Public Disability History

By Raphael Rössel and Bertold Scharf The list of complaints was long: Inadequate teaching facilities, lack of resident participation, arbitrary distribution of premium payments by the institution’s administration and forced residence in the institutional facilities during job training programs. In the early 1970s, the Bremen rehabilitative institution Friedehorst came under severe criticism by various disability advocate groups and youth clubs. 1 To indicate the extent of the misconduct to local politicians, the journalist Gerhard Tersteegen compiled a compendium of the institutional transgressions. His documentation, entitled Heimideologie contra Integration [Institutional ideology versus integration], is only one of the previously unpublished sources featured in Quellen zur Geschichte von Menschen mit Behinderungen (QGMB) that documents the changing cultural realities of people with disabilities in Modern Germany and unearths their constant claims to agency. QGMB follows the

By Jenny Schöldt Translated by Ylva Söderfeldt On May 3, 1868, a group of Deaf gathered together with a few hearing friends – today, we would probably call them ”allies” – at the Manilla Deaf-Mute Institute in Stockholm. The three initiators were the school’s hearing director Ossian Borg, the Deaf teacher Fritjof Carlbom from Tysta Skolan (“The Silent School”, another Stockholm Deaf school), and the artist Albert Berg. Carlbom had paid a visit to Berlin and, inspired by the Deaf club there, had decided to start something similar in Sweden. On this day, twenty-two Deaf and five hearing persons agreed to form the Deaf-Mute Society, Dövstumföreningen, predecessor of today’s Swedish Deaf Association. This remarkable event, a milestone in Swedish Deaf history, celebrates its 150th anniversary this month. It was the actor Joakim Hagelin-Adeby, chairman of the Stockholm Deaf Society, who came up with the idea to stage a play in honor of the history of the Swedish Deaf movement and the ba