ABSTRACT
The post-war cinematic representations of World War I veterans as victims of shellshock (e.g. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari) became an essential element of German political culture. The spectacle of war veterans mute and paralyzed—yet otherwise uninjured—added to public bewilderment about the losses taken in the war. The surreptitious symptoms heightened unsettledness with stealthy weapons like submarines, nerve gas, and long-range artillery. Anxiety about the unknowns of modern life targeted social and ethnic Others—Jews, Roma, and homosexuals; the Dolchstosslegend pointed to “the feminine” as the societal weakness that had sapped martial strength. The enemy-behind-the-lines was female duplicity. Discredited as a diagnostic category by the end of the Great War, shellshock re-emerged in the United States after its war in Vietnam, first to medicalize veteran opposition to the war, and then as a prop in the narrative that the war lost to weak-kneed liberalism at home.
