Theo Jung

Martin-Luther-University Halle-Wittenberg

Diaries as Alter-Ego-Documents: Constructions of Diaries as a Personified Dialogical ‘Other’ in Late 19th and 20th Century Germany

In a diary entry from 1957, a German teenager declared that, inspired by Anne Frank’s famous example, she had decided henceforth to address her own diary as ‘Silberfee’ (silver fairy). While Frank’s ‘dear Kitty’ gave a new boost to such practices, personifications of the diary can be traced back to emphatically older writing traditions, conceptualizing the diary as a space of religious and moral self-examination (e.g., in dialogue with God). Drawing on archival sources of a broader project, this contribution focuses on German case studies from the 1880s and 1950s to trace how modern diaries are often not only ego-documents, but also alter-ego-documents. How are diaries constructed as a dialogical ‘other’ (naming, addressing real or fictionalized persons), and what emotional and psychological functions does this perform for the diarists? In what ways does the quasi-dialogical structure of writing reflect specific understandings of the self in (communicative) relation to others, and how did such practices change against the background of what has been called the ‘democratization’ of diary writing during the 20th century?