World War I Writing

The 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War 1 could be viewed as a tempting opportunity to acknowledge the
origins of military psychiatry and the start of a journey from psychological ignorance to enlightenment. However, the
psychiatric legacy of the war is ambiguous. During World War 1, a new disorder (shellshock) and a new treatment
(forward psychiatry) were introduced, but the former should not be thought of as the fi rst recognition of what is now
called post-traumatic stress disorder and the latter did not off er the solution to the management of psychiatric casualties,
as was subsequently claimed. For this Series paper, we researched contemporary publications, classifi ed military reports,
and casualty returns to reassess the conventional narrative about the eff ect of shellshock on psychiatric practice. We
conclude that the expression of distress by soldiers was culturally mediated and that patients with postcombat syndromes
presented with symptom clusters and causal interpretations that engaged the attention of doctors but also resonated
with popular health concerns. Likewise, claims for the effi cacy of forward psychiatry were infl ated. The vigorous debates
that arose in response to controversy about the nature of psychiatric disorders and the discussions about how these
disorders should be managed remain relevant to the trauma experienced by military personnel who have served in Iraq
and Afghanistan. The psychiatric history of World War 1 should be thought of as an opportunity for commemoration
and in terms of its contemporary relevance—not as an opportunity for self-congratulation.

Gershom Scholem in Deutschland
Zwischen Seelenverwandtschaft und Sprachlosigkeit
Hrsg. v. Gerold Necker, Elke Morlok u. Matthias Morgenstern

Die Biographie des in Berlin geborenen und ab 1923 in Jerusalem lebenden Kabbala-Forschers Gershom Gerhard Scholem ist von den Katastrophen und Umbrüchen des 20. Jahrhunderts geprägt. Im Horizont des für Scholem ambivalenten deutsch-jüdischen Verhältnisses nehmen die Autoren des Bandes seinen Werdegang im Kaiserreich und in der Weimarer Republik in den Blick sowie die Bedeutung, die er als israelischer Gesprächspartner für die Zeitgeschichte der Bundesrepublik Deutschland hatte. Die Beziehungen zu Walter Benjamin und Hannah Arendt, zu dem Theologen Otto Michel und dem Verleger Siegfried Unseld dokumentieren auf unterschiedlichen Ebenen Scholems Verbindung zu Deutschland, die ihn auch bei persönlicher Lyrik und sogar bei seiner wissenschaftlichen Prosa zur jüdischen Mystik begleitete.

The first part of Hillel Zeitlin’s (1871-1942) mystical diary appeared in print in Warsaw 1919. Zeitlin continued to write the diary till the holocaust, and the manuscript is presumed lost. In this paper, I shell reconstruct the content of the lost part of the diary on the basis of the manuscript correspondence between Zeitlin and other Authors. I shell also discus the unsuccessful attempts of Zeitlin to have his diary published. In this discussion, mystical aspect of Zeitlin’s work will come forth.

While many scholars of World War I poetry have identified aspects of soldier poets’ work that embody the change from enthusiastic support of the war to disillusioned criticism of it, in this paper I argue for an additional, and highly meaningful marker of this significant change: the use of the dead and their bodies in this poetry. The commonly held critical view of World War I poetry is that there is a clear divide between poetry of the early and late years of the war, usually located after the Battle of the Somme in 1916, where poetry moves from odes to courageous sacrifice and protection of the homeland to bitter or grief-stricken verses on the horror and pointless suffering of the war. This change is particularly noticeable in the poetry of “soldier poets." Through analysis of poems by a variety of World War I poets, including Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, Isaac Rosenberg, and others, I track this shift and examine how it is mapped onto the bodies of soldiers in their poetry. I argue that poetry of the early years of the war depicts bodies as stable, insulated objects on which poets can project messages of admiration for the sacrifice and nobility of soldiers, support for the war, or concepts of nationalism and empire; in contrast, in the later poetry of the war, bodies are unstable, exposed, and corrupted, no longer able to support old messages of courage and noble sacrifice but reflecting the futility, senselessness, and destruction of the war.

The First World War (1914–1918), known as the Great War, was one of the largest armed conflicts in the history of Europe. The local dispute between Austria-Hungary and Serbia rapidly transformed into a global confrontation. In 1914, the former lands of Poland were split by the Eastern Front. In Mazovia, battles took place between the three superpowers that more than a hundred years earlier had divided Poland into occupation zones called partitions. On one side of the front were German and Austro-Hungarian forces, while one the other side were forces of the Russian Empire.
The Przasnysz county was on the Eastern Front line during the fighting for Przasnysz between the German and Russian armies in February and March as well as July 1915. In both battles of Przasnysz more than 150,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or captured, not to mention civilians.
The article presents contemporary heritage of the First World War in Jednorożec (Unicorn) commune. In 1915 the village of Jednorożec was completely devastated as well as neighbouring areas. The cruel campaigns ended more than hundred years ago, although nowadays we can still find vestiges of them.
The author describes war cemeteries in Jednorożec (the largest of the First World War necropolis in Mazovia), Budy Rządowe, Parciaki and Kobylaki Wólka, where you can still find tombstones, and also these cemeteries (Małowidz, Olszewka), which are remembered only by the oldest inhabitants and marked for example by roadside crosses. Three of the mentioned contemporary cemeteries are under conservation, but unfortunately it do not mean that they are trimed. Other vestiges, described in this article, are: marks of narrow gauge railroad in the forests and traces of dugouts, trenches, trou de loups or gunnery positions. They all can be found on LIDAR maps, as well as during expeditions in local forests. The authors mentiones also the old trees around roman-catholic church in Jednorożec, which survived warfare w 1915 and have marks of great conflagration during the war campaign.
The author describes annual commemoration of the II battle of Przasnysz in June 1915. Since 2012 municipal corporations, local activists, restorative groups and history lovers are organizing two-day meeting with ecumenical prayer in Jednorożec war cemetery and combat reenactment of II battle of Przasnysz. Every year it is scheduled in different locality in Przasnysz county, but meeting in Jednorożec is constant. Jednorożec and nearby villages are the part of The Eastern Front Line of I World War in Mazovia, designated by special information boards and indicators.
All of the described vestiges of the battles of Przasnysz in 1915, located in Jednorożec commune, deserve to be promoted and protected. They should become a part of memoire collective. They are all the marks of the difficult history, but also a kind of warning: no more war!

Female war reporters from belligerent and neutral countries were present in the major war theatres in Europe and the Middle East throughout 1914 to 1918. While admission of journalists to the war zones was severely restricted by the Allies and Central Powers, a considerable number of women managed to access the frontlines or their vicinities and to publish their eyewitness accounts and photographs in well-known newspapers and magazines. Still, studies of female war reporters are rare and women are conspicuously absent from the leading surveys of war correspondents. This article outlines the diversity of female war reporting during the First World War from a comparative and transnational perspective.

Celem niniejszego artykułu jest przedstawienie obrazu armii rosyjskiej, wyłaniającego się z dzienników i wspomnień, powstałych w okupowanych przez Rosjan miastach Galicji Wschodniej. W drugiej połowie sierpnia 1914 r. wojska rosyjskie wkroczyły do Galicji i w wyniku zwycięskiej ofensywy zajęły najważniejsze centra administracyjne na tych terenach, a mianowicie Tarnopol i Lwów. W marcu 1915 r., po drugim oblężeniu, poddał się Przemyśl. Autorzy wykorzystanych w tekście wspomnień na co dzień stykali się z przedstawicielami wrogiej armii i z tej perspektywy opisywali spostrzeżenia dotyczące rosyjskiej siły zbrojnej.
The purpose of this article is to present the image of the Russian army emerging from the diaries and memoirs created by authors lived in the cities of Eastern Galicia occupied by Russians. In the second half of August 1914, Russian troops entered Galicia and, as a result of the victorious offensive, occupied the most important administrative centers in these areas, namely Ternopil and Lviv. In March 1915, after the second siege, Russian entered Przemyśl. The authors of diariesand memories, every day faced representatives of the army and from this everyday perspective they described the observations about the Russian armed force.

Rarely has an event defined a national era so significantly as did the case of the falsely accused and imprisoned French/Jewish army captain Alfred Dreyfus in 1894. Shadows of the dark influence of anti-Semitism fueled pre-war French national identity, disgracing the army and dividing the National Assembly. What was a domestic issue for France the 1890s erupted into international scandal when Émile Zola published his open letter to President Faure in L’Aurore in 1898 condemning the miscarriage of justice by the Army and politicians. Resolved in 1906 with Dreyfus’ exoneration and restoration to rank, those eight years of public debate deeply divided France before and throughout the Great War. Early French and later international filmmakers, sought to narrate the breakdown of French state and civil society through a national lens and against the social and political imprint left by the Affair. Such prospective forms the interconnected structures of three unique yet distinctly different discourses on the traditional war film: Abel Gance’s sweeping epic J’Accuse (1919), Jean Renoir’s emotive La Grande Illusion (1937) and decades later, Stanley Kubrick’s ethical dilemma Paths of Glory (1957). In the dialogues that Gance, Renoir and Kubrick strived to initiate through their films, each would agree with sentiments expressed by former French President Chirac during the centennial commemorations of Dreyfus’ vindication in 2006. Chirac praised Dreyfus’ rehabilitation as a rejection of anti-Semitism and a victory for human rights, concluding that the fight against the dark forces of intolerance is never definitively won. We must remain vigilant.

ROUX, Gaultier, « Pierre Loti, chantre d’une Turquie ambiguë, entre agonie et renaissance (1913-1921) », in Jessica DESCLAUX (dir.), L’Orient des écrivains et des savants à l’épreuve de la Grande Guerre. Autour d’Une enquête aux pays du Levant de Maurice Barrès, Grenoble, Presses Universitaires de Grenoble, coll. « Vers l’Orient », 2019 (ISBN 9782377470602), p. 119-137.

Głównym zadaniem niniejszej publikacji było scharakteryzowanie w miarę możliwości wszelkich aspektów życia Łodzi w dobie Wielkiej Wojny (1914-1918), które były ze sobą nierozerwalnie związane. Najważniejszym problemem badawczym, wymagającym wyjaśnienia, było przystosowanie się miasta i jego mieszkańców do szybko zmieniającej się sytuacji politycznej i wojskowej w związku z ewakuacją administracji carskiej oraz z początkiem i trwaniem okupacji niemieckiej. Po zajęciu miasta przez Niemców w jego egzystencji zachodziły systematycznie wyraźne zmiany. Nowe realia przyniosły upadek gospodarczy, biedę w nieznanej dotąd skali, ale także zmiany pozytywne tj. upowszechnienie szkolnictwa czy wzrost dbałości o higienę i rozwój opieki zdrowotnej. Polityka okupanta niemieckiego ulegająca zmianom na przestrzeni lat wojny, budziła zarówno łatwą do zrozumienia niechęć czy nawet nienawiść, jak i nadzieję na dalsze zmiany, mogące poszerzyć dotychczasowe swobody działania zwłaszcza na polu szeroko rozumianego życia społecznego.

An interdisciplinary reading of an important Italian W.W.I war memoir, Emilio Lussu's Un anno sull'altipiano (Sardinian Brigade), which shows how apparently marginal details in the story (the abuse of alcohol) are connected with the daily reality of trench warfare on the Italian front but are also endowed with a multi-layered symbolism, also hinting at political issues.

Defeated in the Balkan War and its existence in Europe limited to the Eastern Thrace, The Ottoman Empire
started to mobilize in military preparations and military recruitment processes in order to get rid of the severe defeat
and not to experience the same disaster again. In this direction, while the Ottoman Empire was reorganizing movements
within the army with the aid of Germany, the killing of the Austro-Hungarian throne caused European countries to
declare war against each other in the race for industrialization and arms. While the European countries declared war
on each other, the Ottoman Empire declared its mobilization in the face of these developments and began recruiting
troops. Those who had compulsory military service in Istanbul and its vicinity went to the military camps where they
were affiliated to mobilization, and after taking their military training, they set out to serve in Dardanelles. In this
article, the preparations for the mobilization of the Ottoman Empire for World War One, the recruitment process and
military training in Istanbul will be explained through the published memoirs.

Brief introduction to the Russian poet Vladislav Chodasevič and to his poem “The Monkey” (1918-1919), an unusual commentary on World War I. Chodasevič conveys the shock of the conflict’s beginning by juxtaposing the announcement of war with the daily routine of a summer day and an encounter between the poet and an itinerant Serbian street performer and his monkey, an interaction which is  transformed into a curious augury of war. I also review the startling similarity between Chodasevič’s “The Monkey” and Ivan Bunin’s “With a Monkey” (1907), two poems in a rich tradition of Russian literary works featuring Southern European organ grinders and their animal companions.

Статья посвящена организации цензуры в Москве в последние годы перед революцией 1917 г. Доказано, что в период между революциями 1905 и 1917 гг. в Москве не были завершены  процессы реорганизации цензурного контроля сообразно со стремительно развивающимся печатным рынком. В 1915 – 1916 гг. в условиях обострения внутриполитической борьбы неспособность властей эффективно контролировать московскую печать стала одним из факторов, приблизивших Февральскую революцию.

The article studies the organization of censorship in Moscow during the last years before the revolution of 1917. It is proved that in the period between the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, the processes of reorganizing censorship control were not completed in Moscow in accordance with the rapidly developing printing market. In the conditions of aggravation of the internal political struggle, the authorities' inability to effectively control the Moscow press was one of the factors that brought the February revolution closer.

Virginia Woolf is one of a number of women writers who interpret the sea as a radical metaphor. However, her images of the coast let emerge an understanding of the sea which is simultaneously metaphorical, historical and political, thus revealing how groundbreaking her treatment of both sea and shore is with respect to other writers’. Woolf’s handling of the sea brings about a critical reversal of the classical and, specifically, Lucretian inscription of the coast also popular in later literature and still reverberating in masculinist modernism. Moreover, her treatment of the sea as a complex aesthetic, philosophical and political metaphor does not entail an obliteration of maritime history but, on the contrary, reclaims forgotten aspects of history, dismissed and erased in the grand narrative of official historiography. In this way, the coast is reworked by Woolf as a borderline not only between opposite sets of values but also between metaphor and history, with crucial implications. To illustrate this point, I will show how Woolf’s inscription of WWI in the coastal seascape is set against Britain’s celebratory nationalism, and how the violent reality of Empire transmutes the poetic perception of sea and coast in the colonial subject.

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During World War I, Yehoshua Radler-Feldman (R. Binyamin) published in the newspapers Ha-@herut and Ha-po'el Ha-tsa'ir a series of reports and commentaries. In these articles, Radler-Feldman severely criticized the ongoing state of war, which he considered lacking any semblance of political logic or moral reasoning. His main criticism was directed toward the Allied powers, which, in his view, bore the major responsibility for the outbreak of the war. Radler-Feldman determined that the Allied powers also caused the war to drag on in order to protect and enhance their own colonial interests. However, they obfuscated these interests in order to implant the feeling that the war was inevitable.

This essay examines the way the critical approach of Radler-Feldman to World War I reveals the unique Jewish cultural position that he wished to put forth. It shows that he integrated into his writings elements of the pacifist-feminist philosophy of his time, as well as theological views of the Jewish feminine and anticolonial criticism. Through this unique cultural amalgamation, Radler-Feldman intended to uncover the political-cultural order that enabled the war to continue and that influenced the modes of creation of modern nations in general. Furthermore, disengagement from the prevailing political-cultural order would have given the rising Jewish existence in Palestine, according to Radler-Feldman, freedom from the patterns that such an order imposed on its formation and would have turned it into an entity unlike, and inimical to, the one that the European nations were determined to replicate.

This chapter from my book, Literature, Technology, and Magical Thinking, 1880-1920, considers James's WW! writing (Within the Rim) in relation to his final unfinished novel, The Sense of the Past. It considers his queer national identifications and "obscure hurt" and at times goes full Sedgwick.