Abstract
This chapter discusses the comparative methodological framework and historiographical implications of the collection. Beginning from the twenty-first-century geopolitics of European traumatic memory, Leese considers the particular historical landscapes of emotion c. 1945, arguing that concepts of trauma are constituted according to the practices, technologies and narratives of their time and place. Leese further argues that the form, content and recognition of traumatic experience depends on particular historical conceptualizations: for example, the variable concepts of stress or adaptation that were widely present during and after World War II. This historical and geographical specificity matters in the production of social and cultural variation; in the complex interplay of silence, stigma and resilience; in the distinctive, ongoing formations of traumatic memory for successive generations.
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Notes
- 1.
Małgorzata Pakier and Joanna Wawrzyniak, eds, Memory and Change in Europe: Eastern Perspectives (New York: Berghahn, 2015), 10–12.
- 2.
A still useful model of how memory genealogies may be constructed is Jay Winter’s essay “The Great War in the Memory Boom of the Twentieth Century,” in his Remembering War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 17–51.
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Carolyn J. Dean, “Erasures: Writing History and Holocaust Trauma,” in Science and Emotions after 1945: A Transatlantic Perspective, ed. by Frank Biess and Daniel M. Gross (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2014), 388–93.
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Targol Mesbah, “Why Does the Other Suffer? War, Trauma and the Everyday,” Ph.D. thesis (University of California, Santa Cruz, 2006), 44.
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Barbara H. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions, 600–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 9.
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Frank Biess and Daniel M. Gross, “Emotional Returns,” in Biess and Gross, eds (2014), 4.
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Timothy Snyder, “European Mass Killing and European Commemoration,” in Remembrance, History and Justice: Coming to Terms with Traumatic Pasts in Democratic Societies, ed. by Vladimir Tismaneanu and Bogdan G. Iacob (Budapest: Central European University, 2015), 25–6.
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Mark Mazower, Dark Continent: Europe’s Twentieth Century (London: Penguin, 1998), 221–2.
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Peter Gattrell, “From ‘Homelands’ to ‘Warlands’: Themes, Approaches, Voices,” in Warlords: Population, Resettlement and State Reconstruction in the Soviet East-European Borderlands, 1945–50, ed. by Peter Gattrell and Nick Baron (London: Palgrave, 2009), 13–4.
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Dan Stone, “Postwar Europe as History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Postwar European History, ed. by Dan Stone (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 3–4.
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Tara Zahra, “‘The Psychological Marshall Plan’: Displacement, Gender and Human Rights after World War Two,” Central European History 44:1 (2011), 41–3.
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Alice Förster and Birgit Beck, “Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and World War II: Can a Psychiatric Concept Help Us Understand a Postwar Society?,” in Life after Death: Approaches to a Cultural and Social History During the 1940s, ed. by Richard Bessel and Dirk Schumann (Washington D.C: German Historical Institute / Cambridge University Press, 2003), 32–3.
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Rebecca Bryant, “History’s Remainders: On Time and Objects After Conflict in Cyprus,” American Enthnologist 41:4 (2014) 681–2.
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For further studies using this approach see, for example, Mark Micale and Paul Lerner, eds, Traumatic Pasts: History, Psychiatry, and Trauma in the Modern Age, 1870–1930 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Jason Crouthamel and Peter Leese, eds, Psychological Trauma and the Legacies of the First World War (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).
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Allan Young, The Harmony of Illusions: Inventing Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), 5.
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Ferec Erős, “From War Neurosis to Holocaust Trauma: An Intellectual and Cultural History,” S.I.M.O.N.Shoah: Intervention, Methods, Documentation 1 (2017), 41.
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Rhodri Hayward, “Sadness in Camberwell: Imagining Stress and Constructing History in Postwar Britain,” in Stress, Shock and Adaptation on the Twentieth Century, ed. by David Cantor and Edmund Ramsden (Rochester, NY: Boydell and Brewer/University of Rochester, 2014), 320.
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Daniel Hack Tuke, Illustrations of the Influence of the Mind Upon the Body in Health and Disease (Philadelphia: Henry C. Lea, 1884), ix–x; Roy Grinker and John Spiegel, Men Under Stress (Philadelphia: Blakestone, 1945).
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Walter B. Cannon, “Voodoo Death,” American Anthropologist 44:2 (1942), 179–80.
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Otniel Dror, “From Primitive Fear to Civilized Stress: Sudden Unexpected Death,” in Cantor and Ramsden, eds (2014), 99–101.
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Yael Danieli, ed., International Handbook of Multigenerational Legacies of Trauma (New York: Plenum Press, 1998), 4.
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Elizabeth Jelin and Susana G. Kaufman, “Layers of Memory: Twenty Years After in Argentina,” in The Politics of War Memory and Commemoration, ed. by T.G. Ashplant, Graham Dawson and Michael Roper (London: Routledge, 2000), 89–110.
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Derrick Silove, “From Trauma to Survival and Adaptation: Towards a Framework for Guiding Mental Health Initiatives in Post-conflict Societies,” in Forced Migration and Mental Health: Rethinking the Care of Refugees and Displaced Persons, ed. by David Ingleby (New York: Springer, 2005), 42.
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Marilyn Charles and Michael O’Laughlin, eds, Fragments of Trauma and the Social Production of Suffering: Trauma, History, and Memory (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), 4.
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Charles and O’Laughlin (2014), 4.
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Frank Biess, “Feelings in the Aftermath: Towards a History of Postwar Emotions,” in Histories in the Aftermath: Towards a History of Postwar Emotions, ed. by Frank Biess and Robert Moeller (New York: Berghahn, 2010), 32–4.
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Patrick J. Bracken, “Post-modernity and post-traumatic stress disorder,” Social Science & Medicine 53:6 (2001), 32–4.
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Graham Dawson, Making Peace with the Past: Memory, Trauma and the Irish Troubles (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 128.
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Jens Brockmeier, “Reaching for Meaning: Human Agency and the Narrative Imagination,” Theory and Psychology 19:2 (2009), 227.
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Peter Leese, “Traumatic Displacements: The Memory Films of Jonas Mekas and Robert Vas,” in Traumatic Memories of the Second World War and After, ed. by Peter Leese and Jason Crouthamel (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 245–65.
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Rob Boddice, “The Affective Turn: Historicizing the Emotions,” in History and Psychology: Interdisciplinary Explorations, ed. by Christina Tileaga and Jovan Byford (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), 155–6.
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Stephen Schloesser, “Fear, Sublimity, Transcendence: Notes for a History of Emotions in Olivier Messiaen,” History of European Ideas 40:6 (2014), 826–58.
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Boris Drožđek, “The Rebirth of Contextual Thinking in Psychotrauma,” in Voices of Trauma: Treating Psychological Trauma Across Culture, ed. by Boris Drožđek and John P. Wilson (New York: Springer, 2007), 10.
- 35.
See especially Part IV of Bronfenbrenner’s The Ecology of Human Development: Experiments in Design and Nature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981).
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Maurice Eisenbruch, “From post-traumatic stress disorder to cultural bereavement: diagnosis of Southeast Asian refugees,” Social Science and Medicine 33:6 (1991), 673.
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Aaron R. Denham, “Rethinking Historical Trauma: Narratives of Resilience,” Transcultural Psychiatry 45:3 (2008), 396.
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Denham (2008), 492–3.
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Boris Drožđek, “Are We Lost in Translations? Unanswered Questions on Trauma, Culture and Posttraumatic Syndromes and Recommendations for Future Research,” in Drožđek and Wilson, eds (2007), 381.
- 40.
See also E. Ann Kaplan, “Coda: Climate Trauma Reconsidered,” in Languages of Trauma: History, Memory, and Media, ed. by Peter Leese, Julia Barbara Köhne, and Jason Crouthamel (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021), 384–95.
- 41.
Jolande Withuis and Annet Mooij, eds, The Politics of War Trauma: The Aftermath of World War Two in Eleven European Countries (Amsterdam: Askant, 2010).
- 42.
Silove (2005), 42.
- 43.
Nigel Hunt, “Memory and Social Meaning: The Impact of Society and Culture on Traumatic Memories,” in Hurting Memories and Beneficial Forgetting: Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Biographical Developments and Social Conflicts, ed. by Michael Linden and Krzysztof Rutkowski (Amsterdam: Burlington/Elsevier Science, 2013), 49–50.
- 44.
See for example, Sandra Kessler, “Public and Private: Negotiating Memories of the Korean War,” in Peter Leese and Jason Crouthamel, eds (2016), 173–96.
- 45.
Website https://www.memoryandconscience.eu, accessed 21 January 2021.
- 46.
Website https://www.karta.org.pl, accessed 21 January 2021.
- 47.
Jo Stanley, “Involuntary Commemorations: Post-traumatic Stress Disorder and Its Relation to War Commemoration,” in Ashplant, Dawson and Roper, eds (2000), 240–59.
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Leese, P. (2022). The Limits of Trauma: Experience and Narrative in Europe c. 1945. In: Kivimäki, V., Leese, P. (eds) Trauma, Experience and Narrative in Europe after World War II. Palgrave Studies in the History of Experience. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-84663-3_1
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