Psychological Trauma and the Legacies of the First World War

338 Pages·2017·3.805 MB·English

by  Jason Crouthamel, Peter Leese (eds.)

PSYCHOLOGICAL
TRAUMA AND THE
LEGACIES OF THE
FIRST WORLD WAR
Edited by
Jason Crouthamel
and Peter Leese
Psychological Trauma and the Legacies
of the First World War
Jason Crouthamel • Peter Leese
Editors
Psychological Trauma
and the Legacies of
the First World War
Editors
Jason Crouthamel Peter Leese
Grand Valley State University University of Copenhagen
Allendale, USA Copenhagen, Denmark
ISBN 978-3-319-33475-2 ISBN 978-3-319-33476-9 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-33476-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2016954974
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2 017
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A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS
This volume has its origins in scholarship presented at the conference
“Aftershock: Post-Traumatic Cultures since the Great War” held at the
University of Copenhagen in May 2013. The conference and a follow-up
event were funded by Danish Council for Independent Research (FKK)
and the Carlsberg Foundation, Denmark. We received additional grants
from the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies and the
Centre for European Studies, both at the University of Copenhagen, and
we are most grateful to the University of Copenhagen for its support. We
would like to thank Andrew Miller for his herculean work in organizing
the conference. At the conference, we received invaluable and stimulating
contributions from a wide range of colleagues who shared their expertise.
Jay Winter’s generosity in offering critical analysis and synthesizing ideas
at the conference was an inspiration. Allan Young, Simon Wessely, Edgar
Jones, Raya Morag, Mette Bertelsen, Stefan Schilling, and Anne Freese all
posed questions, critiques, and observations that helped enrich our think-
ing and approaches to trauma in the 20th century. At the last stage of com-
pleting the manuscript, we had the tremendous opportunity to present
our ideas, joined on a panel with Julia Barbara Köhne and Ville Kivimäki,
at a seminar at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development and
Research Center on the History of Emotions. We are grateful to Ute
Frevert and scholars at the center who formulated illuminating questions
about our fundamental arguments that helped us defi ne our approaches to
trauma studies and emotions. Ville Kivimäki made that event at the Max
Planck Institute possible and we are most grateful to him. We would also
like to thank Garry White for his expertise as a t ranslator whose advice and
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
attention to detail is much appreciated. Further, we would like to thank
our editor at Palgrave Macmillan, Kristin Purdy, who patiently ushered
the project through the process of review and revision; Michelle Smith for
her editorial advice and expertise; and Chris Chappell who invited us to
submit the manuscript. Jordan Cloud provided insightful questions that
helped with editing the fi nal manuscript. Thanks also to the anonymous
peer reviewers who provided insightful critical comments that helped us
revise and improve the essays.
The Center for Scholarly and Creative Excellence, and its director
Robert Smart, at Grand Valley State University kindly provided funding
that helped produce this project. We are also grateful to several institutions
that provided permission to reprint images and texts included in this vol-
ume, including the Bundesarchiv Berlin-Lichterfelde and Bundesarchiv-
Militärarchiv Freiburg, the Gillies Archive (previously held at the Frognal
Centre for Medical Studies), and the National Library of Ireland.
This volume, Psychological Trauma and the Legacies of the First World
War , is intended to be a companion to a second volume, Traumatic
Memories of the Second World War and After . Both volumes argue that
the traumatic effects of the world wars have been substantially underesti-
mated, and the contributors seek ways to think beyond the strictly medi-
cal defi nitions of what constituted traumatic experience. Further, both
volumes search for a broader defi nition of ‘mental trauma’ by examining
wider groups of war victims, including women and children, who were
shattered by the experience of total war that engulfed combat and home
fronts. By examining varied 20th century social, political, and cultural sites
of trauma, we hope to illuminate the genealogy of trauma at a time when
Western societies in the early 21st century are asking critical questions
about the usefulness of the PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) diag-
nosis. It is vital that the historical context for the experience, diagnosis,
and treatment of trauma is fully explored before we can understand the
experiences of patients, caregivers, and their families today.
(Grand Valley State University) Jason Crouthamel
(University of Copenhagen) Peter Leese
C
ONTENTS
1 Introduction 1
Jason Crouthamel and Peter Leese
Part I B attles over Representations and Perceptions
of Traumatized Men 23
2 Losing Face: Trauma and Maxillofacial
Injury in the First World War 25
Fiona Reid
3 Screening Silent Resistance: Male Hysteria
in First World War Medical Cinematography 49
Julia Barbara Köhne
4 “Always Had a Pronouncedly Psychopathic
Predisposition”: The Significance of Class
and Rank in First World War German
Psychiatric Discourse 8 1
Gundula Gahlen
vii
viii CONTENTS
Part II T raumatized Civilians in the Wake
of the Great War 1 15
5 Violence, Trauma and Memory in Ireland:
The Psychological Impact of War and Revolution
on a Liminal Society, 1916–1923 117
Justin Dolan Stover
6 Gender, Memory and the Great War:
The Politics of War Victimhood in 
Interwar Germany 141
Silke Fehlemann and Nils Löffelbein
7 Subjectivities in the Aftermath: Children
of Disabled Soldiers in Britain After the Great War 165
Michael Roper
8 “Entrenched from Life”: The Impossible
Reintegration of Traumatized French Veterans
of the Great War 193
Marie Derrien
Part III Traumatized Medical Cultures 2 15
9 Making Sense of War Neurosis in Yugoslavia 217
Heike Karge
10 “Everything Ruined, Which Seemed Most
Stable in the World…”: The German
Medical Profession, the First World War
and the Road to the “Third Reich” 237
Livia Prüll
CONTENTS ix
11 Violence and Starvation in First World War Psychiatry:
Origins of the National Socialist ‘Euthanasia’ Program 2 61
Philipp Rauh
Part IV A Coda on Trauma 287
12 Toward A Global History of Trauma 2 89
Mark S. Micale
Suggestions for Further Reading for Chapter 12 3 05
Bibliography 311
Index 3 29
L F
IST OF IGURES
Image 2.1 Another Russian Mystery, 1917 (Image provided by
Dr Andrew Bamje and reproduced with his kind permission) 3 8
Image 2.2 Thespian Society program, 1919 (Image provided by
Dr Andrew Bamje and reproduced with his kind permission) 3 9
Image 3.1 Ferdinand Kehrer as a doctor with magical hands
(Reserve-Lazarett-Hornberg im Schwarzwald, 1917,
reproduced with permission by the Deutsches
Hygiene-Museum Dresden) 5 2
Image 3.2 Verbal suggestion and military drill (Reserve-Lazarett-
Hornberg im Schwarzwald, 1917, reproduced with permission
by the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum Dresden) 5 3
Image 3.3 Ideal of verticality and motionlessness
(Reserve-Lazarett-Hornberg im Schwarzwald, 1917,
reproduced with permission by the Deutsches
Hygiene-Museum Dresden) 5 4
Image 3.4 Max Nonne treating a soldier (Funktionell-motorische
Reiz- und Lähmungs-Zustände bei Kriegsteilnehmern
by Max Nonne (1918), reproduced with permission
by the Bundesarchiv, Filmarchiv, Berlin/
Transit-Film-Gesellschaft MBH) 6 1
Image 3.5 The slanted patient (Funktionell-motorische Reiz- und
Lähmungs-Zustände bei Kriegsteilnehmern by Max Nonne
(1918), reproduced with permission by the Bundesarchiv,
Filmarchiv, Berlin/Transit-Film-Gesellschaft MBH) 6 3
Image 3.6 The Battle of Seale Hayne (WAR NEUROSES by Hurst/Symns,
circa 1916-1918, reproduced with permission by the
Wellcome Library, London) 69
xi