El miedo en la historia: testimonios de la Gran Guerra

Elena Carrera

doi:10.5565/rev/rubrica.79

Fear in History: Witnesses of the Great War

Authors

Elena Carrera Center for the History of Emotions, Queen Mary, University of London https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3655-1130

PDF (ES)

Abstract

The few existing studies on fear during the First World War place the emphasis on diachronic change and do not cross linguistic or cultural barriers. By contrast, the present article analyses the representation of fear in various types of documents in English, French and German: letters and diaries written from the front in 1914-18, autobiographical texts from the following two decades, and military psychology and psychiatry articles and essays publish before, during and immediately after the conflict. After evaluating the possibilities and limitations of autobiographical texts as historical sources, the article examines some of the sociocultural factors underlying the various causal explanations and justifications offered by soldiers writing about their experiences of fear, panic or chronic dread, or about strategies they might have used in order to overcome or endure their fear. These include stoic attitudes, patriotic ideas and religious beliefs professed by some soldiers and challenged by others, depending on their social status, their education, their relationship to their addressees, the situation described and the circumstances in which they wrote.

Keywords

Fear, soldiers, Great War, letters, diaries

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Author Biography

Elena Carrera, Center for the History of Emotions, Queen Mary, University of London

Elena Carrera is Senior Lecturer and Chair of the Department of Iberian and Latin American Studies at Qeen Mary, University of London, and co-founder of the Centre of the History of Emotions at the same University. She is the author of Teresa of Avila’s Autobiography: Authority, Power and the Self in Mid-Sixteenth-Century Spain (2005), and has coordinated Madness and Melancholy in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-century Spain (2010) and Emotions and Health, 1200-1700 (2013).