Karin Kaltenbrunner

In 1914 the eleven-year-old Franz Tauschmann from Altenmarkt near Fürstenfeld began to keep a war diary. However, it didn’t contain the classical chronological notes of what was lived through and experienced; it was far more an anthology of poems, pictures, lists and descriptions of the events of the war, “friends and foes among the nations”, collecting actions and so forth. Franz Tauschmann’s notes testify to the war–propagandist indoctrination of children and young people in the Habsburg Monarchy.

In January 1917 the forester Josef Posch from Königstetten began to note down his experiences in the mountain conflict against Italy in succinct but simultaneously very realistic entries. His impressions are shaped by snow many feet high, cold and continual shortage of provisions, finally focusing on the question of the sense of these ordeals. Josef Posch’s notes ended on 31 March of the same year.

Edmund Fischer from Fürstenfeld joined in the mountain war against Italy from 1915 on as platoon leader in the Telegraph Regiment. In September 1917 when constructing cable lines on Montozzo, almost 10,000 feet in altitude, there was a mine explosion that robbed him of his eyesight. Edmund Fischer remained completely blind for the rest of his life.