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“Because traumatic events are as truth. Such experiences are best understood not only through the unbearable in their horror and intensity, they often exist as memories that are not immediately recognizable straightforward acquisition of facts but through a process of discovering where and why conscious understanding and memory fail.” Cathy Caruth
“Whoever says memory, says Shoah.” Jay Winter, quoted by Susan Rubin Suleiman, Crises of Memory and the Second World War, p.2
Whoever says trauma, thinks PTSD? Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder was included in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III) for the first time in 1980.
The “surviving remnant” “Victims of German torture in Landsberg await burial” (May 1,1945) - Image ID: CW69N4 By early 1946, approximately 250,000 Jewish survivors of the Holocaust were living in the US occupation zone of postwar Germany
View of the Landsberg DP Camp https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1119575
Struggling with “trauma” Major Irving Heymont converses with David Ben-Gurion during his visit to the Landsberg displaced persons camp. Photograph Number: 80978A https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1103423 General George S. Patton at Ohrdruf Concentration camp, April 12, 1945
Couples in the Landsberg DP camp dance in a large public hall. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, courtesy of Rita Friedman Hattem
The injunction to forget and look only forwards • Written by Israel Becker, Lang Ist der Wegis the first feature film to represent the Holocaust from a Jewish perspective. Shot on location at Landsberg, the largest DP camp in U.S.-occupied Germany, and mixing neorealist and expressionist styles, the film follows a Polish Jew and his family from pre-war Warsaw through Auschwitz and the DP camps. • —National Center for Jewish Film 1949
“Back to Life” May 16, 1948, Landsberg Displaced Persons Camp - Survivors Hold Celebratory Parade Marking the Establishment of the State of Israel May 16, 1948 YadVashem Photo Archives 161486/1120
The “psychoneurotic” soldier in World War II General Patton slaps soldier in the film Patton. (Argunners) https://www.navalhistory.org/2018/08/03/this-day-in-history -august-3rd-2018 Penguin sold more than 400,000 copies of this book during WWII
The “nostalgic” Civil War soldier Physicians serving with the Union army diagnosed 5,213 cases of acute nostalgia among white soldiers, and 324 cases among African American soldiers: breakdowns severe enough to warrant men’s being sent home. They ascribed the deaths of 58 white and 16 black soldiers to nostalgia. Currier & Ives, “The Soldier’s Dream of Home” Library of Congress
The “shellshocked” soldier in World War I “A poor morale and a defective training are one of the most important, if not the most important etiological factors: also that shell-shock was a “catching” complaint.” The British Medical Journal, 1922 https://theconversation.com/from-shell-shock-to-ptsd-a-century-of-invisible-war-trauma-74911
Let There Be Light (1946) dir. John Huston https://www.filmpreservation.org/preserved-films/screening-room/let-there-be-light-1946
Veteran activism and the origins of a new diagnosis From “victim” to “perpetrator” “Trauma” as a function of atrocious acts one has perpetrated? Jan. 31 – Feb. 2, 1971 Testimony as therapy?
Partial transcriptof the Mike Wallace CBS interview with Paul Meadlo in which Meadlo describes his participation in the massacre: Q. So you fired something like sixty-seven shots? Right. Q. And you killed how many? At that time? Well, I fired them automatic, so you can't—You just spray the area on them and so you can’t know how many you killed ‘cause they were going fast. So I might have killed ten or fifteen of them. Q. Men, women, and children? Men, women, and children. Q. And babies? A. And babies. The Art Workers Coalition poster And Babies (Dec. 1969) using a photograph of the My Lai massacre taken by U.S. combat photographer Ronald Haeberleon March 16, 1968.
“Post-Vietnam Syndrome confronts us with the unconsummated grief of soldiers– impacted grief, in which an encapsulated, never-ending past deprives the present of meaning.” Therapist Chaim Shatan, “The Grief of Soldiers,” American Journal of Orthopsychiatry (1973), 648 Shatan and fellow antiwar psychiatrist, Robert Jay Lifton, lobbied their professional association for the inclusion of a diagnosis in a proposed new edition of the DSM, initially termed “traumatic war neurosis.”
According to the American Psychiatric Association Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a psychiatric disorder that can occur in people who have experienced or witnessed a traumatic event such as a natural disaster, a serious accident, a terrorist act, war/combat, rape or other violent personal assault. PTSD has been known by many names in the past, such as “shell shock” during the years of World War I and “combat fatigue” after World War II. But PTSD does not just happen to combat veterans. PTSD can occur in all people, in people of any ethnicity, nationality or culture, and any age. PTSD affects approximately 3.5 percent of U.S. adults, and an estimated one in 11 people will be diagnosed PTSD in their lifetime. Women are twice as likely as men to have PTSD. People with PTSD have intense, disturbing thoughts and feelings related to their experience that last long after the traumatic event has ended. They may relive the event through flashbacks or nightmares; they may feel sadness, fear or anger; and they may feel detached or estranged from other people. People with PTSD may avoid situations or people that remind them of the traumatic event, and they may have strong negative reactions to something as ordinary as a loud noise or an accidental touch. A diagnosis of PTSD requires exposure to an upsetting traumatic event. However, exposure could be indirect rather than first hand. For example, PTSD could occur in an individual learning about the violent death of a close family…. https://www.psychiatry.org/patients-families/ptsd/what-is-ptsd
The “explosion” of trauma and a “memory boom” The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC, opened 1993
USC Shoah Foundation Visual History Archive Established in 1994 to preserve the audio-visual histories of survivors and other witnesses of the Holocaust, the USC Shoah Foundation maintains one of the largest video digital libraries in the world: the Visual History Archive (VHA). The Visual History Archive contains over 52,000 audiovisual testimonies of Holocaust witnesses. They were recorded by the USC Shoah Foundation (51,425) and the Jewish Family and Children's Services (JFCS) of San Francisco, the Peninsula, Marin and Sonoma Counties (907) between 1988 and 2015. The majority of the interviews are with Jewish Holocaust survivors. The archive also includes the testimonies of political prisoners, Roma (Gypsy) survivors, Jehovah's Witness survivors, survivors of eugenics policies, and homosexual survivors as well as rescuers, liberators, and participants in war crimes trials. http://libguides.usc.edu/vha/Holocaust
Trivializing trauma? “[I]t is hard not to feel that the concept of trauma has become debased currency when it is applied both to truly horrible events and to something as dubious as the long-term harm to Paula Jones.” Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (2000), p.2 Jones brought a sexual harassment law suit against President Bill Clinton in 1998. Her lawyers claimed that she suffered PTSD as a result of her experience. The case was subsequently dismissed.
