| This study investigates the historical and medial contours of trauma discourses in the aftermath of the First World War. By examining three different visual media - photography, theater, and film - as well as psychiatric and psychoanalytic texts, it presents a cross-section of trauma discourses in early Weimar Germany. The concept of trauma that emerges is heavily influenced by the massive, corporeal damage left in the wake of WWI and ultimately centers on the physical, exploded boundary between self and other. Yet the particular form in which this exploded boundary manifests itself differs according to the medium in which it is represented. Thus, Freud's postwar theory (itself a medium) visualizes trauma in militaristic, physical terms as a breach in the stimulus shield. The Weimar photography of Ernst Friedrich pictures trauma in the shattered boundary between man and machine (prosthetic, militaristic, and optical); the theater of Ernst Toller and Bertolt Brecht locates trauma in the broken boundary between man and animal (with a particular focus on the thin, permeable boundary of skin); and the cinema of Wiener, Wegener, and Murnau identifies trauma in the unstable boundary between subject and object, the living and the nonliving (challenged by the cinematic animation of ghosts, vampires, and golems). Although not all of these postwar works thematically represent the trauma of war, the traumatic past manifests itself within the formal techniques of each particular medium, for example, in the techniques of montage, repetition, alienation, and parallel editing. Thus, each thematic and historically specific trauma mentioned above is paralleled by the structural trauma of the very medium in which it is represented: the trauma of photography in its replacement of a human body part with a prosthetic device; the trauma of theater as it transitions towards modern forms of representation based on shock, corporeality, and the grotesque; and the trauma of cinema in its animation of the static image and the modern artist's loss of direct agency over his art. Ultimately, this study locates a complex layering of meaning in the simultaneous engagements with the historical trauma of WWI and the medially specific structural traumas, each of which articulates a differentiated tactility. |
