Maria dietrich frederick douglass

A 21st Century woman obsessed with productive and passionate anti-racism, I feared for years after buying Love Across the Color Lines to begin this history of the 28-year friendship/romance linking the German/Jewish woman, Ottilie Assing, with African American slavery emancipator Frederick Douglass.

It might show me as a similar fool.

Author Maria Diedrich, a German professor of American studies, tells us why many have never heard of Ottilie: most of her papers were burned at her death at her request. However, despite their lifelong quarrel, Ottilie's sister Ludmilla had saved a bundle of 90 letters, bequeathed to a German library along with the papers of their erudite uncle Varnhagen.

The papers survived WW II hidden in a Polish monastery and nearby library. Dietrich, toward the end of her book, quotes sections of these sisterly letters which leave no doubt that Ottilie claimed a romance with Douglass. P