World War I in the Memories of the Transylvanian Saxons

As fundamental sources for the cultural history of World War I, memoirs and the species pertaining to the memoiristic genre (diaries, memories, recollections, autobiographies and correspondence) have long represented a topic of great interest to researchers, given the capacity of such writings to retrieve both individual and collective destinies/mentalities from the mists of time. For Romanian scholars, in particular, the importance of the genre also stems from the fact that the beginnings of the historiography of the Great War are to be found in memoirs. This study presents a synthetic overview of the Transylvanian Saxons' memoirs about World War I. The sources reviewed include longer or shorter published texts, as well as unpublished material which has been identified in the rich collection of documents preserved at the National Archives in Sibiu and in the archive of the Transylvanian Institute in Gundelsheim, Germany.