About
The Lili Elbe Digital Archive is a companion to Man into Woman: A Comparative Scholarly Edition (Bloomsbury 2020), a thoroughly annotated version of the American first edition with an extensive introduction and six new essays on this narrative. This site provides a collation of the four primary editions of Elbe’s narrative published in three languages (Danish, German, and English) between 1931 and 1933, as well as the German typescript, published here for the first time.
The collation is supplemented by archival materials, including letters by Lili Elbe and by and to her editor, Ernst Harthern (a.k.a., Niels Hoyer); articles about Lili Elbe and the Wegeners from Danish newspapers; and chapters on Lili Elbe from Magnus Hirschfeld’s Le Sexe Inconnu (1935) and Hélène Allatini’s memoir Mosaïques (1939). Danish- and German-language materials have been translated into English, including the Danish first edition and the German typescript. To our knowledge, this is the first complete English translation of Fra Mande til Kvinde to be published.
This digital edition and archive is the achievement of faculty, graduate and undergraduate students, librarians and archivists at Loyola University Chicago, as well as contributing faculty, scholars, students, and archivists from other institutions in the US, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. (For a full list, see Project Team and Acknowledgements.)