The Great War and German Memory: Society, Politics and Psychological Trauma, 1914–1945 (review)

At the center of this study are combat survivors of the Great War who were marked by mental trauma just as physically disabled veterans were marked by the loss of limbs or eyesight. The crucial difference was that psychological trauma was less amenable to clear-cut medical diagnosis. Any determination of the incidence and nature of mental disabilities among war veterans rested on contested understandings of normal and deviant human behavior. These understandings rested, in turn, on conflicting assumptions about the war as human, and national, experience. They also had immediate implications for the public purse, which bore the responsibility for veterans unable to maintain their own livelihood. From the medical diagnoses, prescription of treatment, and prognoses for healing, to the employment opportunities and pensions offered veterans, the story told here is therefore essentially a political one. Human experience had to conform to national priorities, as well as to psychiatric opinion.

Jason Crouthamel begins by examining contemporary medical diagnosis and the treatment of combat trauma, which emphasized the primacy of character and discipline. He then devotes a chapter to the debates that informed the pension law of 1920, legislation that embedded provision for disabled veterans within the broader scheme of social welfare and, in compliance with Article 163 of the constitution, promised a right to work. Subsequent chapters, on the ways in which socialists and communists on the one hand and National Socialists on the other appropriated or rebuffed mentally traumatized veterans, examine in greater detail the politicization of psychological war wounds. Ascertaining the “truth” about mental trauma was at stake in the medical and political discussion. Crouthamel suggests, however, that the historian’s task is less to adjudicate that debate than to explore the presuppositions and goals that animated it.

In his argument, diagnoses and preferred treatments, like pension policy, largely corresponded to partisan opinion of what promoted national health and welfare. Conservative nationalists perceived mental disturbances that were unresponsive to treatment as evidence of inherent flaws in character or nerve, flaws that the Weimar welfare system catered to. Social democrats argued that veterans who suffered from symptoms of mental trauma were victims of the horrors of war. Denying the psychological impact of the war reflected a refusal to confront the war experience realistically. National Socialists perceived ongoing psychological problems as evidence of a personal unwillingness to fulfill obligations to the national community. Mental breakdown in combat already represented “an affront to the official memory of 1914–18” (178). Psychological victimization did not occur in war, but instead resulted from the revolution and subsequent republican political oppression. Under the regime of Adolf Hitler, successful application for state support therefore required evidence of “correct” political views and suffering in the struggle against Weimar democracy.

Underlying the argument of this book are three interrelated issues that are relevant beyond the debate about traumatized war veterans. The Great War and German Memory illustrates how the behavioral sciences, in addressing questions of how normality and deviance affect public health and national welfare, are necessarily rather than incidentally political. In this case, insofar as the state bore responsibility for both the circumstances under which traumatization occurred and its consequences, it relied on medical advice that called the claims of the traumatized into question. It operated, in other words, like a corporation seeking to limit its legal and financial liability. That liability was contained not least by evidence that mental trauma did not represent a normal response to combat. Approximately 600,000 soldiers were treated for some form of nervous illness during the war, but this number represented only about 5 percent of all those mobilized: normality was defined by the vast majority who did not receive treatment. National Socialists took this position most forcefully, viewing the healthy German male as mentally and physically equal to the challenge of modern combat. Those who claimed mental trauma from war, and who...