Survivors: Psychological Trauma and Memory Politics in Hiroshima and Auschwitz

In 1962 a young Jewish-American psychiatrist by the name of Robert J. Lifton came to Hiroshima to conduct research on the psychiatric impact of the A-bomb. The concept of trauma was not widely used at the time and Lifton was one of the first to use it in this context. His Hiroshima research, combined with research on Holocaust survivors and Vietnam veterans, was crucial in the making of what is now known as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. Japanese and other researchers, before Lifton, used varying categories and interpretations for the victims’ continued angst. Lifton’s and other psychiatrists’ work was entangled with and contributed to the history of memory and medicine in Japan and the West. Seeking to historicize the rise of “trauma” and its “survivors,” my talk will examine these entanglements between the medical reaction to the Holocaust and Hiroshima and Nagasaki and the politics of memory in both contexts. What stood in the center of both histories were the victims of the events, who became focal points of growing body of research as well as political symbols. “Survivors’, I argue, developed historically as a transnational category that drew on many sources. The convergence of the histories of Hiroshima and the Holocaust in the late sixties and seventies and the making of the category of PTSD (as well as the subsequent rise of trauma studies) led to the formation of survivorhood as an expansive, universal category that was used beyond the confines of the two cases of mass-killings.