Book Review

Ottilie Assing was a German journalist who for twenty-eight years was the constant companion and possibly the lover of Frederick Douglass. As we know from the start of Maria Diedrich's biography, Assing committed suicide shortly after Douglass's second marriage, to Helen Pitts, another white woman, in 1884. In his 1948 biography of Douglass, Benjamin Quarles elliptically connected Assing's suicide to her close friendship with Douglass; William S. McFeely's 1991 biography, which gives considerable attention to Assing, inspired Diedrich to explore this life and death in full.	1
The relationship commenced when Assing traveled to Rochester, New York, in 1856 to interview Douglass. She then spent every summer living with the Douglass family, but the affair was never confined to the domestic sphere, and it was never a secret. Despite the fact that Douglass's letters to Assing were burned, and only a handful survive from Assing to Douglass, Diedrich (a professor of American studies in Germany and since 1984 a fellow at the Du Bois Institute at Harvard) forged ahead, mining Assing's published articles for their "private subtext," reading deeply letters that Assing and Douglass wrote to, and received from, others, and digging into archives in Germany, Poland, France, and the United States.	2
Diedrich's story is almost wholly Ottilie Assing's, for Douglass's voice proved the more elusive here. Indeed, Diedrich's keen attention to the ways in which Assing invented herself constitutes a beautiful lesson in methodology. The silences and ambiguities in Assing's self-presentation are part of what makes this book so hard to put down.	. . .