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The War in Their Minds, German Soldiers and Their Violent Pasts in West Germany by Svenja Goltermann (review)

In The War in Their Minds, German Soldiers and Their Violent Pasts in West Germany, historian Svenja Goltermann makes an ambitious and fascinating effort to further our understanding of the morally delicate topic of the postwar mental traumas, experiences, treatments, and attempted “normalization” of those that took part in the Third Reich’s atrocities. Her work contributes not only to our understanding of the experiences and recollections of Second World War German veterans and the war’s toll on West German civil society, but also to the broader history of postwar psychiatry, mental health, and trauma. Goltermann interweaves the histories of science, experience, and memory to create a complex yet cohesive narrative in three thematically distinct and mutually supporting parts. Goltermann states that one of her overarching aims is in broadening post1945 history to better incorporate the history of science and production of knowledge. To this end, she utilizes a substantial and robust primary source base including psychiatric journals and handbooks as well as the minutes from statesponsored medical conferences, which allow her to track the evolution of psychiatric practices. She incorporates mass media–particularly films–heavily into her narrative to gauge both how trauma was expressed as well as the media attention it received. She employs numerous legal and governmental documents, particularly internal correspondence from the Ministry of Labor and Social Affairs and Ministry of Finance to underscore which psychiatric victims, traumas, and practices the government officially approved of and provided material support for. Her most unique source base lies in the previously unutilized collection of 450 psychiatric files containing patients’ personal accounts that provide the bulk of her evidentiary “memory fragments.” These compellingly insert the human element into her narrative while allowing her to “make statements about the deeper layers of memory” including dreams, disorientation, anxiety over new beginnings, and emotional “normalization” (13). In Part I, Goltermann examines how violence and trauma experienced by veterans altered the West German family structure. She addresses this topic in three chapters that respectively analyze the evolution of soldiers’ discourse about