Languages of Trauma

Peter Leese is an associate professor in the Department of English, Germanic and Romance Studies at the University of Copenhagen. Jason Crouthamel is a professor in the Department of History at Grand Valley State University. Julia Barbara Köhne is FONTE visiting professor in the Faculty of Culture, Social Sciences and Education at Humboldt-University Berlin.

Introduction: Languages of Trauma
Peter Leese, Julia Barbara Köhne, and Jason Crouthamel

Part One: Words and Images

1. “A perfect hell of a night which we can never forget”: Narratives of Trauma in the Private Writings of British and Irish Nurses in the First World War
Bridget E. Keown

2. Religious Language in German Soldiers’ Narratives of Traumatic Violence, 1914–1918
Jason Crouthamel

3. Languages of the Wound: Finnish Soldiers’ Bodies as Sites of Shock during World War II
Ville Kivimäki

4. Efim Segal Shell-shocked Sergeant: Red Army Veterans and the Expression and Representation of Trauma Memories
Robert Dale

5. The Falling Man: Resisting and Resistant Visual Media in Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers
Jennifer Anderson Bliss

Part Two: Music, Theatre, and Visual Arts

6. Performing Songs and Staging Theatre Performances: Working through the Trauma of the 1965 Indonesian Mass Killings
Dyah Pitaloka and Hans Pols

7. Encounters with Some Things Are Difficult to Say, Re-Membered
Katrina Bugaj

8. Performing Memory in an Interdependent Body
Emily Mendelsohn

9. Memory and Trauma: Two Contemporary Art Projects
Maj Hasager

Part Three: Normalizations of Trauma

10. Between Social Criticism and Epistemological Critique: Critical Theory and the Normalization of Trauma
Ulrich Koch

11. The New Normal: Trauma as Successfully Failed Communication in Nurse Betty
Thomas Elsaesser

12. The Exploitation of Trauma: (Mis-)Representations of Rape Victims in the War Film
Marzena Sokołowska-Paryż

Part Four: Representations in Film

13. Translating Individual and Collective Trauma through Horror: The Case of George A. Romero’s Martin
Adam Lowenstein

14. Aesthetic Displays of Perpetrators in Joshua Oppenheimer’s The Act of Killing: Post-Atrocity Perpetrator Symptoms, Re-enactments of Violence, and Perpetrator-Victim-Inversions
Julia Barbara Köhne

15. Perpetrator Trauma and Current American War Cinema
Raya Morag

Coda: Climate Trauma Reconsidered
E. Ann Kaplan