World War I from the Hungarian Participants’ Point of View: The Value of Wartime Diaries and Memoirs Cover Image

Први светски рат у сећању мађарских учесника Првог светског рата. Прилог вредновању ратних дневника и мемоара
World War I from the Hungarian Participants’ Point of View: The Value of Wartime Diaries and Memoirs

Author(s): Csaba Katona
Contributor(s): Tibor Molnár (Translator)
Subject(s): Cultural history, Civil Society, Military history, Social history, Pre-WW I & WW I (1900 -1919)
Published by: Institut za strategijska istraživanja
Keywords: diaries; memoirs; World War I; Hungary; soldier; wartime; Hungarian participants; ordinary people;

Summary/Abstract: This year marks the 100th anniversary of the outbreak of World War I, and this seminal event in world history is highlighted by numerous books, special studies, and reports. An important part providing new information on World War I is the search for unpublished private papers. Individual viewpoints and experiences are contained in sources that generally mirror and incorporate individual views, and the relevant personal reflect experiences of people living ordinary lives. These include World War I era diaries and memoirs, many of which remain available provide special research opportunities for researchers. Several cultural, social, psychological, and strategic historical themes can be discovered by their use, as they can be excellent sources regarding relations between nations living side by side or waging war against each other. The most important aspect is that through them we can learn the individual stories, intense experiences, and written thoughts of “ordinary” people, and they reveal levels of historical past that cannot be learned by studying great politics. With the help of these personal accounts, we can compare official wartime propaganda to a soldier's experience on the front line. What did it mean in reality for him that the official papers coded as heroic war for God, home, nation, king, etc.? This paper seeks to show the special historical value of such sources by highlighting several wartime diaries and memoirs, featuring one of the most interesting, the most individual ones: that of Bela Munczy. Born in 1896, he was a descendant of a famous Gypsy musician family in Sopron. During the Great War, he served on the Italian Front in 1916 and on the Russian/Polish Front in 1917. His six-volume diary, containing entries written between 4 February 1916 and 31 December 1917, records his impressions of his frontline combat experiences.

  • Issue Year: 2015
  • Issue No: 1
  • Page Range: 224-237
  • Page Count: 14
  • Language: Serbian