Challenges for Science, Threats to the Nation. Austrian and Czech War Neurotics as Examples of a Transnational History of Trauma (1914–1938)

0523820 - MÚA 2021 RIV AT eng J - Journal Article
Kučera, Rudolf - Leidinger, H.
Challenges for Science, Threats to the Nation. Austrian and Czech War Neurotics as Examples of a Transnational History of Trauma (1914–1938).
Zeitgeschichte. Roč. 47, č. 1 (2020), s. 15-32. ISSN 0256-5250
R&D Projects: GA ČR(CZ) GF17-33831L
Institutional support: RVO:67985921
Keywords : World War I veterans * Austria and Czechoslovakia
OECD category: History (history of science and technology to be 6.3, history of specific sciences to be under the respective headings)
Impact factor: 0.122, year: 2020
Method of publishing: Limited access
https://doi.org/10.14220/zsch.2020.47.1.15

The article deals with the scholarly and popular treatment of war-related mental disorders in interwar Austria and Czechoslovakia. It follows the psychiatric discourse on this issue, as well as broader discussions related to interwar social provisioning for the war disabled. It shows that, despite the different outcomes of the war for the two states, similarities prevailed. In both countries, medical experts observed neurotic soldiers with suspicion and did not view them through the prism of medicine, but in relation to the financial constraints pertaining in the period of post-war reconstruction. Hence, war-related neurotic disorders became the object of exclusionary welfare provisions rather than of psychiatric care. In both countries, the veterans were pushed to the margins of the respective welfare systems and they were often publicly stigmatized as unnecessarily complicating post-war reconstruction. Later in the interwar period, war-related neurotic disorders were placed within a nationalizing framework in both states, which regarded the neurotic ex-servicemen as endangering the nation or as a potential problem for future military mobilization. The discourse of degeneration enabled both countries to cast out those with neurotic disorders from the nation and thus to portray affected veterans as a “danger” to the national community.
Permanent Link: http://hdl.handle.net/11104/0308224