Fatal attractionNew York Times Book Review
New York
Aug 1, 1999
Authors: Drew Gilpin Faust
Drew Gilpin Faust reviews the book "Love Across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing
and Frederick Douglass" by Maria Diedrich.
Copyright New York Times Company Aug 1, 1999
Full Text:
The affair between Frederick Douglass and a German journalist endured for
28 years until its tragic conclusion.
LOVE ACROSS COLOR LINES
Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass.
By Maria Diedrich.
THE past year has compelled Americans to confront the complex and morallytroubling private lives of both a dead and a living President. Thomas Jefferson
and Bill Clinton are now joined in this pantheon of demythologized heroes
by Frederick Douglass, self-liberated slave, abolitionist and author of
perhaps the most widely read work in the canon of black American literature,
"My Bondage and My Freedom." Maria Diedrich's "Love Across Color Lines"
explores in depth Douglass's 28-year relationship with Ottilie Assing,
a German journalist and intellectual. Diedrich makes a persuasive case
that this long friendship was in fact an intimate love affair that Douglass
and Assing maintained in spite of Douglass's marriage to a black woman
who was the mother of his five children. Although previous biographers
have acknowledged the importance of Assing to Douglass, Diedrich, a professor
of American studies at the University of Munster in Germany, offers a much
more elaborate portrait of Assing and of the liaison that was at the center
of her life.
In fact, "Love Across Color Lines" is really a book about Assing, not Douglass;
its interest and distinction lie principally in its treatment of Assing,
of her transAtlantic intellectual and cultural milieu, of the challenges
she faced as a halfJewish German emigre, as a woman of talent and ambition,
and as a white woman in love with a famous black man.
Although 28 Assing letters survive in the Douglass papers, the bulk of
their correspondence -- weekly exchanges of letters for almost three decades
- was destroyed. Assing insisted that her papers be burned at the time
of her death; Douglass - or his heirs - evidently prudently disposed of
most Assing letters in his possession as well. Diedrich therefore relies
for an intimate view of this long-lived relationship upon 91 letters Ottilie
wrote to her sister, Ludmilla. Thus, Diedrich warns, her treatment necessarily
suffers from "an imbalance" between Assing's representation of the liaison
and Douglass's point of view. But Diedrich has provided context for these
crucial letters with a rich array of other sources from both sides of the
Atlantic and has embedded the Douglass-Assing relationship within a careful
reconstruction of the 19th-century world of reform and revolution in which
they lived. Although the book is indeed written from Assing's perspective,
it transcends the constraints of her vision to offer a fascinating story
with important implications for our understanding of European and American
cultural history, of women's experiences and available roles, and of the
life of Frederick Douglass.
Ottilie Assing was born in Hamburg in 1819 to a Jewish physician and his
wife, the daughter of one of Germany's most prominent intellectual families.
Ottilie's aunt Rahel Varnhagen had presided over a legendary salon in turn-of-the-century
Berlin, and her writings came to serve as a "feminist bible" for her niece.
Ottilie's parents, "disciples of Romanticism," provided her and her younger
sister with an excellent education and with revolutionary ideals emphasizing
human equality, the intellectual capabilities of women and the dangers
of the constraints of convention. From a young age, Ottilie and Ludmilla
engaged in bitter emotional rivalry, and, not long after their parents'
deaths in the early 1840's, Ottilie set out to establish an independent
identity.
She first turned to journalism, attacking Hamburg's cultural philistinism,
then assumed a position as a tutor to the children of one of the city's
leading actors, Jean Baptiste Baison. Assing became Baison's "partner,
nurse and probably his lover," and she "enjoyed the spotlight of scandal,"
deriving satisfaction from her superiority to convention. But what Assing
regarded as a relationship of equality was in fact profoundly asymmetrical,
"for it was always Ottilie Assing adapting to Baison's needs," even to
the point of yielding him a substantial portion of her inheritance. When
Baison died of typhoid fever, Assing was forced to rely almost entirely
on her own labors for support. In 1851 she began to write for Morgenblatt
fur Gebildete Leser, a distinguished journal to which she contributed for
the next 14 years. Faced with increasing anti-Semitism and growing restrictions
on freedom of the press in the aftermath of the failed Revolution of 1848,
Assing immigrated to the United States in 1852.
Her experience as a person of Jewish descent in Germany made her especially
interested in American racial issues, and soon after her arrival she began
to write for Morgenblatt on "race relations, slavery, black America" and
"to set herself up as Germany's `Negro expert.' " Such ambitions made it
almost inevitable that she should seek out Douglass, as she did in 1856,
literally knocking on his door in Rochester to propose a German translation
of his work. From the outset, Diedrich writes, she was "completely taken
by Douglass's powerful male presence" and wrote about him in such erotic
terms that Diedrich calls her subsequent Morgenblatt article "the first
.. . of the many pub lic love songs" Assing composed for Douglass. But
Diedrich characterizes Assing's description of Douglass as one that "deprived
him of his blackness," assimilating him into her elitist white conceptions
of cultural excellence.
Assing and Douglass began to correspond as she arranged to translate "My
Bondage and My Freedom," and in 1857 Assing spent the first of 22 summers
living in the Douglass family home. Douglass had earlier been romantically
linked in public gossip with an English abolitionist, and Assing believed
that "the Douglass marriage had been over long before she entered the scene."
"Unable, or perhaps unwilling, to see" Douglass's wife, Anna, "as a fellow
human being and as a woman," Assing treated her with contempt, writing
disdainfully of her blackness and her illiteracy.
In the years that followed, Douglass and Assing shared an intense personal
and professional relationship during summers in Rochester and through his
frequent winter visits to her rooms in Hoboken, N.J. It was to Assing that
Douglass fled when he feared implication in the John Brown conspiracy,
and after the Civil War broke out the two collaborated to produce parallel
articles for Douglass' Monthly and Morgenblatt urging the transformation
of the conflict into a war to end slavery.
Diedrich writes that Ottilie's letters to Ludmilla displayed "not the slightest
doubt" that the achievement of emancipation would liberate Douglass from
the public eye and permit him to leave Anna and to marry her. But, Diedrich
observes, Assing did not understand how much Douglass's view of marriage
and family differed from her own. To a man who had been a slave and had
never been acknowledged by his white father, marriage and family represented
both privilege and responsibility, not simply constraining conventions
to be easily overthrown.
Although their collaboration continued after the war, Douglass showed no
inclination to leave his wife. More pessimistic than he about the future
course of American politics and race relations, Assing also began to quarrel
with him about the fecklessness of his grown children. Although Diedrich
believes it was still "obvious that Douglass cared deeply" about her, signs
of tension and even estrangement began to appear. In 1876 Assing departed
for a European trip with hopes that Douglass would join her en route. But
he proved to be less interested in her than in his career and family in
the United States.
When Anna Murray Douglass died in the summer of 1882, Douglass made no
apparent effort to contact Assing. Eighteen months later he married Helen
Pitts, a white woman almost 20 years younger than Assing. The following
August, Assing, said by friends to be suffering from breast cancer, killed
herself in a Paris park with a dose of potassium cyanide. She coupled this
ultimate gesture of Romantic self-determination with what Diedrich calls
"a more substantial way of haunting" Frederick Douglass. Her will provided
that the income of her $13,000 estate be delivered to him in semiannual
installments for the rest of his life.
Ottilie Assing is in Diedrich's portrait an interesting but hardly likable
figure. An intellectual elitist, she had little time for those she regarded
as her inferiors. This rendered her contemptuous of many men and almost
all other women. Yet for all her professed commitments to Romantic individualism
and female freedom, she ended up the victim of her own dependence on a
man and of her longing for the very conventions of marriage that her words
and actions had so long scorned.
Drew Gilpin Faust is Annenberg Professor of History at the University of
Pennsylvania. Her most recent book is "Mothers of Invention: Women of the
Slaveholding South in the American Civil War."