Krieg erzählen. Sprachliche Perspektiven auf die Tagebücher von Egon Erwin Kisch und Yevgenia Belorusets

This article analyses two war diaries from different historical contexts: Egon Erwin Kisch’s Schreib das auf, Kisch! Ein Kriegstagebuch (1914/15) and Yevgenia Belorusets’ Anfang des Krieges. Tagebücher aus Kyjiw1 (2022). Using a discourse-analytical approach, it examines how war is linguistically structured and evaluated within the diary form. The study shows that war emerges not only as a military event but as a discursively constructed phenomenon shaped, among other factors, by terminology, metaphor, and naming. Kisch’s diary reflects military language while increasingly distancing itself through irony and metaphor. Belorusets foregrounds questions of naming, negotiates categories such as “civilian population”, and positions herself through lexical and orthographic choices. Her metaphors conceptualize war as a dynamic and destructive force, while everyday routines function as acts of resilience. The diachronic comparison highlights changes in the discursive organization of war between 1914/15 and 2022, while confirming the central role of language in shaping the social reality of war.