This explorative workshop investigates institutional and praxeological approaches to psychic suffering in Eastern and Western Europe after 1945. It examines the making of trauma through broad political, ideological, environmental or social transformations in the Cold War period through processes of making visible, pathologization, legitimization, or denial. Moving beyond studies focused solely on World War II and its long-term psychological consequences, we aim to understand the Cold War as a period of continued upheaval, producing new institutional responses to psychic distress while shaped by the legacies of previous violence. The workshop focuses on institutional archives and documentary sources – psychiatric and therapeutic case files, forensic assessments, hospital records, bureaucratic documents, police files, and court proceedings. These materials reveal how societies perceived, managed, and classified mental suffering – or failed to do so – under specific historical conditions. In doing so, the workshop seeks to uncover specifically European trajectories in the conceptual and institutional history of ‘trauma\u2019.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Programm<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n Wednesday 3rd December<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n University of Graz<\/p>\n\n\n\n Arrival of Participants Thursday, 4th December<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 9.00-11.15 Panel I: Psychiatry and Medical Records<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Katja Geiger-Seirafi, Ina Markova: Traces of Trauma in Psychiatric Records: Understanding Postwar Psychic Suffering in Austria after 1945<\/p>\n\n\n\n Dagmar Wernitznig: The Third Woman as Second Sex and (Mental) Asylum: Alienness, Exile, and Trauma in Early Cold War Vienna<\/p>\n\n\n\n G\u00e1bor Csik\u00f3s: Captivity, Trauma, and Psychiatric Practice under Hungarian Stalinism<\/p>\n\n\n\n Coffee Break (30 minutes)<\/p>\n\n\n\n 11.45-13.15 Panel II: Police and Secret Services<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Anna Grutza: Between Trauma, Repression and Political Abuse: Diagnoses of Insanity in Polish Secret Police Files<\/p>\n\n\n\n Hayd\u00e9e Mareike Haass: Addressing mental suffering and physical disability in the post-war integration of the Bavarian police force (1950-1965)<\/p>\n\n\n\n 13.15 Lunch Break (75 minutes)<\/p>\n\n\n\n 14.30-16.00 Panel III: Politics and Violence<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Gelinda Grinchenko: Invisible in Life, Absent in Memory: Psychiatric Patients and Institutional Silencing of Nazi Atrocities in Ukraine<\/p>\n\n\n\n Irina Pelea: Manufacturing Madness: Institutional Trauma-Making and Psychiatric Violence in Cold War Romania<\/p>\n\n\n\n Coffee Break (30 minutes)<\/p>\n\n\n\n 16.30-18.45 Panel IV\/1: Professional Discourses<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Nata\u0161a Mi\u0161kovi\u0107: Partisan Hysteria and the Making of the Ethnopsychoanalyst Paul Parin<\/p>\n\n\n\n Roman Mamin: Trauma \u00e0 la sovi\u00e9tique: Redefining the Psyche in the Cold War<\/p>\n\n\n\n Georg Wurzer: The Traumatic Legacy of the Afghan War. How the concept of PTSD came to the Soviet Union, Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania 3<\/p>\n\n\n\n 20.000 Joint Dinner<\/p>\n\n\n\n Friday, 5th December<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n 09.00-11.15 Panel IV\/2: Professional Discourses<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Francesco Toncich: Displacement Trauma in Psychiatric Practice on the Western Side of the Iron Curtain: The Upper Adriatic Case Study<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ketil Slagstad: Making Prognosis, Untracing Trauma. A Praxiographic Analysis of Clinical Research on Schizophrenia in the 1960s and 1970s<\/p>\n\n\n\n Victoria Shmidt: Expertise on child deprivation in socialist psychology and the global resilience movement<\/p>\n\n\n\n Break with coffee and catering (45 minutes)<\/p>\n\n\n\n 12.00-13.30 Panel V: Societal Debates<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n Vinko Korotaj Dra\u010da: Trauma, psychiatry and murder in socialist Slovenia: The case of Metod Trobec and its cultural reflections<\/p>\n\n\n\n Mykola Neborachko: Posthumous rehabilitation as a tool of social legitimization<\/p>\n\n\n\n 13.30-14.30 Discussion<\/p>\n\n\n\n Trauma, Institutional Knowledge, and Social Order: European Perspectives during the Cold War<\/em>, in: H-Soz-Kult, 14.11.2025, https:\/\/www.hsozkult.de\/event\/id\/event-158754<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n
19.00 Joint Dinner<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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