Ramsey County History – Spring 2016: “Albert Wolff: Brilliant Career, Tragic Death”

Albert Wolff: Brilliant Career, Tragic Death
Author: LaVern J. Rippley

Albert Wolff (1825–1893) was a German Forty-eighter; that is an out-spoken liberal who left Germany in the wake of the revolutionary spirit that swept much of Europe starting in 1848. Wolff’s participation in street fighting led to the commutation of his death sentence on the condition that he went into exile. First and foremost a journalist, Wolff was also a politician who arrived in Minnesota in 1852, where he and Friedrich Orthwein started the first German-language newspaper in the territory. Wolff subsequently became Minnesota’s Commissioner for Germany (1869) and he worked hard to bring German immigrants to his adopted state. In the 1870s, Wolff returned to skillfully editing a German-language newspaper in St. Paul, but he later became increasingly depressed and, in 1893, took his own life.
PDF of Rippley article