Few events in Imperial Germany's forty-plus years of existence have been remembered with as much pride and hilarity as the one that took place on October 16, 1906. It began shortly after noon, when a man dressed in a captain's uniform appeared on the streets in the northern part of Berlin and commandeered two small contingents of soldiers returning to their barracks from guard duty. Claiming to be acting on instructions from the kaiser himself, the man ordered the ten soldiers to accompany him to Köpenick, a small but growing city on the southeastern outskirts of Berlin. Arriving in front of city hall around 3:30 p.m., he assigned four of the men to take up positions at the three entrances of the building to ensure that no one entered or left without his permission. The remaining troops followed him inside, where he instructed two men to secure the ground floor. Heading upstairs, he encountered an off-duty constable, who, along with other police officials, was given the task of controlling the growing crowd of curious gawkers that had begun to amass in the plaza and streets outside. With these arrangements set, he barged into the offices of the mayor and other top officials, announcing their arrest on the kaiser's orders and stationing soldiers outside their doors. Within an hour, he arranged to have the mayor and city treasurer transported by carriage to the Neue Wache, the main guardhouse in central Berlin. After issuing orders for the remaining soldiers to withdraw at 6:00 p.m., the unidentified captain disappeared into the night with the contents of the city's cash box, totaling 3557 marks and 45 pfennig.

In August 1942, an internal Sicherheitsdienst (SD) memorandum raised concerns surrounding the media currently circulating in Germany about its Asian ally: “The previous view, that the German soldier is the best in the world, has become somewhat confused by descriptions of the Japanese swimmers who removed mines laid outside Hong Kong, or of the death-defying Japanese pilots who swooped down upon enemy ships with their bombs. This has resulted in something a bit like an inferiority complex. The Japanese look like a kind of ‘Super-Teuton’ [Germane im Quadrat].” In its anxiety that the German public might be taking the wrong lessons from the incessant drumbeat of positive news coverage around Japan's string of victories in the winter of 1941–1942, this statement speaks to the ambivalent position of the Japanese within Nazi propaganda. On the one hand, these images of Japanese self-sacrificial loyalty to the nation reaffirmed the patterns of behavior and thought commonly valorized in the Nazi regime's captive media. At the same time, the reality that it was the Japanese—and not the Germans themselves—performing these feats of valor raised the comparison that the author found so demoralizing, and potentially even destabilizing. Nevertheless, despite the author's reservations, the conclusion was that this media's benefits outweighed the political risks because of its utility in highlighting the “inner weaknesses of Europe” for those elements of the German public still skeptical of National Socialism. In effect, the memorandum conceded, images of Japanese heroism could be persuasive as propaganda because they revealed the weakness and corruption endemic to Western modernity by contrast, which in turn affirmed the Nazi regime's decision to stake its future on a utopian “counter-modernity” framed around a synthesis of völkisch cultural authenticity and technological modernism.

In July 1992, nearly two years after the demise of the German Democratic Republic (GDR/East Germany), Erich Honecker, former general secretary of the ruling Socialist Unity Party (SED) was arrested in Berlin for his complicity in the murder of citizens fleeing his country. Yet his subsequent imprisonment brought forth unexpected help: former SED member Rudolf Bahro, who had been imprisoned by Honecker's regime a decade earlier for publishing a party-critical text, Die Alternative. Bahro wrote to his former jailer on August 17, ironically to offer support for his legal defense. Now, Bahro also expressed hope for a “human understanding … about the substance of our undoubtedly still existing difference of opinion about the path of the GDR” and enclosed his recently published article connecting his support for Honecker with the GDR's founding ideals. In the article, Bahro rejected reducing East German history to the SED's abuses, arguing that “our impulse was conceived with the heart, and no such impulse is ever entirely lost.” That impulse, for Bahro, ultimately emanated from antifascism, its entwined relationship with socialism on German soil, and those who fought for both. Though he acknowledged that “a German revolutionary continuity did not exist en masse” after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, it did survive among the few socialists, like Honecker, who struggled against fascism and “rightly wanted a new German state” after 1945. For his role in building this alternative to capitalism, Bahro argued that Honecker should be allowed to retire in peace.

This article explores how the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder was developed and debated during the wars of Yugoslav succession 1991–1995. It focuses on the rich, wide-ranging, and complex psychiatric and psychotherapeutic discussions of war trauma in the post-Yugoslav space, arguing that arguments about PTSD became a site for expressing political tensions, controversies, and anxieties that could not otherwise be addressed or identified.

This research explores how Yugoslav psychiatrists tailored the language of PTSD to their own particular clinical and political needs, infusing it with local assumptions and experiences, often radically changing its original meaning and intentions in the process. Moreover, the article engages with discourses of psychological trauma in Eastern Europe and the socialist world, which remains a neglected topic. It examines how the post-WWII and socialist-era psychiatric discourse and silences were reinterpreted and worked into the psychiatric-political attempts to make sense of the wars of Yugoslav succession.