Week 3: Trauma, grief and bereavement
Introduction
Watch the video in which Annika talks about the subject of this week.
Download this video clip.Video player: ou_futurelearn_ww1_vid_1023.mp4
Transcript
ANNIKA MOMBAUER
Hello and welcome to Week 3, the final week of the course. Over the last two weeks you’ve looked at the physical and mental casualties of trauma, and you’ve explored some aspects of civilian life during the First World War. In this final week you’re going to turn your attention to the different ways in which shell shock and trauma have been represented in art and literature. You will encounter some authors who may be familiar to you, such as Siegfried Sassoon, but you will also examine other artistic representations of trauma. For example, you will be introduced to the works of German artists, Otto Dix, and Käthe Kollwitz, who addressed grief and trauma in their works.
Finally, you will explore how attitudes to trauma have developed over the twentieth century, and how psychological casualties have been treated in more recent conflicts, right up to the present day by exploring the connection between shell shock and our modern understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder. To conclude the week, you’ll get a chance to test your understanding of what you have learned with the end-of-course test and discover how you can learn more about this, and other periods of history.
Interactive feature not available in single page view (see it in standard view).
In this final week of the course, you will be taking a closer look at grief and grieving during and after the war, and the different expressions that this could take − from private and public grief, to the way such emotions were explored by artists and authors in art and literature.
You will also find out how attitudes to shell shock developed after the war. You will study examples of how this topic was represented in art and literature, and you’ll consider how the condition was treated and regarded at different times in the twentieth century.