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Christoph Lohmann, ed., trans. and intro. Radical Passion: Ottilie Assing's Reports from America and Letters to Frederick Douglass (New Directions In German-American Studies, vol. 1, New York: Peter Lang,1999), 378 pp., $32.95.
The destruction of the Berlin Wall and the opening of Eastern Europe to the West, strangely enough, brought us fascinating new insights into the nineteenth-century African American experience, the antislavery and equal rights movements, and the life of Frederick Douglass. Through the discovery of letters that Ottilie Assing, a German immigrant to the United States, wrote to her sister Ludmilla in Europe, scholars were introduced to a great deal more information about the relationship of Assing and Douglass. Assing, the translator into German of Douglass's My Bondage and My Freedom, had a long-standing personal and intellectual collaboration with Douglass, and the revival of interest in Douglass and Assing has given us a much more complex picture of the life of the great antislavery hero. Maria Diedrich has told heir story in an extraordinary book entitled Love Across Color Lines: Ottilie Assing and Frederick Douglass (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999). It is Diedrich's prodigiously researched work, in fact, that gives the context for Christoph Lohmann's collection, Radical Passion, and his annotations about Assing, derived primarily from Love Across the Color Lines, add to our understanding of Douglass's place in Assing's life.
Ottilie Assing was from a prosperous middle class family in Hamburg, Germany. Her father was a Jewish doctor and poet who converted to Christianity in order...