Ottilie Assing

Ottilie Assing

Ottilie Davida Assing (born February 11, 1819 in Hamburg , † August 21, 1884 in Paris ) was a German writer and fighter for abolitionism .

Life

As the older daughter of Rosa Maria Varnhagen (1783–1840) and David Assur Assing (1787–1842), a Jewish doctor from Königsberg, Ottilie Assing grew up in a liberal, musically and spiritually inspired family: Mother Rosa Maria received Heinrich Heine , among others , Friedrich Hebbel , Karl Gutzkow and the poets of Young Germany in their salon; Ottilie and her sister Ludmilla Assing took part in political discussions and "reading evenings", where guests read plays by Shakespeare , Goethe and others with assigned roles.

After the death of their parents, the daughters moved from Ense to Berlin in September 1842 at Ottilie's suggestion to live with their uncle Karl August Varnhagen . While Ludmilla Assing stayed with him until Varnhagen's death in 1858 and inherited his collection of papers, Ottilie left Berlin on September 11, 1843 after an argument with her uncle and a failed suicide attempt and moved to Dresden . She later returned to Hamburg and sponsored Jean Baptist Baison's theater company , where she was also on stage and whose biography she published anonymously.

Frederick Douglass

When the Baison theater company went bankrupt, Assing lost her fortune and emigrated to the USA in 1852 . There she became a correspondent for Johann Friedrich Cotta's “Morning Paper for Educated Readers” as the successor to the late Amalie Schoppe , a childhood friend of her mother's. In the United States she joined the anti-slavery movement; Her signature, dated July 1861, can be found in an album that also contains entries by Abraham Lincoln , John Brown Jr., who, like his father John Brown , tried to free slaves with militant violence, and other campaigners of the Afro-American freedom movement. During an interview, she met the former slave and civil rights activist Frederick Douglass , whose autobiography she translated into German and with whom she read German philosophers, including the works of Ludwig Feuerbach . Due to the longstanding friendship with the married Douglass, the rumor arose that she had been his lover, but this cannot be substantiated by the correspondence between them.

Ottilie visited her sister in Europe in 1874 and returned permanently to Europe in 1881, one year after Ludmilla Assing's death. In Florence, Ottilie tried to have her deceased sister declared insane and to contest her will. She had inherited the right to live in their house at 27 Via Luigi Alamanni, but not the sister's property, which was earmarked for the establishment of a school. The Varnhagen collection with numerous documents had been transferred to Berlin in accordance with Ludmilla Assing's will and the wishes of Uncle Varnhagen, who died in 1858. If there was a legal dispute with the estate administrator Salvatore Battaglia, this remained inconclusive. On April 7, 1883, Ottilie Assing drafted a final codicil for her will in the American consulate in Florence .

In the summer of 1884, Ottilie Assing stayed in Paris, where she stayed at the Hôtel d'Espagne, Cité Bergère 9-11. Faced with breast cancer that she considered incurable, she took poison in the Bois de Boulogne on August 21 . 70 francs in cash and a brooch in the shape of an oak leaf were found on her body. Frederick Douglass had the American ambassador care for her - now defunct - grave. On September 13, 1884, she was buried on the Cimitière parisien by Ivry (Division 13, Row 1, Point 38). Ottilie Assing bequeathed most of her fortune to the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals . Her papers in the USA were destroyed on her order; only a few testimonies are to be found in the Varnhagen collection of the Biblioteka Jagiellońska in Krakow and in the Frederick Douglass Memorial Archive .

Works

• Ottilie Assing: Jean Baptiste Baison . Ein Lebensbild, 1851 , Verlag Meissner & Schirges, 1851, 126 p. ( * Digitized * ); New edition by Nabu-Press, 2012, ISBN 978-1272741174 , 142 pp.
• Frederick Douglass: Sclaverey and Freedom . Autobiography, translated from English by Ottilie Assing. Hoffmann and Campe, Hamburg 1860. Digitized
• z. Some anonymous feature sections and political reports for: Telegraph für Deutschland , Jahreszeiten , Morgenblatt für educated readers , Süddeutsche Post , Zeitschrift für bildende Kunst , the German-American Conversations-Lexikon (New York, 1870) as well as for periodicals of the German social democracy.
• Christoph Lohmann (Ed.): Radical Passion. Ottilie Assing's reports from America and letters to Frederick Douglass . Lang, New York et al. 1999, ISBN 0-8204-4526-6 .

literature

• Britta Behmer: From German cultural criticism to abolitionism: literary and journalistic considerations by the émigré Ottilie Assing . Master's thesis, Munich 1996.
• Maria Diedrich: Love Across Color Lines. Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass . Hill & Wang, New York 1999, ISBN 0-8090-1613-3 .
• Nikolaus Gatter: “Last piece of the telegraph. We all helped bury him… ”Ludmilla Assing's journalistic beginnings in the year of the revolution . In: International Yearbook of the Bettina von Arnim Society . Vol. 11/12, 1999/2000, pp. 101-120.
• Macaroni and ghost food. Almanac of the Varnhagen Gesellschaft e. V. Berliner Wissenschafts-Verlag, Berlin 2002 (with the lectures of the Ludmilla Assing Colloquium in the Villa Romana, Florence 2000), ISBN 3-8305-0296-6 .

Web links

Wikisource: Ottilie Assing  - Sources and full texts

• Varnhagen Gesellschaft e. V.
• Literature by and about Ottilie Assing in the catalog of the German National Library
• Library Varnhagen of the State Library in Berlin

Individual evidence

1. ↑ See Gertrude Colman's album, catalog 57 (1999) of the antiquarian bookshop Between the Covers - Rare Books Inc. , Merchantville, NJ, USA; Illustration on the book cover by Maria Diedrich: Love Across Color Lines , Hill & Wang, New York 1999 Web resource  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. .  
2. ↑ David Blight describes the complicated relationship between the two in his Douglass biography: Blight, David W. Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom , New York 2018, pp. 521f, 529, 570, 572f.
3. ↑ Archived copy ( Memento of the original from January 27, 2013 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
4. ↑ which one of these?