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The Viennese Ernst Hortner fought in the First World War on the battlefields of the Balkans and the Italian Front. A well-read architecture student, he chose something special to accompany him in the years of his absence: a copy of Goethe’s “Faust” which was with him, in his own words, “on the winter campaigns throughout Serbia and into inland Montenegro, the mountains near Ipek, in the war years 1915/16”.

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.