This book is an attempt to explore the problem of shell shock, or “war neurosis,” in the Great War as a point of reference for public debate about the causes of German defeat in war and social conflict in the two decades following the Armistice of 1918. Its strength lies in its use of letters from men suffering from nervous disorders; the narrative is framed not as history top-down, but as an exploration of debates about war-related disability and pension entitlements as a multi-vocal conversation about many facets of German society in war and peace.

While following the pathbreaking work of Paul Lerner and others, Crauthamel does present new evidence on the problems of war-related psychological disabilities. He shares with Lerner a Weberian perspective, in that the workings of the bureaucracy, both before and after 1933, are the decisive elements in the treatment of disability claims. There are interesting references to the direct intervention either of Hitler himself or of other officials in the cases of disabled party men whose service to the movement in the 1920s made their claims to having been traumatized politically acceptable. Others were not as fortunate. Crauthamel shows the failure of some men even with yeoman service to the party to get through the red tape and rigidity of Labor Ministry officials determined to keep pension costs down. Many of these former soldiers whose pleas for recognition and higher pensions fell on deaf ears believed that only if the Führer had known of these frustrations, their bureaucratic defeats would have been reversed. That never happened. Not a single man who made a claim before a Labor Ministry court to receive a pension for war-related psychological injury won his case (p. 184); those men whose service to the party in the hard years of the 1920s could be documented, did better, but even then, the Nazi cult of willpower precluded their acceptance of disability claims based solely on psychological breakdown in wartime. “Trauma” because of French shelling at Verdun was deemed less “traumatic” than “trauma” due to street-fighting in Munich a few years later. The quotation marks tell the story; trauma is a house of many mansions, and its meaning depends on who holds political power.

This shift of the meaning of trauma from combat in wartime to combat against the “November criminals” and their ilk in peacetime showed the hollowness of Nazi claims to represent the soldiers who had manned German lines during the war. Having played a “correct” role in the war after the war was much more important in the day-to-day efforts many German veterans made to navigate the treacherous shoals of the pensions' bureaucracy. Here Crauthamel shows the German specificity of his story. There is as yet no full study of Italian disability pensions, but it would be intriguing to know whether service to the party in the turbulent postwar years also helped Italian veterans get their pensions, even if their disabilities were partly or totally psychological in character. My guess is that that was not the case. Elsewhere in Europe, penny-pinching and similar stigmatized views of mental illness made the path of many disabled men a thorny one, with the chances of success against bureaucratic opposition virtually nil.

The rhetorical minefield at the center of this book is described by the search—never completed—as to what constituted “trauma” itself. Historians of the Great War period have been elusive about this term, just as much as have many literary critics and students of the Holocaust. Crauthamel shows how the very slipperiness of the term made its hijacking feasible by the Nazis; they then could refer to “trauma” as pointing to the early days of Weimar, to the force-feeding of the peace terms and reparations to the German population, and to the disorders of demobilization, referred to here as secondary trauma.

The fate of those who claimed to have been “traumatized” by the defeat and postwar politics was still determined by the way the pensions' bureaucracy operation in the Ministry of Labor and the way the masculine swagger of the Nazi movement shunned those who broke down psychologically during the struggle. Psychologically disabled men—perhaps even Hitler himself—did well to hide the fact, if they could.

Such stigmatization to a degree limits the effectiveness of the bottom-up approach adopted by Crauthamel. We are in his debt for having unearthed these protests, grumbles, and frustrated pleas, but the outcome of their claims was sealed not by their experience, nor by their protests, nor solely by medical conventions, but by the misfortune they had in living under two regimes that could not afford, either financially or politically, to give them the benefit of the doubt. The iron wall of bureaucracy only very rarely budged when faced with the pleas of a former frontline soldier. It is useful to have the story of a troublemaker such as the angry disabled veteran Konrad D., but his frustration is hardly surprising. Crauthamel's tale is not history “from the margins” (p. 189) but from the bureaucratic core. It is valuable, though, to have these failed pleas for better treatment on record, for they show the shabbiness of a regime professing loyalty to the memory of the sacrifice and suffering of front soldiers while keeping many of them in extremely straitened circumstances.

This finding has been confirmed in studies of the aftermath of the Great War in other countries. At least on this matter, Weimar and Nazi Germany followed no special path. With rare exceptions, disabled veterans of all kinds, and not only “war neurotics” were miserably treated wherever they were. Survivors of more recent conflicts even in our more stable democracies have done little better, even after the medical community recognized the existence of post-traumatic stress disorder. The stigma of mental illness is still a painful reality. The files of the International Labor Office in Geneva throw light on German as well as other European discussions of these problems; they are worth following up by scholars in this field.

Of one thing we can be pretty certain. Chances are very high that there will be more sorry chapters added to this ongoing history of the distrust, fear, and abandonment of men who have been disabled, physically and psychologically, and of those men who one day will be disabled in the service of their countries.