War Neurosis versus Savings Psychosis: Working-class Politics and Psychological Trauma in Weimar Germany

Abstract

Like other social and political issues in Weimar Germany, traumatic neurosis was a hotly-contested area of debate between different groups devastated by the first world war. In recent studies of the effects of the war on European society, historians have examined the social and political biases, especially with regard to gender and class, that shaped how doctors diagnosed and defined mental trauma in modern warfare.1 This article will offer a way of looking at the war neurosis debate in Germany 'from below'. This can be done by examining the responses of psychologically-disabled war victims to the psychiatric profession's arguments on the nature of war neurosis and the memory of the war.2 Working-class victims of psychological trauma used the war neurosis debate to define the psychological impact of the war on different social classes in Weimar Germany. War-disabled interest groups on the political left adopted the voices of war victims to argue that the middle classes, through psychiatrists and state welfare administrators, systematically sought to erase the traumatic effects of the war in an attempt to deny responsibility for its human costs or, at worst, deliberately to prepare Germany for another world conflict. In the responses of psychologically-disabled war victims to the state and psychiatrists, we find a battle over the act of forgetting, as organized working-class veterans and their representatives criticized the repression of the traumatic war experience and theorized on the lingering neuroses that crippled