Abstract:
Between 1969 and 1980 Dr Charlotte Wolff (1897-1986) wrote a memoir, a novel and an autobiography – alongside two psychologically focused works which challenged assumptions regarding gender and sexuality. In this period she also made the difficult decision to visit Berlin, the city which had once been her own as a young medical student and then also as a doctor, before fleeing Nazi persecution in 1933. Wolff was Jewish. She was sexually, romantically – and openly – attracted to women. She had also been deeply involved in Berlin’s literary worlds before she fled and resettled, first in Paris, then in London. This study assesses what Wolff’s archives can reveal about the gaps between her early literary and scientific work and how she and her past were later represented, and then moves on to show how her later achievements were a dialogue between her books and the audience these increasingly attracted: gay and lesbian communities, in the United Kingdom and Germany, who sought to transpose Wolff’s stories of the past upon their own developing sense of history. Her responses to this, through her writing and her actions as a public figure, reflect the complexity of writing sexualities into histories. By depicting her own memories in contrast to her experiences of being approached as a historical object, Wolff’s life writing argued for a nuanced, milieu-specific and anti-essentialist approach to history. A clear case emerges for recognizing Charlotte Wolff as an astute critic with much to offer current research in the field of queer historiography, alongside histories of literature and science.
