Abstract
Since the late nineteenth century, the military had tried to instill in soldiers the sense that they were part of a new “family”—their military unit—which provided them emotional comfort, and the army emphasized that their primary bond was to their unit rather than their family of origin.1 Despite this expectation, men continued to seek emotional support from home. As the war dragged on, letters between soldiers and their families became a lifeline between men and women separated and suffering under hardships on the combat and home fronts. This chapter focuses on letters written by front soldiers, and it explores how soldiers described the emotional and psychological effects of the war to their wives, girlfriends, and families. What did they reveal and conceal about their emotional experiences at the front? How did they perceive themselves in relation to prevailing masculine ideals? How did they characterize the physical and psychological impact of mass violence to their loved ones at home?
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Notes
See, for example, Joanna Bourke, An Intimate History of Killing: Face to Face Killing in Twentieth Century Warfare (New York: Basic, 2000).
which also illustrates mutual emotional support, see Martha Hanna, Your Death Would Be Mine: Paul and Marie Pireaud in the Great War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009).
Hämmerle, “‘You Let A Weeping Woman Call You Home?’ Private Correspondences during the First World War in Austria and Germany,” in Rebecca Earle, ed., Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter-Writers, 1600–1945 (Aldershot, England: Ashgate, 1999), 176.
This resentment of the “Etappenschweine” was particularly prevalent in media produced by left-wing organizations during and after the war. See Benjamin Ziemann, Contested Commemorations: Republican War Veterans and Weimar Political Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), 44–49.
Klaus Theweleit, Male Fantasies, Vol. 1: Women, Floods, Bodies, History, translated by Stephen Conway (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987).
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© 2014 Jason Crouthamel
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Crouthamel, J. (2014). “Don’t Think I’m Soft”. In: An Intimate History of the Front. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137376923_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137376923_4
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
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