Using Ann Laura Stoler’s concept of the ‘archival grain’ (2009)— an epistemological arsenal which generates its own structures of “common sense” about things which could “go without saying,” which in turn serves the dynamic governing needs of the state—I undertake a self-reflexive historical and methodological of the Bavarian War Ministry’s surviving records on soldiers’ suicides during the First World War. Historically, I argue that the assumptive architecture manifested in these self-censored documents indexes a larger set of social, emotional, and moral concerns at play in Great War Germany, as well as the ways the German state asserted itself as the moral arbiter of wartime death through its bureaucratic influence over archival production. The mandated form of these reports conceptually separated suicides from other military deaths, delimiting which deaths the German state considered legitimate war losses and which were not. The reports’ specific contents then implicitly absolved the state of any form of responsibility for these deaths. In nearly every instance, the reports record no ‘service-related reasons’ (dienstliche Gründe) for any of these suicides, instead explaining each case via the individual soldier’s psychological make-up, maladies, and personal circumstances, papering over the socio-emotional traumas wrought by Germany’s involvement in the war in the process. Methodologically, then, I examine how attending to the complexities of reading ‘along the archival grain’ and parsing its specific contours can elucidate implicit narratives and power structures in the silences of the archives, while simultaneously offering a lens into aspects of the human experience which have hitherto surfaced only rarely in the historical record.

Matthew Hershey is a PhD candidate in the Department of History at the University of Michigan who specializes in the history of the First World War in Europe and twentieth-century German history. He is currently in the final stages of writing his dissertation, titled “Inclination toward Death: Suicide and Sacrifice in First World War Germany.” His work situates the history of wartime suicide within the broader context of Germans’ dynamic socio-cultural, moral, and emotional attitudes towards and experiences with death, violence, and killing. His research has been supported by the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD), the Central European History Society, and the Eisenberg Institute for Historical Studies at the University of Michigan.