CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Phillips, Abigail Cerys |
|---|---|
| Title | The Mail Body: Picture Postcards and the Iconography of the Wounded Soldier during the First World War in Vienna |
| Summary | This thesis investigates how the wounded soldier’s body was rendered visually coherent in Viennese postcards during the First World War, arguing that these images did not aim to depict injury as it was lived, but to make it culturally legible. Throughout the work, the injured man emerges as the paradoxically ‘unwounded wounded’ figure, an ideologically flexible allegorical symbol who served as a palatable icon of national strength and masculine continuity. Chapter 1, ‘(In)Visibility, or The Image as Salve,’ explores how trauma was stylised and concealed through conventional visual codes, including sanitised depictions of wounding, Christian iconography, and the elision of permanent bodily loss. Chapter 2, “Who Cares? Social Treatments of the Body,” examines the relational construction of woundedness through proximity to others, highlighting how gendered care sustained masculine resilience and patriotic virtue. Across both chapters, a consistent symbolic logic emerges, wherein injury is granted visibility only when narratively contained, and pain is transfigured into sacrifice and service. The work deliberately resists the impulse to treat postcards as retrospective memorials, viewing them instead as artefacts of real-time mediation. This study thus repositions wartime Vienna as a cultural arena of visual coherence, where the disruptive forces of mechanised war was metabolised through familiar symbolic forms. By foregrounding visual culture, this study uncovers a moment of intense symbolic labour, demonstrating how the wounded soldier became a site through which a fractured body politic was rendered intact. |
| Supervisor | Hall, Karl |
| Department | Historical Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/phillips_abigail.pdf |
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