Hindsight: An Autobiography

by Charlotte Wolff

Overview

Hindsight is the memoir of an outsider: a stateless person; a Jew; and, as Wolff called herself, a “conscious” lesbian. Love for women had been her inclination since she could remember and she writes that no one in her family questioned it. In Hindsight, she describes her girlfriends from Danzig of 1910 with the same candor as adult lovers she meets in Germany, France and England. She gives a vivid account of the years she spent as a physician and party girl in Weimar Berlin, her friendship with Walter and Dora Benjamin, and her interest in chirology (the study of hands) and sexology.

Wolff writes movingly about Jewish identity and history, medicine, psychotherapy, and her life as a 20th century lesbian. She is particularly insightful about how statelessness affects the psyche. She probes her attraction to glamorous friends such as the fashion journalist Helen Hessel (Kathe of Jules and Jim) and Baladine Klossowska (mother of the painter Balthus) in Paris. She describes the wartime refugee colony of Sanary, France and the Quakers, Surrealists, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, and Maria and Aldous Huxley whom she met there. When she moves to London in 1936, her medical degree is not recognized and she reads hands for a living, including the hands of Virginia Woolf, Sybille Bedford, and the Duchess of Windsor, before becoming a researcher at University College London.

Though reluctant to become what she called a “professional lesbian,” Wolff began to join same-sex political groups in the 1960s, after researching her book Love Between Women, published in 1971. Germans invited her to Germany and she ends her book with a detailed account of her triumphant return to Berlin at the age of 80. By turns discursive, narrative and confessional, this is a unique woman’s contribution to the social history of Jews, medicine, and psychotherapy.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940149048168
Publisher:	Plunkett Lake Press
Publication date:	12/19/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	352
File size:	1 MB

About the Author

Charlotte Wolff (1897-1986) was born into a middle-class family of secular German Jews in Riesenburg, West Prussia. She was attracted to girls and women and her family accepted her sexual orientation. She studied philosophy before obtaining her medical degree in 1926 in Weimar Berlin where she was befriended by Walter and Dora Benjamin. One of the 700 or so women physicians then practicing in the city, Wolff treated prostitutes and poor women in working-class neighborhoods. Her volunteer work at a birth control clinic led her to the fields of psychotherapy, sexology and chirology (the study of hands). After being detained by the Gestapo in 1933, she fled to Paris.

In Paris and the artists’ colony of Sanary, Wolff met an international circle of artists and writers including Maria and Aldous Huxley, Thomas and Heinrich Mann, and Man Ray, who photographed her in 1935. Since her medical degree was not recognized in France and she feared a Nazi invasion of France, Wolff travelled to England in 1936. She became a permanent resident in 1937, with permission to practice psychotherapy but not medicine. At first, she read the hands of Maria Huxley’s friends to earn her living, but soon found work as a researcher and was re-instated as a physician in 1952. She maintained her interest in sexology and published the books Love Between Women, Bisexuality, the novel An Older Love, and the biography Magnus Hirschfeld: Portrait of a Pioneer in Sexology. Before Hindsight, she wrote a shorter memoir titled On The Way To Myself. She died in London, shortly before her eighty-ninth birthday.