Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg Explained

Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg (1879 – 1958), also known as Tilli, was a German-born writer and translator. She was the seventh child of Johann Georg Mönckeberg, a lawyer and Lord Mayor of Hamburg.[1]

After her education at school in Hamburg, she travelled to Florence for further study, where in 1900 she stayed with Aby Warburg and Mary Warburg.[2] She married the Dutch art historian André Jolles (1874–1946) on 8 September 1900 and together they had five children (Hendrik (d.1902), Hendrika, Jacoba, Jan, Otto, Ruth).[3] They moved to Freiburg in 1902 and Berlin in 1909 where Mathilde worked as a translator, before their divorce on 26 July 1918.[4]

She then returned to Hamburg and in 1923–4, she published a German translation (entitled Herbst des Mittelalters)[5] of the Dutch cultural historian Johan Huizinga's Herfsttij der Middeleeuwen (1919), (English translation The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1996)).

In 1925, she married Emil Wolff, a Professor of English and Rector of Hamburg University.[6] During the war she wrote a series of unsent letters describing life in Hamburg at this time to her children who were living abroad.[7] These were edited and translated as On the Other Side: Letters to My Children from Germany, 1940–1945 by her daughter Ruth Evans in the 1970s (published 1979, London: Peter Owen, republished in 2007 by Persephone Books).

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Notes and References

  1. [List of mayors of Hamburg]
  2. Ferguson, Niall. High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg. Penguin UK, 25 Oct 2012
  3. Thys, Walter. Gebildeter Vagant. Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2000.
  4. Bodar, Antoine. 'Jolles, Johannes Andreas (1874-1946)', in Biografisch Woordenboek van Nederland. URL:http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/bwn1880-2000/lemmata/bwn4/jolles.
  5. http://www.worldcat.org/title/herbst-des-mittelalters-studien-uber-lebens-und-geistesformen-des-14-u-15-jh-in-frankreich-u-in-d-niederlanden-ubertr-aus-d-niederland/oclc/72067406 Herbst des Mittelalters at WorldCat.
  6. Eksteins, Modris. Walking Since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Heart of Our Century. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000.
  7. Sim, Kevin. Women at War: Five Heroines who Defied the Nazis and Survive. William Morrow & Co., 1982.