The Diary, Part 2: Tracing the book's long journey

(Read Part 1 here) Nicole and I are standing in the middle of a deserted plaza in the city of Saarbrücken. We’re here to meet ‘Karl,’ a German man who somehow found the diary of my great-uncle Adrian, who died in 1921 at the age of 26 in Erie, Pennsylvania. How the diary ended up in Germany is a mystery we are hoping to solve.

Nicole sees someone walking towards us, a tall man wearing a jacket and a scarf. It’s Karl! We eagerly greet him. He’s about our age, and despite claiming he doesn’t speak that much English, it’s actually quite good.

“Here’s the diary,” Karl says, reaching into his pocket and pulling out the book.

I handle the book, and weigh it with my hands. It’s so small! Even though Karl’s wife had already scanned the pages and sent them to us, we didn’t realize that it’s a pocket diary, measuring 6 by 4 inches.

The condition is not great. The binding is starting to fall apart, and the cover is made of that speckled, leathery cardboard that was common to books and photo albums from the early 1900s. It’s very worn, and is starting to shed some of the speckles.

How far it has travelled! Adrian started the diary in April 1918 while training as an artillery officer in Texas. He had brought the little brown book with him on the troop transport to France that summer, and then to areas near the front that fall. I glance at some of the entries which describe long periods of monotony interspersed with fear. It became routine:

“Day goes past uneventfully. We get new barrages at night and work on them some.”

After the Armistice, the diary accompanies him on his Army duties on either side of the Atlantic, from Ft. Dix in New Jersey to the French NCO training academy at St. Maixent, and a posting in Luxembourg.

There are entries for practically every day between April 1918 to December 1921. Here’s what he wrote on April 1, 1919, when he was still in the Army, traveling back to Luxembourg from France:

"Get up in Paris at 8 am. Go to station. Take train to Metz at 11:50. Au Chateau (Henri?). Get in Metz at midnight. Not much money!"

A few weeks ago, in a Saarbrücken café, Karl explains how the book came to him. In his initial online correspondence, he mentioned his late brother-in-law— who had the diary until shortly before his death — had lived in Luxembourg. I thought that Karl’s in-laws might somehow be related to Adrian’s fiancée, a woman named Yvonne whom he had met while stationed there after the war.

Adrian’s diary often mentions her. The day after he takes the train from Paris, he finally gets to see his girl:

"I arrive back at 8 am. Go to our battery. I take command. All goes well. See Yvonne at 10 am. We walk to Hallerich (?) in the evening." 

I was intrigued by this place name, as I didn’t recognize it but realized it could provide clues to where he lived in Luxembourg. Google Gemini, an AI tool, came to the rescue with this:

After Adrian died in 1921, someone—probably a friend or sibling—sent the diary and his newspaper obituaries to Yvonne in Luxembourg. She never married, but the diary stayed with her in the long decades that followed.

Karl tells me that his in-laws were not from Luxembourg. Rather, his brother-in-law ‘Mattheus’ was German but worked in Luxembourg in the medical field, possibly starting the 1980s. 

The country is very small. It's the yellow dot in the photo below. These days, it’s a modern financial center, and wages are much higher than its neighbors. Tens of thousands of Germans work in Luxembourg, and Mattheus was one of them.

Yvonne was born in the 1890s, so it’s conceivable she and Mattheus knew each other late in her life. But it’s also possible someone else gave Mattheus the diary. Or, he happened upon it in an antique shop or yard sale.

We may never know the answer, but regardless our entire family is thankful that the members of this extended German family decided to keep it … and finally return it to us.