Introduction
Mental health and violence in interwar Europe
TRAUMA examines the transnational and trans-medial circulation of key discourses regarding mental health and violence that emerged in interwar Europe (1918–39). Focusing on Britain and Italy, it explores how mentally traumatized World War I servicemen engaging in violent behavior across both the private and public spheres were represented in different sources, such as medical and legal texts, novels, newspapers, war diaries and memoirs, and handbooks for soldiers.
Context
Trauma, demilitarization, and masculinity
World War I was a communal catastrophe that fundamentally altered understandings of mental health. In its aftermath, physicians, jurists, military leaders, journalists, and writers confronted the realities of war trauma, especially the prospect that veterans unable to readjust might turn to violence. The veteran – once an exemplar of normative masculinity and a barometer of national vitality – became a focal point for negotiating collective anxieties about postwar society.
European governments responded by promoting the rhetoric of the war’s regenerative power and holding up veterans as heroic symbols while deliberately suppressing open discussion of psychological trauma, which nevertheless circulated widely in both cultural and scientific discourse.
Objectives
Commonalities and shared values in the aftermath of war
TRAUMA traces the development of and interaction between medical and legal knowledge, writings in the press and the military sphere, and exploration in literature and private writing to probe how shared discourses about veterans’ mental health and violent behavior circulated transnationally.
Its aim is to demonstrate that the enduring nature of such discourses and their wide dissemination contributed to the emergence of commonalities – including the social support to traumatized veterans, the de-mythization of the soldier, and the rejection of the war – that became a fundamental part of Europe and its future social and cultural fabric.