"Nothing is forgotten, and nobody!" Archives for the disability rights movement as a disability policy project

By Ulrike Lux

People with disabilities in Germany have been following the public debate on disability issues and the vicissitudes of disability policy for nearly 40 years now, accompanying them critically and emphatically in their own journals, commenting and discussing them. It would be a shame if the journals Krüppelzeitung, Luftpumpe and die randschau as well as other material such as brochures and discussion papers (the so-called “grey literature”) were lost in the mist of time. Instead, we intend to make them available to the interested public in a modern and easily perusable form.

The idea came from the editorial staff of the journal die randschau published on national scale from 1986 to 2000. Some of us have been politically active for up to four decades in various political contexts. The first of us have now reached pension age.

We keep being asked about old copies of the randschau. Of course, that makes us proud and happy. So we decided to get together once more for a project with the objective to create a “final repository” for our old issues – beyond crates and cardboard boxes on storage racks and cellars – by making them publicly available on the website archiv-behindertenbewegung.de. During our preliminary discussions it became apparent that we wished for a place to collect material about the history of the emancipatory disability movement.

Archival documents

Returning to our old habits from randschau times, we met for an editorial weekend in Marburg. It did not take us long to agree on the overall objective but orientation, content and structure required a little more thought.

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Deaf history and the art of writing novels

By Frances Itani & Pieter Verstraete

One of the main goals of the Public Disability History Blog is to bring disability history to the public. Although it is of course true that a lot of academic research doesn’t get translated into accessible language, to say that the public isn’t exposed to disability history is just a bridge too far. Indeed, there are numerous examples to be quoted of non-academics who are interested in the history of disability and/or are exposed to it. Often people will not consciously pay attention to the presence of persons with disabilities in the stories they read, tell themselves or watch. But there are definitely also examples to be mentioned where disability is willingly interwoven in the narrative that was invented by someone and made public through the publication in book-format, the broadcasting of a television show, the curating of an exhibition or just through some chit-chat in a local bar.

During the previous Summer break I coincidentally came across one example of disability-history-already-being-public, the novel Deafening written by Canadian author Frances Itani. The scene of the book is that of the first decades of the Twentieth century. Itani tells the story of Grania O’Neill who became deaf due to the consequences of scarlet fever, went to the Ontario school for the Deaf and married Jim – who is mobilized during the war as a stretcher barrier. I was impressed by the detailed accounts of the school experiences and the lived-through descriptions of Grania’s emotional responses to the things she encountered during her rich life. And so I decided to contact the author in order to know a bit more about how the book came about, what kind of research she did, what the author wanted to achieve with the book and how the (Canadian) Deaf people responded.


Pieter: Where did the idea for the book Deafening originate?

Frances: I started research for this book about 1996, while finishing another book, Leaning, Leaning Over Water. I was driving through Belleville, Ontario at the time and as I was passing the grounds of Sir James Whitney School for the Deaf (previously known as the Ontario School for the Deaf), I decided to pull in to the grounds of that very old school and present myself at the reception desk. After I explained that my late Deaf grandmother had attended the same school at the turn of the last century (I did not know the exact years, at the time), I was offered a tour of the grounds and various buildings. During that initial tour, I knew I was going to write a book with that setting. I didn't know, at the time, what sort of book it would be, but I knew that I would be back for more research. That was the beginning of a six-year journey: researching and writing Deafening.

Front cover of one of the many editions of the book Deafening

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