Eugen Rogan opened up the conference with his keynote address, “Between Loyalty and Disillusion: Arab Memoirs of the Ottoman Great War.” His talk addressed the conflicting attitudes of Arab subjects captured in a range of diaries and memoirs that remain important documents on the Arab experience of the Great War and which served as the primary resource for his lecture. We are greatly indebted to our two keynote speakers. We were very fortunate to have been able to hold the conference at three distinguished locations in Istanbul – at the Kaisersaal of the German Consulate Istanbul, on the historic campus of Boğaziçi University, and on the property of the Historic Summer Residence of the German Ambassador in Turkey. The conference was convened by Yaşar Tolga Cora and Richard Wittmann as a collaboration of the Department of History of Boğaziçi University and the Orient-Institut Istanbul, with the invaluable additional support of the Netherlands Institute in Turkey, the German Consulate General Istanbul, and the German Embassy in Ankara. We thereby aimed to examine how these experiences add to and differ from insights afforded by visual and audio testimonies, as well as the accounts of the Ottoman Empire’s military allies. The conference took this fundamental question as its point of departure to obtain a better understanding of the personal experiences of Ottomans in the Balkan Wars and the Great War. What did it mean to individuals of different ethnic and religious backgrounds to participate in World War I under the Ottoman crescent and star banner? Focusing on a wide array of autobiographical sources including memoirs, letters, diaries, and non-textual forms of life narrative left by the multi-ethnic and multilingual Ottoman soldiers and civilians who aided the war effort, we organized the conference “Fighting Under the Same Banner: Memories from the Ottoman Theater of the Great War” (Istanbul, September 6-8, 2019).

Fighting under the same banner: Memories from the Ottoman theater of the Great WarĪuthors: Richard Wittmann & Yaşar Tolga Cora

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