Militärische Fachsprache in literarischen Kriegstagebüchern am Beispiel von „Schreib das auf, Kisch!' von Egon Erwin Kisch

The subject of this article is specialised military language, which comprises specific terms and has contributed to the development of a certain terminology. This specialised language is particularly relevant, since it supports communication between the members of a country’s army and between the armies of the world. Additionally, the language of soldiers and conscripts gives us a deeper insight into the way of life of the military, because language and society are closely linked. This article is an attempt to fill a gap in the field of studies on specialised military language. At its centre is the question of how military terminology is processed in the text type ‘diary’, the most direct form of autobiographical recording. First, in the theoretical part, military terminology is defined in more detail. Then its basic lexical-semantic and morphological-syntactic characteristics are discussed. The literary war diary “Schreib das auf, Kisch!” by the Austrian and later Czechoslovakian writer and journalist Egon Erwin Kisch, which describes the everyday life of a soldier in the years 1914–1915, serves as the corpus of the study. The analysis of the authentic diary entries of a soldier allows the study of war experience documented in the form of a diary and reflects the military use of language of the time to varying degrees of intensity. On the one hand, the analytical part deals with the specialist military vocabulary, which covers a broad spectrum of areas relating to military-organisational, operational-tactical, technical and other content and which particularly characterise the nature of the military. On the other hand, figurative word coinages and idioms that can be assigned to soldier jargon and are characterised by a specifically soldierly humour are also examined. The analysis reveals different uses of military jargon in Kisch’s diary, ranging from the sober and objective to the often highly emotional to the humorous and sometimes ironic.