Prewar Life Research Articles

The Man Who Never Returned From War: Considerations on Trauma Theory and History in Rebecca West’s The Return of the Soldier

This paper aims at analyzing the effects of trauma and history in Rebecca West’s novel The Return of The Soldier (1918) and, more specifically, how men and women got equally affected by trauma in the First War. Chris Baldry returns from the battlegrounds affected by shell-shock disorder and his traumatic amnesia prevents him from recollecting what his life was like before the War. The three women living in his house (his wife, whom he no longer recognizes; Chris’s ex-lover, Margaret, who still loves him, and his cousin, Jenny). In fact, Chris’s debilitated mental health comes as a shock to the three women in his life. The drama lived by these three women grows out of proportion as the psychiatrist, Dr. Anderson, intervenes in favor of recovering his patient’s “complete case of amnesia” and leads a trial-like interrogation of Baldry’s pre-war life. Their confessions generate hostility, but, rather than dividing the group of women, they promote reflection on the frailty and vulnerability of men. In symbolic terms, the house where the three women live represents a kind of “laboratory” from which they observe war and formulate their views of it. Through the complex psychological interplay among the women living under the same roof, war is shown from the “home front.” It may also be said that the three women act as listeners and, in so doing, they may offer considerable help towards Chris’s possible recovery.

Joshua L. Chamberlain: A Life in Letters ed. by Thomas Desjardin (review)

Reviewed by: Joshua L. Chamberlain: A Life in Letters ed. by Thomas Desjardin Jonathan T. Engel Joshua L. Chamberlain: A Life in Letters. Ed. Thomas Desjardin. Long Island City, NY: Osprey Publishing, 2012. ISBN 978-1-84908-559-5, 306 pp., cloth, $25.95. Joshua L. Chamberlain: A Life in Letters offers scholars and lay readers alike a practical and interesting resource for learning more about one of the Civil War's more famous figures. Edited by Thomas Desjardin, this volume presents a collection of previously unpublished letters from the National Civil War Museum's holdings. A foreword by James McPherson provides a concise summary of Chamberlain's adult life and his rise to fame in the latter part of the twentieth century. In an introduction, Janice Mullin, former director of the National Civil War Museum, describes the museum's collection of Chamberlain artifacts and discusses the museum's role more broadly. [End Page 405] The book is organized into five chapters, with the first three covering Chamberlain's prewar life, the fourth his Civil War correspondence, and the final chapter his postwar years. The letters are unmodified, retaining original spelling quirks and other distinctive qualities. Desjardin supplies a brief introduction to each chapter and sometimes adds further introductions to contextualize particular letters or groups of letters. The documents follow a straightforward chronological arrangement. Letters by Chamberlain and his wife, Fannie, comprise a majority of the book, but other writings include school essays, an unofficial report written two days after the Battle of Gettysburg, and letters between other family members, friends, and military officers. There is a long series of letters from Chamberlain's cousin Annie (with whom Chamberlain apparently carried on some degree of a romantic relationship before he married). A letter from Chamberlain to his wife, written only a few days after the Battle of Fredericksburg, offers a remarkably close glimpse of his experience on that battlefield. In later years, Chamberlain received letters from veterans, political figures, and former Bowdoin College students, among others. A ballot-counting controversy in Maine in 1880 propelled Chamberlain, head of the state militia, into the limelight and occasioned many letters to him. The book includes several helpful aids for readers, including a timeline of Chamberlain's life, a number of photographs of him or his family members, and a list of key figures (making it easier to identify the various names that appear in the letters). Occasional explanatory footnotes also help elucidate the letters. The book stumbles only slightly with the disappointing shortness of the index, which limits its functionality as a scholarly tool. This well-organized and highly accessible volume will likely be useful to historians and insightful to anyone seeking to learn more about the antebellum and Civil War eras. Jonathan T. Engel Texas Christian University Copyright © 2013 The Kent State University Press

Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America by James Marten (review)

Reviewed by: Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America by James Marten Steve Berry Sing Not War: The Lives of Union and Confederate Veterans in Gilded Age America. James Marten. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8078-3476-0, 368 pp., cloth, $39.95. Too many books have ended with a stacking of arms and a stillness at Appomattox. Too few have followed their soldiers home through the remainder of their postbellum lives. “Upon returning home from the war,” noted one veteran typically, “I found myself broke in every sense of the word, broke pecuniarily, flat broke, and if I was not broke physically and mentally, I was wonderfully bent” (William Dugat Williams Letters, Co. F., 5th Texas, History Research Center, Hill College, Hillsboro, Texas [I am indebted to Susannah Ural for the quotation.]). Despite a flourishing thirty-year historiography in Civil War soldiers’ studies, only a handful of titles have focused on the bent worlds of the Civil War veteran. James Marten admits in his introduction that when he began researching twelve years ago, he had hoped to write “a general history of Civil War veterans, North and South, black and white” (3). But the subject proved too vast, and the historiography too thin, to make a synthetic treatment possible. Instead, Marten has effectively produced a series of well-connected essays, each a kind of core sample designed to show us what a rich and layered historiography might look like, if we were ever to produce one. [End Page 120] Marten gives his essays a chronological frame by opening with a chapter on veterans’ homecomings and closing with one on their fading significance at the turn of the century. But it is the portrait within the frame that proves the most arresting. “Maimed Darlings” (on veterans’ heartbreaking attempts to soldier on despite their disabilities) is a tour de force. The author is a master at accumulating and deploying his ample evidence; where other historians tend to follow a lockstep formula—statement, examples, conclusion . . . repeat—Marten artfully allows form to follow function. He is especially effective at compounding sadness in staccato bursts. “These are simply isolated examples,” he will typically say after a pass-and-review of devastating human tragedies, but by then he has already driven his emotional point home. His section on veterans and alcohol is particularly groundbreaking. (How exactly is it that no one has written a book on Leslie Keeley or the “Keeley Cure”—a forerunner to Alcoholics Anonymous that rose up to make millions for a man who claimed he could “self-help” a generation of “self-medicating” alcoholics with a tincture of gold?) Marten’s chapters on how veterans were marketed to, made a government-supported industry of, and finally awarded pensions (to the greater gross earnings of the pension agents and their lobbyists) are all disturbingly familiar depictions of how quickly the best of intentions run afoul of human greed and selfishness. Marten’s thematic strategy, then, pays big dividends—each chapter is rich and complex and bulging with the kind of quotations one loves to plunder for lectures— but it is also a strategy that necessitates that he lay out first what his study is not. It is not a book about the “interior lives of veterans”; it is not a book about the “tens of thousands of African American soldiers who survived the war” to face such peculiar challenges that they need a book of their own; it is not a book about the well-adjusted majority of veterans who reentered their lives and celebrated their service without a mental hiccup; and it is not a book about veterans and their families, especially their sons, for whom their fathers’ service must have inspired great Oedipal minefields of envy and awe (73, 3). Instead it is a book haunted by those men “who fit less easily back into their prewar lives, who suffered from disabilities and poverty, from mental handicaps and institutionalization” (2). And it is a book about the Gilded Age culture that largely failed those men, especially in the North, where every effort to honor them was...

The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City (review)

The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City, by Barbara Engelking & Jacek Leociak (translated by Emma Harris). New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009. 936 pp. $75.00. The Warsaw Ghetto was the biggest ghetto in Nazi-occupied Europe. At its peak in 1941 it was inhabited by over 445,000 people. In order to fully comprehend this number we have to realize that nearly 10 percent of Holocaust victims came through the Warsaw Ghetto. But the difference between the Warsaw Ghetto and other ghettos was not purely quantitative. Due to the Ghetto's size its inhabitants had to cope with and resolve problems that did not appear elsewhere. When we think about the Warsaw Ghetto we focus too often on the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. Still, we have to understand that- however tragic and important the Uprising was-it was only an episode in the over four-year Ghetto history. And behind the Ghetto walls everyday life was still going on. The book by Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak is a unique and detailed monograph that gives the reader an insight into the daily life of Jewish inhabitants of the closed district. I read The Warsaw Ghetto: A Guide to the Perished City for the first time in 2001 when the book was published in Polish, and I found it very useful for my own research on place memory. Therefore I was delighted when I discovered that the book has been translated into English and published by Yale University Press. Comparing both editions of A Guide to the Perished City I could not find any significant differences between them. The translation by Emma Harris is very close to the original, and it reflects linguistic nuances of each author's style. Her skill in translation of original sources is impeccable. It is worth emphasizing because The Warsaw Ghetto is over 900 pages long, and the translation is as important as the authors' work. The book begins with an introduction to the history of the Jewish population of Warsaw. The authors describe the beginnings of Jewish settlement in the city and trace it back as early as the fourteenth century. They also describe the development of the Jewish district. This background allows the authors to put the history of Warsaw Ghetto into a more specific historical context. On the macro level, the Warsaw Ghetto was a Nazi institution used for-using Hilberg's term-concentration of the Jewish population. However, the specific organization of the Ghetto can only be understood when we see it as a continuation of the prewar life of Warsaw Jewish population. The book ends with a short chapter devoted to the history of Ghetto areas after the Second World War. Almost no visible traces of the Jewish district survived the end of the war. But the ghetto areas became an important place of commemoration of Jewish history. In 1948 the Warsaw Ghetto Memorial by Nathan Rappaport was erected, and in 1988 a special commemoration route was established. Although the authors do not mention it, a Museum of the History of Polish Jews is being erected at the moment in the very heart of the former Jewish district. …

Consumers to Combatants? British Uniforms and Identities, 1914–18

By the outbreak of the First World War, glamorous military uniforms and accoutrements already had a long history of luring men into the armed forces. They also played a central role in the process of transforming raw recruits into servicemen, instilling a sense of separation from civilians, and fostering esprit de corps. The purpose of this article is to investigate further the supposed differences between uniforms and civilian garments. Focusing on the experiences of British servicemen who volunteered or were conscripted into the armed forces during the First World War, it questions whether men's sartorial practices and identities changed significantly once they put on a uniform. Did they, the article will consider, cease entirely to be shoppers and consumers once they were no longer civilians? Concentrating on the period of training, when recruits were first introduced to army life and regulations, the article will assess whether uniforms were perceived as different from other commodities, and whether taking off civilian garments also meant a shedding of the sartorial habits of prewar civilian life.

Serbian Stories of Translocation: Factors Influencing the Refugee Journey Arising from the Balkan Conflicts of the 1990s

This qualitative study highlights the experiences of ten Serbian refugees who migrated to South Australia from former Yugoslavia as a result of the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s. Multiple semi-structured interviews were employed to examine participants' experiences before, during and after the conflicts. Eight stages of the refugee journey were identified: prewar peaceful co-existence, outbreak of war, fleeing towards refuge in Serbian-held territory, realisation that the pre-war life cannot be regained, dissatisfaction with the family's transition situation, decision and application to emigrate, migration and resettlement in Australia, and adaptation to life in Australia. A number of factors were found to influence each stage of the refugee journey (e.g., social, practical and health challenges, age, and negative Serbian stereotypes). From these findings, three adaptation patterns — active integration, passive integration, and segregation — were identified as specific to the participants in the current study.

José Díaz Fernández: eroticism and politics in the Spanish avant-garde

The year 1930 is something of a critical crossroads in pre-war cultural and political life in Spain. It was described at the time by Antonio Espina – a lucid observer of events in the country and a...

Raphael Lemkin and the Struggle for the Genocide Convention, John Cooper (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), vii + 338 pp., cloth $80.00

John Cooper's meticulous account of the life and work of Raphael Lemkin (1900–1959), the Polish Jewish lawyer known for coining the term “genocide,” is the first comprehensive biography of the tireless campaigner for the UN Genocide Convention. Although Cooper focuses on Lemkin's postwar attempts to secure the protection of national, ethnic, racial, or religious groups within the framework of international law, he also offers riveting descriptions of Lemkin's childhood in the contested multi-ethnic borderland of Eastern Poland and his formative years as a student in Lwów (Lvov) in the 1920s. The author also provides valuable information on Lemkin's thriving career as an attorney in private practice and as an international legal scholar (despite the severe discrimination against Jewish professionals in Polish society in the 1930s). He then traces the steps of his escape first to Lithuania and then to Sweden prior to his arrival in the United States in April 1941. Cautiously drawing upon Lemkin's unpublished—and at times unreliable—autobiography, Cooper emphasizes key aspects of his subject's prewar life: Lemkin had a traditional Jewish upbringing but was immersed in secular knowledge; from an early age, he was sensitive to the plight of threatened groups—a sensitivity influenced by Simon Dubnow's advocacy of “cultural autonomy”—and was presciently aware of the shortcomings of interwar “minority protections.” Finally, Cooper details the profound impact of the Nazis' destruction of Poland on Lemkin's later writings and lobbying efforts.

István Szabó's Taking Sides (2001) and the Denazification of Wilhelm Furtwängler

Those who became emigrants or demanded that one should emigrate, believed one thing of Hitler in particular: that he represented the German people. They believed that one had to leave a Nazi German...

The contribution of stressful life events throughout the life cycle to combat‐induced psychopathology

This study examines the contribution of prewar life events, war exposure, and postwar life events to combat-induced psychopathology among 425 Israeli War veterans from the Lebanon War. Data was collected at two time points (1983 and 2002). The sample included veterans with and without combat stress reaction (CSR). Battle intensity and subjective experience of risk in war were associated with CSR. Negative childhood life events, CSR, PTSD in 1983 and postwar negative life events were associated with PTSD in 2002. Furthermore, a path analysis revealed that CSR mediated the relation between battle intensity and PTSD in 2002. Our findings suggest that stressful life events throughout the life cycle contribute significantly to veterans' posttraumatic symptomatology, above and beyond combat exposure.

They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust (review)

Mayer Kirshenblatt and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, They Called Me Mayer July: Painted Memories of a Jewish Childhood in Poland Before the Holocaust. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007. 411 pp. In the 1930s, Poland was home to the largest Jewish community in Europe, forming 10% of that nation's total population, with an almost 1000-year history reaching back to the beginnings of Poland itself. A substantial number of Jews inhabited bigger urban areas, primarily working in trade, manufacturing, and craft cottage industries. Most, however, resided in smaller towns and villages where over the centuries they created a unique kind of community, the shtetl (Yiddish diminutive for shtot, or town), living alongside the largely Catholic population, many of them peasants. Morally and spiritually, the two societies remained resolutely separate, by choice on both sides. Yet they lived in close physical proximity and...familiarity. In the shtetl, pluralism was experienced not as ideology, but as ordinary (Hoffman 1997:12). Reading They Called Me Mayer July, one gets a sense of what such a life was like in interwar Poyln, as Poland was known to Yiddish-speaking Jews. Through his recollections and stories, illustrated with over 200 paintings and drawings, full of remarkable details of daily communal life, Mayer Kirshenblatt offers us a unique window onto a world that no longer exists. And it is this latter fact that also makes this book an important contribution to our understanding of the Holocaust and the degree to which it succeeded in erasing a life-way, a culture, a history, a community. At the very start of the book, Kirshenblatt explains how he was drawn to this project, when he taught himself to paint at the age of 73. He would get together in the steam room at the gym or in a corner of the health club with his buddies, most of whom were Holocaust survivors. Within five or ten minutes of any conversation, whether the topic was politics, women, this or that, we would be back in the concentration camps, on the march, in the railroad cars, in the bush with the partisans. It was as if there were no life before the war, so overshadowed had their memories become by the pain they suffered. I lost many members of my family in the Holocaust, but God spared me from living through that horror myself. He also blessed me with a wonderful memory (p. 2). With the help and encouragement of his daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, anthropologist, folklorist, and co-author of this volume, he set out to recapture that prewar life, creating a visual and textual memoir of his childhood growing up in the rabbinic town of Apt (its Yiddish name, Opatow in Polish), which in 1931 had 5,436 Jews out of a population of 9,512. For many postwar Jews, the shtetl has become the site of Jewish authenticity and a metaphor for loss, according to Eva Hoffman. For some it conjures up poignant, warm images of people in quaint black garb, or Chagall-like crooked streets...For others, it means pogroms and peasant barbarism. Yet while it existed, the shtetl was neither a utopia nor a dystopia, but a coherent, curious, and surprisingly resilient social formation... closely interwoven, reassuringly familiar (Hoffman 1998:11-12). Kirshenblatt manages to capture this latter image without diminishing either the nostalgic or tragic elements the characterized his own life, as well as that of his family and his neighbors. Previous books have documented the diversity and vitality of pre-Holocaust Jewish life in Poland and other East European regions, based on photographs, historical documents, family letters and diaries, and testimonies of those who survived the war (e.g., Eliach 1998, Kacyzne 1999, Vishniac 1983). In fact, one of these, a photographic history titled Image Before My Eyes, is coauthored by Mayer's daughter, Barbara Kirshenblatt- Gimblett with Lucjan Dobroszycki (1977). What makes Kirshenblatt's project unique is the combination of illustration and wide-ranging narrative-created out of forty years of interviews done by the daughter listening with love to the father (p. …

Głosy z czasu Zagłady. Dwie relacje świadków z getta w Stanisławowie

The author analyses two testimonies from the Stanisławów ghetto: Eliszewa/Elza Binder's and Juliusz Feuerman's. Binder's diary, found in the ghetto, begins on 13 December 1941 and ends on 18 July 1942, whereas Feuerman's notes are a chronicle of the ghetto and the destruction of its inhabitants. the purpose of this analysis, supplemented by a biographical context, is to portray - as well as Brenner can - the characters of their authors. The reading of these two accounts, written in the same historical situation is to demonstrate that both the ideological and the emotional reactions to the current events in the ghetto ghetto cannot be separated from their personal emotional situation or their pre-war lives.

Emanuel Ringelblum przed wojną: człowiek i historyk

This article discusses the pre-war life of Emanuel Ringelblum – from the organisation of the Junger Historiker Krajz (the circle of young Jewish historians) at Warsaw University, through his YIVO activity, his involvement in the setting up of tourist associations, work for the Joint Distribution Committee as editor-in-chief of „Folkshilf”, active membership in Poale Zion-Left (he ran its most important education agency: the Ovnt kursn far arbiter) to his involvement in organisation of aid for Jews in the transit camp in Zbąszyń in 1938.

Holocaust Memory between Cosmopolitanism and Nation‐Specificity: Monika Maron's Pawels Briefe and Jaroslaw Rymkiewicz's Umschlagplatz1

Without doubt, some sixty years after the events, the Holocaust is deeply embedded in the minds of those who have no direct knowledge of the actual historical event. Stories like that of Anne Frank and images like the photographs of Hungarian Jews crowded on the Auschwitz ramp have become recognizable icons, especially for the generations who have not witnessed the past first-hand. For these non-witnesses, Marianne Hirsch suggests, the images and stories of the past which they did not experience have such powerful appeal to constitute memories in their own right.2 Postmemory of the Holocaust, as Hirsch terms this phenomenon, does not represent an identity position, but, rather, is a space of remembrance, more broadly available through cultural and public, and not merely individual and personal, acts of remembrance, identification, and projection.3 pronounced reliance on cultural icons in imagining the Holocaust raises several important questions: If memory of this event is more readily available through public rather than individual forms of remembrance, what role do national, religious, and cultural contexts play in post-Holocaust writing? Are stories and images of the genocide, which by now have become icons of cultural memory, read and written the same way in various national contexts? In the age of globalization, Daniel Levy and Natan Sznaider argue, nation-transcending memories which rely on internationally recognized memoryscapes emerge along nation-specific memories. Influenced by the dynamic between the local and the global, Holocaust memory becomes cosmopolitanized - shared across and above national boundaries of remembrance. preponderance of cosmopolitan memory in contemporary iconography of the Holocaust does not mean, however, that there are no distinctions between representations of this event in different countries: The Holocaust does not become one totalizing signifier containing the same meanings for everyone. Rather its meanings evolve from the encounter of global interpretations and local sensibilities.4 In the era of the cosmopolitanization of memory, Levy and Sznaider ascertain, the interaction between nation-specific and nationtranscending representations plays key role in the way in which the Holocaust is imagined, remembered, and commemorated. Two postmemorial texts - Monika Maron's Pavcels Briefe5 and Jaroslaw Rymkiewicz's Umschlagplatz6 - present the kind of writing which is driven by the dynamic between local and cosmopolitan models of representation and memorialization of the Holocaust. Retracing her family history back to 19th century Poland, Monika Maron poses questions about prewar lives and the premature wartime deaths of her grandparents, as well as about the aftereffects of this violent past on the surviving family members, including herself.7 characterization of Pavcels Briefe as eine Familiengeschichte points clearly to the centrality of familial memory and history, but Maron never loses sight of the larger context of German public memory and historical consciousness. writer's search for the traces of her personal past is embedded primarily in the discussion of memory politics in the GDR but Maron tackles also more recent German debates regarding victimhood and perpetratorship in WWII and in its aftermath.8 latter aspect is also intimately connected to the vitriolic debates in -which Maron was involved in the early 1990s. Maron was accused of having been complicit in the GDR regime, when it became public that she served briefly in the 1970s as an informant for the East German Staatssicherheit, an aspect of her biography which she had chosen not to reveal. While Maron struggles to understand better her private history and the reasons for drastic gaps in familial but also national memories, the Polish author, Jaroslaw Rymkiewicz confronts the loss of the entire Jewish community and its memory from Poland's landscape. Rymkiewicz's novel presents one of the earlier examples in the wave of Polish texts from the mid-1980s and 1990s, which deal explicitly with the trials and tribulations of the Polish-Jewish relationship during and after the Holocaust. …

The Lingering Impact of the Scopes Trial on High School Biology Textbooks

The publication of Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection in 1859 began a scientific revolution that changed many people’s view of the world. Although Darwin’s ideas were controversial, in the United States he had a powerful advocate: Harvard’s Asa Gray, an evangelical Christian who was America’s leading botanist and president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (of which William Jennings Bryan— one of John Scopes’s prosecutors—was a member). Gray, who helped arrange for the publication of Origin in the United States, was the only American taken into Darwin’s confidence before Origin was published (Larson 1989). Gray espoused a progressive, God-driven evolution of life. Although some people were disturbed by Darwin’s ideas, Gray’s reconciliation of God and evolution eased many people’s concerns about evolution (Scott 1994, Moore 1997). Gray’s First Lessons in Botany and Vegetable Physiology (1857; later renamed The Elements of Botany) was the leading botany textbook of the late 19th century and the first high school textbook after the publication of Origin to include Darwin’s ideas about evolution. Early in the 20th century the public’s concerns about evolution resurfaced, for by the end of World War I, religious attitudes in the United States had shifted. A perceived decline in morality, along with a collective longing for the seeming simplicity of prewar life, prompted many people to reexamine and increasingly rely on their religious faith for comfort and stability. Religious fundamentalism, based on a literal interpretation of the Bible, became increasingly popular. People who endorsed biblical literalism got their name—fundamentalists—from a series of 12 small pamphlets (containing 90 articles) entitled The Fundamentals that were written between 1910 and 1915. These pamphlets, whose publication was funded by Lyman and Milton Steward (the founders of the Union Oil Company), proclaimed biblical literalism as the antidote to “modernism.” Millions of the pamphlets were distributed (Larson 1989, Clouse 1995). In the 1920s, fundamentalists tried to translate their beliefs into political reform and thereby save the nation’s morality. After a successful crusade to outlaw liquor, fundamentalists set out to eliminate discussions of evolution in public schools. Led by religious leaders such as William Bell Riley, J. Frank Norris, and—most prominently—William Jennings Bryan, fundamentalists began a campaign that blamed Darwin’s ideas for the decline of the nation’s morality. Fundamentalist preachers such as Billy Sunday (a former Chicago Cubs outfielder) used theatrical services to link evolution with eugenics, prostitution, and crime; Aimee Semple McPherson presided at ritual hangings of “monkey teachers”; other preachers claimed that Darwin’s ideas promoted the four P’s: prostitution, perversion, pornography, and permissiveness

Making a Memorial Place: The Photography of Shimon Attie

Assisting the analysand in making the past a living present held within a bearable yet unpredictable future is what psychoanalysis is so much about. Events of the past can never be redone, or fully repossessed, but they must be reconstructed in the context of the transference–countertransference experience of the analytic relationship. In order to make the past a useful present and presence, we need metaphors to give it shape—metaphors that capture the memorial activity linking the past with the present and future in a meaningful manner. In this paper, I explore the ways in which the work of the American photographer Shimon Attie creates a memorial place in which the past is not simply remembered but instead is actively mourned. In The Writing on the Wall, Attie collects broken fragments from prewar German-Jewish life in Berlin, and, by projecting these found shards of former lives onto the buildings in the Berlin Scheunenviertel, which once housed these people, he creates a potential space in which a present can suddenly come alive by the superimposition of a past that was supposed to have been obliterated. In this transitional realm, the spectator is given a wide realm of to-and-fro movements between past and present that permits the creation of an object world that did not exist before. I suggest that Attie's intricate weavings of past, present, and future serve as instructive models for the psychoanalytic process in which the analyst can find himself in a similar position of opening up a playground where the past can be brought into the present and where the presentness of the past can come alive. The ability to move back and forth between the present and the past suggests a link to the Freudian concept of deferred action, later taken up by Lacan under the notion of après-coup, where the impression (Prägung) of an earlier event, having lain dormant for a long time, breaks through into the present through a retroactive action that then completely reshapes the present impression. I draw comparisons to psychoanalytic practice, in which the superimposition (the stacking on top of one another) of recollections, dreams, and associations pries open in the analysand's mind a psychic space in which memories of a seemingly insignificant past absorb a sudden sense of urgency when revisited through this retroactive process.

The Forgotten "Stonewall of the West": Major General John Stevens Bowen , and: "One of the Most Daring of Men": The Life of Confederate General William Tatum Wofford , vol. 16, Journal of Confederate History Series (review)

240CIVIL WAR HISTORY intriguing is Cashin's examination of refugee women. By scanning personal diaries and secondary sources, Cashin provides rich detail on a shadowy area of the war. The refugee experience was profoundly disillusioning for most women, challenging their concepts of class and racial superiority and rupturing the "bargain between the sexes," which exchanged female dependency for male protections (53). In the next essay, Thavolia Glymph sheds similar light on another facet ofdisplaced women with an examination ofcontrabands.They lived precarious lives during the war, seen as a danger by Southern whites and as a problem by Union military leaders. By escaping to the Union lines they, like their male counterparts , played a crucial role in the transformation of the war into a conflict to end slavery. The third essay on the war years, by Kym S. Rice and Edward D. C. Campbell Jr., captures experiences of women through diary excerpts. The final two essays deal with women in the postwar South and reveal much about the limits on female behavior and the changes in women's roles in Southern society. John M. Coski and Amy R. Feely provide the context and background for Confederate Museum's founding, emphasizing the assertive role women played in the museum's creation. The most probing essay is the concluding piece by Marjorie Spruill Wheeler, in which she examines the role the war and Southern memory in the debate over women' s suffrage. Both sides invoked the Lost Cause as justification for their position, but those opposed to suffrage were more successful. Having succeeded in disfranchising blacks by the turn of the century, southern antisuffragists controlled the discourse by successfully casting the issue as a test of southern and state loyalty. Proponents of suffrage had the impossible task of "invoking tradition in support of change" (183). Lavishly illustrated with many rarely published photographs, this is an accessible and insightful work by a collection ofdistinguished historians that should find a broad audience. It can serve for many as a useful starting point to understanding women in the Confederacy, but the essays also provide new insights for advanced students of Southern women and the war. Richard D. Loosbrock Chadron State College The Forgotten "Stonewall ofthe West": Major General John Stevens Bowen. By Phillip Thomas Tucker. (Macon, Ga.: Mercer University Press, 1997. Pp. xviii, 379· $32.95·) "One of the Most Daring ofMen": The Life of Confederate General William Tatum Wofford, vol. 16, Journal of Confederate History Series. By Gerald J. Smith. Series editor, John McGlone. (Murfreesboro, Tenn.: Southern Heritage Press, 1997. Pp. xiii, 241. $16.95 paper.) Civil War history all too often becomes "great-man history." Historians and aficionados frequently talk about what Gen. Robert E. Lee did at Second Bull BOOK REVIEWS24I Run or what Stonewall Jackson did at Chancellorsville, seemingly forgetting the many subalterns who executed their orders. These biographies offer longneeded studies of two Confederate generals: William Tatum Wofford, in the eastern theater of war, and John Stevens Bowen in the western theater. Philip Thomas Tucker's Forgotten "Stonewall ofthe West" offers a good account of Bowen's prewar life and military career. A strong narrative depicts Bowen's attempts to save Missouri from Federal control in 1861 and his subsequent capture at Camp Jackson by Union forces under Brig. Gen. Nathaniel Lyon. Paroled, Bowen became a confidant of Gen. Albert Sydney Johnston, and he commanded troops in combat at the Battle of Shiloh. Tucker's narrative shines when he tells of Bowen's clever and valiant—yet ultimately futile—attempts to stop Union general Ulysses S. Grant's invasion of Mississippi at the outset of his Vicksburg campaign. Bowen opposed Grant at Grand Gulf, Port Gibson, and Champion Hill, only to find himself bottled up inside Vicksburg defenses with the rest of Gen. John C. Pemberton's Confederates. Bowen caught dysentery during Grant's siege ofthe town and died one week afterVicksburg's surrender. Tucker parallels the careers of Bowen and Grant throughout the book. The men knew each other at West Point, and they were neighbors in Missouri. At first this seems like an unnecessary literary device, but Tucker builds the comparison to an exciting climax when Bowen and...

Structural aspects of survivors' thinking about the Holocaust.

Videotaped interviews of 30 Holocaust survivors were scored for integrative complexity, the recognition of alternate perspectives or dimensions of a topic ("differentiation") and the joint consideration of several perspectives or dimensions ("integration"). Memories showed decreased differentiation and integration as they moved from pre-war life to the shock and upheaval when organized persecution began. High complexity levels reflected survivors mustering their resources to enhance their chances of survival and successful postwar adaptation. These findings demonstrate the usefulness of quantitative, objective content analytic methods in Holocaust survivor research, add a cognitive dimension to the study of survival during and after extreme situations, and confirm theoretical propositions about decision making and information processing under stress.

T.G. Masaryk: against the current, 1882-1914

In this study, Gordon Skilling deals with Masaryk's pre-1914 career as a professor and permanent dissenter. Thomas G. Masaryk was a living combination of ideas and actions. As a philosopher he inspired practical work; as a politician he encouraged thinking. This duality, with its considerable impact on Czech and Central European developments, is aptly described and interpreted in Skilling's essays. For thirty years Masaryk was a constant and unrelenting critic of conventional wisdom, established institutions, and customary practices in Bohemia and Austria-Hungary. Masaryk often found himself alone and suffered the blows of a hostile public opinion and official wrath. He displayed a rare example of civic courage. Although he did not openly advocate full state independence for the Czechs and Slovaks, he severely criticized the Austro-Hungarian monarchy and prepared the minds of his fellow citizens for the struggle for national freedom in World War I and for a democratic life after 1918. Skilling's work is unusual in focusing on Masaryk's early career, and it seeks to interpret him in his contemporary proportions and not in terms of his subsequent life as a wartime leader in exile and as President of Czechoslovakia. Rather than providing a chronological account, it treats specific themes of his thought and activity. Skilling does not seek to exalt or disparage Masaryk, but rather to deal with him as objectively as possible. Unlike other works about Masaryk, it deals integrally with all aspects of his prewar life. It discusses his political theory and his practical work as a party leader, but goes beyond politics to his views on scholarship, Czech history, religion, anti-Semitism, nationality, Czech-Slovak relations, foreign policy, the social question, and the place of women.