Writers as Shell Shock Witnesses during World War I

Abstract

The issue of First World War shell shock has been documented mainly from a medical perspective. Many medical texts dealing with war psychoneuroses and their aggressive treatments, such as electrotherapy, were published during the war. Accounts from shell-shocked soldiers are rare. Nevertheless, shell shock was described from a non-medical point of view by a few writers who had undergone or witnessed this pathology. Their texts deal mainly with the psychiatric forms, the most striking ones, but also with the more common concepts of commotion, emotion and pathological fear. The French philosopher Émile Chartier (1868-1951), alias Alain, described the commotional syndrome from which he suffered. The German writer Ernst Jünger (1895-1998), a brave officer and an example for his men, reported his emotional shock. Some psychiatric forms of shell shock are present in the work of the pacifist writer Jean Giono (1895-1970), the naturalist Maurice Genevoix (1890-1980), who suffered himself from a section of the left median and ulnar nerves, or the British poet Siegfried Sassoon (1886-1967). War hysteria and pathological fear have been described, on several occasions, by Blaise Cendrars (1887-1961) or the German writer Erich Maria Remarque (1898-1970). Electrotherapy has been scarcely reported except by Louis-Ferdinand Céline (1894-1961).