During this time she developed the sensibilities that were to shape her life and work: her sexual experimentation, her explorations of gender and androgyny, her unconventional use of artistic source materials, and her interest in urban life as creative inspiration. At sixteen, Freytag-Loringhoven fled to Berlin, where she enrolled in art school.
Her mother came from a family marked by depression and suicide-and herself attempted suicide when Freytag-Loringhoven was a teenager-while her father, a successful city councilor, hailed from a family with a history of abuse and alcoholism. In many ways a companion volume to Gammel’s lucid biography, The Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernism (2003), Body Sweats does much to bring this fascinating figure into focus.īorn Elsa Plötz in the German town of Swinemünde on the Baltic coast (in present-day Poland), Freytag-Loringhoven lived a socially comfortable and emotionally turbulent childhood. Body Sweats, edited by Irene Gammel and Suzanne Zelazo, is the first English-language anthology of work by Freytag-Loringhoven. Yet her life and work is little known today. She was a contemporary of some of the most famous figures in literary and art history, and her work was recognized by many at the time for its merit.
The life and work of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (1874 – 1927) is as fascinating and fraught as Heap’s description. Razor sharp in its execution, her writing was wild and unpredictable. It is this consciousness which she works to produce Art.įor Heap and readers of The Little Review, Freytag -Loringhoven’s work afforded a new take on the world.
Madness is her chosen state of consciousness. She has recognized that if one has the guts and the constitution to abandon sanity one may at all times enjoy an exalted state. A woman of brains, of mad beauty and elegantes wesen, who has abandoned sanity: left it cold.
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