- Cornelia Berens, Hamburg General Introduction/Editorial
- This Newsletter-Journal on trauma research is for you, the readers and members of our network. We need your support and feedback. If you have any suggestions regarding the content and layout of our TRN-Newsletter please do not hesitate to contact us.
The TRN-Newsletter will be published on the internet at irregular intervals, at least twice a year. The Newsletter is published in English and has the following regular sections: focus (several contributions on changing focus themes; newsgroup), networking (news-ticker [updating monthly], forum, portrait [of a network member or an institution working in related fields], conference reports), announcements (conferences, call for papers), books (book announcements, book reviews), links, and archive.
Members of the network can subscribe through the internet without charge. Details on registration are available online at the editor’s address: Cornelia_Berens@his-online.de, at http://www.his-online.de as well as at http://www.TraumaResearch.net.
This first issue of the TRN-Newsletter focuses on video testimonies, that is, the life stories of the survivors of traumatic experiences (in this case, mainly Holocaust survivors) as told in narrative interviews recorded on video. These biographical narratives can be characterized as testimonies. The meaning of testimony and of witnessing — psychologically, historically and, last but not least, legally — as well as the methodological status of testimony and witnessing are themes taken up in these contributions.
You can help us by making the TRN-Newsletter better known. If you plan to attend a conference, why not get in touch and we will send promotional leaflets for you to distribute to participants. If you have a website, please link to this site and let us know so that we can reciprocate.
Funding for the TRN-Newsletter is currently provided by the Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Culture. To secure the financial basis for the TRN-Newsletter beyond 2002, we would appreciate any advice you can contribute about potential funders.
If you plan to visit Hamburg please feel free to visit us. However, since I work part-time at the Institute and part-time at home, please make an appointment in advance by writing an email to the editor Cornelia_Berens@his-online.de.
- Short history of the project
- International Study Group for Trauma, Violence, and Genocide
Trauma research plays a key role in the understanding of the socio-political relations of violence. Large man-made-disasters such as war and genocide or racial persecution and ethnic cleansing often result in extreme trauma. Violence within families, sexual abuse and violence within social relations also have traumatic effects on victims, as well as perpetrators and witnesses. An interdisciplinary discourse with representatives of all disciplines involved in trauma research is the prerequisite for developing new approaches which will bring us closer to a better understanding of extreme traumatization and its effects. The International Study Group thus brought together representatives from the fields of psychoanalysis, history, sociology, and literary studies. Members of the Study Group were (in alphabetical order): Cornelia Berens, Werner Bohleber, Ilany Kogan, Dori Laub (founder), Steven Marans (in the first year), Klaus Roeckerath, Jan Philipp Reemtsma and Christian Schneider.
The purpose of this non-profit organization, founded in April 1996 in Hamburg, was to promote research about trauma, violence and genocide. To this end, the Study Group organized academic lectures and conferences and published books and journal articles.
Over the course of two years (1996 to 1998), the Study Group came together with guests from a variety of disciplines for a series of seven video workshops entitled: Traumatization and coping with trauma. Diagnosis and etiology.
One of the foremost goals of the Study Group was to promote networking among institutions working throughout the world, either practically or theoretically, in the field of trauma and its effects. Since this goal was achieved in the course of the Study Group’s existence with the creation of an informal network of more than seven hundred institutions and individuals worldwide, the Study Group was dissolved during its annual meeting on December 1, 1998, by unanimous vote of its members.
Publications
So far, the Study Group has published one reader in English; another two are due to be released in the near future.
The first reader is entitled "Coming Home" from Trauma. The Next Generation, Muteness, and the Search for a Voice. It was published in 1996.
The second volume includes contributions from the Study Group conference Interdisciplinary Research into Trauma and Violence, held in Stuttgart in November 1995, and will be published in fall 2001.
The third reader is an annotated bibliography, written by Miriam Rieck, on the subject of The Later Medical and Psychological Effects of the Holocaust on Its Survivors and Their Offspring, and will be available by the end of the year 2001.
All three readers can be ordered solely from the Hamburg Institute for Social Research; a small fee is charged for each reader. Donations to support the network are suggested.
For further information please contact by email: Cornelia_Berens@his-online.de.
Conference
International Network for Interdisciplinary Research about the Impact of Traumatic Experience on the Life of Individuals and Society (Hamburg, November 30 - December 4, 1998)
The International Study Group for Trauma, Violence, and Genocide was established with the goal of creating an international network in which representatives from a wide range of disciplines could work together to gain new insights into the effects of traumatic experiences on individuals, groups of people, and entire societies. In the course of the 1998 conference, fifteen in part very diverse institutions concerned with the phenomenon of traumatization made presentations on their work. Each short lecture in the plenary with all eighty conference participants was followed by a workshop session devoted to in-depth discussion — with a multidisciplinary focus - of problems and results. A list of participants as well as the conference program can be obtained from the editor via email.
The conference program was flanked by three English language lectures for the general public. Søren Buus Jensen (The European University Centre for Mental Health and Human Rights, Copenhagen/Denmark) gave a talk about "Trauma: Understanding, Healing, and Prevention. A Mental Health and Human Rights Perspective on Chile, the Former Yugoslavia, and Rwanda", Elisabeth Domansky (at that time Indiana University, Bloomington/USA; visiting fellow, Kulturwissenschaftliches Institut, Essen/Germany) spoke about "Trauma, History and Therapy", while Bessel van der Kolk (Boston University School of Medicine, Boston/USA) concluded the public part of the conference with his lecture about "Memory and the Neurobiology of Trauma".
Abtracts of Jensen´s and van der Kolk´s contributions are available at http://www.his-online.de/veranst/vortrag/sbjensen.htm and http://www.his-online.de/veranst/vortrag/vanderkolk.htm.
The conference ended with the participants’ decision to establish an informal network and to invite other institutions to join. It was decided that the Hamburg Institute for Social Research would edit a network Newsletter and immediately after the conference, 30 individuals or institutions submitted proposals for projects which they considered worthy of realization within the context of the network’s activities and named their areas of competence and skills which might be useful as resources for other TRN-Network members. The provisional name of the network is: International Network for Interdisciplinary Research about the Impact of Traumatic Experience on the Life of Individuals and Society. The abbreviation is: Trauma Research Net (TRN).
- Project proposals and/or areas of competence as of December 1998
- David Becker:
- Subjects: human rights; psychosocial problems
- Cornelia Berens:
- Subject/Project: literature and trauma;
Skills: coordinating; editor of the TRN-Newsletter
- Werner Bohleber:
- Subject/Project: transmission of trauma to the next generation
- Peter Bruendl:
- Subject/Project: child survivors of Nazi concentration camps;
collaboration with Judith Kestenberg
- Doris Denis:
- Subjects/Projects: victims of political repression in the former GDR; job-related trauma (workgroup/workshop)
- Elisabeth Domansky:
- Subjects/Projects: cultural context of violence; gender and violence; video interviews
- Nathan Durst:
- Project/Skills: establishing and running a psycho-social center
- Gottfried Fischer:
- Subjects/Projects: trauma therapy; developing and evaluating therapies; trauma and organizations/organizational changes as collective therapy
Skills: trauma therapy; police training
- Juergen Furtwaengler:
- Subjects/Projects: aspects of prevention; trauma work; trauma in the arts
Contact: Bundeswehr-Hochschule; Bundeswehr-medical staff;
Leadership Development and Civic Education Center (Zentrum Innere Fuehrung)
- Mika Haritos-Fatouros:
- Subjects/Projects: street children, rehabilitation and torture victims
Info/Publication Project: training police in Saloniki
Search: for experts and training in refugee problems
- Mika Haritos-Fatouros for Claudia Hasanbegovic:
- Subjects/Projects: gender violence within the public domain; women as survivors of political repression
- Frederik van Gelder:
- Subject/Project: socio-psychology and violence
Publication: article on trauma research in the Netherlands
- Brandon Hamber:
- Subject/Projects: transitional justice; comparative studies on stress in societies.
Contact: African Traumatic Stress Society
- Michael Hase:
- Project/Cooperation/Publication: dealing with trauma in a normal psychiatric hospital
- Søren Buus Jensen:
- Skills: fundraising; anti-trauma-therapy
- Ilany Kogan:
- Subject/Project: trauma in the second generation of Holocaust survivors;
Search: a home for a collection of interviews with Holocaust survivors in Germany
- Marion Kruesmann:
- Subjects/Projects: psychotraumatology; psychotherapy-research; epidemiology; trauma work in Bosnia
- Bessel van der Kolk:
- Subjects/Projects: interdisciplinary research on trauma; trauma therapy; brain physiology
Contact: International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS/ http://www.istss.org/)
- Friedhelm Lamprecht:
- Subjects/Projects: psychotherapy outcome research; brain physiology
- Dori Laub:
- Subjects/Projects:
- testimonies; Holocaust testimonies
- Birgit Moeller:
- Contact: Amnesty International, German division
- Marion Oliner:
- Contact/Info: worldwide UN conference on racism in 2001
- Jan Philipp Reemtsma:
- Subjects/Projects: violence in the 20th century; trauma and civilization
- Klaus Roeckerath:
- Skills: conceptual work
- Sibylle Rothkegel:
- Projects: Trauma and torture, migration, asylum seekers
- Jack Saul:
- Subjects/Projects: working with the media on trauma; trauma in the arts; "theater of testimonies"
Skills: training of journalists
- Margarete Schauer:
- Subjects/Projects: research on neuro-plasticity; PTSD-research
- Annette Streeck-Fischer:
- Subject/Project: Trauma therapy with children; interdisciplinary working group on violence, trauma and empathy
- Klaus Vogel:
- Subjects: historical/sociocultural contexts of violence and trauma; "collective trauma"; transgenerational transfers; trauma and empathy.
Projects: interdisciplinary working group on violence, trauma and empathy; video testimonies on violence
Skills: coordinating; fundraising; conceptual work
- Mary Beth Williams:
- Subjects: comparison of training; prevention; violence and children
Contact/Info: national 3 year training program for trauma therapy in Finland
During the conference, a working group on "Deportation and Trauma Therapy" was established by Dori Laub, Mika Haritos-Fatouros and others. Current problems/subjects: deportation as an interruption of therapy; trauma therapy as cover-up.
Another working group on "Refugees" was established by Sabine Luebbe, Birgit Moeller, Peter Schroeder and Barbara Preitler during the conference.
The following people have agreed to function as liaison partners between the Trauma Research Net and their respective organizations:
Annette Streeck-Fischer, Coordinator of the Interdisciplinary Working Group on Trauma, Violence and Empathy at the Goettingen Max Planck Institute for History
Bessel van der Kolk, International Society for Traumatic Stress Studies (ISTSS) (URL: http://www.istss.org/)
Brandon Hamber, African Traumatic Stress Society
- Annual or biennial conference
- Members of the Trauma Research Net should have the opportunity to gather in an annual or at least in a biennial conference. I am very grateful to Mihran Dabag, the director of the Institut fuer Diaspora- und Genozidforschung (URL: http://www.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/idg/), who offered his help in preparing the next conference. His office has a lot of experience in organizing retreats, so we are looking forward to a fruitful meeting. A committee is currently preparing the conference, which will take place near Wiesbaden-Naurod, Germany, from June 28-30, 2002.
- Editorship
- Cornelia Berens was born in 1957 and studied modern German literature, literature of the Romance languages, and art history at the RWTH Aachen/Germany, completing her M.A. with honors in 1982. She then worked as a research and teaching fellow at the Seminar for Literary Studies, University of Hamburg, at the Literaturhaus Hamburg, as a literature editor for the "Festival of Women" / Hammoniale, and as a staff member responsible for cultural affairs for the parliamentary group of the party Buendnis 90/Die Gruenen in Hamburg’s state Parliament. In this period she also worked freelance as a critic (art, literature, theater), reader (for publishing companies) and manager of cultural events.
In July 1994, Berens joined the staff of the Hamburg Institute for Social Research and co-coordinated, together with Klaus Naumann, the project "Angesichts unseres Jahrhunderts/In the Face of Our Century". As a member of the Institute’s research unit "Theory and History of Violence", Berens was the coordinator of the International Study Group for Trauma, Violence, and Genocide from August 1995 until the end of 1998 and became the editor of the TRN-Newsletter for the International Network for Interdisciplinary Research about the Impact of Traumatic Experience on the Life of Individuals and Society in 1999.
Berens´ main areas of work, besides her editorship and coordination of the network, are modern literature and creative aspects of traumatization, focusing to date on the relationship between trauma and mourning and on trauma and symbolization. She has begun studying the variety of narrative patterns and ways of writing developed in literature to express traumatic experiences and taken up questions of method in Art Spiegelman´s comic Maus I/II. Berens´ reflections on the complimentary or contradictory relationships between words and images and the montage of three photographs in Spiegelman’s comic, presented in a lecture entitled "Nonfiction/Mice". Trauma and Representation, probes how a previous traumatic experience — here, the suicide of the author’s mother – appears more or less covertly in apparently minor scenes.
Cornelia Berens was also the spokeswoman of the Hamburg chapter of BuecherFrauen e.V. / Women in Publishing from November 1994 to November 1996 and a member of the jury of the Foerderung Freier Theaterarbeit (which selects independent theater groups for municipal funding) of the Office for Cultural Affairs of the City of Hamburg in 1996, 1997 and 1998/99.
- Important technical remarks
- To subscribe the TRN-Newsletter, you are kindly requested to fill in the registration form. Fields that are marked with an asterisk must be filled out completely, otherwise the registration fails. If you don´t have an office address, please repeat your home address in the office address field. We ask you to submit this information in order to facilitate networking.
The TRN-Newsletter will appear at irregular intervals, at least twice a year. One of the sections, the News-Ticker, will be updated every month. The section "links" is under construction, the "newsgroup" will be provided for an online-discussion of the contributions to the "focus", from the moment we´ll manage to find a moderator.
Contributions to the sections "focus" and "book reviews" can be downloaded as rtf-files. Only those files will conclude the endnotes (or footnotes), which unfortunately can´t be seen online on the screen.
- Acknowledgements
- First and foremost I am grateful to all the members of the International Study Group for Trauma, Violence, and Genocide for having had the vision to create a space for international, interdisciplinary, and innovative cooperation in this vital and complex field. Special thanks are due to Dori Laub for the passion and perseverance needed to turn a vision into reality.
The Hamburg Institute for Social Research and its director, Jan Philipp Reemtsma, provided an organizational and intellectual home for the Study Group and the Network in its crucial early years. The Hamburg Foundation for the Advancement of Science and Culture secured the financial basis for the TRN-Newsletter.
Many thanks to both organizations and the people involved.
I would like to thank Mary Beth Williams for her help in discussing first ideas for the newsletter during a wonderful walk around the lake Alster in Hamburg.
I am grateful to Klaus Vogel for offering advice and feedback on this project.
A special appreciation also goes to Copenhagen by remembering Stig Hornshøj-Møller, who passed away in February 1999. During our conference in December 1998, he offered his help and cooperation of the Danish Center for Genocide and Holocaust Studies, which hadn´t been set up at that time, but is running by now. Uffe Ostergaard has been appointed managing director and Eric Markusen is now research director and we are looking forward to cooperating in the near future.
My heartfelt thanks go to Paula Bradish for translating and Wilfried Gandras for designing the TRN-Newsletter.
Last but not least, I would like to express my gratitude to those who I may have unintentionally forgotten to name here.
I would like to apologize to all members of the network for the delays in publication of the first issue of the TRN-Newsletter, and, in particular, to those contributors who submitted their texts several months ago.
- Copyright information
- This website is designed by Wilfried Gandras, Hamburg, and managed by Cornelia Berens, Hamburg. All content and design copyright © Hamburg Institute for Social Research.
Material from the TRN-Newsletter may be freely reproduced but please acknowledge the source. See citation and copyright remarks in combination with any text file. Material and information contained in the TRN-Newsletter are the opinions of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the editor, the Trauma Research Net or the Hamburg Institute for Social Research.
Translation from German: Paula Bradish, Cornelia Berens.
Editor, copyright © Cornelia Berens, Hamburg Institute for Social Research.
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