The churbn in Poland, Galicia and Bucovina

Shimon An-Ski: Der Khurbn in Polen, Galizien und der Bukowina. Tagebuchaufzeichnungen aus dem Ersten Weltkrieg. Herausgegeben, bearbeitet, kommentiert und mit einer Einführung versehen von Olaf Terpitz. Aus dem Jiddischen übersetzt von Lilian Harlander, Thomas Soxberger und Olaf Terpitz. Shimon An-Skis Yiddish diary on World War I appeared posthumously between 1921 and 1923 in Warsaw and New York. In German translation the yudisher khurbn fun poyln, galitsye un bukovine (fun tog-bukh 5674-5677 [1914-1917]) is now available for the first time unabridged and annotated. After his death in 1920 and in the course of the transformation of the European multi-ethnic states into national states, An-Ski fell (almost) into oblivion. Only with the caesura of the 1990s, he and his diary returned to the attention of scholarship and literature. The reason for An-Ski to travel the war torn regions, the border regions of Austria-Hungary and Russia, was to support the local Jewish population financially and do relief work. His diary, being a historical document as much as a literary text, depicts the war events and documents their impact on the Jewish population. An-Skis presentation follows the moments of remembrance, witnessing and charity, each rooted in Jewish tradition. Whereas An-Ski as ethnographer documents the atrocities committed against the Jewish population meticulously based on facts, An-Ski as writer puts the report into a literary form. A form that is shaped by a great variety of included text sorts such as eyewitness reports, letters, official postings and army commands as well as the involved shifts in perspective, be it the viewpoint from the political center of Russia St. Petersburg on Galicia, be it the transcendent interpretation of the war by the individual voice. An-Skis diary, which scholarship on World War I has actively received through the abridged American translation of Joachim Neugroschel (2004), presents itself as little cultural history of Eastern and Central Europe capturing the transition from the imperial to the national. An- Skis original intention to document the war events and their impact on Austrian (to a lesser extent on Russian) Jews turns in todays view to a postmemorial monument of the war and its victims from a Jewish perspective. His diary raises thus once more the question of the conditio humana and the European.