„Notatki z wielkich czasów” i „Pamiętniki z lat 1916–1918”. Ludomił German i jego zapiski z czasów I wojny światowej

Abstract

The article presents the last years of the life of Ludomił German (1851–1921), a Galician teacher and school inspector, playwright, translator and politician. He was an activist of the Democratic-National Party and Polish Democratic Party, membor of the Austrian parliament in Vienna (1907–1918) and the National Parliament in Lviv (1912–1914), vice-president of the Chamber of Deputies and vice-president of the Polish Circle. During the World War I, he kept a diary in which he described his activities in the Supreme National Commitee (established on August 16th, 1914), the Polish Circle and the parliament, as well as the history of the Polish Legions, the struggle for their leadership and the efforts undertaken by the leaders of Galicia and the Kingdom of Poland to unificate the Polish lands and create a more or less independent Polish state. As a supporter of the trialist option (replacing the dualistic Austro-Hungarian Monarchy with the trialistic Austro-Hungary-Poland, created as a result of the joining of the Russian Kingdom of Poland to Galicia), he saw the place of Poles at the side of the Habsburgs almost until the end of the war. He spent the end of his life in Lviv, where he also died. His diary, divided into two parts, is kept in the collections of manuscripts of the Jagiellonian Library in Cracow, Poland (number 8537 I, „Notes from great times”, original) and in the Vasyl Stefanyk National Scientific Library of Ukraine in Lviv (Fond 5, number 6415, vol. I–III, „Memoirs of 1916–1918, copy).