BOOK REVIEW
Trauma and Nostalgia: Practices in Memory and Identity, edited by Lucien van Liere, Srdjan Sremac, Amsterdam University Press (2024), Routledge (2025), 202 Pages, £92.00 (Hardback). ISBN 9789048559220, https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.11930990
The book opens with a small but unsettling scene. A television screen flickers in an Israeli living room during the First Gulf War. Gas masks sit beside the sofa. The broadcast mixes fear, routine, and a strange calm. The war is real, yet it is experienced through images, commentators, and familiar domestic spaces. What lingers is not only fear but also a curious longing for togetherness, for a moment when the nation watched the same screen and waited together. This anecdote, drawn from one of the chapters, sets the tone for Trauma and Nostalgia: Practices in Memory and Identity. The book insists that trauma and nostalgia are not opposites. They often arrive together. They shape how people remember violence, how they explain the present, and how they imagine who they are.
The handbook is edited by Lucien van Liere and Srdjan Sremac, scholars whose work, places them firmly at the intersection of violence, memory, religion, and culture. Van Liere is Associate Professor in Philosophy and Religious Studies at Utrecht University, known for his research on violent conflict and its representations. Sremac is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Religion and Theology at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam and co-director of the Amsterdam Center for the Study of Lived Religion, with a strong record in visual culture, memory, and lived religion. Their academic homes and publication histories explain why they are well positioned to bring together scholars from media studies, sociology, theology, anthropology, and cultural analysis. The result is a carefully edited volume that treats trauma and nostalgia not as clinical labels but as social practices embedded in stories, images, objects, and institutions.
At its core, the book argues that trauma and nostalgia are deeply entangled ways of making sense of the past. Trauma is not only an open wound. It is also shaped by how societies talk about suffering, heroism, and loss. Nostalgia is not simply a sweet longing for better days. It is a way of organizing memory that can soften pain, justify violence, or offer comfort when the present feels unstable. Across eight chapters, the contributors show how memories of war, dictatorship, displacement, and cultural loss are filtered through nostalgic frames that give them meaning. These frames operate at many levels, from personal identity to national politics.
The structure of the book follows a clear progression. The first chapter offers a conceptual map. The remaining chapters move through specific cases drawn from television, comics, museums, film, and popular culture. Each chapter stands on its own, yet together they show how memory travels across media and generations. The arguments are not rushed. The editors allow tensions to remain visible. Rather than forcing a single definition, the book shows how trauma and nostalgia change shape depending on who remembers, what is remembered, and why it matters now.
The introduction, written by Sremac and van Liere, begins with a striking idea. Time, they suggest, does not heal all wounds. It can bury them, but burial does not mean peace. Drawing on philosophy, memory studies, and cultural theory, the chapter frames trauma as an enduring disruption and nostalgia as a response to that disruption. The editors discuss how traumatic pasts are often remembered through nostalgic images that promise coherence and moral clarity. At the same time, they warn that such images can erase guilt, silence victims, or turn violence into a source of pride. This opening chapter establishes the central tension of the book between memory as reflection and memory as restoration.
The second chapter, by Dan Arav, examines Israeli television coverage of the First Gulf War. Arav’s background in media studies and national memory allows him to read television not just as a source of information but as a shared ritual. He shows how broadcasts created a sense of national intimacy during a time of fear. Trauma was present, yet it was framed through familiar voices and routines that later became objects of nostalgia. The chapter reveals how media can turn moments of collective anxiety into memories of unity, even when the threat itself was real and unresolved.
Mario Panico’s chapter shifts the focus to nostalgia and trauma in contemporary European culture, especially in relation to fascist histories. Drawing on his expertise in heritage and difficult pasts, Panico analyzes images, advertisements, and popular media that flirt with authoritarian symbols. He shows how irony and distance often mask a deeper longing for order and certainty. Trauma is not denied but reframed as a period of strength or clarity. This chapter raises uncomfortable questions about how nostalgia can normalize violent histories under the cover of humor or style.
The fourth chapter, by M. Paula O’Donohoe, explores the transmission of memories of the Spanish Civil War and the Franco regime across generations. As a scholar trained in anthropology and European studies, O’Donohoe pays close attention to family stories and silences. She shows how trauma is not only remembered but also reshaped as it passes from grandparents to grandchildren. Nostalgia enters as a way to soften fear or to preserve dignity. The chapter highlights how identity is formed through what is told and what is carefully left unsaid.
In the fifth chapter, Mariecke van den Berg and Jan Grimell analyze homecoming films about military veterans. Their combined backgrounds in theology, gender studies, and sociology allow them to read film as both cultural text and moral narrative. They show how veterans’ trauma is often framed through nostalgic images of service, sacrifice, and belonging. Redemption becomes possible only by returning to an imagined moral center. The chapter reveals how nostalgia can offer comfort while also limiting how trauma is acknowledged.
The sixth chapter moves to Afghanistan, where Bram Verhagen and Srdjan Sremac study the National Museum and its struggle to narrate statehood after decades of conflict. Verhagen’s training in political science and sociology, combined with Sremac’s work on lived religion, produces a sensitive reading of cultural heritage. The museum becomes a site where trauma and nostalgia collide. Objects meant to symbolize national pride also carry traces of destruction and loss. The chapter shows how institutional memory can fail when nostalgia demands unity that history cannot provide.
Mathijs Peters, in the seventh chapter, turns to Edgar Reitz’s film series Heimat. With his background in philosophy and film studies, Peters examines how the series resists simple nostalgia. Instead of offering comfort, it lingers on absence, silence, and slow change. Trauma appears not as spectacle but as something woven into everyday life. This chapter highlights reflective nostalgia, a mode that accepts loss without promising restoration. It stands in quiet contrast to chapters that focus on political or national longing.
The final chapter, by Joshua Hollmann, analyzes the television series Mad Men. As a theologian with a strong interest in popular culture, Hollmann reads the show as a meditation on America’s haunted present. The polished images of the 1960s invite nostalgia, yet the trauma of war, gender inequality, and moral emptiness constantly breaks through. Identity in Mad Men is unstable, built on performances that cannot hide deeper wounds. The chapter closes the volume by returning to the idea that nostalgia often masks unresolved trauma rather than healing it.
One of the book’s major contributions lies in its refusal to treat nostalgia as a mental disorder or trauma as a fixed psychological state. Instead, the chapters suggest that nostalgia can function as a coping mechanism, especially in organizational and institutional contexts. Museums, media industries, and even brands use nostalgic narratives to manage collective anxiety. This opens an important path for future research on organizational nostalgia, where longing for a shared past helps groups survive uncertainty without denying pain outright.
The editors do not avoid debate. At times, the book challenges established theories that sharply separate memory from imagination or trauma from desire. Some readers may question whether nostalgia can ever be truly reflective without sliding into justification. Others may find the emphasis on cultural mediation unsettling, as it suggests that suffering is always shaped by power. These tensions are productive. They invite scholars to think harder about ethics, responsibility, and the politics of remembrance (Temin & Dahl, 2017).
For researchers in social issues, organizational studies, political campaigning, and policy making, this handbook is especially relevant. It shows how narratives of the past influence present socio-economical conflicts and future decisions. Political brands often rely on nostalgic stories to build trust and loyalty. Understanding how these stories interact with trauma can help prevent the manipulation of pain for strategic gain. The book also speaks to ethical concerns by showing how memory can either open space for dialogue or close it through myth.
Compared to other works on nostalgia or trauma, this volume stands out for its balance. It is neither purely theoretical nor narrowly empirical. It sits comfortably alongside books by Svetlana Boym (2009) or Jeffrey Alexander (2013), while extending their insights into new cultural settings. The writing remains clear, the examples concrete, and the arguments grounded. The book offers a careful, humane account of how people live with painful pasts. It reminds us that longing is never innocent, but neither is it simply a failure of reason. In a world marked by recurring conflict and rapid change, this book offers tools to understand why the past continues to matter so deeply in the present.
Disclosure of interest
The author(s) confirm that there are no financial or non-financial competing interests.
Statement of funding
No funding was received.
References
Alexander, J. C. (2013). Trauma: A social theory. John Wiley & Sons.
Boym, S. (2009). Common places: Mythologies of everyday life in Russia. Harvard University Press.
Temin, D. M., & Dahl, A. (2017). Narrating historical injustice: Political responsibility and the politics of memory. Political Research Quarterly, 70(4), 905-917.
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Reviewed by
Mayukh Mukhopadhyay
Executive Doctoral Scholar
Indian Institute of Management Indore
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