“The most important feeling which governs all thoughts and actions before and after combat … is the feeling of fear,” wrote Pyotr Krasnov, an émigré and former General in the Russian Army, in 1927. During my year in Greifswald I plan to complete an English-language monograph that centers around three questions. Taking the example of Russia in transnational entanglements with Western Europe and focusing on the First World War’s Eastern front, it first asks how soldiers were conditioned to cope with fear, second how they did deal with fear, and third how they were dealt with when they could not cope and broke down with fear-induced symptoms—“shell shock” in its Russian permutations. The book seeks above all to make an empirical contribution to the relatively new interdisciplinary field of the history of emotions, but it also aims to contribute to the history of the psy sciences, the medical humanities, the history of masculinities, and the new military history.

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