Eighty letters and postcards sent by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) to Eduard Silberstein (1856-1925) are currently deposited at the Library of Congress (LoC). The project sets to trace the itinerary of this correspondence as a thing in motion, while also acknowledging it as text. How did two of the letters get to be published in a German-language journal in Romania in 1965 and how did they – together with seventy-eight other such letters – enter the collections of LoC? How and by whom was the Freud-Silberstein correspondence assembled into a „thing” and what did this process imply?

In order to answer these questions, the research will delineate the itinerary of the Freud-Silberstein letters, from the 1870s (when they were written) to 2009, when LoC added eight other original letters to the collection.

In following the correspondence as thing in motion, while also acknowledging its textual properties, the research critically engages with the sets of relations constituting the correspondence-as-thing in the course of its peregrinations. It looks for the past owners of the letters and aims to unravel the nature and circumstances of transfers of ownership. Thus, the research uses the engagement with the letters in order to address several broader issues, such as nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Vienna-Brăila connections and the spatial framings of Habsburg and Central European history, Jewish life in Brăila from late nineteenth century until the early 1960s, and changing meanings of collecting, property, ownership and provenance.