Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: trauma, violence and political community
- 2 Survivor memories and the diagnosis of trauma: the Great War and Vietnam
- 3 War memorials and remembrance: the London Cenotaph and the Vietnam Wall
- 4 Concentration camp memorials and museums: Dachau and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
- 5 Testimony and sovereign power after Auschwitz: Holocaust witness and Kosovo refugees
- 6 Conclusion: the return of the political – the memory of politics
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Introduction: trauma, violence and political community
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 October 2013
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of illustrations
- Preface
- 1 Introduction: trauma, violence and political community
- 2 Survivor memories and the diagnosis of trauma: the Great War and Vietnam
- 3 War memorials and remembrance: the London Cenotaph and the Vietnam Wall
- 4 Concentration camp memorials and museums: Dachau and the US Holocaust Memorial Museum
- 5 Testimony and sovereign power after Auschwitz: Holocaust witness and Kosovo refugees
- 6 Conclusion: the return of the political – the memory of politics
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The essence of the trauma is precisely that it is too horrible to be remembered, to be integrated into our symbolic universe. All we have to do is to mark repeatedly the trauma as such.
– Slavoj ŽižekIn the aftermath of a war or catastrophe comes the reckoning. The dead and the missing are listed, families grieve and comfort each other, and memorials are erected. If it is a war that has been won, commemoration endorses those in power, or so it seems at first glance. Victory parades, remembrance ceremonies and war museums tell of glory, courage and sacrifice. The nation is renewed, the state strengthened. Private grief is overlaid by national mourning and blunted – or eased – by stories of service and duty. The authorities that had the power to conscript citizens and send them to their deaths now write their obituaries.
But returning combatants tell a different tale. Survivors are subdued, even silent. Many witnessed the deaths of those around them. They cannot forget, and some are haunted by nightmares and flashbacks to scenes of unimaginable horror. In their dreams they re-live their battlefield experiences and awake again in a sweat. First World War veterans were said to be suffering from shell shock. By the end of that war, 80,000 cases of shell shock had been treated in units of the Royal Army Medical Corps and 30,000 evacuated for treatment in Britain. Some 200,000 veterans received pensions for nervous disorders after the war.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Trauma and the Memory of Politics , pp. 1 - 19Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2003