The prize-winning German original of this monograph (Die Gesellschaft der Überlebenden) appeared in 2009 and has already been extensively reviewed. In it Svenja Goltermann challenges the prevailing notion that memories of the violence that Germans perpetrated in World War II—as well as the traumas that Germans, and especially former prisoners of war, experienced in war and captivity—were simply and perhaps conveniently repressed during the postwar period in western Germany. She argues instead that the very notion of trauma, as historians use the term, was alien to both the psychiatric profession and the German public and should thus not be applied retrospectively. The increasing stability and normality of what became West Germany after 1949 was built not upon a twenty-first-century understanding of “repression” but rather upon personal memories, the prevailing doctrines of the psychiatric community, and publicly negotiated rules about what could and could not be said. This thesis begs a related question about trauma and repression in the German Democratic Republic, which is not addressed in this work.

To make her case, Goltermann divides the book into three parts. The first relies on the little-used psychiatric records of the von Bodelschwinghsche Anstalt Bethel, which provided psychiatric evaluation and care to German soldiers and returnees from prisoner-of-war camps. These records show that memories of violence could not be ignored and that “death and the dead were repeatedly present in the mental worlds” (6) of many Germans. Fear of punishment and feelings of persecution are, for Goltermann, evidence of an awareness that what soldiers had seen and done, especially on the Eastern Front, had been crimes. Since such expressions were so rare in public—with exceptions, such as the film Die Mörder sind unter uns (1946), which Goltermann analyzes at some length in the third part of the book—these private testimonies are a slight corrective to the notion of a postwar silence and taboo that was more prevalent in the literature in the years before 2009. The war may not have been present in public discussions, but it was discussed “in their minds,” as the title of the English version captures more effectively than the German one.

The second part of the book examines the treatment given to suffering veterans, which was based on doctrines entrenched within the psychiatric profession holding that the human capacity to survive stress was enormous and that exogenous factors could not cause long-term mental illness. Goltermann links the tenacity of these beliefs to the experience of World War I, when the psychiatric community came to believe that symptoms displayed by “shell-shocked” veterans were either faked or could be explained as “hysterical” or “wish-determined” (109–10). During and after World War II, psychiatrists set a high bar for diagnoses of mental illness, especially when disability claims were involved, because they were convinced that a lower threshold would encourage a flood of soldiers and veterans seeking either medical discharge or pension claims.

Finally, to show how public understanding of war's effects on the psyche evolved into something closer to today's concerns about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and related maladies, Goltermann looks at how media representations of returning soldiers and of victims of National Socialist persecution came to promote the idea that the experience of violence could have lasting psychosomatic effects. Less a discussion of “public memory culture,” as the title of Chapter 8 suggests, this section has more to do with popular perceptions of psychology than with “memory,” as historians usually discuss it—citations of Aleida Assmann and others notwithstanding. In the field of trauma-induced neurosis, the public and the media were often well ahead of the psychiatric community, which only gradually began in the 1960s and 1970s to recognize the possibility of “experientially determined personality change” (159). In some ways, Goltermann argues, the inability of psychiatrists to contest openly the moral challenge raised by claims to compensation by Jews (of all nations) and by non-German victims of National Socialism empowered those in the psychiatric community who suggested that exogenous factors could have long-term mental effects.

Goltermann stresses that such recognition did not redound to the benefit of returnees and did not further their claims to pensions or to any other recognition of the damage they had suffered in the war. It is ironic that the plight of the persecuted—which, the author says, helped shift attitudes toward war-induced trauma among members of the general public and medical professionals—simultaneously led to an increasing awareness of the crimes of the Third Reich, and, according to Goltermann, the role of the Wehrmacht in these crimes. Such an understanding undermined returnees’ claims to victim status on equal terms with other groups. This latter point challenges, of course, the notion that there had been a myth of the clean Wehrmacht. Germans knew about the crimes of the Wehrmacht either from personal experience (as shown in Part I) or from their exposure to coverage of postwar trials, such as Adolf Eichmann's widely televised hearing in Israel. But how can one then explain the furor around the “Wehrmacht Exhibit” prepared by the Hamburg Institute for Social Research after its debut in 1995? How did the “expansion of the perpetrator image” (298)—to include Wehrmacht veterans by 1970—fade by 1995?

This work is a translation, not a second edition, and neither the bibliography nor the introduction have been updated. This means there is no attempt to connect the work to the literature on the history of emotion that has grown significantly since the book's original publication. Goltermann's opening section examining individual psychiatric records—which presented serious methodological challenges in 2009 (e.g., generalizing from individual [and largely narrative] medical records, or speculating about an individual's feelings)—might have benefitted from engagement with more recent literature that has also struggled with what individual feelings of fear, despondency, or guilt reveal about society and history.

The book deserves attention for its challenging thesis and methodological innovation, not least its combined treatment of individual emotion, history of science, and public memory. Sales of the original German version were brisk among a non-specialist audience of Germans seeking to understand the inner lives of their parents or grandparents, a fact that speaks to the very silence that Goltermann hopes to penetrate in her first part. Yet, it is arguably that very connection among generations that made the reaction to the “Wehrmacht Exhibit” so strong. In an interesting way, this very point may support Goltermann's methodological approach, since the reaction to the exhibit may have reflected a truth about West German political culture: that it was (and is) still based on the interplay between personal and familial memories, on the expertise of professionals (historians, in the case of the “Wehrmacht Exhibit”), and on what can and cannot be said in public.