Novels of the Great War: "Drei Kameraden" by Erich Maria Remarque

While examining the First World War literature there are some titles and authors that always emerge, no matter which country you’re from. Remarque’s Im Westen nichts Neues is what we mean by this simple introduction. But one should never forget that the result of the conflict had great echoes on literature also long after the end of the war and relevant impact in the so called Entre-deux-guerres period. And the name of Erich Maria Remarque was not mentioned by chance since today reading suggestion is his novel Drei Kameraden first published in 1936 and written during the exile in Switzerland. This is not a book about the Great War but it’s a novel about what came after it and it’s generated from a kind of ghost image, from a perennial trauma shaping the minds of those who spent the youth buried in the European trenches. This is the reason why we consider for all purposes “Three Comrades” still a World War One novel. On the contrary, we do not consider for instance the recent 14 by Jean Echenoz a World War One novel. The novel by Echenoz represents simply the use of a war subject in today literature and we are able to collect similar examples in comics, arts, films while in Remarque’s case we’re still, with both feet, in the climate originating from the conflict.

We all know about the dreadful economic situation that Germany had to face after the Treaty of Versailles. And the story that Remarque outlines in this book is about three comrades that try to survive among the shocking unemployment, the plague of alcoholism and the rising of new extremisms by opening a garage for car repair in a German city. Robert, the protagonist, falls in love with Patrice, a beautiful and mysterious woman that eventually will fall ill with tuberculosis. This sentiment becomes a kind of handhold in order not to plummet like all the world around him and his two friends, an entire world that is rapidly collapsing into another dark tunnel. Patrice will try uselessly some cures in Switzerland and the three friends will sell their garage and will go to Switzerland in a last desperate attempt to help her to survive. This popular novel still works as a kind of warning for us. What we understand is that a second parallel tragedy flows beside the one occurred in the European trenches between 1914 and 1918: it is the tragedy of the survivors and of their lives fed by internal and continuous flash-backs of death, getting bigger and bigger inside. We can read Drei Kameraden as a cruel persistent image of death (the one of Patrice) after the mass death (in the battlefields), in the scenario of the rising Nazism.

From warrior to worker: Jünger's Total Mobilisation

Ernst Jünger

Ernst Jünger's name is usually associated with his masterpiece, the realistic account of his wartime experience entitled Storm of Steel (In Stahlgewittern, 1920), as well as his following literary representations of the Great War on the Western Front in Copse 125 (Das Wäldchen 125, 1925) and Fire and Blood (Feuer und Blut, 1925). And yet he’s one of the most problematic authors of the period, whose legacy constantly raises opposing reactions and judgments. It is almost impossible to form a clear opinion on his thinking, to frame his intricate biographical trajectory in defined historical, political and cultural streams. We simply run the risk to miss the point in trying to interpret Jünger’s meditations on World War One in the light of the following decades and of the Nazi Germany. Maybe it would be wise to give up any accusation and defense and simply recognize the complexity and above all the “otherness” of his cultural world in comparison to ours, especially when he praises the energies unleashed by the Great War as a heroic reaction to the European world-weariness and seems to turn into what scholars have often described as a “aesthetic of carnage”.

This attitude could help us to face the sometimes unavoidable discomfort in reading some of Jünger’s works, as it is the case of the collection of essays appeared in 1934 with the title Blätter und Steine (Leaves and Stones), to which we direct the attention today. We invite to discover all the texts gathered in this collection, but particularly representative of Jünger’s literary output of the interwar period is the short writing entitled Total Mobilisation (Die totale Mobilmachung, first published in 1930; an English translation by Joel Golb and Richard Wolin in The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader, edited by Richard Wolin), which resumes the arguments of his key-work Der Arbeiter (The worker, first published in 1932 as final reflection on his battlefield experience) and expresses the core of the ideals of the traditional German conservatism in opposition to the new revolutionary one.

In Total Mobilisation Jünger moves from his recollections on the war to almost philosophical reflections on the following social and political upheavals. In his eyes the First World War appears a technological triumph on human beings, since all armies, and even the humankind as a whole was physically, mentally and socially determined by the available technology. The Great War dramatically shows that the romantic heroic ideal was no longer manifested in acts of outstanding individual bravery, but rather in the often meaningless and helpless fulfillment of one's duty. The rhetoric of Nation and Homeland simply disguised the transformation of the State in a gigantic factory for mass-production for war purposes. We just need to recall some pictures of the thousands of victims lying on the battlefields of the World War One, maybe compare them with some images of the workers in the war industries or of the artillery storage. Speaking about “total mobilization” the author discloses so how «the image of war as armed combat merges into the more extended image of a gigantic work process». According to Jünger, the almost ontological transformation occurred with the Great War has indeed determined a clear sundering of society from all traditional moorings and transformed it in an anonymous society, in which life is converted in energy subjected to a radical mobilization: «In addition to the armies that meet on the battlefields, originate the modern armies of commerce and transport, foodstuffs, the manufacture of armaments – the army of work in general. In the final phase, which was already hinted at toward the end of the last war [i.e. the Great War], there is no longer any movement whatsoever – be it that of the homeworker at her sewing machine – without at least indirect use for the battlefield.»

Die totale Mobilmachung is a difficult essay, which should be considered as part of a wider discussion including among others Heidegger’s essay “Questioning After Technology” or Benjamin’s “On the Origin of the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”.  It deserves therefore a more complex analysis, but we leave our readers to formulate their own interpretations of this work. Here we just invite to trust Jünger’s observation that this new and radical ideal of mass technological mobilization of the society probably «makes the World War a historical event superior in significance to the French Revolution», prefiguring the degeneration of European civilization into totalitarian systems.

Trieste 1914. The city and the war.

The city of Trieste was and still represents a special observatory for understanding what’s going on in the heart of Europe,  for following out the changes in the Danube region, the Balkans and the Mediterranean. Established in Roman time, Trieste voluntarily entered the Habsburg realm in late 14th century, also to strengthen his position against its main competitor for trade in the Adriatic, namely Venice. However only in 1857, after the extension of the Vienna railway to Trieste, the city completely coupled with the high Austrian protective tariff and became the major port of the Empire and, by the eve of the First World War, the eighth busiest port on earth. Besides the entrepreneurial class and the high bourgeoisie, it offered a lively stage also for the middle and the working class, which has been growing over a short period of time due to the economic expansion.  But Trieste was not only an important port and industrial and financial centre, it had a deeper symbolic meaning for the Habsburg Empire, since it declared that the vast continental sovereignty of the Dual Monarchy consisted also of a maritime power. At the same time, the city was also a cosmopolitan cultural centre, attracting writers, artists and intellectuals and bringing them in contact to each other (just think about the friendship between James Joyce and Italo Svevo). Like the Habsburg Empire, also Trieste was a multiethnic city: it grew as a result of the high immigration of people from all over Europe and combined cultural, religious and linguistic diversities. Politically and culturally related to the Habsburg, and yet opened to the Slavic world, Trieste remained geographically and historically linked to Italy, at the point that Italian remained its working and cultural language.

If we consider all these elements, it’s easy to put one leg of a virtual compasses on this city and draw with the other one a circle on the geographical and historical meaning of the First World War, especially on the eastern front. And this is what a new exhibition in Trieste tries to do. Located in the Magazzino delle Idee, (near the Main Rail Station, entrance from the dock, on the sea side), and supported by the Province of Trieste in partnership with the Regional Institute for the History of the Liberation Movement in the Friuli Venezia Giulia, as well as the State Archives of Trieste, the Italo German Historical Institute in Trento and the Universities of Ljubljana and Trieste, this small but interesting exhibition Trieste 1914. La città e la Guerra enables the visitors to approach the Great War through the specific lens of this city. It offers a narrative pattern which runs from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria and his wife, whose funeral procession run through Trieste in summer 1914, to the increasing limitations of both the civil and economical life (by the prohibition of associative activities and control of the citizens’ movements, on the one hand, and the naval blockade which caused the collapse of the maritime industry, on the other hand), from the conscription of all young male sent to the front and the related family tragedies to the terrible famine suffered by those still living in Trieste during the World War One, from the echoes coming from the near battlefields of the Isonzo-front and the Carso to the Red Cross intervention for the population.

The exhibition has free entry and offers informative material in Italian, English, Slovenian, German and English. It also includes a series of conferences and special guided visit for schools. For further information, please contact the Provincia di Trieste at this email address: cultura@provincia.trieste.it

Great War and childhood. A conference in Milan with Manon Pignot

While looking for international and cross-themes that can help all the players of the Centenary in building new bridges of knowledge, a simple and terrible fact emerges: the War of 14-18 was also the first cruel intrusion of trauma in the lives of millions of children. All wars eventually turned into such an intrusion, but with this conflict we assist to a violent impact of the reality of war in family life, economy and psychology and probably for the first time we're allowed to speak about a childhood experience of the mass war. Many efforts were undertaken to deploy huge masses of little boys and girls for war purposes. One of the worldwide experts in this field is Manon Pignot, professor at University of Picardie and author of many studies about the "children of great war". Among her books we now recall Paris dans la grande guerre, L'enfant-soldat: XIXe-XXIe siècle, Allons enfants de la patrie : Génération Grande Guerre and La guerre des crayons : Quand les petits Parisiens dessinaient la Grande Guerre. Notwithstanding the multiple attempts to approach such delicate theme that deals both with a great amount of sources and with the difficult of interpretation, we are still far from giving a clear portrait of the European children of the time. At any rate, this portrait remains an important goal for historians since we have to keep in mind that the war trauma and experience occurring to boys and girls are shaping the imagery of the Second World War generations. So, beside the important and immediate research, there is a kind of long-term return in terms of knowledge and implications.

The Italian venue of "Institut français" in Milan is going to host  a conference with Manon Pignot next 21st of October. Here is the website of the organization.

Photos of animals in World War One: the Goumiers and their horses

Many North African soldiers fought for France during the Great War and played a decisive role in it. Today we’d like to direct our attention especially to the French colonial troops, whose history still remains marginal in the commemoration of the centenary. In 1914 about 15.000 Moroccan soldiers were organised in different military formation and according to recent statistics their number oscillates between 34.000 und 40.000 throughout the war. Among the different companies of the Moroccan troops special attention is due to the Goums (from an Arabic word meaning “people”). At least 23 Goums were employed from 1914 till 1916, each of them comprising between 200 and 300 Berber auxiliaries. 

Goumiers first came from Algeria and were employed during the first intervention in Morocco in 1908 by the French Army. The format of these indigenous irregular troops was then adopted to enlist the Moroccan Muslim levies. Moroccan Goums were made up of men all from the same tribe or region, who often lived together in dourars with their families and were therefore tied together by strong community bonds. These companies remained separate from the regular Moroccan regiments of the French African Army, and usually mixed cavalry and infantry in one unit (an unusual thing for that time). Their element was the mountainous terrain of the Atlas range. Their skill and fierceness were renowned, contributing so to the “Berber myth”: Goumiers were believed to not fear death and have all physical and cultural qualities of endurance that make them perfectly fit for combat. We can find this image also in the international press, as the photo we offer today testifies. It is taken from the magazine L’illustrazione italiana, January 1915, where it was originally published to depict how the Goumiers used their horses as shield to protect themselves. But to us, today, this photo represents rather a further testimony of the hopeless symbiosis between animals and human beings in the battlefields of the Great War.

We thank Eugenio Bucciol, the author of the book Animali al fronte and the editor of the same for the permission to publish this picture.

The poets and the world war: "Before Action" by William Noel Hodgson

There is a moment in the lives of First World War's soldiers that no one will be able to tell precisely. Some writers tried to give an account full of pathos but at the end there is no real possibility to enter a soldier's mind in the minutes before the action, when the artillery attack is already bursting over his head. You may find a vivid description in Emilio Lussu's "A Year on the High Plateau" (Un anno sull'Altipiano), in the passage when his "movie camera" catches the rapid movements of the bottles of cognac going up and down from the thighs of the soldiers to their mouths. One of the most popular poems dedicated to the istants that precede the action is "Before Action" by William Noel Hodgson (born in Petersfield, Hampshire, in 1893). Hodgson was sent to the Frech front in July 1915. He died on the first day of the Somme offensive (1 July 1916) and this biographical data is probably connected with the reasons that make today "Before Action" one of the most renown poems about that strange limbo that stands beyond words, in-between the deadly life in the trenches and the likely death in the no-man's land.


BEFORE ACTION


By all the glories of the day,
----And the cool evening's benison
By that last sunset touch that lay
----Upon the hills when day was done,
By beauty lavishly outpoured
----And blessings carelessly received,
By all the days that I have lived
----Make me a soldier, Lord.

By all of all man's hopes and fears
----And all the wonders poets sing,
The laughter of unclouded years,
----And every sad and lovely thing;
By the romantic ages stored
----With high endeavour that was his,
By all his mad catastrophes
----Make me a man, O Lord.

I, that on my familiar hill
----Saw with uncomprehending eyes
A hundred of Thy sunsets spill
----Their fresh and sanguine sacrifice,
Ere the sun swings his noonday sword
----Must say good-bye to all of this; -
By all delights that I shall miss,
----Help me to die, O Lord.

"The orient in Bohemia?" An exhibition in Prague commemorating Jewish refugees during the First World War

Image source: jewishmuseum.cz

Prague and the historical city center offers many attractions and a lot of exhibitions on different topics, but we want to suggest you today a special one, commemorating one of the lesser known episodes of First World War, namely the odyssey of the Jewish refugees within the Austro-Hungarian Empire. A new exhibition called The Orient in Bohemia? and hosted by the Robert Guttmann Gallery – Jewish museum of Prague tries to shed some light on the issue. The exhibition is organized in three small rooms.

The first room frames the issue in the historical context. So we learn that as soon as the war began thousands of people took flight and for the first time in the modern history, national states were faced with the new problem of refugees. To deal with this emergency, during the first months of the war the Austrian Empire hurriedly built up barracks according to ethnical/national identities in order to accommodate, organize and control this crowd of people. Among them there were also the Jewish communities from Galicia and Bukovina (in what is now the western Ukraine), fleeing from their towns and villages occupied by the Russian Army. This latter had invaded the eastern territories of the double monarchy in Autumn 1614. The eastern Jewish population was gathered especially in different camps. For instance, that of Německý Brod (today Havlíčkův Brod) was originally inhabited by Italian and Istrian refugees, later reserved for Jewish refugees. Due to epidemic and poor conditions, the mortality was particularly high in it. Other camps were in Pohořelice, Kyjov and Mikulov. Small groups of Jewish refugees were also dispersed in villages and accommodated in dormitories or apartments, sharing the spaces and necessities with the local people, which resulted in frequent conflicts. The State provided basic support to those refugees, who were not able to manage; this implied however, that they were not allowed to move without permission and were strictly controlled. Civil committees and aid organisations were also active within the different ethnical groups to support the refugees, as well as the orphans.

The second room – a very minimal space which recall a barrack of the camps – offers video and audio testimonies. The curator, Michal Frankl, told us that it was very hard to find out these video clips, dealing the most totality of documents gathered in the past decades almost exclusively with the memory of the Shoah. Three interviews were finally found out: we can so listen to and watch the videos of few elderly people who experienced the war during their childhoods in Galicia and Bukovina.

The third room enables the visitor to perceive the intricate situation of this Jewish community. Jews started settling in Galicia and Bukovina in the 12th century, reaching close to one million on the eve of the Holocaust, although many of them emigrated at the beginning of the twentieth century, due to the poor conditions of the region. These eastern community were usually Yiddish-speaking Orthodox Jews. As they arrived in the camps and settled in the other regions of the Empire, not only the non-Jewish population, but also their same coreligionists saw them as exotic in their religious customs, clothing and language. For some integrated Jews, the strictly observant religious men with caftans and side curls were a symbol of the ghetto; for other they were a source of authentic Jewish national culture. “Difference” is in fact the key-word of this section, which shows through photos and newspaper illustrations, how the perception of Jewish difference became the subject of intense debate and contributed to the cliché and prejudices against the “Eastern communities”, regarded as non emancipated. Especially the photographs of refugees depict this sense of otherness, as if it was a source of attraction or even ethnographical fascination in documenting different ethnic or racial types. The encounter of the “Eastern” Jews with the local inhabitants stimulated a discussion about Jewish identity, but also stoked prejudices against their allegedly backward. The historical situation worsened the confrontation: due to the great storage of food and basic necessities, Jewish refugees – like other refugee groups – became the target of vicious press campaigns in which they were portrayed almost as criminals. As the documents showed in the last room prove, demands grew for their return home, particularly after the founding of Czechoslovakia. The hatred against the “Eastern” Jews was originally part of the growing nationalism, but played an important role also in the development of Cyzech anti-Semitism.

This exhibition is not so huge, but it represents a really unique experience to learn more about another forgotten history of the Great War. It deserves therefore particular attention. If you are in Prague, don’t miss it. It runs till February 2015. Further information here.

Novels of the Great War: the short stories by Stefan Zweig

Stefan Zweig (1881 – 1942)

We recently had the opportunity to read in Italian a collection of four short stories by the Austrian novelist, poet and playwright Stefan Zweig (Wien, 1881 – Petrópolis, 1942). All these stories are somehow related with the First World War and were conceived during those years even if published some years later. We will enlist in this post the four stories, giving evidence to their original titles in German, in order to put the readers in the condition to retrieve them in other Stefan Zweig’s books.

Die schlaflose Welt ("The Sleepless World", first published on the 18th of August 1914 on "Neue Freie Presse") reconstructs the exhausting sense of alert, pain and wait propagating all over the nights and days and tries to catch that shocking impact and turmoil in an apparently secondary aspect of life (or at least usually forgotten by WWI literature) the sleep-wakefulness cycle. Episode am Genfer See (“Incident on lake Geneva”, written during the spring of 1918 but released in Leipzig by Insel Verlag in 1929) is story of a Russian prisoner ending up in the neutral country of Switzerland, in the lake Geneva. The fact of being bewildered and moved from pillar to post has a deep influence in his short stay on the lake and will lead him to commit suicide swimming across the lake. “Incident on lake Geneva” represents an intense recognition of the vanity of all attempts of help among men. Der Zwang ("The Obligation", like the previous one written during the spring of 1918 and released in Leipzig by Insel Verlag in 1920) is another masterful interpretation of the influence of war in every single life. The protagonist is tormented by the inner conflict between replying to the call to arms and desertion. Of particular interest is the short reportage dedicated to the battlefield of Ypres, Ypres ("Ypres", released by "Berliner Tageblatt" on the 16th of September 1928), that we can read today as a first attempt to describe the huge machine willing to commercialize and sell the memory of World War I. To our eyes this story appears as an accurate meditation on the risk connected with the tourist movement rose around the Great War infamous battlefields and with the possibility of trivializing everything. Today we live on the edge, very close to this risk, but when Zweig wrote his story it was only the beginning. One different from the other, the WWI stories of Stefan Zweig show a new sensibility towards the theme and are able to move inside a poignant spectrum of shades and tonalities. The reader will be probably touched by Zweig’s ability to create characters tortured by a distressing feeling of exile, by an unsettling sensation of being elsewhere, both with body and with the mind.

Landscapes of the Great War: imagination, representation, experience (CfP)

Bridge on the river Soča (Isonzo)

In this post we give evidence to a new Call for Papers. It is particularly interesting for its focus and for the "geographical approach" to our main theme:

The 8th International Conference of the International Society for First World War Studies will explore the theme of “Landscapes of War”. In recent years scholars have sought to move towards a global history of the Great War, focusing on the geographical scope and diversity of the conflict, from Flanders to the Caucasus, the Alps to East Africa, from the Mediterranean to the oceans. This conference will focus on the physical spaces in which the war took place across the many different theatres of war, and the ways in which these diverse landscapes were encountered, altered, imagined, experienced, represented and remembered. How did the physical characteristics of the various battlegrounds impact on military strategies and manoeuvres? How did men, women and children interpret the landscape? How did generals, soldiers, prisoners, workers, farmers, reporters, artists, architects, tourists and others interact with the landscapes of the war? How does the study of the landscape enhance our understanding of the military, political, economic, social and cultural history of the conflict?

The conference will take place over three days, with the first and third days devoted to academic presentations and discussions. In order to give participants a direct experience of one highly significant landscape, the second day will consist of an organised visit to the Asiago Plateau, where the keynote address will be held.

In line with the traditions of the International Society for First World War Studies, the conference aims to focus on new and innovative research, bringing together graduate students and post-doctoral scholars with established academics. The Society aims to foster dialogue between historians of all methodological approaches and geographical areas.

 Possible themes include:

− the military and operational impact of the terrain
− diverse landscapes of war: from the mountains to the desert, the plains to the sea
− the modification, pollution and destruction of landscapes by human interventions
− cityscapes and urban landscapes during and after the war
− prisoners of war and landscapes
− landscapes of war imagined, described and depicted
− the study of landscape: cartography, geography and the natural sciences
− landscapes of war behind the lines: transit and rest areas, training camps
− landscapes after battle: ruins, traces, memories and reconstruction
− battlefield tourism and cultural heritage
− landscapes and nation: real or imagined relationships between territory and nationality
− the productive landscape: agriculture and wartime production, distribution of resources, deprivation and conflicts over food.

In order to maximise discussion time, all conference papers will be circulated in advance and discussed by panellists before the debate is opened to the audience. Papers may be submitted in English, Italian, French or German, but the working languages of the conference will be English and Italian, with simultaneous interpreting available. Participants who submit papers in languages other than English or Italian will be asked to also send a 3-page summary in English. As in previous years, a selection of papers will be published in English after the conference.

Applicants are asked to submit a 300-word abstract in English or Italian, accompanied by a short CV, to landscapesofwar@gmail.com by 30 November 2014. Successful applicants will be notified by January 2015 and must submit their paper electronically by 30 June 2015.
The opening day of the conference will be hosted by the Bruno Kessler Institute in Trento, and the closing day by the University of Padua, with an organised coach transfer via Asiago on the intermediate day. The transfer will be free of charge for all registered delegates. Information on accommodation in Trento (for the first night) and Padua (for the second) will be circulated to confirmed participants in January 2015.
A limited number of bursaries for travel and accommodation will be available for participants whose institution does not provide conference funding. Applicants should please indicate whether they would like to request financial support. For further information, please contact landscapesofwar@gmail.com

Organizing committee:

Roberto Bianchi, University of Florence
Selena Daly, University College Dublin
Marco Mondini, Italian-German Historical Institute, Trento and University of Padua
Martina Salvante, Interuniversity Centre for Historical-Military Research, Italy
Vanda Wilcox, John Cabot University, Rome

A photo reportage about Forte Interrotto and Monte Mosciagh on the Altopiano of Asiago

The photo reportage we propose today is connected with the 16th itinerary to Forte Interrotto, Monte Mosciagh and the Asiago Plateau we suggested a few weeks ago. You can find the description along with all the travel tips here.

• 

  WWIB REPORTAGE

  1 Approaching Forte Interrotto
• 

  WWIB REPORTAGE

  2 The bastion of Forte Interrotto
• 

  WWIB REPORTAGE

  3 The front of Forte Interrotto
• 

  WWIB REPORTAGE

  4 The courtyard
• 

  WWIB REPORTAGE

  5 Inside the Forte
• 

  WWIB REPORTAGE

  6 The Forte before its renovation
• 

  WWIB REPORTAGE

  7 Wood approaching Monte Mosciagh
• 

  WWIB REPORTAGE

  8 Small clearing with the monument to the Catanzaro Brigade
• 

  WWIB REPORTAGE

  9 Austro-Hungarian war cemetery
• 

  WWIB REPORTAGE

  10 Wood grave markers of the war cemetery of Mosciagh
• 

  WWIB REPORTAGE

  11 A second war cemetery at the feet of Monte Zebio
• 

  WWIB REPORTAGE

  12 View on Asiago, at the centre the War Memorial

"100 Jahre erster Weltkrieg". A Virtual exhibition on Great War

The German National Library has recently inaugurated a new exhibition and this time you can visit it from your home. The web portal 100 Jahre erster Weltkrieg gathers together a wide range of materials and sources and arranges them in chronological and thematic order. The curators introduce this virtual exhibition retracing the long history of the collections related to WWI. Already in 1914 it was clear that the Great War was a decisive and incomparable event of the human history. The rising mass media intensified the content and the forms of production and distribution of information and penetrated the everyday life of the whole society.

This both written and visual production immediately drew the attention of many librarians of the time, who tried to gather as much material as they could, but also of single citizens. Private and public war-collections arose everywhere, most of them claiming to be complete and assembling all kind of materials: books, newspapers, placards, letters, pictures, medals, drawings, postcards, musical pieces, etc.

The results of the war collection launched by the former union of German Libraries in Leipzig in October 1914 was amazing according to the report written in 1921: 35.000 books and brochures, 1.300 war maps and more than 600 war newspapers from the trenches, but also from the prison camps or the hospitals, and then again 15.000 posters and many other stuff were collected. Today the old alphabetical catalogue contains a list of about 40.000 cards, which were recently reconverted into the database of the German National Library, so that the items are now searchable in the web. All posters and thousands other – mainly graphical – items were however not included in this alphabetical catalogue and are currently object of a new large project on the WWI Collection, which aims to digitalized also these printed materials and make them available online.

It is on this background that the virtual presentation 100 Jahre erster Weltkrieg was conceived, in order to make visible part of this collection. The website enables the visitors to discover in particular the “media history” of the Great War, and this is the particularity of this exhibition. Besides two units related to the war collections and their history – Krieg Ausstellen and Krieg Sammeln – special attention is directed to the media, i.e. newspaper, literature, posters and postcards. A wide range of digitalized material concerning the regulation and control of the everyday life, both on the front line and of the civil society, can be consulted. A specific section is then devoted to all aspects of the propaganda. Each unit offers a short historical and thematic introduction, as well as a gallery of images in high definition. This is an interesting exhibition, moreover at your fingertips here.

The poets and the world war: "Voice of dead sentry" by Clemente Rebora

Born in Milan in 1885, Clemente Rebora is ascribable to the group of most prominent Italian poets of the pre-war period. It is well know his contribution to “La Voce”, a very influent literary review of the first part of the 20th century. With the editions of “La Voce” he published Frammenti lirici (“Lyrical fragments”, 1913) an enigmatic book in which the reader can detect a huge innovation in the concentration of language and words, still to be seen as pedestal of a long season of the Italian poetry. Rebora took part in the First World War in the areas of Asiago and Gorizia as infantry official and his already fragile nervous system was definitely damaged by the typical shell shock trauma. Due to space limit we avoid now to consider the second part of his life, or at least what it’s usually framed liked this, after the war experience and the spiritual crisis and the subsequent entry in the congregation of Rosminians. Before leaving you to the poem we selected, we just wanted to add that Clemente Rebora is probably the author of the most bloody and dreadful poems in the corpus of the Italian “war poets”. This Voice of dead sentry we present today is a clear example of this assumption and our suggestion is to go further with Viatico (“Viaticum”), an upsetting short poem with no equals, at least in the Italian literature of the First World War.

VOICE OF DEAD SENTRY

There's a gutted body
with ripples of face, emerging
on the stench of the torn air.
The earth is fraud.
I'm mad, but I don't cry:
a matter of those who can and of the mud.
But man, if you can come back,
don't tell the war
to those who're not aware,
don't tell this, where man
and life still get on well together.
But clutch the woman
one night, after a whirlpool of kisses,
if you can come back;
whisper to her that nothing on earth
will redeem what’s lost
of us, the decayed men of here.
Squeeze her heart so to strangle her:
and whether she loves you, is for you
to understand later in life, or never.

VOCE DI VEDETTA MORTA

C'è un corpo in poltiglia
Con crespe di faccia, affiorante
Sul lezzo dell'aria sbranata.
Frode la terra.
Forsennato non piango:
Affar di chi può, e del fango.
Però se ritorni
Tu uomo, di guerra
A chi ignora non dire;
Non dire la cosa, ove l'uomo
E la vita s'intendono ancora.
Ma afferra la donna
Una notte, dopo un gorgo di baci,
Se tornare potrai;
Sòffiale che nulla del mondo
Redimerà ciò ch'è perso
Di noi, i putrefatti di qui;
Stringile il cuore a strozzarla:
E se t'ama, lo capirai nella vita
Più tardi, o giammai. 

"The First World War in Colour”, a book by TASCHEN edited by Peter Walther

Our imagery of the First World War is shaped by faded, maybe damaged black and white pictures. This is somehow relevant for our minds. If we shift to cinema, the situation is a little bit different (although not that different). The Great War continued to inspire many directors after the advent of colour film, but the cult movies on this conflict remain probably the black and white ones. For these reasons it’s always significant to give evidence to new books that stand out from the usual. And a new book opportunity comes from this The First World War in Colour, that TASCHEN just released. The editor Peter Walther is particularly interested in early colour photography techniques and in what it’s commonly called autochrome technology (see this Wikipedia link for detailed explanation about this pioneering technique). Of course only a very small group of photographers was familiar with this printing process and an ever smaller group applied this to frame the catastrophe of the First World War.

One of most interesting thing of this book is given from the simple fact that all the pictures here included needed long exposure time and this gives the strange, unnatural and sometimes shocking sensation of long pondered images​, so different from the urgent and immediate sensation we can find out in the black and white photos of the time.​ The archives that made this book possible are from Europe, USA and Australia. The book is essentially divided into five chapters, one for each year of war, with a remarkable appendix about photographer biographies, credits and further readings. Some names of these pioneers? Paul Castelnau, Fernand Cuville, Jules Gervais-Courtellemont, Léon Gimpel, Hans Hildenbrand, Frank Hurley, Jean-Baptiste Tournassoud and Charles C. Zoller. Here you can find a preview with some images taken from the book.

Finally, there's probably no more suitable post to give evidence to the link featuring some rare World War 1 photos that The Open University shared with World War One Bridges to commemorate 100 years since the start of the war.

(In Italy TASCHEN is distributed by Logos Edizioni that we to thank for the prompt cooperation.)