Ottilie Assing facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Ottilie Assing
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| Born | 11 February 1819 |
| Died | 21 August 1884 (aged 65) Paris, France
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| Nationality | American, German |
| Occupation | Feminist, freethinker, abolitionist |
Ottilie Davida Assing (11 February 1819 – 21 August 1884) was a 19th-century German-American feminist, freethinker, and abolitionist.
Early life and education
Born in Hamburg, she was the eldest daughter of poet Rosa Maria Varnhagen, raised as a Lutheran, and David Assur, a Jewish physician, who converted to Christianity upon marriage and changed his name to Assing. He became prominent in his field. Her mother was friendly with other literary women, including Clara Mundt and Fanny Lewald, and prominent in liberal circles that supported (but failed to achieve) social revolution in 1848. Her aunt Rahel Varnhagen was a noted salon host.
After the deaths of their parents and the Great Fire of Hamburg in 1842, Assing and her sister Ludmilla went to live with their uncle Karl August Varnhagen von Ense, a prominent literary figure and revolutionary activist. His wife, the noted Jewish writer and saloniste Rahel Varnhagen, was long dead. Ottilie and Ludmilla soon came to blows in that household, and Ottilie left, never to return.
Career
In 1852, Assing emigrated to the United States, settling in New York City and eventually nearby in Hoboken, New Jersey. She supported herself by writing articles for the Morgenblatt für gebildete Leser and often wrote under a male pseudonym. At first, she wrote general interest pieces about culture, but soon her writing focused on the abolitionist movement. Through the hundreds of articles she wrote, hers became one of the central voices in interpreting abolitionism and the realities of the United States' slave-holding society for European audiences.
Assing read the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and, impressed, she went to Rochester to interview Douglass in 1856. She suggested that she should translate his work into German. They struck up an immediate friendship. Over the next 28 years, they attended numerous meetings and conventions together. She visited and stayed with his family numerous times, living in their home for months at a time. Assing translated Douglass's works for her German audience, in addition to lining up a publisher for My Bondage and My Freedom (Sklaverei und Freiheit: Autobiografie von Frederick Douglass), distributed by Hoffmann and Campe in Hamburg in 1860.
Personal life
Assing died in August 1884.
Works
- Ottilie Assing: Jean Baptiste Baison. A Biography, 1851. Verlag Meissner & Schirges, 1851, 126 p (Digitalisat); Reprint by Nabu-Press, 2012, ISBN: 978-1272741174, 142 S.
- Frederick Douglass: Slavery and freedom. Autobiography from English provided by Ottilie Assing. Hoffmann und Campe, Hamburg 1860. Digitalisat .
- Partly anonymous feature articles and political reports: Telegraph for Germany, Seasons, Morning Journal for educated readers, Süddeutsche Post, Journal of Fine Arts, the German-American Conversations-Lexikon (New York, 1870), as well as periodicals of German social democracy.
- Christoph Lohmann (eds.): Radical Passion. Ottilie Assing's reports from America and letters to Frederick Douglass. Long, New York u. A. 1999, ISBN: 0-8204-4526-6.
See also
In Spanish: Ottilie Assing para niños
