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Flight out of Time

diary of Hugo Ball

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General referenceInterpretive dossier study · Crown Archives visual atlas
Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionJan 19, 2026
Entity authorityQ106253765 ↗
Source-derived summary

Flight out of Time: A Dada Diary (German: Die Flucht aus der Zeit) is a 1927 book by the German writer Hugo Ball. It is an edited version of Ball's diaries from the years 1913 to 1921, which includes his time in the Dada movement at Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich, as well as his quick rejection of Dada and modern literature in general. The book consists of personal notes and excerpts from mystical and anarchist literature.

The original diaries are lost so it is unknown to what extent Ball changed their content, but the changes were made to emphasise a trajectory away from Dadaism and anarchism and toward Ball's later interest in Catholic theology. Ball's wife Emmy Hennings described the book in a letter as a "very edited diary" and "by no means directly copied" from the original texts. The title Flight out of Time is a reference to monastic life. The book was published a few months before Ball's death at the age of 41.

Editorial summary

“Flight out of Time” enters the record as diary of Hugo Ball. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Flight, Time and diary can confirm, complicate or overturn.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1927, 1913, 1921—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1927. Its strongest next move is a source search built around Flight, Time and diary.
Editorial analysis

Why this record matters

“Flight out of Time” is worth following because a concise public description often conceals a longer documentary argument. Here, Flight, Time and diary provides the most credible route into that argument.

Evidence profile

The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jan 19, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q106253765. VIAF identifies the subject as 219967209. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1927, 1913 and 1921.

Critical limits

The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.

How to read it

Use the entry as an orientation point, then follow its citations and revision history. Names, dates and institutional relationships should be checked against the original record.

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  2. Expand the search: follow Flight out of Time primary sources, Flight out of Time archive and Flight research across catalogues and specialist indexes.
  3. Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.

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Source & attribution

This entry incorporates text from “Flight out of Time” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.