Example from the Friedeman Waldeck letter collection
Example from the Friedeman Waldeck letter collection
© Ruth Federman Stein/Rita Schlautmann-Overmeyer (Ausschnitt)

Exile-Letters Friedeman-Waldeck

Project lead and contact person:

Dr. Angelika Lampen and Rita Schlautmann-Overmeyer M.A.

Faculty and Department: Institut für vergleichende Städtegeschichte

Project duration and funding agency: Application Stage

Research question:

The project examines the question of which topics and political events preoccupied Jewish people in exile and in what way the experience of death and expulsion shaped their new beginnings in a foreign country. In addition, the edition is intended to contribute to the generation of empathy and to enable future generations to remember after the "end of contemporary witnessing".

Project Abstract:

The planned project "Exile-Letters Friedeman-Waldeck" will index, annotate, and edit the letter legacy of Simon (d. 2001) and Gerda Friedeman (d. 2015), born Waldeck, who were able to flee to Great Britain and the USA, respectively, in 1938/39. The digital edition will follow TEI P5 and will allow identification and contextualization of people and places by embedding norm data. Users will be able to choose their individual approaches to the material by selecting events, letters, people, places, and topics. Furthermore, the generated data will be integrated into the web service "correspSearch" in order to make it connectable for comparative research. In this way, the project will contribute to making the hitherto hardly systematically indexed source group of letters from Jews in exile accessible to research.

Digital methods to be used:

  • The digital letter edition is marked up according to current standards in TEI P5.
  • With the help of line-by-line text-image linking, facsimile and transcription are merged.
  • The various entities are linked to standards data (GND, etc.).
  • Finally, the letters are entered into the Correspondence Metadata Directory CorrespSearch.
  • Through interactive maps and a timeline, important historical events are classified.

Role of SCDH in this project:

The SCDH provides support at all stages of the project. In particular, SCDH supports the development of the data presentation, the indexing and the creation of a faceted search as well as the provision of an interface for the data export.