In his 1912 article “A Horoscope” Vladimir (Ze’ev) Jabotinsky described the hypothetical circumstances for the outbreak of the next world war, which previsioned the eruption of the actual war in 1914. The success of that prognosis incepted the formation of Jabotinsly’s self-image as a prophet, which he and his admirers maintained during his career. But his prophetic confidence often disrupted his ability to see the events around him outside of his political paradigm and created significant blind-spots in the scope of his political vision. The essay attempts to pinpoint the genealogy of the development of Jabotinsky’s self-image as a prophet and to underscore the circumstances of World War I that enabled its emergence. I am interested in the dynamics of the relationship between personal mythology and history, and more particularly in the circular dependency between the understanding of one’s past and patterns of self-perception and behaviour in the present.

At to date, the early poetry of Julian Tuwim (1894–1953) has neither been placed in the context of the First World War, nor been factored into discussions about his Jewish identity. He is regarded primarily as a poet of the interwar years, even though many of the poems published after 1918 did in fact originate during the First World War. This article proposes that the events of the war provoked an examination of identity constructions in Tuwim’s texts, and that the resolutely expressive use of language in his early poems creates a textual perspective of ironic distance. From this perspective, the ‘comical beating of the Jews’ is transformed into a violent act of exclusion, and the euphoria of war is transformed into a catastrophe. His poetics of linguistic expressiveness represents a radical break with elaborate imagery and metaphorical symbolism, and pointed the way for later writers in the 20^th century.

Many German Jews saw World War I as an opportunity to gain equal rights in the German Empire. Yet some associated it rather with the encounter with Eastern Europe and Eastern European Jewry. Being deployed to parts of Poland, Galicia or the later Ukraine, writers such as Arnold Zweig, Sammy Gronemann and Max Brod were confronted with orthodox Jewry and accessed a different cultural and religious system. After the war, they described their experiences in various literary genres. While Zweig idealized Eastern European Jewish life in his essay „Das ostjüdische Antlitz“ (1920) and Gronemann tried to illustrate daily life and explain religious traditions in his memoir „Hawdoloh und Zapfenstreich“ (1924), Brod developed the idea of an educational system for the Jewish minority.