War Memoirs 1914-1918

Harry Marcuse (1876-1931) was a psychiatrist in Berlin. During the First World War, he served as an army doctor, first on the Eastern Front, and in 1918, as head of a field hospital in France. Sometime after the war he wrote memoirs of those experiences, but the manuscript lay dormant in the legacies of his widow and daughter for decades, until they were gratefully discovered by an American granddaughter who had studied German. The unfamiliar script was painstakingly transcribed by her husband’s parents in 1991 and subsequently translated into English by her husband, Herbert Kaufman. The work provides a fascinating reflection of military and social conditions from the viewpoint of a Jewish commissioned officer in the German army during the First World War.