Woman, war, town under siege : two autobiographic narratives from Festung Przemyśl (1914-1915)

This article compares two narrative records (diaries) of the nearly six-month siege of the fortress town of Przemyśl by the Russians in the early phase of the First World War. The two authors, Helena Jabłońska née Seifert and Countess Ilka von Künigl-Ehrenburg, wife of an Austrian offi cer, came to Przemyśl for completely different reasons and did not know each other. Yet each of them made up her mind to write down one’s observations, experiences and refl ections in a diary, or to be more precise, a hybrid of a diary an memoir. Their value as fi rst-hand records of life, getting increasingly harder, in a town that lived through the longest siege of the World War I is undisputable. While their literary quality is uneven, they can claim the distinction of having been written from a woman’s point of view. They are no mere chronicles of fact, but two dramatic stories of women trapped by the mighty tide of history in a narrow urban space, which is being redrawn and renamed. Seen from that perspective, both diaries present a story of the remapping of the besieged town and the emergence of a new map bearing a distinctly feminine signature.