Dr. Stefano Serafini, “War Neurosis, Trauma, and Violence in Interwar European Literature”

In this talk, co-sponsored by the Georgetown Humanities Initiative, the Department of Italian Studies, and the Department of German, Dr. Serafini investigated how interwar European literature grappled with the pervasive, yet often repressed, impact of war trauma through a comparative analysis of Giovanni Comisso’s Il delitto di Fausto Diamante (Italy, written in 1926 but published in 1933), Dorothy L. Sayers’s The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (Britain, 1928), and Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz (Germany, 1929). Each novel centers on a World War I veteran—a disoriented young man trying to find his footing in postwar society, a former convict just released from prison, and an aristocratic amateur detective—who exhibits a unique yet interconnected manifestation of war neurosis, channeled as a compulsion toward risk and self-endangerment rather than passive suffering.

By focusing on violence, psychological fragmentation, masculinity, and the challenge of reintegration, this analysis revealed how these novels subvert dominant medical discourses of the 1920s, which largely pathologized, dismissed, or ignored the mental wounds of returning veterans. Instead, trauma is depicted as a concealed but profoundly destabilizing force—one that unsettles both personal identity and the fabric of social relations. In illuminating these struggles, literature emerges as a vital space for articulating what societies strive to suppress, exposing the human costs of war, the precariousness of postwar identity, and the lasting consequences of marginalizing those who bear the psychological scars of conflict.

Dr. Serafini completed his outgoing phase at Georgetown in May. The Humanities Initiative valued his time with us and looks forward to the continued development of his research.