News Archive for August 2010

The University of Maryland Libraries are delighted to announce that a digital version of the papers of Dadaist artist, performer, and poet Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven is available to be consulted on-line through the Libraries’ ArchivesUM gateway. Researchers can access the digital edition through the collection’s EAD finding aid: http://hdl.handle.net/1903.1/1501. In Summer 2009, the Libraries took advantage of the “Reel Deal” offered by OCLC Preservation Resources to digitize the microfilm edition of the papers. Freytag-Loringhoven’s papers were part of a preservation microfilming project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and completed in 2004.

There is increasing interest in the life and work of Freytag-Loringhoven, commonly known as the Baroness. Described by The Little Review editor Margaret Anderson as “perhaps the only figure of our generation who deserves the epithet extraordinary,” (Anderson, My Thirty Years War 177) Freytag-Loringhoven published, between 1918 and 1929, approximately forty of her poems in little magazines such as Broom, Liberator, The Little Review, transatlantic review, transition, and the single issue of New York Dada. Born Else Hildegard Ploetz on July 12, 1874, in Swinemunde on the Baltic Sea, she ran away to Berlin in 1892, where she became involved in the Bohemian theatre circles. In 1910, she came to the United States to join Felix Paul Greve, then known as Frederick Phillip Grove, whom she had married in 1907. Subsequently abandoned by Grove, by 1913 she had moved to New York City, where she met and married the penniless Baron Leo von Freytag-Loringhoven. It was in New York, after the Baron had returned to Germany during the war and subsequently committed suicide, that Freytag-Loringhoven became entrenched in the Greenwich Village artist movement and began her brief and successful writing career as “the Baroness.”

The Libraries’ Digital Collections also feature two additional Freytag-Loringhoven resources, “Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven Digital Library” and “In Transition: Selected Poems by the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.” The first of these was the work of University of Maryland graduate students in English and Library and Information Studies. The second began as part of Tanya Clement’s dissertation entitled The Makings of Digital Modernism, completed at the University of Maryland in 2009.

(Submitted by Dr. Ruth M. Alvarez, August 2010)

Draft from “Matter Level Perspective,” circa 1923-1927.  See other drafts in the folder (Series III, Box 1, Folder 40): http://hdl.handle.net/1903.1/6623, or a textual interpretation by Tanya Clement here: http://www.lib.umd.edu/digital/transition/poem.jsp?pid=umd:55442)

The Albert W. Hilberg Collection consists of 48 photographs of Hiroshima before and after the dropping of the atomic bomb, as well as 41 print publications by the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission (ABCC). Albert W. Hilberg, M.D., was a physician member of the ABCC. These photographs may also be held at the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) and/or other libraries such as the National Library of Medicine (NLM). The Collection was donated to the University of Maryland Libraries in October 2008 by Dr. Hilberg’s daughter, Kristin Henderson.

The University of Maryland Libraries have digitized the images, which are now available via Digital Collections@UM.

	Stone building with four large windows on the side in the snow-covered field, before or after the explosion(?), circa 1945
	The same building after explosion, with the roof collapsed and the windows broken, mountains in the background, August 1945