| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 88.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Radical Passion: Ottilie Assing's Reports from America and Letters to Frederick Douglass. Ed. and trans. by Christoph Lohmann. (New York: Lang, 1999. xxxviii, 378 pp. $32.95, ISBN 08204-4526-6.)

Published under the auspices of the Longfellow Institute at Harvard University, which is devoted to promoting study of the multilingual traditions in American literature, Christoph Lohmann's Radical Passion is indispensable for anyone interested in nineteenth-century American politics and society, slavery, race relations, and—above all—the drama of Frederick Douglass's life. Beginning in 1856, when the German journalist Ottilie Assing visited Douglass's Rochester home to seek his approval and help for her translation of his autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, Assing and Douglass shared an intense relationship that was intellectual, emotional, and, for a time, sexual. The relationship lasted twenty-eight years and was an open secret: he visited her in New York and Hoboken; they attended meetings, the theater, and social gatherings together; they entertained and traveled together; and for several months during twenty-two summers Assing lived in the Douglass household, along with Douglass's long-suffering wife, Anna Murray, and their five children. . . .

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