Fascinating Hints--but Scant Proof--of a Forbidden Love

Ottilie Assing (1819-1884) was a half-Jewish German journalist, a passionate freethinker, a vivacious intellectual, a radical atheist, a daughter of the Enlightenment, of German Romanticism and of the failed revolutions of 1848. She was “strong, irreverent, courageous” and had been taught from earliest childhood to be “the architect of her own life.” When she was 33, Assing immigrated to the United States and quickly immersed herself in the political life of her raucously divided new country; soon her work focused on slavery, and she became “Germany’s ‘Negro expert.’ “In 1856, Assing met the great abolitionist (and ex-slave) Frederick Douglass and, according to “Love Across Color Lines,” embarked on an intense 28-year affair with him that combined political, intellectual, emotional and sexual intimacy and that ended in tragedy.

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There is much that is fascinating in this tale, but much that is wrong with Maria Diedrich’s telling of it, too. Diedrich is hampered by a lack of sources--Douglass’ house, along with his papers, burned in 1872, and Assing’s will stipulated that her papers be destroyed. It is clear that Assing and Douglass had a deep connection--for over two decades they wrote to each other weekly, and for 22 years Assing spent summers living with Douglass, his wife and their children. But Diedrich never conclusively proves that Assing and Douglass were lovers.

Furthermore, whereas Douglass’ presumed affair with the white abolitionist Julia Griffiths provoked a “vicious uproar,” his far-from-hidden relationship with Assing was met, by Diedrich’s own account, with “silence.” The author never satisfactorily explains this puzzling disparity. And she has an annoying inclination to combine speculation with sentimental gush, as when she writes that the time Assing and Douglass spent together was “always special and precious because not a single moment could be taken for granted.” Even more alarming is the author’s inclination to fabricate emotions, conversations, indeed whole scenes: “[H]e and Ottilie exchanged a warm smile that needed no words and no touch. . . . He nodded toward the bowl of fruit. . . . It would be a good day!”

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Still, Assing emerges as a unique character and a sharp thinker. Her painful experiences of German anti-Semitism endowed her writing with “a kind of double consciousness of the antagonism that perverted relationships between those at the center and those at the margins, between ‘them’ and ‘us.’ . . . What rendered her work exceptional from the start . . . was her keen awareness of the importance of race in the American experience.” (In fact, anticipating the work of some present-day cultural theorists, Assing regarded African Americans as “the only true Americans.”) She and Douglass worked especially closely during the crucial Civil War years, “discussing strategies, selecting topics, writing articles and speeches together, exchanging ideas, information, material.”

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In some ways, though, Assing and Douglass operated on perhaps fatally different assumptions. Assing viewed marriage as a bourgeois prison, but for African Americans, who had been “denied the right to institutionalized relationships . . . marriage was a goal they struggled for, a privilege associated with freedom. For Ottilie Assing . . . it was a radical move to assault marriage.”

Assing spent almost three decades constructing a “narrative of perfect interracial love.” But in reality, Diedrich argues, Assing and Douglass orchestrated “a choreography of almost obsessive happiness and avoidance” that “lost its glamour as the soul mates began to take off their rose-colored glasses.” In 1882, Douglass’ black wife, Anna Murray Douglass--whom Assing had once described as a “stupid old hag”--died, and less than two years later Douglass remarried. But he bypassed Assing for Helen Pitts, a white, and much younger, woman. Seven months later, Assing committed suicide.

It is not entirely clear that this should be interpreted as the desperate act of a lovesick woman. Assing, a devotee of Goethe, regarded suicide as a glorious act of self-definition, and she apparently had discovered that she had terminal cancer. In any event, she generously (or was it furiously?) left her estate to Douglass, “in recognition of his noble labors in the antislavery cause.”