Our Journal: First World War Studies

The literature of the Eastern Front during World War I has not received the same critical attention as has that of its western counterpart. This article will address this lacuna by focusing on a neglected but at the time popular prisoner-of-war novel: Friede H. Kraze’s The Magical Forests (Die magischen Wälder) (1933) published under the pseudonym Heinz Gumprecht. The Magical Forests reworks experiences of wartime captivity in Russia and places them in a narrative that demonstrates the prisoners’ loyalty to their comrades and to the nation. Russia is portrayed in the novel as feminine, primitive, and backward, qualities that the prisoners find to be both exotic and attractive. The novel is unique in that it not only focuses on the prisoners’ suffering but also presents Russian captivity as having allowed the prisoners to forge a revitalized national community based on the values of male soldierly comradeship. This article will analyse Kraze’s depictions of the natural landscape and peoples of Russia encountered by the prisoners. It shows how the masculine bonds of comradeship among the prisoners are both reinforced and challenged by their relations with Russian women. While The Magical Forests articulates colonial fantasies of settling and developing Russian territory, the novel also displays a more complex identification with the lands and peoples of the country that challenges the notion of a straight path from turn-of-the-century Russophobia to Nazi anti-Bolshevism.

Key Words: representations of prisoners of war in literature, collective memory of World War I, captivity in Siberia, German images of Russia, nationalism in literature, interwar Europe

The Four Minute Men, a group of volunteer speakers on wartime topics, exerted a tremendous influence on domestic mobilization in the USA from 1917 to 1918. The article assesses the experience of Four Minute Men, especially in postwar recollections. In particular, I argue that historians have misunderstood the authorship and significance of the 1927 article ‘Memoirs of a Four Minute Man’. This article misrepresents the writer’s own experiences and overstates the sense of disillusionment experienced by wartime speakers in the 1920s and 1930s.

Key Words: Four Minute Men, propaganda, postwar memoirs, US Home Front

A major problem of state and institution building in Yugoslavia after 1918 was that the end of the war was not a complete caesura between separate South Slav pasts and a unified ‘Yugoslav’ future: much historical and institutional baggage was carried over into the new state. This was obviously the case with the Yugoslav army, where creating a new institution entirely from scratch was impossible, given the immediate internal and external threats that faced the new state and given the prestige and the military efficacy of the Serbian army. The Yugoslav army was consciously modelled on the pre-war Serbian army, not only in terms of its institutional framework, but also in terms of its ethos and ideology. There was little space in this ideology for commemorating Austria–Hungary’s war, just as there was little space in the Czechoslovak, Polish or Romanian armies. It was difficult to fuse Austro-Hungarian and Serbian veterans into one army, and problems were especially acute in the officer corps. This article addresses some of the successes and failures encountered in the attempt to fuse disparate and often antithetical military institutional cultures in Yugoslavia in the decade after the end of the First World War.

Key Words: Yugoslavia, Austria–Hungary, Serbia