Gender, Memory and the Great War: The Politics of War Victimhood in Interwar Germany

Abstract

Trauma was ‘collective’ in that it was a national experience, but competing social groups fought over how it was to be remembered and who would be included in trauma narratives, memorials and sites of memory. In this chapter, SilkeFehlemann and Nils Loffelbein trace how Germany in the 1920s wrestled with the meaning of psychological trauma that overshadowed Weimar society. There was no consensus on trauma as a collective experience in interwar Germany. Rather, trauma was hierarchalized and its meaning was fractured along social and political lines. Fehlemann and Loffelbein expand their study beyond ‘war neurosis’ to look at psychological trauma in terms of mourning and bereavement through the perspectives of psychologically-stressed widows, mothers of soldiers, and other civilians who were largely ignored in the public sphere of commemorations and remembrance.