„PARTICIPAREA MEA ÎN PRIMUL RÃZBOI MONDIAL”. JURNALUL INEDIT AL SASULUI TRANSILVĂNEAN OTTO FOLBERTH
„My Participation in the First World War”. The Manuscript Diary of the Transylvanian Saxon, Otto Folberth

Summary/Abstract: The historian and intellectual Otto Folberth (1896-1991) has become a famous member of the Transylvanian Saxon culture through hard work and his critical editing of the writings of Stephan Ludwig Roth (1796-1849), a Lutheran priest executed in Cluj on the 11th of May 1849 by the Hungarian revolutionaries. The last one has been mainly known for his work The fight for language in Transylvania, in which he has promoted equal justification among the three main languages, Hungarian, German and Romanian, claiming about the latter that it was known by all the inhabitants of Transylvania. The present study presents Folberth’s unpublished war diary, kept in the archives of the Transylvanian Institute of Gundelsheim, Germany. The aim of the research is to make this primary document, written during the conflagration and known to the historians of the Great War, thus introducing it into the larger scholarly circuit and thereby contributing to the rediscovery and resizing of the image of the war, assessed by a twenty years old lieutenant, who has recorded these events on a daily basis. The journal summarizes 58 notebooks, having a pagination of 25-30 pages, and includes his notes from the age of 14 years up to the age of 90 years. Under the title „My participation in the First World War”, it summarizes the period of July 1915-January 1919, the period during which he has been on the Eastern front, in Galicia, and in Budapest, the capital of Hungary. Accompanied by vintage photos, military and campaign sketches, Folberth’s diaries are regarded as unique sources that present not direct military scenes, but the lives of soldiers and civilians behind the front lines. The young lieutenant tackles political, military, ideological, philosophical, religious, social and anthropological topics, expressed through quotes from his own correspondence, from letters of his companions, from official dialogues with civilians, from anonymous military poems and songs, all filtered through his psychological and emotional experience. In addition to these facts and events, Folberth also captures the rhetorical deep feelings related to „the madness of war”, the „desire of peace”, the destruction and death sowed between people, military heroism, illusions and last moments of life of anonymous soldiers.

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