Preliminary communication
https://doi.org/10.5559/pi.18.33.04
The culture of memory between tradition and avant-garde: a contribution to the research of guidelines for compiling histories of Habsburg units in the First World War
Filip Hameršak
; Miroslav Krleža Institute of Lexicography
Abstract
The paper presents for the first time the guidelines of the Hungarian Minister of Territorial Defence (Home Guard), published in 1918 in Croatian language in the Mali Vijesnik official gazette, an appendix of the Vijesnik naredaba za kr. ug. domobranstvo, intended to provide compiling histories of individual Habsburg units in the World War One, a battlefield guide and a biographical lexicon of senior officers. The guidelines are preliminary contextualized within a wider area of military history, including in particular its memorial component, and along with a transcript of the exhaustive »Instructions for writing troop histories« lesser-known terms are also explained. For a time being, it can be concluded that the military leaders of the Habsburg Monarchy, in an ambitiously »grassroots« or bottom-up« venture of collecting, processing and publishing military-historical material, sought to balance the historiographical-critical, memorial and propaganda aspect, in a way that could still be methodologically relevant today. However, a more detailed assessment of the guidelines will be possible only when further research in the archives and libraries of Vienna and Budapest more precisely determines their corpus, the corpus of collected material and the corpus of published histories.
Keywords
World War I; military history; culture of memory; Austria-Hungary; Croatia; historiography; methodology; memorialization
Hrčak ID:
316440
URI
Publication date:
15.4.2024.
Visits: 889 *