14 Facts About Ottilie Assing

Ottilie Davida Assing was a 19th-century German-American feminist, freethinker, and abolitionist.

Ottilie Assing's mother was friendly with other literary women, including Clara Mundt and Fanny Lewald, and prominent in liberal circles that supported social revolution in 1848.

Ottilie Assing's aunt Rahel Varnhagen was a noted salon host.

In 1852, Ottilie Assing emigrated to the United States, settling in New York City and eventually nearby in Hoboken, New Jersey.

Ottilie Assing supported herself by writing articles for the Morgenblatt fur gebildete Leser and often wrote under a male pseudonym.

Ottilie Assing read the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and, impressed, she went to Rochester to interview Douglass in 1856.

Ottilie Assing suggested that she should translate his work into German.

Ottilie Assing visited and stayed with his family numerous times, living in their home for months at a time.

Ottilie Assing translated Douglass's works for her German audience, in addition to lining up a publisher for My Bondage and My Freedom, distributed by Hoffmann and Campe in Hamburg in 1860.

Douglass and Ottilie Assing are widely believed to have had an intimate relationship, but the surviving correspondence contains no proof for that.

Ottilie Assing gave him shelter when "he was on the run from conspiracy charges in connection with John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry", when he was at risk for capture and execution.

In 1884, having already been diagnosed with incurable breast cancer, Ottilie Assing was in Europe trying to establish her claim to her sister's estate when she learned that Douglass had married Helen Pitts, a younger white woman who worked with him as his secretary in the Recorder's Office.

Ottilie Assing had struggled with depression during much of her life, and her physician was aware that she had suicidal tendencies.

Ottilie Assing bequeathed him ongoing income from a $13,000 trust fund.