Intellectuals and World War I A Central European Perspective Edited by Tomasz Pudtoki and Kamil Ruszala

It was a heavy, sometimes devastating impact, the one of the First World War and inye

If you want to discover much more, there is a new book Intellectuals

and World War I A Central European Perspective Edited by Tomasz Pudtoki and Kamil Ruszala tome published by Jagiellonian University Press.

This book offers a vision or historians and scholars and what meant the First World War in the world of letters, in the minds of intellectuals, in their thoughts, in their habits, and if they survived, seeing and analyzing also how the World War changed their world and more than this, their way of thinking.

A war is not simple and the First World War interested the entire humanity. The creatives ones taken in consideration the one  of East and Central Europe. I admit that I didn't know most of them but this trip was great for this reason.

Some examples of the ones you will meet? I picked up some examples.

Béla Balazs. He was a  close friend of philosophers and future librettist of Bluebird's Castle of Béla Bartòk; when sent to war, fell wounded and hospitalized. In that occasion of forced seclusion, Balazs started to write his essays about his long hospitalization. 

Sad and shocked because his battalion composed by 960 people was gone, he felt the body as a metaphor of death and passage to another existence, sometimes pretty abruptly thanks to the war. 

While Balazs joined the war he attacked all that intellectuals who preferred to look out of the window what it was going on in the world, without to do nothing and without to fight in the front.

He felt, considering that he was much more than a simple soldier, the time spent at the front precious. And in this sense in his composition "Princess" the woman is seen like the "feminization of non combat" while the man like the militarism on the front.

Another intellectual who joined the war and lost the existence in the battlefield was the hungharian reporter and writer Elémer Banyai. Thanks to his heroism this intellectual became a hero for his nation.

Jozsed Nadass not just joned the war but later they amputated one of his legs. A man, during a war, said the writer, sees just the brutalization of the world, becoming at the same time, brutal. 

He "abhorred war". He was young, explained in his writings, and he did not know exactly what it meant the word war, as later would have sadly understood.

Not just this, Nadass suffered also of the close, too much close contact with the rest of soldiers; his nudity, his sharing everything with the rest of them.

The story of Hugo Zuckermman is so sad. He was a man of letters and a poet. Part of the 275.000-400.000 Jewish Hasburg's soldiers, he tragically died in the front. He wrote a poem Reiterlied that became immensely famous. Published when he was still alive, after his tragic departure, followed by the horrible and devastating suicide of his wife the year later in 1915, it gave a perspective of who Hugo was obtaining a big success.

Beautiful book, erudite but accessible to everyone, you can jump here and there, for reading profiles, stories of intellectuals who made the difference leaving important messages to the humanity.

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori