1. Black Holes, Blank Spaces, and Trauma as Linguistic Vessel
Trauma is a brief term for a complex phenomenon.1 A linguistic vessel for experiences that can hardly be put into speech. It originates in the seafaring language of ancient Greece and is most often translated as “wound”, but can also mean “hole” or “leak”, “loss” and “defeat”, thus in itself metaphorically referring to the gap and conceptual intangibility associated with the phenomenon. Nowadays, it is mainly used as a terminological construct for physical and psychological phenomena, which can be phenomenologically observed but hardly narrowed down to a singular concept and which must therefore be investigated under a multitude of different perspectives. This terminological and conceptual vagueness has made trauma a permanent guest in literature and the vernacular beyond the clinical context, which, in turn, needs to draw from literary examples, both, ancient and modern,2 to come to terms with its specific unrepresentability. Trauma itself is an untouchable area, even if it leaves physical traces. As a past historical occurrence, it is present in its long-lasting consequences, which not only affect the individual but can also have a collective or transgenerational dynamic. As a future occurrence, it is present potentially anytime, anywhere and to anyone. However, there is no trauma ‘as such’, only traumatogenic events that may cause trauma consequences. There is the specific, individually varying experience and reception of these events. And there are theories, concepts, and models that seek to illuminate the interplay of event and experience. Finally, there are multitudes of personal narratives that articulate the unspeakable after the fact. Ideally, these would form a trauma narrative that could mend the hole ripped by the trauma. But the trauma itself remains a shapeless but all the more gaping wound, untouchable and incomprehensible.
Traumatic experiences are events with an immense destructive power that threatens one’s existence. They penetrate those affected from the outside, shake their understanding of themselves and the world, and bring the external world out of joint and the inner space out of balance. They can build up sequentially and cumulatively over time. But usually they come suddenly and unexpectedly, in a way that is impossible to prepare for or defend against. They are boundary violations flooding the ego, disturbing the distinction between inside and outside, tied to experiences that are difficult to understand and can hardly be conceptualised. Fundamentally, they can be considered neither “events” nor “experiences”, because the possibility of verbalising what has happened, of symbolising it, expressing it and storing it as a memory, is itself limited. This is why one speaks of an “adversity”, “Widerfahrnis”3 or “Erleidnis”4 that can affect anyone such as an accident, attack, rape, war, and persecution, and which confronts us with the unavailability of life ‒ “Unverfügbarkeit”, as the Marburg theologian Rudolf Bultmann would say ‒ and one’s own transience.
In fact, trauma research has developed at precisely such stations. It began in the middle of the 19th century with the invention of the railway as the world’s first mechanical means of mass transport, continued with hysteria research, the phenomenon of war tremors in the First World War, the Holocaust, and the phenomenon of sexual violence. Finally veterans of the Vietnam War made sure that the first official diagnostic tool for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) was codified in 1980. Thus, wide ranges of phenomena are essentially connected by the fact that they are events “of extraordinary threat with catastrophic proportions that would trigger profound despair in almost anyone.”5 The main criteria of PTSD include persistent states of hyperarousal and avoidance attitudes that make the trauma a foreign body (“Fremdkörper”) in one’s life, a sore spot that cannot be touched and cannot become part of one’s own biography. The attitude towards life is determined by the impression: “nothing is the same anymore”. Strengths that were believed to be safe seem lost, resources closed, and life’s path divided. This is also related to the narrative processes that are blocked by the traumatic event, which dismantles the ability of those affected to report on their experience and to feel a coherent sense of meaning.6 A central feature of trauma is speechlessness: the inability to recount the event and to come to terms with it or to cope with it through the process of reporting and understanding. Traumatic “events are experienced but not experienced as part of the self” (Traumatische “Ereignisse werden durchlebt, aber nicht als Teil des Selbst erfahren”).7 They leave behind “a destruction of form and structure”8 that prevents the event from being represented and understood in a coherent manner. Its classification in a temporal, spatial and causal context is not possible. Memories of the trigger appear fragmented, like shards that do not form an overall picture. If the event is addressed anew through certain triggers and is re-experienced in the form of intrusions such as flashbacks and nightmares, this happens in a “here-and-now feeling”9 that causes the past event to be experienced as if it were present and prevents inner distancing. The intrusions are perceived as repetitions of a terror that has broken into life and continues to determine it. The emotional world appears foreign and hostile or numb and dull. Those affected feel cut off from joy and sadness, but also alienated from people close to them who did not experience the event and hope that the traumatised person will quickly heal and get back to business as usual. But time does not heal all wounds, and trauma does not wear away on its own.10 If an attempt is made to define it as finished and put it aside unprocessed, i.e. if it is ignored, repressed or trivialised, this usually does not result in it disappearing over time.
That we are currently talking so much about trauma is not self-evident. The American psychotherapist and trauma scholar Judith L. Herman sees the research into psychological trauma as a history of resistance with periodic amnesia: phases of intensive research are repeatedly followed by phases in which the topic is forgotten, becomes taboo and understanding in society dwindles. Trauma research is therefore characterised by periodic waxing and waning.11 This involves economic, political and insurance interests, but also defence mechanisms tied to the trauma itself. Against this background, the introduction of PTSD can be seen as the successful implementation of a framework concept. Even if it does not cover all subsequent disorders, it has lifted the taboo on the subject and has made clear that psychological trauma is a worldwide phenomenon that urgently needs to be treated.12 Since 1991, psychotraumatology has been institutionalised as a separate scientific discipline. It understands trauma, at a critical distance from psychoanalysis, as a reaction to an extremely destructive event that occurs objectively from outside, is neither desired nor fantasised, and for whose treatment separate therapeutic approaches have been developed. These can point to good results, but the odds for a definitive cure are uncertain and the caesura associated with the trauma wound remains present as a scar. The patient’s desire for everything to go back to the way it was before the trauma is understandable but inappropriate, so therapy goals include realistic adaptation to the changed situation and acceptance of the loss. Traumatic events also have a social dimension. They confront us with the cruel aspects of our coexistence, with the dark sides of our social order and with a truth that no one wants to know: that our lives are fragile and the world is a dangerous place where some people seek to torture and exterminate others, and that in the extreme, “a single incident of violence” is enough to destroy a person mentally.13 In this way, they point beyond the individual possibilities of recovery to the “pathology of reality”,14 which determines with its underlying influence the coexistence of trauma across generations and will not be eliminated from the world entirely.15
2. How to Represent the Unrepresentable: Blank Spaces in the Work of Khaled Barakeh
In 2018, the Hamburg Museum of Art and Industry (Hamburger Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe) presented works by Syrian artist Khaled Barakeh as part of the “Days of Exile” (“Tage des Exils”).16 In his works, Barakeh, who was born in Damascus in 1976, deals with political power structures, torture, flight and exile and the long-term consequences of armed conflicts as well as with longstanding social injustices. He obtained a degree in painting from the Faculty of Fine Arts in Damascus (2005) and a Master of Fine Arts at the Odense Funen Art Academy in Denmark (2010), before coming to Germany in 2013 as a master’s student at the Städelschule Art Academy in Frankfurt am Main. Today he lives in Berlin. There he noticed how the effect of terrible reports was wearing off and how the eyes of media users became accustomed to the horror. How the many images of war became common, caused people to become numb and stop looking,17 while the war actually continued and its reality remained an internal reality for himself and a permanently unfinished past for those affected. How would it be possible to break this numbness and awaken empathy in those who live far away from the horror? For this effect, Barakeh created his “Untitled Images” and showed them to the public in the 2018 exhibition in Hamburg. The images show “the horror of loss”.18 People who, just a moment ago, had lost someone, perhaps a child, and who are still holding the dead in their arms. The artist worked with photo templates that documented the war in Syria. Barakeh cut the bodies of the deceased out of the photographs, almost scratching them out in such a way that only their silhouettes remained visible as a white spot, concealing the identity of the victims to protect their dignity.19 In this way, the series “The Untitled Images” draws attention to the survivors who have to learn to live with the loss, while at the same time showing the brutal reality of the Syrian war and the cruelty of the political regime, but also the “violence that comes from the act of showing through the media.”20 The blank space can be interpreted as a representation of the unrepresentable and thus as a representation of trauma. It marks the gap, the hole, the sore spot that survivors hold in their hands and that will accompany their lives from now on.21
Khaled Barakeh: The Untitled Images. 2014, 5 digital prints on paper, 21x30 cm each. https://www.khaledbarakeh.com/sp/the-untitled-images.
When I saw this picture22 for the first time, printed in the German academic journal “Forschung und Lehre”,23 I immediately understood it as a visualisation of what we call “trauma”.24 Four years earlier, in 2014, I had completed my Habilitation at Christian Albrechts University Kiel with the thesis “Ein Hauch von Ordnung” (“A Touch of Order”),25 which, against resistance, introduced the topic of trauma into the field of German-language Practical Theology. I took up the professorship for Practical Theology at Philipps University Marburg another four years later in 2018. In Marburg, the trauma theme was already pre-established by two innovative works: by Ruth Poser’s dissertation on Ezekiel and by Kristina Augst’s study on sexualised violence in the church, both published in 2012.26 And so it made sense to network the topic across disciplines and bring together Biblical Studies and Practical Theology ‒ an idea that my colleagues Alexandra Grund-Wittenberg and Christl M. Maier were immediately on board with, and we all used our contacts to get an interdisciplinary, international conference off the ground at Philipps University.
When we were looking for a cover image for our conference volume “Readings of Trauma”, Barakeh’s image came back to my mind. For it symbolises the unresolved task of defining trauma more closely as a hermeneutic construct, and it conveys the hope that there could be a third, creative possibility between the “everything and nothing” that so often determines life for those affected – by making visible, in an alienating way, through the blank space, what our eyes have become so accustomed to through the many images that it is no longer seen. I saw its invisibility, its incomprehensibility, its silence in the noise of war. And I felt its power and the powerlessness of the survivors as well as the precarious role assigned to me as an observer: repelled and attracted at the same time by the “tremendum and fascinosum” (Rudolf Otto). All this finds a linguistic vessel in the Greek word
3. Readings of Trauma: The Concept of This Volume
This volume is based on the conference “Readings of Trauma. Hermeneutical Perspectives on Biblical and Modern Trauma Narratives”, which took place at the Faculty of Protestant Theology at Philipps University Marburg (April 5–7, 2022). It brings together renowned scholars from Germany, The Netherlands, Great Britain, The United States of America, and South Africa to explore trauma as a hermeneutical construct, to discuss the possibilities and limitations of the category, and to compare hermeneutical perspectives on biblical and modern trauma narratives through the lenses of Jewish and Christian theology, religious studies, literary studies, psychotraumatology, and psychoanalysis. It thus brings together strands of discourse that usually remain separate. Approaches from so-called “historical trauma research”30 are brought into contact with modern trauma narratives. Medical-psychological approaches, using trauma as a clinical diagnostic tool, meet trauma as a cultural interpretation pattern (“kulturelles Deutungsmuster”) that has been used in literary and cultural studies since the 1990s.31 Psychoanalytic approaches meet approaches from psychotraumatology and “trauma studies” in the fields of Biblical exegesis32 stand besides trauma research in pastoral care. In this way, trauma becomes visible as a construct, initially slow to establish itself, now widely popularised as a vague bandwagon term that needs to be sharpened in its descriptive power if it is to retain its heuristic function. It is a context-dependent and at the same time cross-cultural phenomenon. As a linguistic and cultural expression it stands for extreme experiences of violence and powerlessness that people have experienced in relation to their environment, so that it can also overlap with other discourses such as those on vulnerability or resilience.33 It has individual and collective dimensions34 and stands for incisions in the life stories of individuals as well as for caesurae in societies evoked by historical catastrophes. Trauma narratives can be understood as echoes of such events, which are difficult for individuals to express, but which, in literary form ‒ via the detour of culture35 ‒ open up a collective space for expression, lamentation, processing, and remembrance, which has a constructive effect without cancelling out the loss.
Such an echo, such a detour, was the starting point of our conference and is also found here at the beginning of this volume. The volume starts with an end: with the historical caesura of 1945. It marks the specific speechlessness after the end of the Nazi dictatorship and of the Second World War, which, following Adorno’s dictum (“writing a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric”),36 was also a turning point in literary history. Nevertheless, poems were written after Auschwitz. The best known is Paul Celan’s “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”), and one of the most renowned experts on this poem is the literary scholar Thomas Sparr at Suhrkamp Verlag who presented the “biography” of this poem in 2020.37 Written in 1944/45, “Death Fugue” is not only Celan’s most famous poem but also one of the earliest testimonies of a Jewish author confronting the post-war period with Nazi crimes; thus it is probably the most famous poem of the 20th century. Generations of students have learnt it by heart, have read it, heard it recited. Snippets of the text – the “black milk of daybreak” or the assertion that “Death is a master from Deutschland” – have been quoted, referred to, alluded to. Literary scholar Wolfgang Emmerich called it “a centenary poem” (“ein Jahrhundertgedicht”),38 which assimilates and passes down to its readers the fundamental experience of the 20th century. Sparr reads this poem as an expression of trauma which exposes the wounds that Nazi destructiveness has left on language and as a coded message to posterity. Many of the witnesses with personal knowledge of the Holocaust and of Celan, and of those involved in the earliest translations of “Todesfuge” into English, are dead. Those who remember them are dwindling. What remains is the poem. A poem that anchors the hard-to-represent, hard-to-express, hard-to-endure Jewish experiences during the Holocaust in the minds of a twenty-first century readership as a “Message in a Bottle”39 for the contemporary world and posterity. “Death Fugue” continues to disrupt, even today, and the first person to understand this was Celan himself. It was for this reason that, quite early on, he refrained from reading it publicly. Thus, the permanently unfinished past found an exemplary creative expression, while the author himself succumbed to the destructive dynamics of trauma: the “Poet, Survivor, Jew”40 Paul Celan took his own life in 1970, at the age of 49. Twenty-five years after the end of the horror that never ended for him, the survivor did not survive.
The basic hermeneutical questions of the Trauma conference in Marburg were developed from Celan’s poem, which does not mention the word “trauma” at all. The “black milk” corresponds to the white spot in the images of Khaled Barakeh. It was written by someone who did not see the concentration camps himself; who translated other people’s suffering into his own alienating linguistic images, and thus created a poem that has become a symbol and an icon for Jewish suffering during the Holocaust and beyond, a metonym for Auschwitz, the Holocaust, the Shoah, translated into all the languages of the world, in order to bear witness, although the real historical experiences the poem seeks to express remain untranslatable.
Nowadays, Celan’s own multicultural and multilingual existence, rooted in the landscape of the Ukrainian/Romanian Bukovina, comes into contact with new military conflicts that are once again sweeping across these landscapes in new constellations, destroying the hope for lasting reconciliation after decades of peace and prosperity ‒ raising the question of whether war and violence remain a constant factor of human nature across time and space, so that the associated traumas can also be found in other times and other cultural texts and contexts, even if the term itself had not yet been used. The foreign, coded texts then act like “narrative vessels” (“Erzählgefäße”), to use a term by Swiss writer Peter Bichsel,41 in which one’s own experience finds form and expression. At the same time, the texts soften the intrusiveness of one’s own experience and take on something of a problem-distancing function.
Old Testament scholar Friedhelm Hartenstein, Munich, brings us into contact with such “narrative vessels” from antiquity to raise the question: How and to what degree can the Bible be understood as trauma response? How can cultural forms “work” on trauma? And what specific kind of connection between trauma, memory, and ritual do they offer? His article offers a historical and hermeneutical evaluation of “trauma” as a category for the interpretation of cultural phenomena, especially the literature contained in the Hebrew Bible. As a starting point he takes one of the Sumerian lamentations on the destruction of the city of Ur (ca. 2000 BC). Although he sees the category “historical trauma” and transgenerational trauma dynamics as controversial, he uses “trauma” as an interpretive category for cultural phenomena to discuss the significance of trauma-theoretical impulses for debates on the relationship between forms of “collective memory” and (modern) historiography. He also highlights the possibilities and limits of the category of trauma for the historical and literary understanding of the Jewish Tanakh and the Christian Old Testament concentrating primarily on the question of the connection between trauma, memory, and ritual, as it becomes apparent specifically in the Ur Lament. According to Hartenstein’s thesis, the genre serves as a “memory as prevention” mediated in ritual. The introductory part gives a survey of trauma-theoretical insights with a focus on the difference between individual and collective trauma which can only be discussed by looking into the broader framework of cultural differences and common structures of the organisation of memory. The second part, therefore, deals with the two dimensions of social memory attested to in the Hebrew Bible: the ritually mediated events that form the identities of the group members, and the more distanced view of historiography. The latter possibly starts within the Hebrew Bible but has fully come to the fore since the European Enlightenment. The paper stresses the important hermeneutical position of distancing if it is used as a means of uncovering what is permanently unfinished in the constructions of the past. Finally, the parallel of trauma and ritual is examined with regard to the core of Israel’s collective memory: The Exodus and the Passover. Here, in the very heart of shaping identity, both salvation and trauma experience are indissolubly connected in a monotheistic sharpening: ritual appropriation even seems to be the decisive way to process experiences of events that remain as crucial as they are elusive and that can only be narrated and lived in a fragile and ambiguous manner. Hartenstein’s contribution “The Hebrew Bible as Trauma Response? Historical and Hermeneutical Considerations” thus lays a decisive foundation for our opening chapter “Readability of Trauma ‒ Hermeneutical Questions and Foundations”, but also for the entire volume, and highlights the special sense of reality of the Hebrew Bible, which can touch people right up to the present day despite the wide cultural distance.
Compared to the 4,000 years that have passed since the Ur Lament, the one hundred years of trauma research seem to be small and meagre. But the scientific description of the serious wounding of the body as well as the psyche that is called “trauma” is a result of modernity, as psychotherapist Peter J. Winzen explains in his article “One Hundred Years of Psychoanalytical Trauma Aetiology as a Therapeutic and Hermeneutical Instrument”. This informative article outlines the history of psychological trauma research that has become the standard narrative, in order to supplement it. It looks at the historical transformation of the traumatic symptoms and the significance of political, cultural and social movements beyond trauma therapy that are helpful in healing psychological injury. It deals with the psychoanalytical perspectives on the trauma event and the question as to how the traumatic destruction experienced, the lived lack of protection and the failure of language are verbalised. Since trauma therapy is all about adapting one’s own history of language to forms and traditions, it requires, according to Winzen, cultural studies and the exegesis of handed-down texts, which post-traumatically lead to fragile trust in universal references.
While the first chapter discusses the hermeneutical questions pars pro toto for literature, exegesis, and psychology, the second chapter, “Trauma Narratives in the Hebrew Bible”, concretises these hermeneutical considerations using the example of paradigmatic texts from the Hebrew Bible. In her contribution “Jerusalem’s Demise as a Cultural Trauma in the Book of Jeremiah”, Christl M. Maier, a recognised specialist in the Book of Jeremiah, attempts to open up the prophetic book anew. Using the theory of cultural trauma by Jeffrey C. Alexander as a ‒ not uncontroversial ‒ heuristic tool, the paper interprets the book of Jeremiah as a master narrative about a cultural trauma compiled over several generations.42 Alexandra Grund-Wittenberg, who has dealt with interdisciplinary topics between psychology and the Bible before, explores the opportunities and limitations of the trauma debate using the example of the Psalms: “‘And one to bind up their wounds’ (Psalm 147:3). Dealing with Trauma in the Psalms: Some Insights and Open Questions”. Given the often vague use of the term trauma, she advises caution: “Sociological theories of cultural trauma developed in modern societies need to be tested for their viability, especially when applied to ancient cultures.” Joel Baden, Yale Divinity School, reads Lamentations as a theological text concerned with the theological state of Israel’s self. The conquest and destruction of the Temple shattered its self-understanding, and Lamentations in his eyes is the textualised result, which can be read as an expression of trauma and fragmentation.
In the third chapter, “Texts and Contexts: Re-Readings in Modernity”, the internal perspectives are expanded and brought into contact with new contexts. It begins with the enlightening contribution by Andrew Mein, Birmingham, “Biblical Consolation and the Avoidance of Lament: Voices from the First World War”. According to Mein, biblical scholars have been thinking about the therapeutic value of laments for some time now and have asked about the healing function of the lament Psalms. He examines this thesis for a particular moment in the history of the reception of the Psalms: the First World War, which represents an important stage for trauma research in general. Did people at that time, in the midst of trauma, really use the text of lament to express and even process their experiences? Andrew Mein shows on the basis of contemporary sources: Wartime writers in Great Britain and Germany tended to read them less as pastoral resource than as a source of theological reflection or national confidence. Björn Krondorfer, a German scholar who teaches in Arizona, also seeks a contemporary historical reference and advocates for a more cautious application of “trauma” in our theological and critical thinking regarding post-conflict societies when he asks about “Traumatisation or Implicated Subject? Post-1945 Challenges to Theological Work in Germany”. His article critically assesses the 21st century ubiquitous use of trauma discourse within the context of the rhetoric of “suffering Germans” in the immediate postwar years in Germany. Though the language of trauma was not yet available in the decades following the defeat of Nazi Germany, clergy and theologians had high hopes for a renewal of the church by generating a discourse that zoomed in on the losses and suffering of a defeated Germany. However, an undifferentiated understanding of a traumatised collective presumes a unifying bond between all kinds of traumatised people, regardless of the ethical difference between “harm endured” and “harm inflicted”, which, according to Krondorfer, must be critically evaluated. Theologian Katya Tolstaya, born in Russia and teaching in The Netherlands, specialises in transfer research between Eastern and Western Europe. She is sensitive to how the persistent influence of the Soviet legacy manifests as a collective, unresolved intergenerational trauma that continues to shape the socio-political landscape of post-Soviet states, especially Russia. She hosted the international conference “Gulag Legacy: History, Memory, and the Sacred in Post-Soviet Russia” at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam in 2018 and initiated its Master’s programme “Theology and Religious Studies: Peace, Trauma and Religion”. In her contribution “Theology After Gulag, Bucha, and Beyond: Reflections at the Intersection of Eastern and Western Theological Discourses”, she advocates not only for a differentiated use of the term “trauma”, but underscores the importance of a nuanced understanding of religion. According to her, it is essential to distinguish religion from ideology. Every religious tradition can be misused, but also holds an antidote that can lead to coming to terms with a traumatic past, while trauma itself underscores the necessity of a “hermeneutics of stakes”, as she puts it. Finally, David M. Carr’s article takes us back to a basic biblical text. Using the example of the catastrophic flood in Genesis he shows that trauma narratives in the Hebrew Bible and events in modern times not only have motif and structural parallels but can also interpret each other. Historically, the stories of the flood have not played a particularly central role in Jewish reflections on trauma. But at the same time, they are connected to realities of contemporary environmental traumas. Carr suggests that the ancient texts reflect what the American psychiatrist Robert Jay Lifton called “death encounters”, wherein a few individuals survive what initially threatens to be a total destruction of life on earth or an entire community. He shows that these narratives contain features linked to aspects of the contemporary debate and offers a fruitful re-reading of post-traumatic biblical narratives of flood and rescue amidst the Climate Catastrophe.
The fundamental connection between trauma and vulnerability is illustrated in the fourth chapter: “Reading and Re-Reading the Vulnerable Life”. The chapter begins with Ruth Poser’s article “The Book of Wounds: Trauma and Vulnerability in Ezekiel.” As Poser points out, wounds and vulnerability are a major theme all throughout the book. Her analysis shows that God and human beings alike are seen as vulnerable. Therefore the book of Ezekiel can be read as literature of survival, offering space to work through a trauma of war and to mourn the wounds it has struck. It opens up a way to imagine a future for Yhwh and Israel and helps to accept and to affirm vulnerability. An innovative combination of modern and ancient texts is offered by L. Juliana Claassens, Professor of Old Testament at the Faculty of Theology at Stellenbosch University in South Africa. Her article draws on a creative conversation between biblical and contemporary trauma narratives by way of a comparative reading of “The Rape of Dinah” (Gen 34) and “Milkman” by Anna Burns. To her, both are multi-layered trauma narratives in which an individual story of sexual violence is used to represent the vulnerability of a traumatised community, so that the narratives bridge the different contexts of ancient Israel and Northern Ireland in the 1970s in spite of the wide cultural distance. Johanna Stiebert, Professor of Hebrew Bible at the University of Leeds, finally broadens the debate by bringing in Black Lives Matter and #MeToo as two of the various mass protest movements of the early 21st century. Unlike other movements, both have considerable impact in predominantly white spaces, including in digital activism, Biblical Studies, and critical interpretation of the Hebrew Bible. Stiebert explores the nature of this impact, focusing on both problematic aspects and positive action and considers the centrality of trauma and traumatisation in both biblical texts and protest movements.
Like the first, the fifth and final chapter summarises the three perspectives once again: Psychology, exegesis, and literary scholarship, but now in reverse order. It starts with Maggie Schauer, a German clinical psychologist specialising in trauma-related disorders. She heads the Competence Centre for Psychotraumatology at the University of Konstanz. Her research collaborations focus on multiple and complex traumatisation and the transgenerational consequences of violence and neglect. Together with Frank Neuner and Thomas Elbert, she conceptualised Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET) for the treatment of trauma-related disorders following multiple and complex traumatisation as a biographical narrative method which is used in crisis areas around the world.43 Schauer coordinates therapy and aid projects in war and crisis zones, in refugee camps after humanitarian and natural disasters, in demobilisation projects for child soldiers, and with survivors of torture and human rights violations in their countries of origin as well as with refugees and asylum seekers in Germany, and told us about this important work at the conference in Marburg. For this anthology publication, she introduces a new topic. Together with the Catholic theologian Lydia Maidl, who has also published on Khaled Barakeh,44 she illuminates the complex relationship between trauma and religiosity ‒ for trauma can shatter a person’s relationship with religion and spirituality ‒ under the title: “Narration and Storytelling: Resolving Bonding Issues with God and Spirituality After Trauma.” Encountering traumatic events can alter how victims and survivors perceive the overall benevolence of the world, the meaningfulness of life, and their own self-worth. Feelings of punishment and abandonment during the traumatic event can lead to heightened despair and anger towards a personal God, as well as a loss of trust and faith in his power and willingness to help. Studies have documented a significant negative correlation between religious and spiritual wellbeing after childhood interpersonal trauma. However, recent meta-analyses confirm that narrative-based interventions, such as Narrative Exposure Therapy, which includes giving testimony and regaining dignity, can provide corrective relationship experiences and promote trauma recovery. These interventions may also be beneficial for reconciling trust in God, as the authors say. ‒ But for this to happen, psychology probably would have to open up more to such topics and seek interdisciplinary discussions and exchange with pastoral care. About a third of all patients come to therapy with questions about meaning. But questions of meaning do not appear in the psychological curriculum. How, then, should therapists listen, read, and accommodate the religious doubts associated with trauma?
Might reading texts like Lamentations have a therapeutic function promoting recovery from trauma? This is the question raised by Paul M. Joyce, Professor of Old Testament/Hebrew Bible at King’s College London, in his contribution “Hope, Denial, and the Integration of Loss: Reading Lamentations in the Wake of Trauma”. Joyce sees trauma theory as an important conversation partner for Biblical Studies. But like others he is also a bit suspicious of all too fast meaning-making in the reading of Lamentations, though he highlights the reader-involving nature of interpretation: Whether it is through the emotional appeal of the book’s rhetoric or unresolved interpretative questions, or indeed through the recurrent possibility of irony, the reader is drawn into participation in this open text, issuing in a diverse range of exegesis and reception. According to Joyce, the reader may find either hope or denial within an ambiguous verse, depending upon the context of reading.
Maike Schult also directs attention towards the reader. Illustrating with poems by Paul Celan and Nelly Sachs, her article “Wounds That Must Not Heal: Reading as Trauma-Witnessing” asks about the hermeneutical task attached to readings of trauma and the challenge to resist false comfort. According to her, the trauma discourse can lead to the illusion that traumatic wounds can be understood and healed. From the perspective of those affected, the longing for healing is just as understandable as the desire to forget. On the other hand, it is a collective, cultural task to remember. Literary forms can be read as vessels to remember, as “Messages in a Bottle” (Osip Mandel’štam and Paul Celan) sent to readers of other times and other places who are ready to bear witness and preserve the dignity of the victims. They ask the recipients to witness other people’s suffering and to keep open their lack and loss. Thus, Maike Schult intertwines her two professions, literary studies and pastoral care, to lead back to the article of Thomas Sparr and to plead for the careful reading of wounds. Wounds that cannot heal. And wounds that must not heal.
In this way, the volume brings together different disciplines and different readings in a large arc without coming to a definitive conclusion or offering one ‘correct’ reading of trauma (cf. the Conclusion by Hindy Najman). Its value may be seen in the value of different approaches themselves and it aims at a trauma-informed reading. But a trauma-informed reading needs, as Friedhelm Hartenstein puts it, to take into account the culturally specific ways of dealing with trauma and the twofold dimensions of trauma: “on the one hand, it is only experienced in the flesh by individuals, on the other hand, its consequences always affect the social world. Society is then, above all, reminded of the fragility of its foundations: the common language, the shared world views and the founding narratives. […] Trauma as an extreme abutment of meaning-making is a profound problem. Its representation requires specific (symbolic) forms and mediations. They, not the trauma itself, can be described and understood.” In other words: The black hole and the blank space remain hermeneutical challenges in trauma research ‒ terrible and brutal in reality, but stimulating and fruitful, sometimes almost poetic, as a heuristic tool for academic debate. This is the ethical dilemma we cannot escape when we say: We enjoyed working on this volume.
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Becker, E.-M., ‘Trauma Studies’ and Exegesis. Challenges, Limits and Prospects, in: >E.-M. Becker/J. Dochhorn/E. K. Holt (eds.), Trauma and Traumatization in Individual and Collective Dimensions. Insights from Biblical Studies and Beyond, Göttingen/Bristol 2014, p. 15–29.
Becker, E.-M./Dochhorn, J./Holt, E. K. (eds.), Trauma and Traumatization in Individual and Collective Dimensions. Insights from Biblical Studies and Beyond, Göttingen/Bristol 2014.
Bohnenkamp, B./Manning, T./Silies, E.-M. (eds.), Generation als Erzählung. Neue Perspektiven auf ein kulturelles Deutungsmuster, Göttingen 2009.
Bronfen, E./Erdle, B. R./Weigel, S. (eds.), Trauma. Zwischen Psychoanalyse und kulturellem Deutungsmuster, Köln/Weimar/Wien 1999.
Caruth, C., Unclaimed Experience. Trauma, Narrative, and History, Baltimore 1996.
Caruth, C. (ed.), Trauma. Explorations in Memory, Baltimore 1995.
Felman, S. (ed.), Literature and Psychoanalysis. The Question of Reading: Otherwise, Baltimore 1982.
Felstiner, J., Paul Celan. Poet, Survivor, Jew, New Haven/London 2001.
Fricke, H., Das hört nicht auf. Trauma, Literatur und Empathie, Göttingen 2004.
Herman, J. L., Die Narben der Gewalt. Traumatische Erfahrungen verstehen und überwinden. Mit einem Nachwort der Autorin aus dem Jahr 1997, 5. Auflage, Paderborn 2018 [Trauma and Recovery. The Aftermath of Violence ‒ From Domestic Abuse to Political Terror, New York 1992].
Hillebrandt, R., Das Trauma in der Psychoanalyse. Eine psychologische und politische Kritik an der psychoanalytischen Traumatheorie, Gießen 2004.
Kansteiner, W., Menschheitstrauma, Holocausttrauma, kulturelles Trauma: Eine kritische Genealogie der philosophischen, psychologischen und kulturwissenschaftlichen Traumaforschung seit 1945, in: F. Jaeger/J. Rüsen (eds.): Handbuch der Kulturwissenschaften, Bd. 3: Themen und Tendenzen. Sonderausgabe, Stuttgart/Weimar 2011, p. 109‒138.
Keul, H., Schöpfung durch Verlust. Band I: Vulnerabilität, Vulneranz und Selbstverschwendung nach Georges Bataille, Würzburg 2021.
Kiedaisch, P. (ed.), Lyrik nach Auschwitz? Adorno und die Dichter, Stuttgart 2012.
Laub, D., Eros oder Thanatos? Der Kampf um die Erzählbarkeit des Traumas, Psyche 54/9 and 10 (2000), p. 860–894.
Lehmann-Carli, G./Johannsmeyer, B./Johannsmeyer, K.-D./Schult, M. (eds.), Zerreißproben: Trauma – Tabu – EmpathieHürden, Berlin 2017.
Maercker, A., Symptomatik, Klassifikation und Epidemiologie, in: A. Maercker (ed.), Posttraumatische Belastungsstörungen, 4., vollständig überbearbeitete und aktualisierte Auflage. Mit 35 Abbildungen und 40 Tabellen. Berlin/Heidelberg 2013, p. 13–34.
Maidl, L., Editorial, Spiritual Care 9/4 (2020), p. 297‒298 (https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/spircare-2020-0108/html).
Meyer-Blankenburg, L., Bilder gegen die Abstumpfung. Raue Wunde. Der syrische Künstler Khaled Barakeh will nicht, dass wir uns an die Bilder des Schreckens gewöhnen, chrismon (08.04.2022) (https://chrismon.de/artikel/52548/kunst-von-khaled-barakeh-untitled-images-2014).
Neuner, F./Schauer, M./Elbert, Th., Narrative Exposition, in: A. Maercker (ed.), Posttraumatische Belastungsstörungen, 4., vollständig überbearbeitete und aktualisierte Auflage. Mit 35 Abbildungen und 40 Tabellen. Berlin/Heidelberg 2013, p. 327–347.
Poser, R., Das Ezechielbuch als Trauma-Literatur, Leiden/Boston 2012.
Reemtsma, J. P., Vertrauen und Gewalt. Versuch über eine besondere Konstellation der Moderne, Hamburg 2008.
Reemtsma, J. P., Im Keller, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1998.
Schauer, M./Neuner, F./Elbert, Th., Narrative Exposure Therapy (NET) for Survivors of Traumatic Stress, 3rd Edition, Newburyport, MA/Göttingen 2025.
Schult, M., Verfremdung als Strategie homiletischer Rhetorik, in: M. Meyer-Blanck (ed.), Handbuch Homiletische Rhetorik, Berlin/Boston 2021, p. 371‒387.
Schult, M., Für Sinn sorgen? Seelsorge und kognitive Verhaltenstherapie nach traumatischen Ereignissen, in: A. Haußmann/R. Höfelschweiger (eds.), Spiritualität und Sinn. Seelsorge und Kognitive Verhaltenstherapie im Dialog, Leipzig 2020, p. 139–162.
Schult, M., Nichts wird mehr, wie es war: Das Konstrukt Traumaheilung aus transgenerationaler Perspektive, in: Y. Drosihn/I. Jandl/E. Kowollik (eds.), Trauma – Generationen – Erzählen. Transgenerationale Narrative in der Gegenwartsliteratur zum ost-, ostmittel- und südosteuropäischen Raum, Berlin 2020, p. 37–50.
Schult, M., Verwundbarkeit und Verletzungsmacht: Dynamiken des Traumas, in: H. Keul/Th. Müller (eds.), Verwundbar. Theologische und humanwissenschaftliche Perspektiven zur menschlichen Vulnerabilität, Würzburg 2020, p. 13–20.
Schult, M., Schöpfung aus dem Nichts? Traumics und Religion, dargestellt am Beispiel von Warum ich Pater Pierre getötet habe, in: T. Zimmermann (ed.): Geschichte und Mythos in Comics und Graphic Novels, Berlin 2019, p. 307–324.
Schult, M., Umwege erhöhen die Ortskenntnis: Realitätsgewinn durch Literatur, in: Ad Fonty: Einem Realisten auf der Spur. Themenheft, Pastoraltheologie 108/12 (2019), p. 506–521.
Schult, M., „Unkraut vergeht nicht.“ Resilienz und posttraumatische Reifung, in: C. Richter (ed.), Ohnmacht und Angst aushalten. Kritik der Resilienz in Theologie und Philosophie, Stuttgart 2017, p. 183–196.
Schult, M., „Leiden ist fast nicht besprechbar.“ Trauma und Sprachlosigkeit zwischen den Generationen, in: A. Drescher/U. Rüchel/J. Schöne (eds.), Bis ins vierte Glied. Transgenerationale Traumaweitergabe. Publikation zur Fachtagung der Landesbeauftragten für die Stasi-Unterlagen in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern und Berlin (Schwerin, 16. Oktober 2014), Schwerin 2015, p. 137–149.
Schult, M., Ein Hauch von Ordnung. Traumaarbeit als Aufgabe der Seelsorge [typewritten habilitation manuscript], Kiel University (CAU) 2014.
Seidler, G. H., Psychotraumatologie. Das Lehrbuch, Stuttgart 2013.
Seidler, G. H./Eckart, W. E. (eds.), Verletzte Seelen. Möglichkeiten und Perspektiven der historischen Traumaforschung, Gießen 2005.
Shay, J., Achilles in Vietnam. Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character, New York/London/Toronto/Sydney 2003 [1994].
Shay, J., Odysseus in America. Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming, New York/London/Toronto/Sydney/New Delhi 2002 [1995].
Shengold, L., Soul Murder. The Effects of Childhood Abuse and Deprivation, New Haven/London 1989.
Sparr, Th., „Ich will fortleben, auch nach meinem Tod“. Die Biographie des Tagebuchs der Anne Frank, Frankfurt a. M. 2023.
Sparr, Th., Todesfuge. Biographie eines Gedichts, München 2020.
The question of reading as trauma-witnessing was largely raised by literary theorist and publicist Ulrich C. Baer, New York. He is one of the earliest representatives of trauma studies in literary studies and psychoanalysis and one of the most important mediators of US-American trauma theories in the German context. German-born, he studied at Berkeley, Harvard, and Yale, under Cathy Caruth, whose books are known in Germany mainly through his writings and under Shoshana Felman. His dissertation (Traumadeutung. Die Erfahrung der Moderne bei Charles Baudelaire und Paul Celan, Frankfurt a. M. 2002; Remnants of Song: Trauma and the Experience of Modernity in Charles Baudelaire and Paul Celan, Stanford 2000), published at Suhrkamp, explores experiences of unresolvable trauma that cannot be processed by will or consciousness. Taking his examples from Baudelaire and Celan, Baer asks about the specific capabilities of literature and the aesthetic form as an overall model of the communicability of traumas. In his anthology “No One Witnesses for the Witness” (Niemand zeugt für den Zeugen. Erinnerungskultur und historische Verantwortung nach der Shoah, Frankfurt a. M. 2000) he combines perspectives from psychoanalysis, literary studies, and law studies. I am glad that we were able to win him for our conference in Marburg and grateful for the inspiring discussions with him. As my contributions in this volume might show, I have learnt a great deal from him.
For the following see Schult, Nichts.
For example Shay, Achilles; Shay, Odysseus; Shengold, Soul.
Seidler, Psychotraumatologie, p. 16, 30.
Seidler, Psychotraumatologie, p. 30. The term „Erleidnis“ was suggested by Jan Philipp Reemtsma in: Reemtsma, Vertrauen, p. 131. Reemtsma, a German literary and social scholar, was kidnapped in 1996 and released after 33 days after a ransom of 30 million DM was paid. He described his time in the cellar in: Reemtsma, Keller, which was published two years later, but always resisted labeling this time with the popular term “traumatisation”.
On the “trauma criterion” included in ICD-10 (World Health Organization 1994) and APP (American Psychiatric Association 2000) cf. Maercker, Symptomatik, p. 14.
Schult, Sinn.
Laub, Eros, p. 861. Translations from the German in this article by M.S.
Laub, Eros, p. 867: „eine Zerstörung von Form und Struktur“.
Neuner/Schauer/Elbert, Exposition, p. 333.
Fricke, Trauma, p. 167.
Herman, Narben, p. 17–51.
Lehmann-Carli/Johannsmeyer/Johannsmeyer/Schult, Zerreißproben.
Seidler, Psychotraumatologie, p. 17: dass „im Extrem ein einziges Gewaltwiderfahrnis“ ausreicht, um einen Menschen seelisch zu zerstören.
Hillebrandt, Trauma, p. 109: „Pathologie der Realität“.
Schult, Nichts; Schult, Leiden.
From November 14, 2018 to January 13, 2019, the Hamburg Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe showed around twenty of Barakeh’s works. Some of them were created especially for the exhibition, focusing on the phenomenon of transition. The exhibition title “The Blue Hour” took up a motif known in many cultures that describes the phase of twilight before sunrise in the morning and after sunset in the evening. Barakeh transferred this motif to the situation of migrants who have to find their way in a new society and at the same time come to terms with their experiences of flight and loss of home: https://www.kunstforum.de/nachrichten/khaled-barakeh-im-hamburger-museum-fuer-kunst-und-gewerbe/ and https://www.khaledbarakeh.com/biography.
Barakeh, Untitled, p. 142: “After a few years of repetitive images of Middle Eastern misery shown in Western media, I’ve noticed a certain numbness, even a cruel boredom, in viewers becoming used to seeing scenes of massacres on daily basis.”
Barakeh, Untitled, p. 147. The series from 2014 consists of five photos, digital C print, 21 x 30 cm each. They show the moment of loss, but also raise a hermeneutical question: “This series […] raises the question of how the existence and nonexistence of an artwork might affect the material existence of the reality presented in a photograph. It asks, how can we shape public opinion, based on reality on the ground, without showing the reality as it is?”
Anonymous, Khaled, p. 1091; Barakeh/Dreesen, Untitled.
This is not to be confused with the “empty spaces” (Leerstellen) that Wolfgang Iser introduced into literary theory as a basic concept of reception aesthetics.
In the case of our cover image, Barakeh used a template by Manu Brabo, a Spanish photojournalist born in 1981, who also reported on the civil war in Libya, for which he was arrested and later awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
Anonymous, Khaled, p. 1091.
The trauma reference is not mandatory. The pictures reappear in the exhibition “Mourning. On Loss and Change” at the Hamburger Kunsthalle (2020) and in the exhibition “Being Mortal” („Sterblich sein“), which was shown at the Dom Museum Vienna, Austria in 2023/2024. Barakeh himself spoke of “people staging traumatic events” in relation to images of the Syrian war, who enter a kind of competition to see which of them is the cruelest: Barakeh, Untitled, p. 143.
It was also the first work to bring trauma research into conversation with pastoral care and literature. The focus was on the question of what the cultural techniques of reading, writing, and storytelling can do to approach the experience of trauma without wanting to take possession of it. I used the novel “The Wall” („Die Wand“, first published in 1963) by Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer, in which the protagonist tries to bring “a touch of order” back into her life to clarify the question of how pastoral care could offer holding and containing to those affected without succumbing to the illusion of having understood the other person’s suffering. In essence, then, it was not a question of pragmatic action, but of hermeneutics.
Poser, Ezechielbuch; Augst, Weg.
Cf. Meyer-Blankenburg, Bilder. On the concept of alienation in Russian literary theory, in Bertolt Brecht, and in homiletics cf. Schult, Verfremdung.
Keul, Schöpfung.
Cf. e.g. Schult, Schöpfung.
The term “historical trauma research” was introduced into psychotraumatology in 2005 by the anthology Seidler/Eckart, Seelen, to propose the establishment of a separate interdisciplinary research area. I would like to thank Günter H. Seidler for this advice and for our discussions on the emergence of the trauma discourse in Germany.
Cf. e.g. the following works which contributed to the establishment of the topic in cultural studies: Felman, Literature; Caruth, Trauma; Caruth, Unclaimed; Bronfen/Erdle/Weigel, Trauma; Baer, Niemand; Baer, Traumadeutung; Bohnenkamp/Manning/Silies, Generation.
Cf. Becker, ‘Trauma Studies’.
Schult, Verwundbarkeit; Schult, Unkraut.
Becker/Dochhorn/Holt, Trauma.
Schult, Umwege.
Kiedaisch, Lyrik.
Sparr, Todesfuge. The book was published on the occasion of Celan’s 100th birthday and is a tandem report on his life and the international reception of his work. The Suhrkamp Verlag, founded in 1950, represents the attempt to help shape a democratic society in Germany after the Nazi dictatorship. Sparr’s “Biography of the Poem” was followed by the “Biography of the Diary of Anne Frank”, published in 2023 by S. Fischer Verlag.
Cf. Sparr, Todesfuge, p. 9.
The idea of the poem as “a Message in a Bottle” is tied to the Russian Jewish poet Osip Mandel’štam, with whom Celan strongly identified, not only for aesthetic but also for existential reasons, and whose work he also translated. For Celan, translating meant allowing the foreign (language) poem to land as a “Message in a Bottle to Heartland” („eine Flaschenpost an Herzland vielleicht“), entering into the “mystery of encounter” with it and thus creating the paradox of “foreign closeness”, a message abandoned into the unknown. Cf. Sparr, Todesfuge, p. 13; Baer, Traumadeutung, and the contribution “Wounds” by Maike Schult in this volume.
Felstiner, Celan.
Cf. the contribution “Wounds” by Maike Schult in this volume.
Alexander et al., Cultural Trauma. In contrast: Kansteiner, Menschheitstrauma.
Schauer/Neuner/Elbert, Narrative Exposure Therapy.
Maidl, Editorial, p. 297.