“Shell Shock” in the American Imagination: World War I's Most Enduring Legacy

The war veteran suffering shell shock is one of the most enduring images of twentieth‐century war. Coined during World War I, it was soon discredited as a diagnostic category and studied thereafter as a socially constructed concept akin to hysteria. Culturally, however, shell shock played out in Germany's interwar period as a metaphor for a nation traumatized by war whose defeat and hurt could only be avenged through more war. In the United States, the notion of shell shock proved useful for defining a new diagnostic category, posttraumatic stress disorder ( PTSD ) was said to be “like shell shock.” This paper will reprise in greater detail this biography of shell shock with attention to the way art, film, and other cultural forms played into its construction, and how PTSD and traumatic brain injury ( TBI ) now abet an American lost‐war narrative eerily similar to that which remilitarized Germany in its interwar period.