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.
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. 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). They moved to Freiburg in 1902 and Berlin in 1909 where Mathilde worked as a translator, before their divorce on 26 July 1918.
She then returned to Hamburg and in 1923–4, she published a German translation (entitled Herbst des Mittelalters) 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. During the war she wrote a series of unsent letters describing life in Hamburg at this time to her children who were living abroad. 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).
See also
References
- List of mayors of Hamburg
- Ferguson, Niall. High Financier: The Lives and Time of Siegmund Warburg. Penguin UK, 25 Oct 2012
- Thys, Walter. Gebildeter Vagant. Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2000.
- Bodar, Antoine. 'Jolles, Johannes Andreas (1874-1946)', in Biografisch Woordenboek van Nederland. URL:http://resources.huygens.knaw.nl/bwn1880-2000/lemmata/bwn4/jolles.
- 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.
- Eksteins, Modris. Walking Since Daybreak: A Story of Eastern Europe, World War II, and the Heart of Our Century. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000.
- Sim, Kevin. Women at War: Five Heroines who Defied the Nazis and Survive. William Morrow & Co., 1982.
External links
- Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg at WorldCat Identities.
- On the Other Side: Letters to My Children from Germany, 1940-1945 at Persephone Books.
- Correspondence of Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg, Andre Jolles, Aby Warburg et al. in Thys, Walter. Gebildeter Vagant. Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 2000.