Start Date
29-9-2018 2:30 PM
End Date
29-9-2018 3:45 PM
Description
War provides a space for state-sponsored expressions of violence encouraged – or at least allowed – within the public sphere. During WWI, returning soldiers were welcomed and generally hailed as heroes, especially in comparison with more recent conflicts. Men on the front lines were faced not only with rifles, machine guns, and mortars, but also the effects of poison gas. Such violence and images of ripped and torn bodies were an expected part of a soldier’s life. This daily exposure and indeed the mass media reports on what was happening on the front play into Mark Seltzer’s pathological public sphere or “wound culture,” which relies on the torn and open body as public spectacle. During the war, such violence took place in prescribed locations and across nationalities. After the war ended, violence on both sides of the Atlantic took on a different form.
In both America and Germany, postwar male violence took on the form of a rise in serial murder. The term “serial killer” was not coined for another few decades, but the interwar period saw a rise in violence that would have their enactors – including Carl Penzram in America and Peter Kürten in Germany – labeled as such long after their deaths. A rash of cannibalistic serial killers in Germany made its way not only into social commentary by Bertold Brecht, but also the cinema with Fritz Lang’s 1931 movie M. The violent male no longer presented himself in uniform in service of his country in order to kill the state-sanctioned enemy, but walked unnoticed among his countrymen and murdered those he saw fit.
This paper aims to explore the emerging interpersonal serial violence after the armistice declaration of 1918 in which male violence shifts from the public to the personal sphere and emerges into Seltzer’s pathological public sphere. It will compare and contrast depictions of soldiers, both ally and enemy, with the representation of the postwar serial killers and their victims. It will draw connections between the mass media coverage of violence on such a massive scale on foreign soil with the attempts to represent – and make sense of – such individualized violence at a time of peace on the Homefront.
4B3: ‘This Mad Brute’: Postwar Male Violence and the Pathological Public Sphere
War provides a space for state-sponsored expressions of violence encouraged – or at least allowed – within the public sphere. During WWI, returning soldiers were welcomed and generally hailed as heroes, especially in comparison with more recent conflicts. Men on the front lines were faced not only with rifles, machine guns, and mortars, but also the effects of poison gas. Such violence and images of ripped and torn bodies were an expected part of a soldier’s life. This daily exposure and indeed the mass media reports on what was happening on the front play into Mark Seltzer’s pathological public sphere or “wound culture,” which relies on the torn and open body as public spectacle. During the war, such violence took place in prescribed locations and across nationalities. After the war ended, violence on both sides of the Atlantic took on a different form.
In both America and Germany, postwar male violence took on the form of a rise in serial murder. The term “serial killer” was not coined for another few decades, but the interwar period saw a rise in violence that would have their enactors – including Carl Penzram in America and Peter Kürten in Germany – labeled as such long after their deaths. A rash of cannibalistic serial killers in Germany made its way not only into social commentary by Bertold Brecht, but also the cinema with Fritz Lang’s 1931 movie M. The violent male no longer presented himself in uniform in service of his country in order to kill the state-sanctioned enemy, but walked unnoticed among his countrymen and murdered those he saw fit.
This paper aims to explore the emerging interpersonal serial violence after the armistice declaration of 1918 in which male violence shifts from the public to the personal sphere and emerges into Seltzer’s pathological public sphere. It will compare and contrast depictions of soldiers, both ally and enemy, with the representation of the postwar serial killers and their victims. It will draw connections between the mass media coverage of violence on such a massive scale on foreign soil with the attempts to represent – and make sense of – such individualized violence at a time of peace on the Homefront.