Dieser Beitrag ist mit Zustimmung des Rechteinhabers aufgrund einer (DFG-geförderten) Allianz- bzw. Nationallizenz frei zugänglich. / The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq initiated a surge of texts by US soldiers who utilized recent Web 2.0 technology to forge new types of war narratives, such as the so-called "milblogs." Milblogs merge letter and journal writing with journalistic reporting, and they maintain contact between soldiers and their social environment. They are at once public and private communication. Military psychology since Vietnam has referred to warrior traditions of Native American communities to discuss public narration and ceremonial acknowledgment of a soldier’s war experience as vital elements for veteran readjustment and trauma recovery. This article analyzes an exemplary milblog to argue that the interaction between blogger and audience does similar cultural work and has comparable ceremonial and, therefore, therapeutic functions: Soldiers publicly share their experience, reflect on it with their audience, receive appreciation and support, and thus mutually (re-)negotiate group identity

Whether invoking the noble—or the cruel—savage, the image of Native Americans has always included notions of war and fighting. Non-Natives have attributed character traits to them such as cunning, stealth, endurance, and bravery; and they have used these im ages to denounce or to idealize Native Americans. In the U.S., a prolon ged history of frontier conflict, multiplied by popular frontier myths, has resulted in a collective memory of Indians as fighters. While images of fighting Indians have entered American everyday language, Germans have had no significant collective history of American frontier settlement and conflicts with Native Americans. Nevertheless, they have acquired a number of idioms and figures of speech relating to Indian images due to the romanticized euphoria for Native themes, spurred by popular nove ls and Wild West shows.

Dans l’Amérique et les Caraïbes des XIXe et XXe siècles, l’œuvre du poète national est au cœur d’un trafic d’images qui nourrit un lien social fragile dans un temps où les collectivités reposent moins sur un lien direct entre leurs membres que sur un lien imaginé. Prenant ses distances vis-à-vis des représentations en circulation à son époque, comme les représentations exotiques de la nature, le poète offre une vision démocratique ambitieuse pour l’avenir de la communauté à travers des images nouvelles du territoire, du peuple, de l’esclavage et de l’histoire. L’ethos auctorial encourage l’appropriation de ce discours par le lecteur en désignant le poète comme figure de référence. Mais c’est surtout à travers son procédé d’écriture qui met à mal les normes littéraires de son temps que celui-ci est à même d’influer sur la société. Plutôt qu’ils ne parviennent à saisir l’esprit de leur peuple, Whitman, Martí et Césaire participent par leur travail sur le fragment, les formes populaires ou le tremblement du sens à la création d’un devenir collectif. / In 19th and 20th centuries America and West Indies, the national poet’s works lay at the centre of a traffic of images. This traffic feeds the fragile social ties of young collectivities, at a time when communities are bound by imagination rather than by direct contact between their members. Distancing themselves from the representations of the community circulating at that time, like the exotic images of the New World’s nature, the poet offers an ambitious democratic vision for the future which is channeled through images of the territory, the people, slavery and history. The poet’s ethos encourages the reader to appropriate this discourse by presenting the author as a role model. However, it is mainly thanks to his style, at odds with the literary norms of his time, that the poet is able to act upon society. Whitman, Martí and Césaire do not so much contrive to capture their people’s spirit, as they participate through their work on the fragment, on popular poetical forms or on the destabilizing of meaning, in the creation of a common devenir.