In the first half of the 20th century, more than 120 million people lost their lives in untimely or violent deaths – on the battlefield, in concentration camps, through fierce air strikes or as casualties of the many severe epidemics and hardships that followed in war’s path. The experiences of war travelled through and between different media of the time and were often focused on the emotional, the personal, the everyday and the subjective. War and trauma also remained in the stories when the years of conflict were replaced by peace and prosperity. The displaced remains of bodies and the reminiscence of personal or collective suffering lingered on in the culture of everyday life. This book is about these sense-making, persisting media representations and narratives, how they were established in different media formats and how they moved between different media of the time. In the period between 1910s and 1950s, the period covered here, it was mainly daily newspapers, film and radio that communicated the realities of war. Taken together, different media repeated and reinforced beliefs about war experiences, turning the terror and trauma of war into stories situated within the conventions of public display. The contributors to this book represent a variety of scholarly fields – history, human rights studies, media history, film studies, comparative literature, and rhetoric – and their chapters deal with anything from anti-war fiction during the First World War and interwar journalistic reportages to war correspondent radio, film documentaries in the aftermath of the Second World War and Cold War comic books. Although many of the examples are taken out of a Swedish empirical context, the foremost aim is not to present a possible Swedish or Nordic experience, but to highlight the narrative structures and genres as well as the significance of different media forms for the representation of war violence and death in public life. By examining a variety of media forms, the interdisciplinary set of authors in this book introduces new ways of thinking about media portrayals of human suffering and dead bodies. Thereby, the book addresses more basic questions about the relationship between death and media, the history of (mediated) emotions, and why it is that death is so present and yet so taboo in modern society.
