Remembering the War: An Autoethnography of Survival

This is an autoethnography of World War II (WW2) survival and trauma based on a recovered family archive and a reflexive engagement with my own childhood memories. Driven by subjective imperatives to bear witness to forgotten war experiences, and to explore family mental health problems, I delve into not just personal memories but forgotten voices found in the archive whose stories have never been told thus offering a perspective of multiple subjects. My grandmother’s witness testimony of concentration camp survival recorded in 1946 compels me to research and reflect on life in the state of exception and the long-term and intergenerational impact on survivors. This autoethnographic work helps me examine the character of survival of war trauma as a form of exclusion from community and often an incomplete return from bare life to polis. Through engaging with the archive, I find some partial answers to questions about my family members, and reconstruct my family memory narrative.

Afrasia at War

Memories of global wars are often anything but global: counterfactual notions of a “white man’s war” continue to present a one-sided account of World War II centred on Europe and North America that sidelines the contributions and sacrifices of millions of soldiers from all over the world and negates their manifold agendas and forms of agency. This is particularly true of the “Afrasian” war experiences of tens of thousands of African soldiers who fought in Asia which are the subject of Biyi Bandele’s novel Burma Boy. The following essay highlights how Bandele’s text counteracts Eurocentric accounts of World War II, explores the complex motivations of African soldiers and their equally complex encounters with Asians in Burma, and draws on transregional imaginaries to produce a challenging non-heroic account of “Afrasia at war.”

‘“Gott Strafe England”: Ivor Gurney’s Strafes and Ways’

This essay describes Ivor Gurney’s use of the word ‘strafe’ in his poems of the First World War. At the outbreak of the War, the word was a new arrival in the English national consciousness. It had come to prominence in the German Army’s slogan, ‘Gott strafe England’ (‘God punish England’). Allied counterpropagandists soon redeployed this slogan as evidence that the German people were hateful and frenzied, and it gained currency as an informal English noun for a German artillery bombardment. In poems dating from during and after the War, Gurney draws on ‘strafe’s’ interlinguistic existence to express his contempt for the two powers’ propaganda. In treating the word as fluctuating between two languages, Gurney stages his separation from both English and German narratives of nationhood. Tracking his use of the word ‘strafe’ shows how he described the importance of individual experiences for understanding the War, portrayed a sense of ‘Wonder’ that he suggested could define soldier poets, and expressed his post-war belief that England had betrayed him. By outlining how Gurney attached these possibilities to ‘strafe’, this essay contributes to the wider critical understanding of how and why he wrote about his War experiences.

Warrior candidates: Do voters value combat experience in postwar elections?

Electoral competition in postwar societies is often dominated by war veterans. The question whether voters actually reward candidates’ records of war service, however, remains open. We answer it using a unique dataset with detailed information on the records of combat service of nearly four thousand candidates in two cycles of parliamentary elections held under proportional representation rules with preferential voting in Croatia. Our analysis shows war veterans’ electoral performance to be conditional on the voters’ communities’ exposure to war violence: combat veterans receive a sizeable electoral bonus in areas whose populations were more exposed to war violence, but are penalized in areas whose populations avoided destruction. This divergence is particularly pronounced for candidates of nationalist rightwing parties, demonstrating the importance of the interaction between lived war experiences and political ideology in postwar societies.

Brain–Immune Interactions as the Basis of Gulf War Illness: Clinical Assessment and Deployment Profile of 1990–1991 Gulf War Veterans in the Gulf War Illness Consortium (GWIC) Multisite Case-Control Study

The Boston University-based Gulf War Illness Consortium (GWIC) is a multidisciplinary initiative developed to provide detailed understanding of brain and immune alterations that underlie Gulf War illness (GWI), the persistent multisymptom disorder associated with military service in the 1990–1991 Gulf War. The core GWIC case-control clinical study conducted in-depth brain and immune evaluation of 269 Gulf War veterans (223 GWI cases, 46 controls) at three U.S. sites that included clinical assessments, brain imaging, neuropsychological testing, and analyses of a broad range of immune and immunogenetic parameters. GWI cases were similar to controls on most demographic, military, and deployment characteristics although on average were two years younger, with a higher proportion of enlisted personnel vs. officers. Results of physical evaluation and routine clinical lab tests were largely normal, with few differences between GWI cases and healthy controls. However, veterans with GWI scored significantly worse than controls on standardized assessments of general health, pain, fatigue, and sleep quality and had higher rates of diagnosed conditions that included hypertension, respiratory and sinus conditions, gastrointestinal conditions, and current or lifetime depression and post-traumatic stress disorder. Among multiple deployment experiences/exposures reported by veterans, multivariable logistic regression identified just two significant GWI risk factors: extended use of skin pesticides in theater (adjusted OR = 3.25, p = 0.005) and experiencing mild traumatic brain injury during deployment (OR = 7.39, p = 0.009). Gulf War experiences associated with intense stress or trauma (e.g., participation in ground combat) were not associated with GWI. Data and samples from the GWIC project are now stored in a repository for use by GWI researchers. Future reports will present detailed findings on brain structure and function, immune function, and association of neuroimmune measures with characteristics of GWI and Gulf War service.

Waltz with Bashir’s Animated Traces

Contemporary documentary practices are strongly challenged by growing suspicions of the cinematic claim to truth by indexical capture—the notion that footage objectively captures traces of the past is becoming increasingly less convincing. Under this light, the chapter re-examines Waltz with Bashir (2008, dir. Ari Folman), a groundbreaking animated documentary, and its unique slew of strategies for making powerful non-indexical truth claims about the reality of war experiences and the creative, post-traumatic ways in which they are remembered. Waltz with Bashir’s final sequence, which cuts from animation to archival footage, grounds the story’s moment of catharsis in solid historical proof and appears to retreat from the film’s creative strategies. The chapter explores the stitches hiding behind this unusual cut and suggests an alternative, subversive reading of the final sequence. It then concludes that the film’s meaningfulness and documentary value are sustained despite skepticism about the objective truth of its cathartic ending.

Gender and the politics of war historiography in Buchi Emecheta’s Destination Biafra

Buchi Emecheta’s novel about the Nigerian Civil War, Destination Biafra (1982), challenges war historiography in ways that scholarship designating it a “female perspective” on the conflict can sometimes overlook. This article focuses on how Emecheta deploys a dual narrative approach that weaves an omniscient narrator with diverse Nigerian women’s points of view in order to position their lived experiences and subjective knowledges as collectively amounting to the definitive history of the Civil War. This draws the reader’s attention to the gendered effects of the civil war as the lens whereby which all facets of the war can be understood - even and especially its macro causes in neocolonialism and petrocapitalism. By writing women who know the economic imperatives behind the conflict; exercise agency under dangerous circumstances; and employ methods of survival that safeguard others, Emecheta reveals the gendered politics of war historiography, and tests these politics by collapsing distinctions between what is habitually conceived of as the war front (and therefore to be narrated by active combatants), and everywhere else (to be narrated by witnesses, refugees, or survivors). Destination can therefore be understood as an attempt to intervene directly in historiographical method, as it rejects the designation of women’s war experiences as mere addenda and questions gendered expectations of where to look for and find historical truths.

Trauma and Mentalization Ability in Older Patients

The topic of trauma and aging has been studied more frequently in the recent past from the perspective of the consequences of early trauma experiences, especially in the context of war experiences. However, trauma can also occur later in life and have lasting consequences into older age. The study presented here assumed that these consequences can also manifest themselves in an impairment of mentalization ability. It examined a sample of patients between 40 and 80 years of age from a psychosomatic clinic ( N = 150) was examined with the Essen Trauma Inventory (ETI) and two mentalization instruments. Results show that, as age increased, stressful events in adulthood correspond with impairment in mentalization ability in old age. Regarding posttraumatic symptomatology, the influence of intrusions increased as age increased. Finally, the results are discussed in a theoretical and therapeutic context.

Sociodemographic Factors in Combat Compensation Seekers for Delayed-Onset PTSD

ABSTRACT Introduction Sociodemographic factors can sometimes be more contributory in relation to war-related stress-induced disorder treatment and compensation-seeking than health-related factors. However, their impact is often overlooked. This study explores a relationship between sociodemographic factors and diagnoses of combat-related stress-induced disorders in combat compensation seekers for delayed-onset PTSD (DOPTSD). Materials and Methods Between June 2002 and August 2004, at the Regional Centre for Psychotrauma Zagreb, University Hospital Dubrava, the expert team evaluated subjects to diagnose DOPTSD and other comorbid illnesses. The study included 831 war veterans who experienced combat stress during the 1991-1995 Croatian war. They were subjects of psychiatric treatments before applying for compensation. The researchers derived results from data collected during the expert evaluation for compensation seeking, which included a structured diagnostic procedure. The diagnostic procedure included structured clinical interviews that also provided sociodemographic (age, sex, education, employment, marital status, number of children, and place of residence) and other data (heredity, medical history of physical and mental disorders, history of social functioning, combat-related and post-traumatic experiences, symptoms, their duration, intensity, and treatment). After the interview, the Clinical Global Impression Scale, the Clinician-Administrated PTSD Scale, and the Mississippi Scale for Combat-Related PTSD were applied. Final diagnoses of a lifetime or current PTSD and stress-related disorders according to the ICD-10 were established after fulfilling psychiatric and psychometric criteria. Multiple logistic regression determined independent contributions of sociodemographic characteristics (e.g., age, gender, education, employment and marital status, and parental status), war (duty duration and physical disabilities from combat injuries), and post-war experiences (outpatient treatment duration and the number of hospitalizations) in predicting compensation eligibility. Results Better-educated combat compensation seekers were 2.23 times more likely to have eligible psychiatric diagnoses. Furthermore, married veterans were 2.22 times more likely to have eligible diagnoses than single compensation seekers. Likewise, hospitalization status was a risk factor concerning post-war experiences for eligible psychiatric diagnoses. Conclusion Marriage and higher education are accounted for longer DOPTSD in the group of combat compensation seekers with diagnoses eligible for compensation as a protective factor. A higher number of hospitalizations was also predictive because of more severe PTSD symptomatology as a risk factor. Higher education, marriage, and the higher number of the hospitalizations contributing to war-related DOPTSD diagnoses eligible for compensation.