There is a line from A Woman in Berlin that has stayed with me long after I finished the book. It goes something like: “I caught sight of myself in the mirror today. A face I didn’t recognize, eyes too large, mouth drawn tight, the look of an animal that’s been hunted.” That line is more than a woman’s diary entry; it is the world speaking to itself after 1945.
When Berlin fell, when the camps were opened, when Hiroshima turned to ash, humanity saw its own reflection and didn’t recognize what it had become.
If the First World War broke our illusions of glory, the Second broke our illusions of morality itself. The real terror wasn’t what we did to each other; it was realizing how easily we did it. It was ordinary people who had built the camps, filed the reports, and driven the trains. The modern age discovered that the line between good and evil was not between nations; it ran through every human heart.
The world started to rebuild with vengeance. Streets, bridges, borders. But beneath that came a reconstruction of faith. Nations wanted to believe in order again, in decency, in the idea that systems could prevent sin. The United Nations, IMF, World Bank, WHO, and UNESCO were born in those fragile years, built less from idealism and more from shock. They were the architecture of a collective trauma response, a feeble attempt of telling itself that systems could be designed to keep chaos contained, that structure could stand in for conscience.
The phrase “Never Again” entered public vocabulary, as prayer and a denial. You can find it carved into memorials, written into treaties, and taught in classrooms. But behind it was a quiet tremor, a fear that the same darkness still lived inside us. So we built modernity as a shield. We focussed on prosperity, speed, consumerism, progress, all ways to prove we had evolved past cruelty.
But trauma doesn’t disappear because history declares it over. It changes shape, from collective grief into collective ambition, from moral reckoning into productivity. The twentieth century’s obsession with growth and efficiency was, in many ways, a psychological coping mechanism, proof that the world could be clean again if it just kept moving fast enough.
Psychology itself was reborn from the rubble. Freud’s Europe, defined by repression and neurosis, gave way to something rawer and truer. Viktor Frankl wrote from a concentration camp that survival depended on meaning. Erik Erikson argued that whole societies pass through identity crises, not just individuals. Social psychologists like Stanley Milgram and Solomon Asch tried to understand obedience and conformity, why people follow orders even when their conscience screams. Abraham Maslow drew a pyramid to describe what we need to feel human, and Carl Rogers wrote that empathy was the only antidote to despair.
Every theory seems to be a piece of debris repurposed into structure. Every therapist was a quiet architect of a post-war soul. It was as if the mind itself had become the new territory to rebuild, the last frontier where civilization could still be repaired.
Art also followed similar suit. Italian neorealists filmed men searching for dignity in broken cities. Japanese filmmakers turned destruction into stillness. Writers like Primo Levi, Etty Hillesum, and Nelly Sachs refused to look away, proving that language could bear witness even when theology could not. Abstraction rose in painting, shapes and color fields replacing faces, because what image could capture what was lost?
Rebuilding was everywhere, but healing was nowhere.
Maybe this is the real story, that progress was the trauma’s disguise. The Cold War, the space race, consumer capitalism, the idea of endless growth, all descendants of that same wound. We learned that if we kept constructing, we would not have to feel. We could build ourselves into amnesia.
Yet the past has a strange half-life. It decays slowly, releasing its poison in new forms. We see it again now, in 2025, in wars that look too familiar, in leaders using fear as language, in refugee camps that echo the old ones. In the phrase “collateral damage,” in the quiet desensitization of scrolling through suffering. The world still trembles with inherited trauma; we just call it geopolitics, or nationalism, or markets.
The systems we built to prevent another war now sustain a thousand smaller ones. The institutions meant to uphold human rights now negotiate which lives matter first. We have turned “Never Again” into a slogan that expires after every convening.
And psychology, that post-war invention of self-understanding, now bleeds into therapy apps, wellness hashtags, and mindfulness breaks between air raids. The language of healing has become the wallpaper of collapse.
But we are still looking for mirrors. Everywhere, people catch sight of themselves, not recognizing who they have become or what the world has turned them into.
Collective trauma doesn’t end; it changes shape. It lives in institutions, in architecture, in algorithms. It changes uniforms, changes flags, and learns new languages. It hides inside progress.
If World War I taught us fragility, World War II forced us to face responsibility. And maybe our own time will teach us something harder still: that rebuilding is not the opposite of violence, that the things we build, nations, technologies, empires, can themselves become extensions of it.
We are all still standing in that mirror from A Woman in Berlin, decades later, still asking, So this is who’s left.
And the reflection keeps changing.