Authors

Discussion

This paper examines photographic postcards produced and circulated on the Eastern Front in 1915-1917 on the territory of present-day Belarus as affective media of war communication. It situates Belarus within the stabilised front line Riga-Dvinsk-Baranovichi-Pinsk and within a still under-researched history of German-occupied territories. Drawing on a private collection of postcards created by commercial photographers and ordinary soldiers, it treats them as complex visual and material sources that link infrastructures of communication, everyday practices, propaganda, and colonial imaginaries.

First, the paper analyses postcards within the Feldpost system as a mass medium that sustained vital contact between soldiers and home. In a context where millions of items moved daily, the arrival of a card (rather than its textual content) functioned as a minimal but crucial message of survival and emotional reassurance.

Second, it explores postcards as amulets: portable fragments of home and of the front, invested with protective meanings. Images of cemeteries, hospitals, ruins, or anonymous dead bodies are read as encrypted commentaries on danger, loss, and the fragile line between “him” who died and “me” who writes.

Third, it approaches postcards as souvenirs that constructed Belarusian towns, landscapes, Jews and “locals” as terra incognita. Through composition, motifs and captions, they articulated a colonial gaze that integrated these spaces into the mental map of the German Empire.

Using interdisciplinary approach the paper shows how these postcards mediated war, distance and power on the Eastern Front.