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An examination of human nature that highlights the connection between trauma and violence and focusses on German history   …and ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free John 8:32 Still from the film Das Vermächtnis/The Legacy   Blog 1.  Introduction The collective, institutional and industrialised violence of German National Socialism…

Chimpanzee cub The initial perspective When we look at human nature, we come across two opposing perspectives: one that sees violence as a natural part of human nature that can be kept within limits using a variety of measures – and the other that assumes that people are naturally peaceful and that violence, when it…

Trauma is a word that is used in a variety of ways in everyday language today. But do we really understand what it means when we speak about trauma ? The word trauma (Greek: wound), which can be found since the 17th century, was initially used in a medical context and stands for a physical…

The symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder are all triggered by the memory of the event that caused the psychological ‘wounding’. We therefore need to focus on our ability to remember so that we can gain an understanding of traumatic memory and its effects. Artist impression of neurons The Neurobiologist Eric Kandel explains that what we…

The psychologist David Lisak explains the difference between the human response to danger under normal circumstances and a response to danger in a life-threatening situation. Under normal circumstances, information indicating danger is perceived by the senses and then processed by a complex network of neural connections. In this context, the stimuli perceived by the senses…

As we have seen, traumatic memories are both unconscious and persistent. Therefore, they are difficult to access and, by maintaining information that is no longer relevant, disrupt our ability to remain connected to our natural and social environment through constant adaptation. The symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder can be traced back to these two characteristics…

We have seen that every single person is connected to their environment through the potential of our brain to constantly change and adapt to new circumstances. We have also seen that this connection can be disrupted by the rigid persistence of traumatic memories. A comparable case in which an initial situation of connection becomes disturbed…

An interruption of the basic tendency towards social connection can occur in a social context through the experience of shame, humiliation and the death of a close person. Like the loss of connections triggered by traumatic memories, experiences of loss in the social context can also lead to violence. This is shown by the following…

A tendency towards connectedness also exists in a broader social/ societal context. The sociologist Ron Eyerman describes the feeling of social connectedness as a sense of belonging to a group (Eyerman, 2001). This sense of belonging can be disrupted by social crises that trigger experiences of social separation and alienation. These crises are often caused…

The Peasant War 1524/25 Method In this part of the blog series, we will look for the pattern of loss of connection and violence described in Part 1 in the context of German history.  The aim is to explore events that caused social crisis and had the potential to trigger experiences of alienation and to…

The Graeco-Roman heritage Since Germany only came into existence as a nation since 1870, we have to look at the Western European tribes if we want to go further back in history. Those tribes were themselves strongly influenced by the culture and ideology of the Greeks and Romans. From the ancient Greek Empire, we find…

The concept of inequality and the political practice of imperialism employed by the Romans during their 400-year rule left a lasting impact even after the fall of the Roman Empire. The historian Julia Smith, who studies the history of the early European Middle Ages, gives a detailed account of the impact of Roman imperial culture…

Painting by Max Lingner 1951-1955 The Peasant War 1524-1525 In this part of the blog series I will refer to events in German history that can be described as social crises because they had a negative impact on the sense of social and societal belonging. To do this, I will first outline the socio-historical background…

Die Schlacht am Weissen Berg, 1620 Socio-political background The split in the religious unity of Europe initiated by Luther in 1517 led to a local uprising of Bohemian Calvinists against the Catholic Habsburgs in 1618, which turned into a European war with religious and imperial motivations. Reinhardt describes how rivaling principalities of different denominations called…

Watercolour by Denis Dighton, 1815 Socio-political background The Thirty Years’ War left the German-speaking principalities under the influence and control of France, which promoted the sovereignty of the German princes and their establishment of autocratic regimes (Reinhardt, 1950). The ideas of princely absolutism, which built on the concept of inequality formulated by Aristotle several hundred…

Socio-political background Following Napoleon’s defeat in 1815, the German Confederation was formed, a loose association of 39 states, of which the Kingdom of Prussia and the Austrian Empire were the largest. Pulzer describes how the emergence of an organised liberal movement demanding constitutional reform and greater national cohesion led to revolutions in 1848, which were…

Still from the film Das Vermächtnis Socio-political background According to Pulzer, the rapid growth of the German economy, the empire’s competition with other European states for colonies, the development of an aggressive program of military expansion, and a series of diplomatic crises had led to a tense international atmosphere in 1914. When Germany became involved…

‘Anyone who claims that Germany was “unprepared” for Hitler’s rise to power is resisting attempts to see this event as the logical climax of German history’  (Wer behauptet, Deutschland sei auf Hitlers Machtübernahme „nicht vorbereitet” gewesen, wehrt sich gegen Versuche, in diesem Ereignis den logischen Höhepunkt der deutschen Geschichte zu sehen) (Mosse, 1979) In previous…

‘We need future-oriented perspectives, which do not deny the traumas of the past but transform them into possibilities for the present’ Braidotti 2006 In the first part of this blog series, we examined trauma and trauma-like experiences by referring to neurobiological, psychotherapeutic and sociological studies to illustrate how violence is made possible by a person’s…

As we saw in the second part of this blog series, the violence of German National Socialism was made possible by the fact that a loss of connection existed on many levels and increased over a long period of time. The emotional needs that arose as a result could be ideologically seized upon and politically…

In the last blogs we discussed how the human tendency to experience ourselves as connected to one another can be disrupted by traumatic memories and how this disruption leads to a distorted view that legitimizes violence based on fear. We also observed how this view has become established within European history and has enabled oppression,…

While I was compiling this blog series, we as a global population have left a pandemic behind us, triggered by the Covid 19 virus, and are continuing to experience the threat of the effects of climate change, which are becoming more apparent day by day. The war in the Ukraine and the war in Gaza…