmilla (born 1821) received an excellent education from their mother. Ottilie, an exceptionally intelligent child, grew up in a domestic environment marked by unconventionality, liberal ideas, extensive traveling, and the Jewish culture of her grandparents. When the mother died in 1839 and the father in 1842, the two sisters had to fend for themselves. They moved to Berlin to live with their famous uncle, Karl August Varnhagen von Ense. Ottilie, though enjoying the cultural excitement of the big city, soon clashed with her uncle and her sister, and after an attempted suicide in 1843 moved back to Hamburg. Despite having a small independent income, she was determined to work, earn a livelihood, and experience life to the fullest. She learned to paint and began to publish reviews of literature and the arts. She moved in intellectually interesting circles, expressed her radical ideas freely, and scandalized almost everybody by moving in with a prominent, married Hamburg actor, Jean Baptiste Baison, first as a governess to his children and then as his lover. After he died of typhoid fever in 1848, Assing continued to have an amiable and trusting relationship with his wife. In 1851 she published her first article (on emigration) in the distinguished journal Mor- genblatt fur gebildete Leser (Morning News for Educated Readers). In August 1852 she left Hamburg for the United States. She carried with her the verbal agreement to become the Morgenblatt’s American correspondent. Over the course of14 years, until 1865, she wrote 125 articles, explaining and interpreting the United States to her German readers, presenting her own view on politics, the arts, and most importantly, on the “Negro question” and race relations.During her stay in the United States, Assing wanted to investigate the life of African Americans, having but a vague understanding of race through literature, particularly through Carla Mundt’s novel Aphra Behn. Assing gave an informative account of her crossing in a column entitled “Transatlantische Briefe” (Transatlantic Letters), published in Jahreszeiten (Seasons, November 1852). Upon her arrival in New York, she was guided by the information networks catering to immigrants, stayed in a boarding house suggested to her by a friend, and settled into life in New York City. Since she wanted to report truthfully about the United States, she traveled extensively through New England and upstate New York, avoiding “the West,” which she found lacking in culture and refinement, and all the while reporting to the Morgenblatt about what she experienced.
In the United States of the mid-1850s, she could not help but get immersed in the debate over slavery and abolition. Having decided to learn more about the individual experiences of African American slaves, in the summer of 1856 she met Frederick Douglass. He agreed to let her translate his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, which was then published in 1860 in Germany as Sklaverei und Freiheit: Autobiographie von Frederick Douglass (Slavery and Freedom: The Autobiography of Frederick Douglass'). Working together on this translation project established a relationship that lasted almost thirty years. Assing moved to Hoboken, New Jersey, in the winter of 1856—1857 and rented rooms that could accommodate Douglass’s frequent visits, where she lived in a circle of like-minded Freethinkers, Forty-Eighters, and Socialists. Her relationship with Douglass developed amid activities related to the abolitionist and women’s rights movement and the household routine of the Douglass family.
The children made emotional space for the white woman, but As- sing condescendingly ignored Mrs. Douglass, Anna Murray. Ottilie continued to work as translator and teacher and became the authoritative voice on all things “Ne- groe” for the Morgenblatt and her German readers. During the Harper’s Ferry raid in October 1859, Assing and her German American friends proved their loyalty by helping Douglass to escape, first to Canada and then to England, from which he returned in March 1860.During the Civil War, Assing continued to report on the plight of African Americans, and, together with Douglass, analyzed the war from an African American perspective as a struggle of black selfliberation. The political issues that dominated the Reconstruction years affected their relationship but never disrupted it. Assing supported the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment with a vengeance, infuriated by the reluctance of the women’s movement, but she was rather dismissive about the Republican maneuverings regarding the end of Reconstruction and the
lack of equality and support for the African American population. Meanwhile, Douglass had relocated his household to Washington, D.C., enjoying moderate political recognition for his service to the Republican Party. Assing continued to visit over extensive periods of time and supported him publishing a journal, The New National Era, for which she wrote many articles.
In July 1876 Assing returned to Europe: she visited her literary and financially successful sister in Florence, traveled extensively in Italy, and went to see friends in Germany. In September 1877 she returned to a rather unstable personal and emotional situation. Helen Pitts had entered the Douglass household. When Assing’s sister died in March 1880, leaving her personal estate in disarray, another trip to Europe was inevitable. Assing departed again in the summer of 1881, unknowingly for the last time. Throughout the following years she lived in Italy. In 1882 Anna Murray died, and in 1884 Douglass married Helen Pitts. Six month later, on August 12, 1884, Assing was found dead in Paris; she had poisoned herself. It was said that she had been diagnosed with incurable cancer. Douglass, who was bequeathed a monthly income during his lifetime, did not seem to reflect on whether her suicide had anything to do with him.
Christiane Harzig
See also Forty-Eighters; Slavery in German American and German Texts
References and Further Reading
Diedrich, Maria. Love across Color Lines:
Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass. New York: Hill and Wang, 1999.
Lohmann, Christoph. Radical Passion: Ottilie Assings Reports from America and Letters to Frederick Douglass. New York: Peter Lang, 1999.