With the centenary of the First World War, interest in the war has increased and research about the war has developed in new directions. This timely volume combines two of these new directions: an increased interest in ego documents from the Great War, and an increased interest in the First World War beyond the Western Front. The essays assembled here, written by an international team of scholars, analyse the testimonies of people who lived through that war.
While British and French perceptions of the First World War understandably focus largely on the western front and German perceptions, too, draw largely on the war in the west, increasing attention now is being paid to the fact that the Eastern Front involved as many soldiers, left behind as many dead, and had consequences at least as significant as what occurred in the west. Without ignoring the war in the west, this volume focuses particularly on what occurred in the east and the south: eastern Europe, the Balkans and the Baltic region, Italy, and the Ottoman Empire.
It offers a critical examination of the value of ego documents connected to the First World War, both as part of a broader belief in the 'authentic' access to historical events that they provide and in relation to their use to historians. At the same time, it extends our understanding of the war geographically and culturally. The volume is based on an appreciation that each ego document is representative, not in the statistical meaning of the term, but in that it contains elements of larger social patterns of experience. In this way, and by extending our gaze eastward and southward, this volume offers new and revealing perspectives on the history of the First World War.
