By Sebastian Barsch & Andreas Hübner
Disability History is not only an academic subject. The question of the social construction of disability also raises fundamental questions about how power is distributed in a society, how normality and abnormality are defined and how definitions change over time. Disability history can thus also enrich the teaching of history by providing children with perspectives on history, power and powerlessness that have been largely neglected.
However, in the few cases where teaching materials on the history of disability exist, there are often two problems: firstly, people with disabilities are often portrayed only as victims. Secondly, the history of dealing with disability is often presented as a success story, for example, when discussing positive developments in social services and the inclusion of disabled people in society. And yes, this is important too! It is important to show that the situation of people with disabilities has often been one of suffering, of exclusion and murder. So learners also need to learn about these terrible aspects of history, to deal with them, to understand their emotions and to work with them. This is also done in the hope that learning from history will be achieved and that young people will be empowered to take a stand against exclusion in the present. It is also important to address the fact that the situation for people with disabilities may well have improved, depending on the time and region. To ignore this is to ignore part of history.
However, this approach is also too simplistic. What is missing from the teaching of history in schools is a multi-perspective approach to disability. Questions can be asked: Has the history of disability always been one of exclusion? Have 'we' really come so far? What agency have people with disabilities experienced at different times and in different regions? Where do they appear as actors in history? Which stories remain hidden in official curricula and national narratives? And how can these “invisible” histories help foster a multi-perspective approach to the past?
These are the key questions explored by LETHE – (e-)Learning the Invisible History of Europe through Material Culture, a portal funded by the European Union. While LETHE is not solely focused on disability history, but rather on overlooked histories in general, the core question remains the same: How can we bring hidden narratives to light?
To do so, LETHE introduces, among others, a “hidden” disability history that leads students on a journey tracing the monument of the Grey Buses in Ravensburg, Baden Wuerttemberg. The Grey Buses Monument commemorates the victims of National Socialist euthanasia and the so-called “T4 Program”. The euthanasia program meant to systematically eliminate what eugenicists and their supporters considered “life unworthy of life”: those persons who the Nazi regime deemed as psychiatric, neurological, or physical disable. Yet, being deemed “unworthy of life” or “disable” by the Nazi regime was not about a person’s “abilities”, but it was a means of a specialized language that dehumanized victims. The “T4 Program,” named after the address of the central control center at Tiergartenstraße 4 in Berlin, initiated a campaign of mass murder by involuntary euthanasia. Beginning in 1939, this systematically organized extermination program marked the industrial-scale killing of vulnerable individuals in Nazi Germany.
Based on the Grey Buses Monument, students delve into the hidden history of how disability was problematically managed in both German states. By studying prominent figures from the West German disability movement, such as Franz Christoph, they gain valuable insights into the agency of people with disabilities and learn to place this agency within a historical context. Engaging with these hidden histories, students come to understand how individuals who were once marginalized can be empowered to emerge as active agents in shaping their own narratives.
In this, LETHE addresses the experience of victimisation in the story. But it does not stop there. The central question for the teaching materials here is how continuity and change, cause and effect have manifested themselves in different times and regions in relation to the phenomenon of disability. Through the stories of victims, stories of self-determined participation are also told. For example, under the economically difficult conditions of socialism in the GDR (Link zu behinderung-ddr.de einfügen) , people acquired aids to increase their own mobility and thus created accessibility where the political administration did not provide for it. But the discovery of the skeleton of a child with Down's syndrome from the 5th and 6th centuries, with an elaborate burial ritual, also raises the question of whether disabled people have always been marginalized.
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| Screenshot from the LETHE-project teaching material on disabilities. |
What these examples show is that a complex phenomenon like disability cannot be treated in a less complex way, because history is not less complex and human societies are even less so. But what is also crucial in dealing with the phenomenon of disability is the question of how students can be actively involved and how they can generate their own questions and form their own judgements within this multi-perspective view of disability, in order to gain orientation for their own lives.
Perhaps it is precisely these examples, away from the usual master narratives, that are suitable to illustrate the real diversity of historical and contemporary societies and to get young people actively involved in a discussion about how we want to live in the present without (again) excluding certain groups. Given the current global political situation, this seems more important than ever.
Link to the LETHE-website:
https://letheproject.eu/
Sebastian Barsch is professor for history education at the University of Cologne, Germany. His work and research interests focus among others on inclusive history education. ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6715-1466
Andreas Hübner is Senior Lecturer in History Education at Kiel University. His teaching and research focus on global history, history didactics, the Anthropocene and environmental studies. Orcid: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3885-4429
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Recommended citation: Sebastian Barsch & Andreas Hübner (2025): Disability history in the classroom – the LETHE-project. In: Public Disability History 10 (2025) 2.
