Wartime Diaries Research Articles

What Concerned Chiang? A Survey and Analysis of Chiang Kai-Shek’s Wartime Diaries

Chiang Kai-shek (1887-1975) has been one of the most controversial figures in Modern China since the early-1940s. One of the key issues in the controversy is whether Chiang paid more attention to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) than to the Japanese during China’s war of resistance. This article attempts to answer this question through statistical analyzes of Chiang’s wartime diaries. Together with the question are Chiang’s considerations behind his critical decisions that would finally collapse the Republican China in 1949. The article demonstrates that the CCP received far less attention from Chiang than the issue of finance, let alone other issues. The times that the CCP received Chiang’s extraordinary attention was when it was conducting provoking operations against the Nationalist government.

Tempered by war: the military experiences of Vietnam decision-makers

The article focuses on three senior decision-makers in the John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson administrations that each played a key role in the escalation in Vietnam, namely Walt W. Rostow, Roger Hilsman, and John T. McNaughton. It builds on Andrew Preston’s argument in this journal that the dichotomy between ‘hawks’ and ‘doves’ might caricature Vietnam War advisors to suggest the same for the dichotomy between ‘civilians’ and ‘veterans’. Using new material, most notably McNaughton’s wartime diaries and Hilsman’s OSS files, the article suggests that wartime experience was clearly an important formative experience for civilian advisors but in different ways. First, where political scientists tell us that veterans are more likely to espouse certain views, and in particular resist the use force, these examples suggest that proximity to combat - i.e. how much active combat they experienced - mattered more. Second, there was no uniform ‘military’ experience: these advisors were more likely to support the types of tools – i.e. air power or irregular forces - with which they were familiar and only then, if they had become invested in the underlying bureaucratic project of the agency in which they were deployed. In other words, a process of socialization or indoctrination into the armed services happened unevenly. Put together, the examples suggest that the formative experiences in the Second World War cast a long shadow onto the Vietnam War decisions but did so in complex ways.

Donald Edward Moggridge (1943–2021)

Donald Edward Moggridge (1943–2021)

Qiang Fang and Xiaobing Li, editors. Corruption and Anticorruption in Modern China. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Groups, Inc., 2018. 398 pp. Hardback $126.00, ISBN 978-1-4985-7431-0.

Qiang Fang and Xiaobing Li, editors. Corruption and Anticorruption in Modern China. Lanham, MA: Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Groups, Inc., .  pp. Hardback $., ISBN ----. While students and observers of China may disagree on many things about China, one thing that they tend to agree on is the serious, and continuous, corruption throughout Chinese history, from imperial ages to the reform era. Accordingly, anticorruption is also an important, if not more important, theme that continues to be an issue in Chinese politics. Thus, corruption and anticorruption, both have constituted a lens through which we can understand modern China, including the ruling regimes in different periods, the political elites, the common people, and the underlying cultural identity of the nation. This book covers a topic that has long been of interest to me. Hence, it was a great pleasure to read this book, Corruption and Anticorruption in Modern China, edited by Qiang Fang and Xiaobing Li. Being a political scientist who studies corruption and anticorruption in contemporary China, I find the historians’ studies in this book fascinating. Under their pen, corruption and anticorruption in modern China become a grand picture dynamically unfolded in front of the readers, linking imperial dynasties (e.g., Han, Tang, Ming, and Qing), Republic China (e.g., Yuan Shikai, Chiang Kai-Shek’s GMD), and contemporary China (e.g., under Mao, Jiang, and Xi) in both a longitudinal and comparative way. Feeling the echo of history, and reconsidering the similarities and differences between the present and the past, one can more deeply reflect the logic of Chinese political institutions. As a famous quote from Kenneth Lieberthal’s book, Governing China, states, “But all long-term observers of this remarkable country (i.e., China) know that there are few places in the world for which the phrase ‘the more things change, the more they stay the same’ more aptly applies” (, p. xvii). It also comes as a surprise to see scholars in other disciplines share similar research interests in several specific topics that have been largely understudied, such as corruption fugitives (chapter  by Yue Li and Chen Liu), political satire (chapter  by Helen Xiaoyan Wu), and political rumors (chapter  by Stella Y. Xu). In these chapters, the historians’ documentation and interpretation of the issues, for example, why the problems occurred and their sociopolitical implications, and the authors’ scholarly utilization of the available materials, Review©  by University of Hawai‘i Press provide new analytical and methodological angles to think about in my own related research (e.g., Zhu ; Zhu, Lu, Shi ). Moreover, for the general readership who are interested in the general topic of China, or corruption and anticorruption in China in particular, this book has at least the following merits making it worth reading. First, this book provides an earnest and timely presentation of historical materials. All contributors skillfully dissect historical materials into analytical stories accessible to general readers. For example, chapter  by Qiang Fang sampled sixty-one primary corruption cases involving top Qing officials and classified the politics behind corruption reporting and tackling, which demonstrates the fundamental flaws of the imperial system. In chapter  written by Patrick Fuliang Shan, abundant information and analysis about Yuan Shikai’s management ideas and implementations are presented in detail, and readers can reconsider their constructed opinions on Yuan Shikai and the Beiyang period. In chapter  by Sherman Xiaogang Lai, historical details conveyed by Chiang Kai-Shek’s wartime diaries are excavated, illuminating how Chiang as the national leader perceived his own political party and the critical historical moments at that time. In contrast, other chapters remind readers of the near past. For instance, chapter  by Dongyu Yang, reviewed the corruption and anticorruption in Jiang’s era by studying a case of anticorruption in Shaanxi Province to exemplify the practices at that time. This is also the age when the market economy and the socialist political system were dramatically adapted together, economic opportunities and political resources met, and thus cultivated the hotbed of corruption. The anticorruption practices in Jiang’s era also inspire readers to compare these with the recent anticorruption initiatives under Xi. Chapter  by Xiansheng Tian, documented the recent breaking news about the Bo and Wang event...

Rereading the Transmutations of Miksa Fenyő’s 1944-1945 Diary, Az elsodort ország [‘A Nation Adrift’

This review article examines the 2018 publication by Helena History Press of A Nation Adrift [‘Az elsodort ország’]: The 1944-1945 Wartime Diaries of Miksa Fenyő. Translated by Miksa Fenyő’s son, Mario D. Fenyő, this work gains new layers of meaning when alternately read as a Holocaust narrative, a family history, an example of life writing and the continuation of intellectual activity in the face of great adversity. Only recently available to an English-speaking audience, Az elsodort ország provides a remarkably comprehensive, well-composed description of the Hungarian Holocaust, World War II and the Siege of Budapest, as related by Miksa Fenyő (1877-1972), the former editor and critic of the modern literary journal, Nyugat [‘West’] and deputy director of GyOSz [Gyáriparosok Országos Szövetsége; ‘Association of Hungarian Industrialists’].

Seven Late Twentieth-Century Lives: the Mass Observation Project and Life Writing

From its revival in 1981, the Mass Observation Project has collected life writing. In response to open ended questionnaires (‘directives’), MO correspondents send in what often amount to fragments of autobiography. While this material has been explored by researchers ‘horizontally’, to discuss attitudes and behaviour in relation to the themes raised by particular directives, my book Seven Lives from Mass Observation is the first attempt to use the material ‘vertically’, assembling the fragments of autobiography contributed by some individual writers who continued to respond over two or three decades. In an earlier book, Nine Wartime Lives, I used MO's original wartime diaries (and directive responses) to write biographical essays exploring a set of common themes, derived from the mature historiography of the period, from the contrasting perspectives of nine very different observers who had all participated as active citizens in public life. This article describes the very different challenges and insights posed by the use of the more recent MOP material. The longer time frame, and less developed historiography, demanded toleration of initial confusion in the research process before the key theme of a contrast between the 1960s and 1980s emerged. The reflective narrative of MOP's autobiographical fragments (different from the immediacy of the MO wartime diaries) shaped the sample chosen: a single older generational cohort, born between the two world wars, responding to the 1960s and the 1980s as adults formed by earlier experiences. Writing intimate biographies of living people, guaranteed anonymity when they first volunteered for MOP, required developing a set of ethical protocols in conjunction with the MO Trustees.

A View of the Disaster and Victory from below: Serbian Roma Soldiers, 1912–1918

The Kingdom of Serbia fought in three consecutive conflicts between 1912 and 1918. These events merged into a devastating experience of an all-out war, completely reshaping all aspects of contemporary life. As the first centenary of these events has recently shown, the memories of wartime still play a very prominent role in the Serbian national narrative. By 1915 around 20% of Serbian combatants belonged to some of the country’s minorities. Second class citizens on the social margins of society, the Serbian Roma constitute those whose wartime history is the least known to research and the public. However, the wartime diaries kept by Serbian soldiers are full of causal references to their Roma fellow combatants. This article provides an overview of the duties Roma soldiers played in the war, based on the perspective of Serbs who were fighting alongside them. The article tackles the general image and the position of the Roma population in the Kingdom of Serbia. In addition, the horrific challenges the war created for Serbian society are tackled from the perspective of those who were, already in peace time, in the most disadvantageous situation socially and economically. Overall, despite the unifying experience which the wartime suffering imposed on all citizens of the Kingdom, the old prejudices towards the Roma survived after 1918.

Soviet Diaries of the Great Patriotic War

To make sense of the unprecedented destruction wrought by World War II, Soviet historians have increasingly turned to diaries for insight into how this conflict was experienced and understood by individual citizens. This essay explores recent historiographical approaches to Soviet wartime diaries by examining the groundbreaking and diverse methods of Oleg Budnitskii, Jochen Hellbeck, and Jeffrey K. Hass, as well as discussing my own research. Using soldiers’ diaries, Budnitskii has illuminated lesser known and taboo aspects of frontline service, complicating both the celebrated myth of the Great Patriotic War and the assumption that Soviet people did not think outside of the categories of Soviet ideology in the process. Hellbeck has investigated Stalin-era practices of diary writing as a tool for perfecting oneself, purging it of bourgeois individualism, and aligning it with collective. Based on this, he has argued that Soviets had a unique self-concept (or subjectivity), which was distinct from the liberal, western tradition. Donning a historical-sociological approach, Hass has studied diaries from the Leningrad Blockade to discern how extreme starvation put pressure on various norms and behavioral logics at work in the besieged community. Drawing inspiration from all of these researchers, my study – also of wartime Leningrad – attends to the cognitive and narrative strategies that Leningraders employed to come to intellectual grips with the siege. I treat the diary as a sense-making text rather than as a laboratory of self.

“A Distress that Cannot Be Forgotten”

For the abstract, use this text instead: "Using the case of the Bosnian War during the 1990s, and drawing on Iris Murdoch’s philosophy, this paper develops an understanding of moral vulnerability, where one’s ability to imagine certain ways of being ethical can be transformed through the extreme violence of war and genocide. There is a vulnerability to moral injury through violence that is grounded in the way persons imagine themselves and the world. Beginning with the wartime diaries of Zlatko Dizdarević, a survivor of the Bosnian wars of the 1990s, the paper turns to different understandings of moral injury, as well as Margaret Urban Walker’s understanding of “moral vulnerability.” I argue these approaches do not capture an important dimension in Dizdarević’s witness. The paper then turns to Iris Murdoch’s philosophy to begin to articulate and account for this dimension and sketch an understanding of moral vulnerability distinct from current moral injury discourses.

Боксерское восстание в Китае в военных мемуарах, дневниках и письмах

Боксерское восстание в Китае в военных мемуарах, дневниках и письмах

Fictionalizing the real: imagined publics and constructions of self in Etty Hillesum’s diary

The diary of Etty Hillesum, a Dutch Jew living in Amsterdam under German occupation during World War II, seems, like many wartime diaries, a seductive point of access to unmediated first-hand experience – but we should not too quickly confuse ‘intimate’ for ‘immediate’. We must ask: When Hillesum writes her diary, for whom is she writing? To what extent is she constructing the character of Etty, and for what purposes? How can we see, in this constructed self and consciousness of an imagined audience, evidence of reconciliation and struggle with the events of the war and her role within it as an initially protected, socially privileged member of the Jewish Council? Drawing from James Young’s suggested ‘poetics’ of Holocaust diaries as well as Bloom’s notion of the ‘public private diary’, I perform a close reading of the evolution of the narrative voice created by Hillesum in order to demonstrate the complex negotiations performed by the (female) (Holocaust) diarist to construct a self for an evolving imagined audience – and then enact that self.

The Wartime Diaries of Canadian Baptist Military Chaplain William A. White, 1917–1918

ABSTRACTThis article focuses on Rev. William A. White’s experience as a black Baptist chaplain for the No. 2 Construction Battalion (Coloured). More specifically, its focus is almost solely on his wartime diaries and what they tell us about his experiences, convictions, joys, and struggles. These details provide a unique glimpse onto the daily life of a military chaplain at the front. They also reveal attitudes and responses to prejudice and patriotism. In that regard White’s diary illustrates a commitment to nation and empire that was striking when one considers the prejudice and hostility directed towards blacks in Canada and in the military. This research not only fills a lacuna in regards to research on White, it is also fitting because of the centenary of the formation of the No. 2 Construction (Coloured) and subsequent appointment of White, the first black chaplain in the British Empire.

The First World War in Women’s Autobiographical Writing. What, in What Way, and Why Was Omitted?

Summary This article deals with omissions, lacunae and understatements in women’s personal diaries featuring the First World War, in particular the Diaries of Zofia Nałkowska, the Diaries of Maria Kasprowiczowa and Memoirs of Podolia by Helena Kutyłowska. Their content provides ample clues for identifying the characteristic features of women’s wartime autobiographical writing shaped by both the historic context and the personality of the female author. In their autobiographical accounts the war is an eye-opener, making people see things in a more nuanced way, and as an menacing force intruding upon their private worlds. Each narrative works under its burden, and yet none of them is overwhelmed by it. If only for that reason women’s wartime diaries and memoirs remain an interesting historical and personal record, capable of yielding new insights both to historians and historians of literature.

Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 by Samuel Hideo Yamashita

Reviewed by: Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 by Samuel Hideo Yamashita Simon Partner (bio) Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945. By Samuel Hideo Yamashita. University Press of Kansas, Lawrence, 2015. xii, 238 pages. $29.95, cloth; $29.95, E-book. Samuel Hideo Yamashita’s Daily Life in Wartime Japan, 1940–1945 offers many insights into the wartime experiences of Japanese housewives and children, city dwellers and farmers, civilians and servicemen. Yamashita draws on his long experience with wartime diaries and letters: he has collected 160 diaries, translated (according to his website) 65 of them, and included several in a fine anthology, Leaves from an Autumn of Emergencies: Selections from the Wartime Diaries of Ordinary Japanese (University of Hawai‘i Press, 2005). Many more are featured in this book. However, the reader who is looking for a comprehensive account of daily life in wartime Japan—if we understand daily life as the everyday experiences of a broad cross-section of the population—will be disappointed. The book contains three interesting chapters on the broader picture of daily life in wartime Japan (these chapters—1, 2, and 7—would have made more sense grouped together in my opinion). However, the remaining five chapters focus on two special groups—450,000 evacuee children sent with their teachers into the provinces, and a small group of kamikaze pilots—and one special day: August 15, 1945. These are fascinating topics which certainly involved “ordinary” people (if such a category actually exists—one of the strengths of this book is its vivid portrayal of unique personalities). But they [End Page 189] by no means represent the range of daily life experiences of Japan’s 70 million people during the eight years from the “China Incident” to Japan’s surrender, or even during the five years explicitly covered by the book. There is by now a considerable body of work in English (and much more in Japanese) on civilian Japanese experiences of World War II. Yama shita has drawn liberally on some of the classic works in English (e.g., Thomas Havens’s Valley of Darkness and John Dower’s essay “Sensational Rumors, Seditious Graffiti, and the Nightmares of the Thought Police”1), though without actively engaging with (or even mentioning) these influential works in his text. But he could also have drawn on an extensive historiography that encompasses some of the complexity of wartime experience in a modern society. These include works on art and music; boys’ and girls’ education; men’s and women’s labor; consumption and saving; clothing; rural life; women and childrearing; military conscription; and government propaganda and censorship; not to mention the experiences of almost three million Japanese civilians living in Japan’s formal and informal empire.2 That said, the three topics covered by Yamashita’s chapters on daily life—neighborhood mobilization, food security, and modes of resistance—are all interesting, albeit limited by his heavy reliance on diaries and his limited use of other available primary and secondary sources. The basic outlines of the stories of mass mobilization, neighborhood associations, food rationing, and food scarcity are well documented, and Yamashita does little more than summarize existing research. But his diaries offer vivid illustration of what these conditions meant in practice for urban Japanese [End Page 190] families. For most, their enthusiastic embrace of the war effort bumped up against the harsh realities of burdensome obligations, stress and exhaustion, shortage and hunger, fear for their own and loved ones’ safety, and, eventually, the prospect of invasion and defeat. The diaries also illustrate the diversity of responses to the war situation, from the protected comfort of a wealthy journalist, to the wholehearted efforts of middle-class housewives, to outright defeatism. Indeed, the chapter on popular resistance is to me the most interesting in the whole book, revealing as it does the determination of many people to preserve a private space in their lives separate from their country’s “total war,” even as they collaborated outwardly with the war effort. It is fascinating to me that the same diary genre that for some was a coercive space in which they felt obliged to represent themselves as aspiring “splendid citizens” was...

African American Masculinity in the Wartime Diaries of Two Vietnam Soldiers

In her article American Masculinity in the Wartime Diaries of Two Vietnam Soldiers Sharon D. Raynor discusses an unpublished diary (1967-68) written by her father, Louis Raynor with the diary (1965-66) of David Parks that was revised and published as a memoir. By contextualizing the traditions of African American autographical writing and wartime diaries, Raynor analyzes how African American masculinity permeates the autobiographical structure in the Raynor and Parks diaries as each soldier interweaves a collective experience with a unique personal experience in the Vietnam War. The Vietnam experience challenged their ideologies about racial politics, but affirmed their masculine identity in the face of violence. Raynor focuses on how in these wartime life writings, African American masculine identity is pervasive in the narratives and how it is performed and documented by Raynor and Parks differently.

Identity Discourses and the Sino-Soviet Split

Identity Discourses and the Sino-Soviet Split Daniel Leese Yee-Wah Foo, Chiang Kaishek’s Last Ambassador to Moscow: The Wartime Diaries of Fu Bingchang. 256 pp. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. ISBN-13 978-0230584778. $115.00. Ted Hopf, Reconstructing the Cold War: The Early Years, 1945–1958. 320 pp. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. ISBN-13 978-0199379767. $27.95. Austin Jersild, The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History. 352 pp., illus. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014. ISBN-13 978-1469611594. $36.95. The past decade has witnessed a flood of new publications on the turbulent relationship between the People’s Republic of China (PRC) and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. This new wave of scholarship has increasingly been based on Chinese archival holdings as well.1 Although the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Central Archives near Beijing have remained off limits to both foreign and independent domestic researchers, at least the first half of the Hu–Wen administration (2003–12) witnessed unprecedented access to archives at the provincial, municipal, and county levels. The comparatively open archives during these years included the Archive of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, which allowed for greater access to its records, especially from the [End Page 988] 1950s. The insights gained from these holdings have considerably enriched our knowledge about Chinese foreign policy with regard to both high-level domestic decision making and international relations.2 Restrictions have tightened in recent years, however, and many previously accessible documents have been reclassified or, under the pretext of digitization, withdrawn from the catalogues. The three books under review here all in one way or another have profited from the short-term liberalization of Chinese archival practices. Two of them heavily rely on Chinese primary sources, and this review is therefore written from the perspective of a historian of China, not the Soviet Union. The books share a focus on the early or even pre-Cold War period of Chinese–Soviet relations between the 1940s and the mid-1960s. In Chiang Kaishek’s Last Ambassador to Moscow, Yee-Wah Foo analyzes Guomindang diplomacy during World War II. More specifically, she traces the life and times of her grandfather Fu Bingchang. The special relationship between author and research subject is not adequately discussed, and the book over long stretches reads like an attempt to cast Fu’s historical role in a brighter light. The volume is divided into six parts, starts with a family history prior to 1943, and continues with a cultural history of embassy life and organization in the 1940s. On Fu’s farewell visit prior to embarking for Moscow, Chiang Kai-shek personally stated Fu Bingchang’s mission to project an image of China as a great power; to minimize Soviet interference, especially in Xinjiang and Manchuria; and to make the Soviet Union join the war against Japan. Parts 3–5 discuss the difficulties of achieving these tasks by looking at Fu’s role in the October 1943 Moscow declaration, which granted China great-power status, the removal of Soviet influence in Xinjiang, and the negotiations of the Far Eastern Agreement at Yalta in 1945. All these questions have been extensively dealt with in previous diplomatic histories—for example, by Garver and Heinzig—and despite the author’s effort at ascribing a greater role to Fu Bingchang, the utter powerlessness of the Chinese delegate and his country’s complete dependence on U.S. backing cannot be dispelled.3 There are a few interesting new details on the situation in Xinjiang and on the second round of discussions regarding the 1945 Sino-Soviet treaty, which merit the specialist’s interest. [End Page 989] The book mostly offers details on the personal relations between Fu and other major ambassadors, as well as relations with the Soviet hosts, which were characterized by mistrust, spying activities among lower-level staff (not to mention infiltration by Chinese Communist Party [CCP] spies, most notably Fu’s mistress and press attaché Hu Jibang). A unique source explored in the book is the war period diary of Fu Bingchang, which remains in the family’s possession and consists of about 220 handwritten pages. It is difficult...

The Ethics of Witnessing: The Holocaust in Polish Writers’ Diaries from Warsaw, 1939-1945 by Rachel Feldhay Brenner (review)

THE ETHICS OF WITNESSING: THE HOLOCAUST IN POLISH WRITERS' DIARIES FROM WARSAW, 1939-1945 Rachel Feldhay Brenner. Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2014. ix + 198 pp.Language and words took on new meanings during the Holocaust. The act of writing a diary took on new meanings as well. Rachel Feldhay Brenner's The Ethics of Witnessing: The Holocaust in Polish Writers' Diaries from Warsaw, 1939-1945 offers a glimpse into one of these new meanings of bearing witness as a non-victim through her examination of these five Polish writers' diaries. Through her research and analysis of the five prominent Polish writers and non-victims living in Warsaw during the Nazi occupation, Brenner suggests that these diarists' (Jaroslaw Iwaszkiewicz, Maria Dabrowska, Aurelia Wylezynska, Zofia Nalkowska, and Stanislaw Rembek) contemporaneous responses to the Jewish genocide deepen our understanding of the ethical, mental, and emotional challenges that face any witness of terror (4). Brenner's text highlights how these wartime diaries provide a glimpse of the self-examining personal, emotional, psychological, and religious quandaries facing non-victims living on the of Nazi-occupied Warsaw.Through a simple and well-organized layout of the six chapters comprising this book, Brenner successfully guides her readers through her analysis of the private and literary writings of Iwaszkiewicz, Dabrowska, Wylezynska, Nalkowska, and Rembek. Each chapter focuses on a particular diarist and the lens through which they viewed their situation in Germanoccupied Warsaw. With several subheadings included in each chapter, the reader is able to seamlessly follow Brenner's approach to and analysis of each of the diarists. Brenner's analysis of these authors' writings (literary work created before, during, and after the war), and the lenses through which they viewed their life and experiences while living in the Aryan side of German-occupied Warsaw, provide her readers with a unique perspective of some of the personal conundrums facing theses diarists.In addition to focusing each chapter solely on one of the five diarists, Brenner provides subsections that reveal the diarists' backgrounds, thus providing context to the philosophical and personal ideals to which each author clung. Consequently, in addition to shedding light on these five writers and their life works, Brenner introduces her readers to their various antisemitic attitudes and tendencies which were woven throughout their concerns of maintaining and sustaining Enlightenment-era inspired humanism (Jaros3aw Iwaszkiewicz and ZofiaNa3kowska), steadfastly embodying nationalism (Maria D1browska), striving for the aesthetical and ethical (Aurelia Wyle?ynska), and remembering Poland's Romantic Messianic destiny (Stanis3aw Rembek). …

Rewriting history

The paper tries to analyse how the irruption of history was transformed into an artistic and intellectual challenge in the autobiographical works of Sándor Márai. Márai who started to keep his diary in 1943 inspired by his readings of the diaries of André Gide sought to construct an authentic space of presence, safe from historical time and from the discourses of public opinion, in order to devote himself to researching the singularity of his existence and his “lived time”. But the programme of his diary was progressively changed: although Márai had started recording his daily observations and reflections with a similar detachment from public affairs as Gide, during the course of the war, his diary became more and more determined by public discourses. The Hungarian writer shifted his perspective from the individual to the collective, the aphoristic discourse giving way to passionate accusations. His reflection, which earlier belonged to the order of cognition, turned later into the order of ethic, in a mixture of moral reflection, political commitment, expression, and performative verbal action. But the overshadowing of the aesthetic experience of the world during the chaotic years of his intellectual and artistic confusion also had its dangers, namely the incursion of semi-public political and ideological discourses in Márai’s wartime diaries. In the reformulation of his wartime experiences thirty years later – in the Memoir of Hungary – Márai succeeded in finding a new artistic form to represent his past. The complexity of narrative structures and temporal composition, the dramatic and metaphorical correlation of the changing social, national and psychological components of identity represented in the Memoir of Hungary creates a particular literary (aesthetic) effect, which in turn intensifies our reading experience and encourages the reader to go beyond the ideological constructions of official historical writing.

Charles F. Gunther: An Illinois Yankee Trapped into Working for the Confederacy

Charles Frederick Gunther, who would eventually endow the Chicago History Museum with much of its Civil War Collection and become a leader in Chicago politics at the turn of the twentieth century, descended from a family which moved from Wurttemberg, Germany to Pennsylvania and then eventually to Peru, UHnois.(Figure 1) He had tried several occupations prior to the outbreak of the Civil War - clerking in a retail store, working for an druggist, cashiering at a bank, and peddling ice for the Bohlen, Wilson and Company firm in Memphis, Tennessee. He was a young man of twenty-four searching for adventure and his niche in upwardly mobile society when the South seceded and he was trapped in Memphis. Fearing that Confederate authorities would impress him into the army or the local populace would suspect his northern sentiments and brand him a traitor, he accepted a job as purchasing agent and purser aboard the Rose Douglas, a steam packet commanded by Captain James L. McGinnis, an old and experienced steam boater who had served as a pilot, owner and master of ships plying the Mississippi River. The principle task of the Rose Douglas for the years 1861 and 1862 was to assist the Confederacy's effort to ferry men, material, and provisions up and down the Mississippi, White, and Arkansas Rivers for Confederate authorities in the Trans-Mississippi Department. These were the two years that Gunther chronicles in his war time diaries and which tell this, his story, of the life of a Yankee working for the South. The first two years of the War Between the States were exciting ones for Charles Gunther. He not only met and assisted Confederate leaders in the states bordering the Mississippi River, but he became an eyewitness to history, facing dangers from the Union Navy, suffering under the same privations as the local river folk when food and medicine became scarce, contracting malaria from the swamps and lowlands of the Mississippi Delta, and seeing northern troops eventually strangle the South and its commerce with overwhelmingly superior naval and land forces. All of these historical trends were meticulously recorded in two small, five by seven inch diaries, recently uncovered, that described his day-to-day experiences during this period of his captivity. (Figure 2) These daily journals were crammed full of his private thoughts, hopes, aspirations, and fears hidden from the eyes of even his fellow river men and his southern friends he met in numerous river ports lest they reveal his true northern sympathies and brand him as a traitor to the cause. When he could finally enter his true thoughts on December 28, 1862, the relief in his words was evident. To our great joy we are once more in the land of freedom - am bound for home now (Peru, Illinois) - sure very much unexpected - but thank God I am free to again speak my opinion.1 Charles Gunther's diaries seem at first to be openly pro Confederate. But when the researcher reads between the lines, it becomes evident he is merely afraid his personal entries will be seen by southern authorities and spell his doom. Once this duplicity is understood, the diaries provide a unique perspective of a northerner trapped in southern service that shares an intimate portrait of life on the rivers during the crucial early years of the Civil War when the fate of the Trans-Mississippi theatre and perhaps the whole nation was decided. In his own words, these are the impressions that defined this man and his understanding of the war that it still being fought today. This is Charles Gunther's story. As Gunther begins his diary in January 1861, his personal situation seems grim and directionless. His ice company, due to the seasonal nature of the business, just laid him off. He is forced to take a few menial labor jobs chopping wood, slaughtering hogs, and shucking corn. Travelling through Arkansas and back to Memphis looking for work, playing poker, and discussing Illinois issues with his good friend Asa Hoffman, an old acquaintance from Peru, Illinois, consume much of his time. …

The Languages of Time: Translating Calendar Dates in Holocaust Diaries

Holocaust diaries often use two calendars—Gregorian and Jewish—to date entries and events, choosing one or the other to convey a particular significance. Translators frequently have found it difficult to integrate this multicalendrical dating, however. On the basis of his examination of the seminal wartime diaries of Chaim Kaplan, Abraham Lewin, Moshe Flinker, and David Kahane, the author of this article argues that the translators' omission of the dual-calendar perspective compromises translations' integrity and distorts crucial aspects of the diarist's evolving confrontation with his or her wartime ordeal.