Hartmann, Anna-Maria
Dissertation topic: "At home in war. The staging of trauma disorders of (returned) soldiers in contemporary European and US-American film." (working title)
Doctoral scholarship from the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and funding from the Marianne Plehn Programme of the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes and the Elitenetzwerk Bayern (01/10/2025 - 30/9/2028).
Contact address at the University of Würzburg:
Chair of Modern German Literature I
Am Hubland
97074 Würzburg
First supervisor: Prof Dr Stephanie Catani
Second supervisor:
Prof. Dr Jonas Nesselhauf (Saarland University)
Class in the Graduate School: "Philosophy, Languages, Arts"
Doctorate in the Graduate School from WS 2025/26.
Abstract:
My thesis asks how trauma sequelae are staged in the contemporary war film genre and what influence they have on the way films narrate war. The starting point of my study is a conspicuous prevalence of narratives about trauma disorders in contemporary (cinema) film, which goes hand in hand with a broad academic and public debate about war trauma and its individual and social consequences. While the field of tension between war, trauma and trauma-related disorders has already been discussed extensively in the literature, there has been no interdisciplinary and systematic work to date that uses film-analytical concepts and terms from the field of psychotraumatology to examine how film deals with the trauma-related disorders of (returned) soldiers. With the exception of a few individual analyses, the military conflicts and wars of the 21st century in particular have been largely neglected in the existing contributions.
My project eliminates this desideratum by developing a specific set of analytical tools with a view to these conflicts that combines genuinely humanistic methods with psychopathological knowledge. An essential achievement is thus also the transfer of clinical categories to fictional trauma narratives, such as those found in contemporary film. My limitation of the corpus to films after 2001 has two methodological reasons: Firstly, it proves problematic to apply diagnostic categories such as post-traumatic stress disorder, which first appeared in the classification system of the 3rd edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-III®) in 1980, to older fictional film productions. The restriction I have made ensures that both the military conflict addressed in the films and the process of making the films can be analysed against the background of the psychiatric recognition of trauma disorders. On the other hand, in this way the aforementioned significance of trauma disorders as a subject of contemporary war film productions is taken into account, which stands in a remarkable discrepancy to previous research.
