Tilli Wolff-Mönckeberg was the daughter of a lawyer who later became Lord Mayor. (Oddly enough, Edith Henrietta Fowler’s father was Mayor of Wolverhampton and a cabinet minister.) Tilli was intelligent and well-educated but married very young and had five children. Unusually for the time, she and her husband separated during the First World War and Tilli returned to Hamburg, did some translating and took in lodgers. In 1925 she married a Professor of English who later became Rector of Hamburg University. Most of her children left Germany in the 1930s and during the Second World War, when she wrote the diary in the form of unposted letters that were later published as 'On The Other Side', she had only one married daughter left in Hamburg. She was cut off from the other two daughters and two sons who were in Sweden, England, South America and the USA.