Trauma has had various lives in the past century. It has meant different things to different people – doctors, experts, historians, writers, communities and, of course, individuals. Its effects are deeply personal, and attempts to understand it have led to insights into the structure of memory, personhood, and a range of diagnostic symptoms. Yet its lives have, especially since the turn of the 21^st century, become increasingly political and politicized, too. What exactly is trauma, and how do we come to terms with its immense influence in determining the way we think about justice, healing and the relationship between victims and perpetrators? These questions have particularly shaped German and European histories. In the former’s case the slow process of “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” (coming to terms with the past) has been central to a post-war and then, 50 years later, a post-reunification national identity that has, through various processes, been required to confront the genocidal trauma inflicted by the Third Reich. Colonialism and its legacies too have played a great role in determining the nature of Europe’s relationship to the world, and here too one finds that psychic wounds have played decisive roles in directing the course of history.

In this course we explore trauma through multiple disciplinary perspectives. We explore its historical origins, our shifting understandings of its etiology, as well as the way it is inherited and transmitted. Various approaches – psychoanalytic, historical, literary and anthropological – will offer multiple windows into the way trauma dovetails in and out of people’s experiences and collective identities. How it becomes part of the way we tell stories about ourselves and others, and how systems of reparation, recuperation, and justice are established in its wake. By centering the role of biography and narrative, we will learn how trauma reveals existentially crucial aspects of identity and belonging. The city of Berlin, which is haunted by various great and terrible historical events, will be another anchor for our exploration. Much has happened here, and much continues to be shaped by competing memories of past violence, loss and devastation. It is a city where the past is frequently felt as a heavy and weighty presence, and excursions to various sites of attempts at commemoration and memorialization will be a central supplement to our reckoning with the treacherous terrain of memory opened up by our investigation of trauma.