The German Trauma

Author: Gitta Sereny
Publisher: Allan Lane
ISBN:
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Book Description
IN 1945, Germany underwent a radical political transformation, moving certainty and irreversibility from dictatorship to freedom under a model federal constitution. But despite this remarkable public success, and the economic revival that accompanied it, the experience of war remains current in the imagination of Germans. Indeed, so total was their defeat, so complete was their culpability, that Germany's obvious dynamism has coexisted with the always open wound of their history. The fact that this wound exists and has been felt so deeply for more than half a century, has altered what has usually been thought of as the German character.

The German Trauma

Author: Gitta Sereny
Publisher: ePenguin
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 432

Book Description
As a schoolgirl, Gitta Sereny was captivated by the theatrical spectacle of a Nuremberg Rally. Later, when the Nazis marched into Vienna, the spell was quickly broken when she saw an eminent Jewish doctor forced to scrub the pavement by Nazi thugs. The war years forged Sereny's lifelong fascination with Hitler's Germany and the indelible mark it made on the twentieth century. In this book of experiences and reflections she threads fragments of her own life into her larger quest to understand what it is 'that leads human beings so often and so readily to embrace violence and amorality'.

Echoes of Trauma and Shame in German Families

Author: Lina Jakob
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253048273
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 248

Book Description
How is it possible for people who were born in a time of relative peace and prosperity to suddenly discover war as a determining influence on their lives? For decades to speak openly of German suffering during World War II—to claim victimhood in a country that had victimized millions—was unthinkable. But in the past few years, growing numbers of Germans in their 40s and 50s calling themselves Kriegsenkel, or Grandchildren of the War, have begun to explore the fundamental impact of the war on their present lives and mental health. Their parents and grandparents experienced bombardment, death, forced displacement, and the shame of the Nazi war crimes. The Kriegsenkel feel their own psychological struggles—from depression, anxiety disorders, and burnout to broken marriages and career problems—are the direct consequences of unresolved war experiences passed down through their families. Drawing on interviews, participant observation, and a broad range of scholarship, Lina Jakob considers how the Kriegsenkel movement emerged at the nexus between public and familial silences about World War II, and critically discusses how this new collective identity is constructed and addressed within the framework of psychology and Western therapeutic culture.

Hysterical Men

Author: Paul Frederick Lerner
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 9780801440946
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 356

Book Description
Paul Lerner traces the intertwined histories of trauma and male hysteria in German society and psychiatry and shows how these concepts were swept up into debates about Germany's national health, economic productivity, and military strength in the years surrounding World War I. From a growing concern with industrial accidents in the 1880s through the shell shock "epidemic" of the war, male hysteria seemed to bespeak the failings of German masculinity. In response, psychiatrists struggled to turn male-hysterical bodies into fit workers and loyal political subjects. Medical approaches to trauma valorized work and productivity as standards of male health, and psychiatric treatment--whether through hypnosis, electric current, or suggestion--concentrated on turning debilitated soldiers into symptom-free workers. These concerns endured through the Weimar period, as "nervous veterans" competed for disability compensation amid the republic's political crises and economic upheavals. Hysterical Men shows how wartime psychiatry furthered the process of medical rationalization. Lerner views this not as a precursor to the brutalities of Nazi-era psychiatry, but rather as characteristic of a more general medicalized modernity. The author asserts, however, that psychiatry's continual skepticism toward trauma resonated powerfully with the radical right's celebration of war and violence and its supposedly salutary effects on men and nations.

Trauma and Guilt

Author: Susanne Vees-Gulani
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
ISBN: 3110202034
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 228

Book Description
This book analyzes postwar literary works on large area bombings of German cities both in the context of trauma theory and questions of guilt and shame about Germany's Nazi past, embedding the recent debate surrounding the air war of World War II and its influence on German culture in a broader historical, societal, and psychological context.

The German Trauma

Author: Gitta Sereny
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141962623
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 504

Book Description
Gitta Sereny is one of the world's most respected journalists and historians. This book gathers together the best of her writing on Germany from over sixty years. It amounts to an extraordinary portrait of the country and its people, how they have come to terms with their Nazi past, both collectively and in specific instances - and how the burden of their guilt has altered the national identity. She writes about key individuals - Stangl, Speer - and the questions which their lives raise. Thepenetration and conviction of her writing throughout is startling and she constantly reminds us why it is important to consider the questions she addresses - war guilt, holocaust denial and the temptations of obedience.

Trauma in First Person

Author: Amos Goldberg
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0253030218
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Book Description
An examination of what can be learned by looking at the journals and diaries of Jews living during the Holocaust. What are the effects of radical oppression on the human psyche? What happens to the inner self of the powerless and traumatized victim, especially during times of widespread horror? In this bold and deeply penetrating book, Amos Goldberg addresses diary writing by Jews under Nazi persecution. Throughout Europe, in towns, villages, ghettos, forests, hideouts, concentration and labor camps, and even in extermination camps, Jews of all ages and of all cultural backgrounds described in writing what befell them. Goldberg claims that diary and memoir writing was perhaps the most important literary genre for Jews during World War II. Goldberg considers the act of writing in radical situations as he looks at diaries from little-known victims as well as from brilliant diarists such as Chaim Kaplan and Victor Kemperer. Goldberg contends that only against the background of powerlessness and inner destruction can Jewish responses and resistance during the Holocaust gain their proper meaning. “This is a book that deserves to be read well beyond Holocaust studies. Goldberg’s theoretical insights into “life stories” and his readings of law, language and what he calls the “epistemological grey zone” . . . provide a stunning antidote to our unthinking treatment of survivors as celebrities (as opposed to just people who have suffered terrible things) and to the ubiquity of commemorative platitudes.” —Times Higher Education “Every decade or so, an exceptional volume is born. Provocative and inspiring, historian Goldberg’s volume is one such work in the field of Holocaust studies. . . . Highly recommended.” —Choice “Amos Goldberg’s Trauma in First Person: Diary Writing During the Holocaust is an important and thought-provoking book not only on reading Holocaust diaries, but also on what that reading can tell us about the extent of the destruction committed against Jews during the Holocaust.” —Reading Religion “Amos Goldberg’s work offers an innovative approach to the subject matter of Holocaust diaries and challenges well-established views in the whole field of Holocaust studies. This is a comprehensive discussion of the phenomenon of Jewish diary writing during the Holocaust and after.” —Guy Miron. Author of The Waning of Emancipation: Jewish History, Memory, and the Rise of Fascism in Germany, France, and Hungary “This is an important contribution to trauma studies and a powerful critique of those who use the “crisis” paradigm to study the Holocaust.” —Dovile Budryt, Georgia Gwinnett College, Holocaust and Genocide Studies

German Cinema - Terror and Trauma

Author: Thomas Elsaesser
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134627572
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 353

Book Description
In German Cinema – Terror and Trauma Since 1945, Thomas Elsaesser reevaluates the meaning of the Holocaust for postwar German films and culture, while offering a reconsideration of trauma theory today. Elsaesser argues that Germany's attempts at "mastering the past" can be seen as both a failure and an achievement, making it appropriate to speak of an ongoing 'guilt management' that includes not only Germany, but Europe as a whole. In a series of case studies, which consider the work of Konrad Wolf, Alexander Kluge, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Herbert Achterbusch and Harun Farocki, as well as films made in the new century, Elsaesser tracks the different ways the Holocaust is present in German cinema from the 1950s onwards, even when it is absent, or referenced in oblique and hyperbolic ways. Its most emphatically "absent presence" might turn out to be the compulsive afterlife of the Red Army Faction, whose acts of terror in the 1970s were a response to—as well as a reminder of—Nazism’s hold on the national imaginary. Since the end of the Cold War and 9/11, the terms of the debate around terror and trauma have shifted also in Germany, where generational memory now distributes the roles of historical agency and accountability differently. Against the background of universalized victimhood, a cinema of commemoration has, if anything, confirmed the violence that the past continues to exert on the present, in the form of missed encounters, retroactive incidents, unintended slippages and uncanny parallels, which Elsaesser—reviving the full meaning of Freud’s Fehlleistung—calls the parapractic performativity of cultural memory.

The Great War and German Memory

Author: Jason Crouthamel
Publisher: Liverpool University Press
ISBN: 9780859898423
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Focuses on the traumatized German war veteran. This work traces how some of the most vulnerable members of society, marginalized and persecuted as 'enemies of the nation, ' attempted to regain authority over their own minds and reclaim the authentic memory of the Great War.

Trauma and Recovery

Author: Judith Lewis Herman
Publisher: Basic Books
ISBN: 0465098738
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
In this groundbreaking book, a leading clinical psychiatrist redefines how we think about and treat victims of trauma. A "stunning achievement" that remains a "classic for our generation." (Bessel van der Kolk, M.D., author of The Body Keeps the Score). Trauma and Recovery is revered as the seminal text on understanding trauma survivors. By placing individual experience in a broader political frame, Harvard psychiatrist Judith Herman argues that psychological trauma is inseparable from its social and political context. Drawing on her own research on incest, as well as a vast literature on combat veterans and victims of political terror, she shows surprising parallels between private horrors like child abuse and public horrors like war. Hailed by the New York Times as "one of the most important psychiatry works to be published since Freud," Trauma and Recovery is essential reading for anyone who seeks to understand how we heal and are healed.