Historians of Habsburg POWs & WWI Central Asia - Diary Digitization

Three months ago, a woman I'd met after a museum lecture handed me a small stack of family papers: a 1920 military certificate, and three pocket notebooks in tight German cursive. "I don't know if this is useful for anything," she said. It turned out to be the WWI diary of Dr. Jakob Rosenberg, a young Austro-Hungarian army medic from Czernowitz, Bukovina — the first pages written the week Russian troops attacked his hometown in August 1914. I've just published the second installment of "Flight Across Persia" on my new Substack, where I'm translating and annotating Rosenberg's full account: from the outbreak of war, through captivity in Russian Turkestan, to his escape across Persia to Baghdad and Aleppo. This post ("Czernowitz") is about the digitizing process itself — and a question I had to sit with before starting: my expertise is Habsburg Central Europe and Republican China. Was I the right person to carry a story that runs through Persia and Mesopotamia too? If you work on Habsburg POWs, Central Asia or Persia in WWI, or the German-Ottoman theater, I'd genuinely like to hear from you as the series continues. #History #WWI #HabsburgEmpire #PublicHistory