Lisa Kirchner

Universität Wien

War Diaries, Feldpost and Memoirs: Writing about Violence against Civilians during the First World War in Egodocuments

In my PhD project, I explore depictions of violence against civilians during the First World War in ego documents. By primarily utilizing diaries and memoirs, I research how Austrian war participants articulated their experiences of violence committed against the civilian population in various zones of war and occupation from 1914 to 1918. My analysis emphasizes the perspectives of low-ranking actors, specifically, enlisted soldiers and noncombatants, whose voices gained only marginal recognition in the public commemoration of the First World War in Austria for a long time. This marginalization is further reflected in the scarcity of relevant archival holdings, where the surviving material often consists of singular ego documents rather than comprehensive collections from the same author. In my paper, I concentrate on a few case studies in which I have more than one type of ego documents by a person, which allows for comparative analysis. Notable examples include the records of a Red Cross nurse, consisting of her diary and a self-published memoir from 1928, or those of an enlisted soldier, which comprise his war diary as well as his Feldpost correspondence with his family. Which differences can be identified in the depiction of violence against civilians across these various ego documents? Can this possibly provide insights into how the type of source (as well as the time of writing) can influence the content and scope of writing about violence against civilians?