Materiality of Adam Bunsch’s war diaries

Abstract

The aim of the article is to present the war records of Adam Bunsch, a Polish officer and artist mobilized in August 1939. They consist of annual calendars, a diary from one year, memories, unsent letters to his wife, a sketchbook, a preserved set of documents from service in the Polish Armed Forces, and calendars that were brought to the country and currently are kept in the family archive. The theoretical and methodological background for the conducted research is Krzysztof Pomian’s category of semiophores, proposed by Paweł Rodak to describe the materiality of diaries, bringing out primarily the visible, material and present aspect of objects. For the researcher of Adam Bunsch’s personal documents from the war it is important to consider them in their entirety. All their aspects are fully revealed: variety and multiplication of forms, supplementarity and redundancy of content. Describing the materiality of documents allows us to look into the circumstances of their creation and highlight their different functions.