The Limits of Trauma: Experience and narrative in Europe c. 1945

This chapter discusses the comparative methodological framework and historiographical implications of the collection. Beginning from the twenty-first-century geopolitics of European traumatic memory, Leese considers the particular historical landscapes of emotion c. 1945, arguing that concepts of trauma are constituted according to the practices, technologies and narratives of their time and place. Leese further argues that the form, content and recognition of traumatic experience depends on particular historical conceptualizations: for example, the variable concepts of stress or adaptation that were widely present during and after World War II. This historical and geographical specificity matters in the production of social and cultural variation; in the complex interplay of silence, stigma and resilience; in the distinctive, ongoing formations of traumatic memory for successive generations.