Unknown Fronts. The “Eastern Turn” in First World War History: Baltic Studies, #17

Unknown Fronts

The Eastern Turn in First World War History

Edited by

Elka Agoston-Nikolova

Marijke van Diggelen

Guido van Hengel

Hans van Koningsbrugge

Nicolaas A. Kraft van Ermel

Groningen

This book has been published with support of the Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture and the Nicolaas Mulerius Fund.

Baltic Studies 17

ISSN: 0928-3994

ISBN (paperback): 978-90-825590-1-9

ISBN (e-publication): 978-90-825590-2-6

© 2017 The respective authors and the Instituut voor Noord- en Oost Europese Studies (INOS)

INOS is an imprint of:

Nederland-Rusland Centrum B.V.

Antonius Deusinglaan 2

9713 AW GRONINGEN

The Netherlands

www.nrce.nl

The Netherlands-Russia Centre is affiliated with

Table of Contents

Introduction: The Eastern Turn in history, historiography and memory

Guido van Hengel

I. Cultures, Images of the Self and the Other

1. War of Spirits in the East: East Central and Southeast European Intellectuals and the First World War

Maciej Górny

2. The Real Enemy – The Eastern Front in Austrian Jewish Periodicals

Lukas Waltl

3. Visual Representations of World War One: Discovering the Salonica Front

Nicole Immig

II. Diplomats

4. Diplomacy in the Apogee of Nationalism: Nation and State in Allied and American Public Statements on the Polish Question, 1917-18

Denis Clark

5. Perspectives from a Neutral State: Dutch Sources on the Question of the Armenian Genocide

Nicolaas A. Kraft van Ermel

III. Soldiers

6. The War Diary of Capt. D. Bakŭrdzhiev. World War I seen from below

Raymond Detrez

7. From Struma to Cherna: The Literary Memoirs of Sotir Yanev, a Bulgarian Officer at the Salonika Front (1917)

Elka Agoston-Nikolova

8. Changing fortunes: The frontline-experience of the Royal Bavarian Army on the Eastern Front 1915-1918

Jeremias Schmidt

IV. Civilians

9. Women Like That: Women’s poetry and private writings as a source for women’s Great War history

Vivienne Newman

10. Both Doctor and Etnographer: Arius van Tienhoven and the image of Serbia during the First World War

Pelle van Dijk

11. The Great War and the Jewish Refugees in Russia. Research in the documents of the Joint Distribution Com­mittee

Giuseppe Motta

12. FRONT-LINES

Guido van Hengel and Thijs van Nimwegen

Notes and References

Sources and Bibliography

About the Authors

Introduction: The Eastern Turn in history, historiography and memory

Guido van Hengel

Unknown fronts

It seems as if there is not much unknown about the First World War, especially after the wave of new books that were published during the 2014-2018/2019 centennial. Moreover, the war is not only a recurring theme in historiography, it has been an echo in European politics and society too. The Urkatastrophe of the 20th century produced crucial dilemmas for many social, cultural and political issues of 20th and 21st century Europe. Even some old dilemmas, such as the responsibility for the outbreak of the war, are being debated over and over again. Anachronisms, then, seem to be the only way out from a saturated debate. In 2014, during the centennial of the outbreak of the war, media liked to spread the warning that the geopolitical situation resembled the situation of 1914. A cartoon in a Dutch newspaper showed several world leaders dancing on a rope, next to the outcry: It’s 1914 all over again! The Economist, well known for its thought-provoking covers, showed the EU leaders on a cliff, accompanied with the title of Clark’s bestseller The Sleepwalkers. An alarming message: the end is near.

This always works: powerful analogies invoke strong emotions. For Europe, both history and memory of the First World War are full of symbolic meaning. But at the same time it must be underlined that across the continent there are multiple and even conflicting interpretations of that very meaning. Clearly some current international animosities and historical disputes date back to the years between 1912 and 1924, roughly speaking from the Balkan Wars to the Great War to the last days of the Ottoman Empire and the first days of the Soviet Union. The debate about the Armenian question, the wars in former Yugoslavia, the conflict in Ukraine, and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are just a few examples.

Europe’s frames of memory

The history of the First World War has been overshadowed by political and cultural memory. It ranks number four in Claus Leggewie’s famous seven circles of European memory.¹ In this article Leggewie refers to the imagination of the shared European memory of the First World War in the 2005 film Joyeux Noel.² This international co-production made a Lieu de Mémoire of the Christmas Truce of 1914, when German, British and French soldiers shared their chocolate and drinks in the trenches to celebrate the birth of Christ. Most probably because of this and other films, including the classic All Quiet on the Western Front³, the dominant frame of Europe’s collective trauma is first and foremost associated with the images of the trench warfare at the Western Front. This war is thus a commonplace of collective violence and mourning, which is further transformed into a strong political myth. In 2016, for example, the German chancellor and French president once again stood side-by-side in Verdun, to commemorate the soldiers who died there, and, at the same time, to send a message of European solidarity in times of disintegration and mistrust. But is this all there is, especially these tumultuous times?

Yet, it appears that the memory-box of the First World War has multiple layers that seemingly recently have been discovered. Under the well-known images of the muddy trenches of Verdun and Passchendaele, other images appear showing the fortress of Przemysl, the battles in Bukovina, the Isonzo front, the sieges of Belgrade and Lviv, the fights behind the Masurian lakes, the front of Salonica, the catastrophe of Gallipoli and many more. Perhaps the time is right to reconsider a new collective site of memory for the suffering in Europe’s Great War. But in order to discuss the cultural memory of the European Great War one must first know and scrutinize the historical facts.

This book seeks to shine new light on some of the above mentioned lesser known, sometimes forgotten eastern fronts of the First World War. The essays in this book elaborate on both the memory and history of these fronts, but first and foremost, they seek to break open intellectual spaces for new historical and historiographical debates that do include the Eastern fronts. Of course, with twelve essays, the contribution cannot be more than modest. However, all essays reflect this notion that the complete history of Europe’s Great War is far from written.

After hundred years of research

The oldest focal point in World War I research is the guilt-question. Who started the war? Immediately after the war broke out the Great Powers started to publish diplomatic sources as evidence of their innocence. After peace was signed in Versailles and other suburbs of Paris, the question of war guilt led to vehement debates, not just in historical but also – if not mainly - in political circles. The Berlin journal Kriegsschuldfrage⁴ tried to untie the knots of the Bosnian conspiracy in order to prove Serbia’s guilt - and Germany’s innocence. The question was further elaborated on in classics such as Sidney Fay’s The Origins of the World War (1928)⁵ and Luigi Albertini’s Le Origini della Guerra del 1914 (1942-3)⁶, and in Fritz Fisscher’s influential Griff nach der Weltmacht (1961)⁷.

But there was more to discuss than guilt and responsibility. After the Second World War the focus shifted from the level of the generals and diplomats to the common people: the soldiers. The guilt was not necessarily to be found in the nation-states but as well as in certain social groups: the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the intellectuals, or, in terms of ideology, the capitalists, the imperialists, or the militarists. This notion of young, noble and innocent soldiers being exposed to megalomaniacal plans of villainous generals was strengthened by communist ideas which after 1945 soon became state ideology in most parts of Eastern Europe. But also in the Western part of Europe, the focus shifted from generals to soldiers, not so much inspired by socialism as well as by new fashions in social and economy history. New meth­ods, including quantitative analysis, as well as microhistory became popular in history faculties of Germany and especially in France.

The next phase in World War I research was inspired by the cultural turn in the humanities. In the 1980s scholars became increasingly interested in the emotions of the war, the language, and how artistic ideas had turned into violence and military action. Modris Eksteins’ Rites of Spring (1989)⁸ is perhaps the best example of this type of research. Eksteins discussed the Great War in the context of masculinity, time, modernity, art, philosophy, and generational awareness, and hence influenced at least one generation of World War I historians.

In the 1990s it was Jay Winter, who coined the memory boom, and wrote pioneering studies about how the First World War was commemorated in Europe. These were the times when Pierre Nora’s Lieux de Mémoire⁹ were widely read and discussed in the Anglo-Saxon world, just like Aleida Assmann’s works about time, space, and memory¹⁰. Obviously, in the 1990s the very last survivors of the Great War were rapidly passing away, which made the issue of commemoration and memory very urgent. After all these phases of military and diplomatic history, social and economic history, the cultural turn and the memory boom, it seemed that the First World War had been researched and analyzed thoroughly enough. But, as aforementioned, many of the historical dilemmas keep coming back, like boomerangs.

Today, the new fashions in history writing are all about transnational spaces, area studies, cultural transfer, and Global History. This trend is also recognizable in First World War historiography. For example, around the centennial, new monographs were published about the role of the colonies (and colonized) in the Great War, and recently many books have been written about the yet unsolved or cyclical conflicts in the Middle East, of which many are rooted in the events of the Great War and its aftermath. In order to fit in Eastern Europe here, one does not have to focus on different unknown or non-Western areas. Instead, a transnational approach is necessary. The limits in terms of topography, ideology, and research must be stretched. In his contribution to this book Raymond Detrez has explained how the Bulgarian history of the Great War has been researched mainly from a Bulgarian perspective, with a Bulgarian national, sometimes ideological conviction. Exchanging views, and comparative research, would transcend the strict national frames and give clearer insights into the dynamics of war, and those participating in it - regardless of their nationality.

There are three reasons to analyze the Eastern Fronts once more in a specific pan-European context. First, since the fall of Communism and the collapse of the Eastern Bloc, many unknown sources in the archives have become available for international scholars. Second, during and after the Cold War the Eastern theatres of war have been hidden under thick layers of communist and nationalist propaganda. These stories need to be analyzed, discussed, re-interpreted and rejected or possibly reinforced by scholars from both Eastern and Western Europe. And lastly, the Eastern part of Europe has rapidly grown into the European family as a consequence of EU-enlargement. Because of the increasing misunderstandings between the Western and Eastern member states and its citizens, it is of importance that the EU creates a common market, not only for the famous four freedoms (goods, products, capital and persons) but for historical controversies too.

The international conference Unknown Fronts, which was organized in Groningen on November 5 and 6, 2015, aimed to give a number of scholars from both Western and Eastern Europe the opportunity to share their thoughts, ideas, and research findings. Questions were raised like: Where are new sources to be found? What methods do we choose to research these sources? What has been researched and how? How to connect the different historiographies of Europe?

Most of the traditions in First World War historiography mentioned above were present, which made the program of the conference quite broad and colorful: Diplomacy was discussed as much as the autobiographical writing of individual soldiers. The big picture of the geopolitical interests was discussed alongside the small picture of microhistories of families behind the fronts. Some scholars, such as Maciej Górny, elaborated on the cultural background of the war, while others, such as Jeremias Schmidt and Nicole Immig, provided new source material from hidden or closed archives. For this book, the essays have been clustered in five sections: 1) cultures, imagining the self and the other, 2) diplomats, 3) soldiers, 4) civilians, and 5) memory and culture.

Essays

Basically, most essays in this conference volume revolve around new or old sources from the unknown fronts of the East, from the Masurian Lakes to Gallipoli and from Vienna to Moscow. These include periodicals, visual sources, diplomatic documents, newspapers, or sites of memory.

The first three essays form a triptych about cultural differences, the imagining of the self and the other in both discourse, intellectual debate, as well as in visual material. As Maciej Górny explained, opinions on cultures and national character were filtered through the dynamically developing apparatuses of propaganda and censorship and hence formed into a genre named the Krieg der Geister (War of Spirits). Górny concludes that the Krieg der Geister must not be limited to the Western theatres of the war: Neither in intellectual standing of the authors involved, nor in the discursive strategies they used, did Krieg der Geister in the East deviate from its counterpart on the Western front. Still, in order to understand the intellectual and cultural enthusiasm for the war, one must understand that the war of the spirits in the East was not between warring states (e.g. England versus France), but rather inside the often multinational societies (and armies!) of the waning Habsburg, German and Ottoman Empires, as well as in the relatively new states of Serbia, Bulgaria and Rumania. In his essay, Górny gives some remarkable examples of cultural framing and imagining in wartime Eastern and Central Europe. This imagining of the other is discussed by Lukas Waltl as well in his essay about Austrian Jewish periodicals. By approaching periodicals not just as sources, he writes, but as objects in their own rights […] it is possible to investigate […] how very complex matters […] are being interpreted, integrated into already existing narratives and explained to the public or to particular communities. In this sense, the study of periodicals can serve as a means of exploring how, in a society, reality is being constructed via discourse. Similar observations are made by Nicole Immig in her essay about visual sources of the Salonica Front, indeed one of the most forgotten fronts of the Great War. The images of the soldiers in the Southern Balkans, and especially those that were printed in Western media do not only show a discursive image of adventurous fringes of Europe’s civilization, but also a patronizing humanitarizing and modernizing mission of the Allied forces in the Balkans. Obviously, these images tell as much about those who are depicted (the other) as those who made and distributed them (the self).

The triptych about cultures, images of the self and others is followed by two essays on the role and culture of diplomacy in the First World War. Denis Clark and Nicolaas Kraft van Ermel both elaborate on the position of two relatively distant outsiders in the European war: the US and the Netherlands. The former just entered the war in the very last year, while the latter did not participate in the war at all. Hence, we have a distant and neutral perspective, one from a global political player with essential power, and the other from a European small state with relatively modest power. It is interesting to see the European conflict through the big lens of the US, and the very small lens of the Netherlands. The specifically defined focus on neutrality in the First World War, and the role of the neutrals, is a relatively recent phenomenon in historiography.

In the third section of this book we shift the focus to the micro-perspective of the Eastern fronts: the experiences of soldiers. Raymond Detrez concludes in his essay about the Bulgarian captain Bakurdzhiev that "unpretentious, but touching document humaine can serve as an antidote to the usual self-glorification and self-pity" of bombastic nationalistic narratives on World War I. Microhistory functions here as a counterpoint to dominant and hegemonic national frames. A similar approach is taken in the essay of Elka Agoston about the Bulgarian soldier Sotir Yanev. Microhistorians such as Carlo Ginzburg and Giovanni Levi teach us that sometimes one detailed close-up can be of primary importance in understanding the whole storyline, even more than the long- and high-angle shots. This is the case in Agoston’s essay. The personal details of the Bulgarian soldier Sotir Yanev alters the entire image of a heroic war. Jeremias Schmidt shares the front-experiences of the Royal Bavarian army on the Eastern front he discovered in diaries and other documents kept in the State archives of Munich. He states that there are no studies yet about the other German forces, which means that there still remains much to be researched. In line with the three essays in this part, one could argue that the human experiences of the gruesome war can and must be researched in order to understand, and keep on understanding the past.

Not soldiers, but civilians are central in the fourth section. Pelle van Dijk writes about a Dutch doctor and Vivienne Newman about British nurses. Both the nurses and the doctor went from the Western part of Europe to Serbia and other eastern fronts to help in chaotic field hospitals, nursing wounded and diseased soldiers. Newman explains why women’s poetry can be a good source for exploring an important, under-researched area of women’s Great War history; the service on the forgotten Eastern fronts. Pelle van Dijk elaborates on the Dutch doctor Arius van Tienhoven who worked in the Balkans during both the Balkan Wars and the Great War. Recently, van Tienhoven’s grandchildren have sent a number of boxes full of pictures to the Royal Library in the Hague, offering a great sources of new research into the role of neutral civilians in the unknown Serbian front. Possibly, this could also lead to a renewed interest for the eastern First World War in the Netherlands. Then, Giusseppe Motta investigates the life of war refugees, with special regard to the Jews in the Eastern settlements. As a main source he uses the joint distribution report to analyze position of refugees in general, and the life of Jews in Russia during the Great War in particular.

Perhaps the memory of the Great War has given space for reconciliation, freedom and peace. It is certain, that the First World War formed a great inspiration for artists, poets and writers. Therefore, we have included some artistic interpretations of war poems that were written at the unknown fronts.

The University of Groningen and the Netherlands-Russia Centre facilitated, at least during these two days, an intellectual and scholarly climate for exchanging new insights and sources on the unknown fronts of the Great War. Hopefully the essays in this book will inspire further research, and will contribute to more understanding of the historical narratives from both the Western and Eastern fronts, and, eventually, an Eastern Turn in Europe’s history and, not to forget, in cultural memory. We are especially grateful to the Groningen Research Institute for the Study of Culture and the Nicolaas Mulerius Fund. Without their financial support the exchange of ideas at the conference and in this publication would be impossible. Many thanks are also due to Jojet Westerhuis who has aided us in the process lead­ing up to and during the conference. Eventually we would like to thank all the other speakers of the conference.

I. Cultures, Images of the Self and the Other

1. War of Spirits in the East: East Central and Southeast European Intellectuals and the First World War

Maciej Górny

Up until 1918, East Central and Southeast Europe region was by and large a recip­ient rather than a producer of wartime propaganda, for fairly obvious reasons. However, if we approach the problem of ‘War of Spirits’ from a slightly broader perspective, the resulting image will prove richer and more complex than that of a war’s periphery. Representatives of nationalities engaged in a struggle for self-determination exercised impressive creative autonomy. The broadening of the research field of intellectual combat toward East Central and Southeast Europe necessitates another reconfiguration with regard to common perceptions of World War I. First, the time-frame of the conflict in the East differed from that in the West. East of Germany, war did not begin in 1914, nor did it end in 1918. Second, ‘War of Spirits’ frequently saw allies engage in conflict with one another. Many of such conflicts, at first expressed primarily in magazine articles, transformed into actual wars after 1918. Some simmered on in political and scholarly articles published in the newly-established nation-states. Broken down into a myriad of minor sections, the Eastern front of ‘War of Spirits’ proved by and large to anticipate the post-war situation in the region.

Krieg der Geister: West to East

The war cannot be said to have come as a complete surprise to the intellectual elites of Europe. Some indeed looked to it with hope. This attitude – regardless of the frustration it breeds among historians according to Wolfgang J. Mommsen – drastically hastened the spontaneous mobilisation of the intellectual strata.¹ On August 8th, 1914, Henri Bergson delivered the first of his speeches describing war as a clash between civilisation (represented by France and England) and German barbarianism. On September 18th of the same year, The Times published an address by British scholars and writers, criticising German culture for its supposedly aggressive character and penchant for self-admiration.² A German response of a comparable calibre was not long in the waiting. In September 1914, 93 professors signed the Address to the World of Culture, overruling all charges of German militarism. Instead, authors of the Address invoked racist ideology, claiming that Those who choose to ally themselves with Russians and Serbians, who embarrass themselves publicly by coaxing Mongolians and Negroes to make war against the white race, have the least right to pose as defenders of European civilisation.³ In October, three thousand German academics affixed their signatures to an even more radical Position of the Academic Teachers of the German Reich, indignantly rejecting any attempts at singling out Prussian militarism from German culture in general.⁴ This response, naturally, prompted further reactions.

The warring states defined boundaries for intellectual reflection on the war in two distinct ways. First, due to government regulation, the publishing market turned to short works aimed at a broader readership. Prominent intellectuals were unofficially persuaded to address the war in their works and thus get involved in the national effort. In fact, many did not require additional encouragement. Second, many authors based their ruminations on war on material supplied by the media controlled by the national propaganda. The schematic view of reality imposed by propaganda affected the resulting works. Regardless of those conditions, it was the intellectuals – and not the politicians – who assumed the task of disseminating appropriate statements while retaining a limited creative autonomy. It would be wrong to identify war of the spirits with wartime propaganda. Both operated according to their own dynamics, and, though mutually inspiring, remained autonomous.⁵ The nature of these publications was perfectly captured by a Polish observer, Salomon Besser, who claimed: Above all, in combat, each of the warring nations speaks only of its enemy, of his diametrically opposed spirit, and assumes him to be evil, naturally thinking itself good. Every nation fights in the name of its own spirit.⁶

Not coincidentally, most works concerned with the national character of wartime enemies published in Russia, Germany, Austria-Hungary, France, and Great Britain saw print during the first two years of the conflict. They were a product of a wave of enthusiasm with which intellectuals welcomed the outbreak of the Great War in August 1914. After two years, however, the emotional engagement waned, as did the general interest in those issues. Societies of warring countries grew weary with the decisive victory capable of lifting spirits proving unattainable, and losses at the front – coupled with shortages at home – becoming increasingly cumbersome. Pacifism was rife.⁷ While war of the spirits in the West continued beyond that point, after two years, it also began to dissipate. The Eastern Front tells yet another story.

War in the East owed its specificity not only to the spatial ramifications of the conflict, but also to its time-frame. Neither 1914, nor 1918 marked a clear-cut caesura. The Balkans entered into a state of war already in 1912, not only engaging a few of the countries later involved in the Great War, but also European diplomats and public opinion in general. The situation then grew even more complex, as events such as the revolution and Bolshevist coup in Russia, auguring a prolonged and chaotic period of civil war, unfolded. The transition from military activity prior to German capitulation to that which took place already after the conclusion of the war was seamless. In these conditions, many phenomena captured perfectly between the dates 1914-1918 in the West, lasted much longer in the East and, as a result, yielded even more destructive results. On the other note, the viability of propaganda in the region was far lower than in the most developed countries of the West. Outside Bohemia and Bulgaria, a significant proportion – and sometimes even the majority – of peasants were illiterate second-class citizen.⁸ Mobilisation of popular opinion and dissemination of major state policies typically occurred by way of the pulpit.⁹ Up until 1918, the region was by and large a recipient rather than a producer of wartime propaganda, for fairly obvious reasons. Though all of its nationalities furnished recruits for the warring armies, most did not have a nation-state to implement an independent information policy. While motifs developed by major powers for their own purposes were regurgitated and appropriated, the process never reached the same intensity on the margins as it did at the centre.

The beginnings were not regionally specific. Austrian propaganda applied the same patterns to publications in all languages of the Cisleithania. In Russia, stringent language policies meant that, outside of publications in Russian, only Polish titles appeared in numbers of any significance during the war. Just as in the West, most authors employed in magazines involved in war of the spirits were intellectuals and men of culture. Unstable political situation sometimes placed the same authors in both warring camps. Such was the case with Wincenty Rzymowski, the later Minister of Foreign Affairs in the Provisional Government of National Unity in 1945. In 1915, Rzymowski published the pamphlet Podboje Rosji (Russia's Conquests) through Prawda magazine (which he edited). The pamphlet described the internal consolidation of the empire in the face of the war: Through flared nostrils, Russia draws in the scent of blood spilled by Vistula and San; with this scent, her lungs fill with a clear conviction for the great work of uniting all nationalities under its crown into a single, giant nation of all Russia.¹⁰ When Germans occupied the Kingdom of Poland, Rzymowski was interned in a prisoner of war camp. A year later, following his release, he gave a lecture in the main hall of the Warsaw Technical Association, entitled Germany and the coalition, in which he shared his camp experience, all the while copying the popular motifs of the German war of the spirits. Germany and its allies in Central Europe were faced by a procession of countless tribes and peoples, serving England often against their best wishes. According to Rzymowski, the British were characterised primarily by egotism and cold deviousness: English patriotism depends on an extremely tightly measured exchange of services between citizen and the state. … In the eyes of the citizen, war is a business venture the state chose to invest in.¹¹ The French, on the other hand – again, much alike in the works of German intellectuals – were plagued by a desire for revenge. For its erstwhile eulogist, the nation of all Russia ended up on the worst side of the deal:

In a prisoner of war camp, the Russian is a born proletarian, pauper, by nature and habit given to offering himself a servant to any power and for any reward. … While the Frenchman consumes the abundant provisions and delicacies … the Muscovite stands behind his seat with that lowly bend in his neck, a timeless mark of congenital slavery.¹²

German and Austro-Hungarian military achievements in Central and Eastern Eur­ope tipped the balance decisively in favour of the proponents of the Central Powers. Prior to these developments, however, the region (mostly Poland) saw the publication of translations of Western brochures and original works which critically reviewed primarily the German national character. Polish readers thus obtained access to a translation of Ernest Barker's typical characterological study, in which he identified Germanness with a cult of power and associated it with Treitschke and Nietzsche.¹³ The same motif recurred in works of native writers: Adam Szelągowski likened contemporary Germany to a grim fulfilment of the concept of the half-Slavic, half-Teutonic philosopher.¹⁴ The nationalist interventions of German professors prompted outrage. Already after the evacuation of Russians from the Kingdom of Poland, economist Faustyn Rasiński hoped that Germans would come to their senses since The followers of Leibnitz and Humboldt cannot lend their names to that famous address of latter-day 'scholars.'¹⁵ His