Wartime Letters Research Articles

The forgotten wartime letters of Abraham Benaroya (1943–1945): an unusual story of Jewish resistance in Greece and Nazi-Germany

ABSTRACT Focusing on Abraham Benaroya, a prominent labor leader in southeastern Europe, this research examines his experiences during World War II, a period often neglected in prior studies. Existing scholarship has predominantly highlighted Benaroya's contributions to the Pan-Hellenic labor movement from 1909 to 1924/5, incorrectly assuming that his removal from political power signaled the end of his influence on both Jewish and non-Jewish historiography; however, his wartime writings challenge this notion, revealing a compelling story of individual and familial resistance against Nazi Germany. During the tumultuous years of 1942–1945, amidst the Nazi occupation in Greece, Benaroya's fate took a unique turn. Despite being Jewish, he avoided extermination, and as a Greek Socialist activist he escaped execution and survived internment in various German prisoner-of-war camps. By employing the biographical turn approach and exploring Benaroya's forgotten Holocaust-era letters from captivity, this study presents a narrative of Greek-Jewish individual and familial struggles, choices, and resilience. In doing so, it contributes fresh perspectives to the current bottom-up scholarship, which moves beyond the generalized narrative of Jewish passivity. Instead, the current study offers a profound discourse on the complexities of Jewish survival and resistance under the extraordinary circumstances of the Nazi regime in Occupied Greece.

Amirkhan Eniky’s frontline diaries in the mirror of Russian-Tatar literary relationships

The article systematizes information on the history of the diary entries “Front daftarlarennan” (“From Frontline Notebooks”, 1941–1944) by Amirkhan Eniky, which served as a starting point for the creation of his war stories. They were published in the media half a century later, on the 50th anniversary of the Great Victory. In his brief comments, the writer admits that he kept notes secretly while working as an HQ clerk, serving in the guard, in between battles, and he decided to publish them in his declining years, considering their content to be instructive for a new generation. Our analysis of the diary entries reveals their genre and stylistic features. The article proves that their narrative is of discrete nature: it is not a picture of military everyday life that is brought to the fore, but a man’s image of the inner world, pictures of nature, which leads to the transformation of psychologism. In his “notebooks” the writer reflects on life and death, on war as a phenomenon and on human behavior in critical circumstances. The process of national self-knowledge in these frontline notebooks is associated with the process of personal self-knowledge. The artistic fabric of A. Eniky’s diaries includes episodes with prophetic dreams, excerpts from wartime letters, Tatar legends, Turkic proverbs and quotes from the books he had read.

Analyzing gender clues in war-time letters

Abstract Many historians struggle with their information needs which cannot be directly served by the information access systems. Satisfying these needs often requires reasoning and interpretation of pieces of information in context, from user-specific viewpoints. One common need in studying historical phenomena is what indicates gender in historical text. We call such textual indicators ‘gender clues’ because they help satisfy information needs regarding the concept of gender. In this article, we analyze gender clues qualitatively and present a typology of them based on a set of private letters from the Second World War in Finland. We also discuss the general need to create metadata to support the historian’s explorations from specific viewpoints, especially in small and noisy collections that are common in the historical domain.

Religion, Patriotism and War Experience in Digitized Wartime Letters in Finland, 1939–44

This article examines religious and patriotic languages in digitized letters written by ordinary Finnish people in the Second World War. We combine qualitative and quantitative methods to analyse how religious and patriotic languages were used throughout the war years. Our findings show that the frequency of religious and patriotic vocabulary fluctuated widely during the war. Religious words were most notably connected to the intensity of the warfare, peaking during the periods of heated combat and dropping in the period of stationary warfare. Patriotic words were likewise common during the early periods of combat, but their use waned in the later war years. The analysis of words occurring in close proximity to the religious and patriotic words suggests that this was due to the different functions of the two languages. Religious parlance was essentially a vehicle of private emotional coping, while patriotic style gave a collective meaning to the sacrifices of the war. Religion and patriotism diverged during the war because the collective meaning of the war vanished but the need for emotional comfort persisted until its end.

In the Land of the Living: Wartime Letters by Confederates from the Chattahoochee Valley of Alabama and Georgia ed. by Ray Mathis

In the Land of the Living: Wartime Letters by Confederates from the Chattahoochee Valley of Alabama and Georgia ed. by Ray Mathis

Catholic Patriotism and Suffering in the Wartime Letters of the Belgian Mystic Berthe Petit

Abstract This article focuses on the use of patriotic feelings and shared experiences of suffering to promote a new devotion. Studying her wartime letter-writing campaign, we examine the strategies that the Belgian mystic Berthe Petit (1870-1943) adopted to promote the devotion of the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. By examining the letter writing of Petit and her father confessor during the Great War, we will show how, in 1909, the campaign initially focused on her own mystical experiences and corporeal suffering, but shifted during the war to emphasize that the future of Belgium, France and Britain, was linked to their consecration to the Sorrowful and Immaculate Heart of Mary. Stressing the historicity of the mystic, we show how the war (1) provided new opportunities for mystically inspired, non-approved devotions; and (2) how the uncertainties and sorrows of the Great War offered female mystics new openings and lines of thought to explore.

Mississippi "Milish": Militiamen in the Civil War

Mississippi "Milish"Militiamen in the Civil War Tracy L. Barnett (bio) War fever swept through the piney woods of South Mississippi during the spring of 1861, and enthusiastic young men from rural hamlets, small towns, and cities across the South enlisted as Confederate soldiers.1 In Liberty, Mississippi, the Amite County Rifles, eventually becoming Company C, Seventh Regiment Mississippi Infantry, organized in April 1861.2 Two local siblings, Benjamin Franklin Wilkinson and Jefferson Washington Wilkinson, joined the regiment and marched off to war, leaving behind farms, wives, and young children. Then, in March 1862, their oldest brother, John Cain Wilkinson, enlisted in Company K, Thirty-Third Regiment Mississippi Infantry. He, too, left behind family—a wife and six young children—in addition to a plantation and slaves. Micajah Wilkinson, the middle brother, was the only male member of the family to remain in the Magnolia State.3 Micajah Wilkinson did not enlist in the Confederate army—a decision he never fully explained and we may never fully understand. Given his wartime letters, he [End Page 343] appears a deeply committed husband and father, so his motivations may have been based on familial concerns. They could also have been financial or, as he was a planter, occupational. Regardless, Wilkinson sought to remain in Liberty for the duration of the war.4 Though he refused to enlist, he held an ideological commitment to the Confederacy and as a plantation owner with seventeen slaves he certainly had a vested financial stake in its success. Self-identifying with the Confederate cause, both he and his wife praised Confederate victories, lamented battlefield defeats, and on a few occasions disparaged "the yanks" in their wartime correspondences.5 Moreover, Wilkinson never took up arms against his native state nor participated in any known unionist activities. For all appearances then, he fully supported the Confederacy. Nonetheless, Wilkinson's support had its limitations, and he resented the war's interference with his daily life.6 Frequently separated from his brothers, wife, and children, Wilkinson longed for peace and fervently hoped "that the day will come when we will all meet at home to stay & enjoy the society off our familys."7 Desiring nothing more than to remain a farmer in Amite County, Wilkinson nonetheless expected the war to reach his plantation's doorsteps. Conscription, implemented by the Confederate Congress in the spring of 1862, threatened to pull both youthful and middle-aged men into the folds of the Confederate army.8 Thirty-nine-year-old Wilkinson, who balked at the notion of leaving Mississippi and abandoning his family, sought legal means to circumvent the draft. But at the same time, he never questioned his devotion to the South nor did he appear to expect censure from his family or neighbors for his decision to eschew military service.9 At first he even opposed militia service but quickly reconsidered. While temporarily removing him [End Page 344] from his home and family, militia service, he thought, would protect him from the Confederate conscript officer and keep him within the confines of the state. "If I was to get off I would bee conscripted & I had rather stay with the militia," he told his wife."10 Mary concurred with her husband's judgment: "Some times I think you had as well stay there [in the militia] as to come home and be drug about from piller to post and then send off in the confederacy. I would be very glad to see you but I believe I would wait a while."11 Choosing service in the Mississippi militia instead of the Confederate army, Wilkinson officially joined Company C, Quinn's Second Regiment Minute Men on July 12, 1862.12 Numerous Southerners, including Micajah Wilkinson, served in state organized militias during the American Civil War.13 Instead of the extremely patriotic, youthful Union and Confederate volunteers, who rushed off to war in 1861 to prove their place as men and citizens, militiamen tended to be married men in their late thirties and early forties who had well-established careers. As vital components of the Southern home front, these men expressed idealistic support for the Confederacy, but intentionally eschewed prolonged period of absence from...

СОБИРАНИЕ ДОКУМЕНТОВ ЛИЧНОГО ПРОИСХОЖДЕНИЯ ПЕРИОДА ВЕЛИКОЙ ОТЕЧЕСТВЕННОЙ ВОЙНЫ

The article covers the issues of initiative acquisition of archives in the documents of personal origin during the Great Patriotic War, the organization of work to identify and collect the wartime documents. Collecting documents of ordinary citizens, in particular letters from the front and to the front is analyzed. Proposals to create the specialized archives of documents on the history of the war were never implemented. Quite a lot of the actions, search operations and expeditions were conducted in the country, for example, the “Chronicle of the Great Patriotic War”, the “Frontline letter”, the “Search”, the “Memory”, etc., during which a significant number of documents of war participants and home front workers were collected and stored. Not so much of the documents of personal origin of the war participants are concentrated in the archives. In general, there prevails the collection type of organization for storing documents from the period of the Great Patriotic War. With reference to the corpus of documents of personal origin of the war period the research literature pays its attention mostly to correspondence and diaries, memoirs. Historians and archivists, analyzing wartime letters, offer different classifications depending on the authors, recipients, subjects, etc. The article provides a generalized classification of letters based on their inherent similarities. The author also analyzes the reasons for a small number of extant diaries and memoirs, and provides examples of their classification. Likewise the article describes current approaches to the collection of personal papers within the frames of the Moscow Glavarkhiv project “Moscow – with care for history” and the Ministry of Defense project “The Memory Road”.

Ordinary Yet Emblematic: The Transnational Correspondence Between an American GI and His Sweetheart during the Korean War

Operating on the core premise of microhistory, that the lives of ordinary people are endowed with explanatory power for a specific period or event in history, this article analyses the war-time letters from the 1950s written by an American serviceman and his girlfriend, later wife, during the Korean War. The author addresses methodological concerns regarding implications that the unique characteristics of personal letters have on the utilization of them as primary source material in historical and biographical writing, in addition to reflections on the author’s close familial relationship to the historical subjects and how this impacts the overall objectivity of the article. An analysis of the letters demonstrates how the couple developed various techniques to mitigate the effects of distance and how they coped with the pervasive sense of uncertainty and fear that consumed Cold War America. This study broadly contributes to the existing life writing literature by demonstrating how a life writing approach, when applied to a particular moment in history, can be utilized in historical study to tell a previously untold part of that particular moment.

Teodycea w czasie Zagłady. Wojenne kazania rabina Szlomy Zalmana Unsdorfera

Many analyses of the Holocaust’s influence on Jewish theology emphasize the dimension of the lack of continuation. From this perspective, the Holocaust, as an unprecedented event, made the Jewish theology face new inquiries, at the same time radically questioning the traditional answers. The wartime letters written by Orthodox rabbis who were witnesses to and victims of the intensifying repressions constitute a fascinating primary source, the analysis of which makes it possible to paint a picture of the transformation of Jewish theology in reaction to the Holocaust. Krawcowicz presents an interpretation of rabbi Szlomo Zalman Unsdorfer’s wartime sermons, laying stress on the many dimensions in which Unsdorfer’s thought is a continuation of selected threads of rabbinical tradition and the way in which it fits into the framework of the traditional Jewish theological responses to historical catastrophes ratherthan reach beyond them.

Bodies in Hunger: Literary Representations of the Indian Home-Front During World War II

In this article, I interrogate the representation of bodies on the Indian home-front in 1943, the year of the Bengal Famine. I begin by examining letters Indian soldiers wrote to their families from Middle Eastern battlefronts, and analyse the empathic role of soldiers’ bodies as they imagined distant hunger. I then move on to study Bengali novelist Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Ashani Sanket (Intimations of Thunder, 1944–1946), in which he imagines World War II as a predatory beast, feeding upon the bodies of Bengali villagers. While the first section of this paper focuses on the cultural history of the Bengal Famine recovered through wartime letters, the second section engages with literary criticism, analysing how hunger and its contexts influence form. I argue in this article that letter-writing and literature read alongside each other yield new layers of meaning to the experience of hunger in the homeland.

Боксерское восстание в Китае в военных мемуарах, дневниках и письмах

Боксерское восстание в Китае в военных мемуарах, дневниках и письмах

The Church and Confederacy: The Lynches of South Carolina ed. by Robert Emmett Curran

Reviewed by: The Church and Confederacy: The Lynches of South Carolina ed. by Robert Emmett Curran Adam L. Tate The Church and Confederacy: The Lynches of South Carolina. Edited by Robert Emmett Curran. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2019. 456 pp. $69.99. In 1972, Yale University Press published The Children of Pride: A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War, a massive collection of wartime letters from the family of Rev. Charles Colcock Jones, a chief promoter of the religious mission to the slaves. Robert Manson Myers, the editor of the collection, arranged the correspondence to tell the story of the Civil War through the experiences of one large family. The effect was stunning as readers gained both multiple and intensely personal perspectives on the war. Robert Emmett Curran, professor emeritus at Georgetown University, credits The Children of Pride for inspiring his project on the correspondence of the Lynch family of South Carolina, the most prominent and influential Catholic family in the state during the nineteenth century (xi). Their letters, skillfully edited and introduced by Curran, provide a Catholic perspective on the fall of the Old South. In many ways, the Lynches were a nineteenth-century southern success story. They acquired education, land, and slaves, markers of economic success in the antebellum South. Conlaw and Eleanor Lynch left Ireland in 1818, eventually settling in the small upcountry town of Cheraw, South Carolina. There they raised twelve children. The eldest, Patrick, served as the bishop of the Diocese of Charleston, which included the states of North and South Carolina, from 1858 until his death in 1882. Two of the Lynch daughters joined the convent. Ellen (1825–1887) joined the Ursuline order and became Mother Superior of their convent in Columbia, South Carolina in 1858. Other Lynches worked as physicians, entrepreneurs, and farmers. Curran, using letters from 1858 to 1865, allows the Lynches to illustrate the many challenges Catholics experienced in the Deep South. Diseases such as yellow fever made South Carolina a dangerous place in the nineteenth century. Several of the Lynch siblings succumbed to tuberculosis as well. In addition, as a distrusted religious [End Page 88] minority, Catholics had to fight for respect from their neighbors and possessed few institutions of their own to support Catholic communities. Ellen—Sister Baptista—perceived this problem acutely as she built her convent and school in the midst of the war. The Lynch letters also demonstrate that southern Catholics, spread throughout the vast rural expanse of the region, networked with each other constantly. A number of letters served to introduce Catholics who had arrived in South Carolina to their local coreligionists. Sister Baptista often asked her brother Patrick about information on various Catholic families when vetting potential nuns for her convent. Building institutions in the Deep South, especially for the Lynches, was part of a program of converting their neighbors and anchoring Catholicism in the region. Baptista, for example, welcomed Episcopalian young women to her school and expressed hopes of converting them to Catholicism. Moreover, the Lynches’ commitment to place made them patriotic South Carolinians. While their family letters rarely discussed politics, most of the political sentiments expressed in the volume demonstrated support for the Confederacy, slavery, and the war. The gem of the volume is Sister Baptista, who deserves a biography of her own. A prolific writer, she constantly pressed her brother, the Bishop, for news. Patrick’s letters were rare, and few seem to have survived. Sherman’s troops, in burning Columbia, South Carolina, destroyed Baptista’s Ursuline convent and school. Combined with Patrick’s unsuccessful voyage to Rome to solicit official recognition from Pope Pius IX for the Confederacy, the burning of the convent demonstrated the tragedy of the war for the Lynches. All they had tried to build had been destroyed. Curran notes that after the war, Sister Baptista wished to rebuild, but her brother the bishop seemed enervated by the vast destruction the war brought (364–365). Curran has done students of American Catholicism and nineteenth-century South Carolina a tremendous service by publishing this volume. It deserves a wide readership among those interested in southern religion and southern Catholicism in particular. Thankfully, it is much...

"Our Aim Was Man": Andrew's Sharpshooters in the American Civil War ed. by Roberta Senechal de la Roche

Reviewed by: "Our Aim Was Man": Andrew's Sharpshooters in the American Civil War ed. by Roberta Senechal de la Roche Zachery A. Fry "Our Aim Was Man": Andrew's Sharpshooters in the American Civil War. Edited by Roberta Senechal de la Roche. (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2016. Pp. xiv, 321. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-62534-248-5; cloth, $90.00, ISBN 978-1-62534-247-8.) Given editor Roberta Senechal de la Roche's background as an expert in collective violence, a reader of "Our Aim Was Man": Andrew's Sharpshooters in the American Civil War might anticipate a reinterpretation of the sniper's role in mid-nineteenth-century death and killing. The editor acknowledges such issues—addressed elsewhere in Drew Gilpin Faust's This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York, 2008), Earl J. Hess's The Union Soldier in Battle: Enduring the Ordeal of Combat (Lawrence, Kans., 1997), and Dave Grossman's On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society (Boston, 1995)—but instead she lets the soldiers themselves do the talking. The result is an edited collection of primary sources from Andrew's Sharpshooters, a company of Massachusetts marksmen attached to the Union Army of the Potomac. Senechal de la Roche's volume, annotated with insight and narrative, allows the reader to follow a handful of unique soldiers through the war's bloody eastern theater. Senechal de la Roche offers many useful points in her commentary. She highlights, for instance, how ineffectively Civil War infantry commanders utilized snipers. By the end of 1862, Andrew's Sharpshooters had received orders to dispense with their specialized target rifles to adopt the more mundane Sharps for use in skirmish detail, an order that wounded the sharpshooters' pride and individuality. Two men in particular carry the weight of the story in illustrating such points. The first, Moses Hill, was a stonecutter in his late thirties who left behind a substantial letter collection documenting his service up to his return home and subsequent death in late 1862. The second, Luke Emerson Bicknell, left a promising academic career in Boston to fight with the company. He later penned a postwar memoir that Senechal de la Roche mines extensively. Hill's letters, despite coming from a specialized marksman, are rather typical of an Army of the Potomac soldier in 1861 and 1862. He loves General George B. McClellan and hates the army's "Black Republickan" tormentors (p. 186). [End Page 1008] Hill gripes about food, illness, weather, and homesickness, and he expresses jealousy at the newspaper attention that Hiram Berdan's more celebrated sharpshooters receive. But Hill's account is also rich with the occasional insight into the world of the Civil War sniper, including his frequent target practice and exploits in combat during the Peninsula campaign. Bicknell is another matter entirely. His wartime letters frequently sidestep military matters to offer lugubrious romance for his sweetheart back home. His 1880s memoir has eluded publication until now, and a glance at his postwar assertions might demonstrate why. The sharpshooter constantly strains credulity, claiming to have rebuked General McClellan about ineffective infantry tactics and Massachusetts governor John A. Andrew about state manpower policy, both face-to-face. And Bicknell's Gettysburg recollections are even more incredible; he supposedly marched up to General George G. Meade and convinced the army commander not to counterattack off Cemetery Ridge before accepting the personal effects of Confederate general Lewis A. Armistead after Pickett's Charge. This is not to dismiss Bicknell's writings entirely, as his description of fighting in the West Woods at Antietam is downright gripping. But historians would do well to acknowledge, as Senechal de la Roche wisely does, that many of his claims are "embellishment" (p. 202). Fortunately, then, "Our Aim Was Man" relies on more than Bicknell's account alone. Zachery A. Fry U.S. Army Command and General Staff College Copyright © 2018 The Southern Historical Association

From Alabama to the Skies of France, 1917–1918: Penrose Vass Stout’s Improbable Journey

From Alabama to the Skies of France, 1917–1918: Penrose Vass Stout’s Improbable Journey Robert J. Jakeman (bio) It was late afternoon, september 28, 1918. a lone aircraft appeared over an American airfield in France. Montgomery native Penrose Stout was at the controls. He had departed a few minutes earlier, and his ground crew did not expect him back so soon. After making a smooth landing, he climbed out of the cockpit. He took a few steps and then collapsed from wounds inflicted by five German aircraft that had surprised him shortly after takeoff. Stout was a member of the 27th Aero Squadron, one of four squadrons that made up the 1st Pursuit Group. As a combat pilot, Stout was part of a select cadre: approximately 50,000 American men applied to train as pilots in the Great War; only about 1,400 saw combat.1 In some ways Stout was typical of American pilots during the war. He was college–educated, white, and a professional, but he was unlike many of his comrades in several important ways. First, he was thirty–one [End Page 291] years old, substantially older than most other pilots, whose average age was about twenty. In fact, he was older than Eddie Rickenbacker, considered well advanced when he started flight training at twenty–eight.2 Second, he was a southerner who had migrated to the North for economic opportunity. Third, he left a well–established career to volunteer for the Air Service. Fourth, he was a talented artist who documented his service with his drawings. Finally, he flew with one of the most successful and elite American air units of the war, the 1st Pursuit Group. It included such famous pilots as Eddie Rickenbacker and Frank Luke, both recipients of the Medal of Honor.3 Click for larger view View full resolution Image 1. Penrose Vass Stout in his Air Service uniform (courtesy Alabama Department of Archives and History, hereafter ADAH). Stout’s combat duty lasted scarcely a month and he did not down any enemy aircraft. Nevertheless, his story offers important insights into the experiences of America’s first combat pilots. His letters [End Page 292] home contain descriptions of daily routines, accounts of combat missions, and much more. But just as important as the words of his letters are the numerous sketches he scattered throughout his correspondence. In addition, he compiled a sketchbook that documents his military service. Recognizing the value of Stout’s wartime letters and artwork, his family preserved them over the decades and recently donated them to the Alabama Department of Archives and History. penrose stout was born february 28, 1887, the eldest son of Robert Platt and Zemula Vass Stout of Montgomery. Pen, as he was known to family and friends, was named for his maternal grandfather, Horatio Penrose Vass, who was born in Maryland and migrated to Mobile.4 Pen’s father was a cotton broker and earned a modest income.5 Despite the family’s modest circumstances, Stout completed high school and went on to college at Alabama Polytechnic Institute (now Auburn University). Perhaps the earliest surviving example of Stout’s artistic talent appears in the Auburn yearbook. Over a half–dozen of his sketches appear in the 1905 edition.6 He apparently entered Auburn in 1904 as a sophomore, majoring in civil engineering.7 Like all male Auburn students of that era, he was a member of the corps of cadets. He excelled and rose to the rank of cadet lieutenant. He was a brother in the Alpha Tau Omega fraternity, president of the German club, and secretary of his senior class. The description with Stout’s senior photograph in the yearbook declared him “the best artist in the [End Page 293] school.”8 In 1907 or 1908 he completed a degree in civil engineering but remained at Auburn and to enter the newly launched architecture program .9 He was in the first class of five and also served as an architecture instructor. In 1909 he completed a second bachelor’s degree, this time in architecture.10 Click for larger view View full resolution Image 2. The “Biscuit Trust,” from the...

Paris Dada and the Transfiguration of Boredom

Paris Dada and the Transfiguration of Boredom Joyce Suechun Cheng (bio) Il n'y a pas moyen de s'ennuyer: ce serait au détriment des caresses et tout à l'heure nous n'y serons plus. (There is no way to get bored; that would be to the detriment of caresses and soon we shall be there no more.) —André Breton and Philippe Soupault, Les champs magnétiques1 By his own account, the artist Francis Picabia left the Dada movement out of boredom. In a sarcastic statement from 1921, "M. Picabia Separates from the Dadas," he writes: Everything is boring, isn't it? The falling leaves are boring, growing leaves are boring, warmth is boring, cold is boring. Clocks that don't ring are boring, those that do ring are boring. To have a telephone is boring, to not have a telephone is boring. People who die are boring, as are those who don't die.2 In little more than a week, fellow Dadaist André Breton responded with a short text entitled "Artificial Hells." Dated May 20, 1921 and unpublished in his lifetime, Breton's text criticizes Picabia for his disloyalty while issuing a circumspect defense for Dada, whose dissolution the author now saw as inevitable. But more intriguingly, Breton suggests that the very affective disposition causing Picabia's defection had initially motivated him and his friends to join Dada only two years ago: I will simply recall … the public standing of French poets in 1919: verses by Guillaume Apollinaire, Blaise Cendrars, Pierre Reverdy, Louis Aragon, Philippe Soupault, and myself were recited daily in one hall or another to the same audience, who invariably applauded. The profound boredom that emanated from these recitals, the incomprehension that resulted from reading out loud … lastly the impossibility of reaching anything but a bewildered public of half a dozen writers, all led us to give a favorable welcome to Dada, which, for its part, promised lively polemics and large audiences.3 Picabia's and Breton's accounts suggest that the affective character of Paris Dada was distinct from that of earlier iterations of the movement. If the predominant affects of Dada in Zurich and Berlin had been rage and disgust, reflecting the Dadaists' repudiation of the meaningless brutality of World War I, Dada in Paris might be described in terms of the distinct absence of affect. The name the Paris Dadaists gave to this absence is boredom, a banal, everyday experience held to have initiated and terminated the movement. While scholars have underlined the link between the trauma of World War I and Dada's dysfunctional complexes (masochism, neurasthenia, epilepsy, schizophrenia, etc.), it is worth recalling that one of the most pervasive, though underestimated, effects of wartime is boredom.4 The Paris Dadaists, many of whom served in the war, knew this well.5 The dandy and autodidact Jacques Vaché, whom Breton befriended while serving as a neurology intern in the military hospital in Nantes in 1916, complained often of boredom during his internment in his wartime letters: "Je m'ennuie, cher ami—vous voyez … mais je vous ennuie aussi."6 In 1919, as the demobilized Dadaists struggled to transition to civilian life, boredom became their daily predicament. Recalling this pivotal period, Breton described a state of aimlessness: "My future was impossible to envision. … For hours on end I paced around the table in my hotel room. I walked aimlessly throughout Paris, and spent evenings alone on a bench in Place du Châtelet. I don't believe I was pursuing an idea or solution: no, I was prey to a kind of daily fatalism, translated by a not-unpleasant 'drifting with the tide' [à vau-l'eau]."7 It was in this condition that Breton and his friends encountered Dada, which promised a reprieve from their boredom and the absence of prospects. In July 1919, six months after Vaché died of an opium overdose, Breton and his friends published his letters in the fifth issue of their review Littérature. This same issue announces the collaboration between the Parisian poets and Tristan Tzara's Zurich-born movement in a typographically striking leaflet: "LITTÉRATURE oui mais DADA 1-2-3-4-5...

Memoir: Love and uncertainty

Werner Heisenberg's wartime letters to his wife record scientific and personal privations, finds Ann Finkbeiner.

Eating bread with tears: Martynas Jankus and the deportation of East Prussian civilians to Russia during World War I

ABSTRACTDuring World War I, Martynas Jankus became the most well-known deportee in the Lithuanian-speaking world. This article uses a variety of sources, including his wartime letters, diary, and postwar memoirs, to explore which factors were the most important in enabling him to survive deportation, how representative he is of the larger population of deportees from East Prussia and their experiences, and how his life as a deportee was affected by laws and agreements at the international and domestic levels.

In the land of the living: wartime letters by Confederates from the Chattahoochee Valley of Alabama and Georgia

In the land of the living: wartime letters by Confederates from the Chattahoochee Valley of Alabama and Georgia

‘Dangers behind, pleasures ahead': British-Canadian identity and the evacuation of British children to Canada during the Second World War

Between 1939 and 1940, over six thousand British child evacuees were shipped across the dangerous Atlantic seas to the safe shores of Canada. Examining three Toronto-based organisations, the University of Toronto's Women's War Service Committee, the St George's Society of Toronto and Havergal College, illustrates the British-Canadian connections that inspired Canadians to open their homes to small strangers for ‘the duration’. Wartime letters from six-year-old evacuee Julie Kemp and those sent between her natural mother and foster mother reflect the constant negotiations and intricacies of this prolonged separation between child and family and country. Post-war oral interviews with former evacuees point towards the complexities of their reintegration back into British society and the lasting effects of their evacuation. The children's wartime migration drew upon pre-war British and wartime Canadian identity. Upon the evacuees' return home, this combined with a post-war British identity to produce an amalg...