Guerrilla memoirists: recovering intimacy in the margins of First World War memoirs

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the growing scholarship on marginalia, relatively little attention has been given to their function in military memoirs. This article proposes that modern military marginalia have a quality of their own, if we accept Yuval Noah Harari’s diagnosis of a ‘modern war culture’ emerging from the concurrent developments of an expanding book market and a post-Enlightenment epistemology that attributes special significance to the experience and remembrance of war. In the light of this ambivalent quality of modernity, the military annotator can be seen as a ‘guerrilla memoirist’, re-appropriating the intimate conversation among combatants in tacit challenge to the commodification and marketization of their shared experience. The article draws on historical examples of military marginalia and on Lewis Hyde’s account of the gift relationship to contextualize a case study: the annotations (including a pasted-in trench map) made by an American First World War veteran in a copy of Storm of Steel, the 1929 American edition of Ernst Jünger’s best-selling war memoir In Stahlgewittern.