"Pressearbeit ist Propagandaarbeit": The Soldier Newspaper "Heimat" and its Authors

The present study focuses on the attribution of authorship in Heimat, a soldier weekly published during the last months of WWI by the Kriegspressequartier (hereafter, KPQ) of the Austro-Hungarian army. The publication of the newspaper was among the measures of ‘patriotic instruction’ devised by the Armeeoberkommando (hereafter, AOK) to prevent that social and political unrest on the home front, together with the negative influence of enemy propaganda, could threaten the troops’ morale and undermine their commitment to the cause of the Habsburg Monarchy (Cornwall 268-269). In accordance with the strict communication strategy of the military, Heimat was presented to its readers as a privately published weekly, and the only names that appeared on it were those of its Chief Editors, namely the writer and playwright Josef Neumair and, from 9 May 1918, Robert Musil, the world-famous author of the Man without Qualities. Conceived as a mixture of propaganda and entertainment, the newspaper featured a number of anonymous articles propagating the patriotic message of the Austrian nation, its values and its efforts for peace. In our study, after a careful re-examination of the extant primary and secondary sources, we performed a series of analyses using a computational method known as “stylometry,” which allowed us to determine the authorship of some of the articles anonymously published in the newspaper. Because stylometry exploits statistical distributions in the use of language to identify the stylistic fingerprint of an author, the technique offers an evidence-based approach that is indispensable for dealing with the complex philological problem posed by Heimat.