Trauma, Experience and Narrative in Europe after World War II

Ville Kivimäki is Senior Research Fellow at Tampere University, Finland. He leads the Lived Nation research team at the Academy of Finland’s Centre of Excellence in the History of Experiences (HEX).Peter Leese is Associate Professor of Social and Cultural History at the Institute of English, Germanic and Romance Studies, University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

• PART I: COMPARATIVE APPROACHES.- The Limits of Trauma: Experience and Narrative in Europe c. 1945.- Beyond the Western Front.- PART II: CASE STUDIES.- Testing the Silence: Trauma and Military Psychiatry in Soviet Russia and Ukraine During and After World War II.- Experiencing Trauma Before Trauma: Posttraumatic Memories, Nightmares and Flashbacks Among Finnish Soldiers.- Entangled Bystanders: Multidimensional Trauma of Ethnic Cleansing and Mass Violence in Eastern Galicia.- Traumatized Children in Hungary After World War II.- “We will cry a little, but then we will forget”: Narratives of Loss and Victory in Postwar Yugoslavia.- Guilt, Responsibility and Trauma: Restoring the Moral Self-Image in Postwar Slovakia.- “Perpetrator Trauma” in Memoirs of Veterans of the Polish Home Army.- Environmental Trauma in the Narratives of Postwar Reconstruction: The Loss of Place and Identity in Northern Finland After World War II.- Suicide Rates as a “Social Thermometer”: Reading the Traumatized History of Lithuania.- PART III: CODA.- Towards a History of Trauma in Central and Eastern Europe After World War II: A Coda.