Mathilde Wolff-Mönckeberg

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).