Depression – A life threatening disability in Nazi Germany

By Jörg Watzinger

In this article I give a biographical sketch of my grandmother’s life in the context of Nazi psychiatry. She died in the psychiatric clinic Göppingen in May 1945.

My grandmother Marie Watzinger was born in 1880 in Munich where she grew up with two sisters. Her father was a professor of pathology. Marie had no professional training and did not visit university. Theatre and literature became a central part of her life as a young woman.

Marie as a young woman in Munich. Private photo.

In 1912 she married my grandfather Carl Watzinger, who worked as a professor for archeology at the university of Gießen. Together they had three children: Karl Otto, my father, born in 1913, Helmut, born in 1915 und Irmgard born in 1921. While my grandfather Carl was far from home as a soldier during WW1, Marie brought up the two boys single-handedly. In October 1918, following the call for a professorship of the Archeological Institute, the family moved to Tübingen.

In family conversations, I never got a response to questions I had about my grandmother. It felt like she had gone lost. I was pleased therefore, to find the letters she exchanged with my father during the two-year period of his imprisonment from1939 until 1941.

In the letters I discovered a woman who knew a lot about classical literature and music. With my father Karl Otto she embarked on an energetic exchange of ideas about literature. She could express herself well and had her own opinions about the literature she read. She had a particular love for Goethe, his poems “Poetry and Truth” and his letters.

Classical music was played in the home. She listened to Beethoven, Mozart, Haydn and Bach on the radio and she also enjoyed playing piano herself.

The longing for her children

Karl Otto, Helmut and Irmgard with their mother. Private photo.

My father left Tübingen for Berlin in 1932 to study law and to leave, as he called it, the professor´s village Tübingen, for the vibrating capital where the political future and the place of the working class in the new republic was to be decided. My uncle Helmut studied electrical engineering in Darmstadt. Up to 1940 my aunt Irmgard had been very present at home during the preparations for her Abitur (A-levels) supporting her mother. After a compulsory labor-service she moved for Karlsruhe to study fine arts. Many letters convey how much my grandmother missed her children. On many occasions she made references to Irmgard’s youthful freshness and cheerfulness.

November 1940 my grandmother celebrated her 60th birthday in Tübingen. Her sister sent her favorite chocolate cake from a Munich cake shop. My father Karl Otto, supporting the SAP (Sozialistische Arbeiter Partei), imprisoned due to aiding and assisting high treason, could not be with them. After his release from prison in September 1941 my father was abducted to Dachau concentration camp. He stayed there for the next three years as a political prisoner. The abduction to Dachau concentration camp marks the end of her correspondence with my father. He corresponded from now on only with my grandfather Carl. When Marie did write at all, it was only a few short lines.

What happened to Marie?

For information on the last three years of Marie’s life, I have as a source the correspondence of my grandfather with the clinic in Göppingen and with his sister in law, Irma. In addition to this, I visited the clinic in Göppingen twice.

After Karl Otto’s deportation to Dachau concentration camp, Marie’s condition deteriorated significantly. In addition to physical incapacity due to extreme asthma, came mental difficulties. She had difficulties with concentration. She was restless, hardly slept, talked without cease and could no longer keep the household running. New maids ran away after short time.

Last photo of Marie Watzinger (r.) with her daughter-in-law Hanni, Christmas 1942.
Private photo.

After one year, in autumn 1942, my grandfather committed her to psychiatric services in Göppingen for the first time. The letters of my grandfather show that this decision was made after lengthy consideration of the situation with his sister-in-law. The advice of specialists was taken. In the clinic, Marie was diagnosed with a restless depression and a drug addiction to a stimulant asthma medicine.

Marie’s condition deteriorates 

After two years in the clinic without any improvement, weight loss resulting from a refusal to eat, became a focus of medical attention. During this time, autumn 1944, my father Karl Otto was forced to join the SS Brigade Dirlewanger to the eastern front in Hungaria. Irma, Marie’s sister, died from a bombing raid in Giessen. Marie weighed only 39 kg. Bed rest was prescribed, apparently to prevent extreme restlessness when getting up. She fell silent, blamed herself to be the cause of all misfortune. In March 45 Göppingen, city of heavy industry and garrison, was bombed heavily. The patients had to move to the air-raid shelter and stay seated there for long time. In this context Marie broke her leg. In April 1945 US Army occupied Göppingen without any further resistance. On 4 May 1945 Marie died in the clinic.

Marie is also a victim of the Nazi rule

In 1933 after the begin of Nazi rule at the university of Tübingen the majority of students and professors welcomed the new regime enthusiastically. My grandfather was the only professor in Tübingen who had not joined the NSDAP. For a sensitive person like my grandmother, my father called her „schwernehmerisch“ („she could not take things easy“), the violent vibrations of the Nazi politics were clearly noticeable even at her home filled with classic music and literature. Factors which triggered the aggravation of Marie’s condition, which led to the hospital admissions, were the arrest of my father Karl Otto in 1939 and the beginning of the war in 1939. To a greater extent, the abduction to concentration camp of Karl Otto in 1941 after his return from prison.

Psychiatry in Nazi Germany did not offer support or therapy that time. In contrary, it was life-threatening to become mentally ill. Patients were declared as genetically damaged, forced sterilization started already in 1934, until 1945 about 400.000 people were sterilized. Later they were declared as „life unworthy to live“: many of these people were finally murdered under the label „Euthanasia“.

During the T4 action 1940/41 70.000 patients were taken away from psychiatric clinics and murdered in special institutions, i.e. Hadamar or Grafeneck. After the end of T4 action the killing did not end. It went on inside the psychiatric clinics, altogether 300.000 people were murdered until 1945 in context of Euthanasia. This equals the number of all psychiatric patients in Germany in 1929.

There were two main arguments in Nazi politics regarding psychiatry. One was saving public money and the other was Eugenics. Both existed before Nazi rule, but both were discursively combined and practically executed without any compassion like nowhere else in the world. With the world-wide economic crisis in 1929 the money for the clinics was reduced already in 1930 as a consequence of tax deficiency.

Eugenics was the answer of the psychiatry in whole Europe on the frustration, not finding remedies for mental health patients. Instead of healing the patients the society was healed from the patients, as Mr. Brüggemann, psychologist in Christophsbad for 40 years, put it during my visit in spring 2019.
The killing of patients started with the so called T4 action in 1940. As a thorough investigation showed, from the clinic Christophsbad 293 patients were taken away, all „Staatspfleglinge“ (patients who stayed in a private clinic, but whose costs were paid by the state). 182 of them were murdered evidently. Many of them died afterwards in the different institutions. Only 61 patients have survived the crimes of „Euthanasia“. A clinic internal group working on T4 has not found any evidence that wild euthanasia has taken place in Christophsbad after T4 action was stopped.

Clinic Christophsbad in Göppingen, photo: Christophsbad.

My grandmother was lucky to stay in a private clinic, where the doctors were not obliged to the „Euthanasia“-ideology. They took care to keep their patients alive, at least to keep the clinic running economically after the loss of the „Staatspfleglinge“.

My father survived three years at Dachau concentration camp. My grandmother died without getting news from him and without hope to see him again four days before the liberation from Nazi rule. Although her life had a such sad end, to come to know that she had not been murdered was a great relieve for me. I am glad to give a place to my grandmother in family and in public memory.

Jörg Watzinger is engaged in connecting descendants of Nazi persecuted people and in initiating groups of descendants.
_________________________________

References:
Ernst Klee (2014): "Euthanasie" im NS-Staat. Frankfurt a.M.
Hans Ludwig Siemen (1987): Menschen blieben auf der Strecke. Gütersloh.
Thomas Stöckle (2016): Die „Aktion T4“ und die Heilanstalt Christophsbad in Göppingen. Göppingen.

Recommended citation:
Jörg Watzinger (2019): Depression - A life threatening disability in Nazi Germany. In: Public Disability History 4 (2019) 12.

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A History of Psychiatry in Objects

by Bettina Alavi and Ralph Höger


Using the agency of objects as an approach in university-based teacher training seminar
During the winter semester of 2017/18, students on the teacher training course at Heidelberg University of Education and students at the University of Heidelberg took part in the seminar “A History of Psychiatry in Objects”. This seminar was designed and taught by the history educationalist Bettina Alavi and Ralph Höger, a doctoral candidate at the Heidelberg School of Education. The seminar adopted Disability History (Waldschmidt/Bösl 2017; Bösl 2010) as its approach, focusing in particular on the question of the “agency” of material culture (that is, the agency of things and objects). The seminar enquired to which extent objects both contribute to and constitute 20th- and 21st-century understandings of psychiatry: how are the boundaries drawn between healthy/unhealthy, normal/not normal, socially acceptable/inacceptable? Our underlying assumption was that social ideas and orders are inscribed into psychiatric objects and that the psychiatric objects themselves in turn influence the emergence of social orders. Students’ task was to summarise the findings arising from this specific perspective of psychiatric objects in the form of articles for this specialist blog. The seminar thus gave teacher training students the opportunity to take part in a form of Public History. At the same time, the seminar itself constituted a form of Public History, promoting the themes and concerns of Disability History to educators able to disseminate them more widely across society.

Schmidt, Heinrich, Die Pfälzische Kreis-Heil- u. Pflegeanstalt Klingenmünster, Landau 1926, p.2.

Seminar participants traced the agency of objects in the following historic psychiatric items: restraint belts, injection needles, keys, regulations for nursing staff, a medical file, and a carpet made by patients. The objects all came from the Pfalzklinikum Klingenmünster, a psychiatric and neurological clinic in a remote part of the southern Palatinate near Landau. The clinic served as a local example, providing participants with both a concrete context and previously unstudied objects.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the Pfalzklinikum staff Andreas Dietz and Christel Flory. Christel Flory worked at the clinic for many years as a laboratory technician and collected the objects we investigated herself.

State of research

Psychiatric history is already an established field of research within social history and forms the subject of several relevant publications. Brink’s Grenzen der Anstalt (2010) was helpful in the context of our seminar, as the concept of boundaries – both between the outside world and the institution and within the institution, between open and closed wards and gardens and buildings, for example – proved particularly stimulating for our object-focused approach.

Excerpt from the construction plan 1867 ©Pfalzklinikum Klingenmünster

Beyer’s Ph.D. thesis (2009), which looked specifically at the Pfalzklinikum Klingenmünster, contained a lot of detailed information on the clinic, which helped to place the objects in context. Previous studies on the agency of objects in the history of psychiatry include Majerus (2017), who looked at pills, walls and room layouts, and Ankele (2017), who investigated hospital beds.

The students’ blog articles

In their sheer materiality, the regulations of 1903 formed the foundations of employment relations between nurses and the clinic, regulating nurses’ entire period of service. The regulations set out the training nurses were to receive and detailed the scope of their duties. They reveal a certain margin for interpretation and highlight their own normativity, for example by setting out the sanctions applied for specific conduct.

The nurses’ keys tell us about power relations, regulating how people were locked in and out of the institution. At the same time, the keys highlight the fluidity of the boundary between “inside” and “outside” the institution. The keys made both temporary openings and unplanned, forced imprisonments possible. The power of the keys thus invested care staff with significant authority. Accordingly, staff needed to be very careful with these power-bestowing objects.

A woman’s medical file from the National Socialist period reveals performative agency. The acts of writing performed in these records led to momentous decisions in a later court case. The diagnosis set down in the medical file became the main grounds for the woman’s forced sterilisation.

Injection needles were ambivalent objects. They were vehicles of therapeutic care on the one hand and medical force on the other. As objects associated both with the hope for a cure as well as with sedation and control, injection needles defined the boundaries in doctor-patient relations.

The restraint belts represent compulsory measures that restricted the patients in their free movement. With the restraint, power is directly transferred to the nursing staff which executes the compulsory measures. Even just the look of the belts might have triggered patients' anxieties.

Nurses’ uniforms are a “social skin”, delineating the boundaries between doctors and nurses, nurses and patients, and doctors and patients. At the same time, these boundaries are subject to negotiation, which can be seen from the fact that in many places, female nurses no longer wear a cap; in some institutions, uniforms have disappeared altogether.

The construction plans reflect the major shifts in child and adolescent psychiatry in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Modern facades sought to express the field’s successful “clinification”. However, it remains doubtful whether this was enough to truly draw a line under its inglorious previous history.

The carpet woven by patients in the 1970s exemplifies the tension between the economic activity required for the clinic’s upkeep and the therapeutic measures structuring inmates’ daily routines, such as art therapy. Thus it reveals the somewhat contradictory aspects of occupational therapy, oscillating between the aspiration for meaningful, useful work and the desire for artistic self-realisation.

Students’ blog contributions were edited to various degrees.

Bettina Alavi is professor for history didactics at the Heidelberg University of Education. Ralph Höger is a doctoral candidate the Heidelberg School of Education.

__________________________
References
Ankele, Monika (2017): Wie das Krankenbett zum Medikament wurde.
http://science.orf.at/stories/2847043/ (last accessed 2 May 2018)

Beyer, Christof (2009): Von der “Kreis-Irrenanstalt” zum Pfalzklinikum. Eine Geschichte der
Psychiatrie in Klingenmünster. Neustadt: Institut für Pfälzische Geschichte und Volkskunde.

Bösl, Elsbeth (2010): Was ist Disability History? Zur Geschichte und Historiographie von
Behinderung. In: Elsbeth Bösl, Anne Klein, Anne Waldschmidt (eds.): Disability History.
Konstruktion von Behinderung in der Geschichte. Eine Einführung. Bielefeld: Transcript, pp.
29-43.

Brink, Cornelia (2010): Grenzen der Anstalt. Psychiatrie und Gesellschaft in Deutschland ;
1860 - 1980. Göttingen: Wallstein Verl. (Moderne Zeit, 20). Available online at
http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=46189.

Majerus, Benoît (2017): Material Objects in Twentieth Century History of Psychiatry. In:
BMGN - Low Countries Historical Review 132 (1). DOI: 10.18352/bmgn-lchr.10314.

Waldschmidt, Anne/Bösl, Elsbeth (2017): Nacheinander/miteinander. Disability Studies und
Dis/ability History. In: Nolte, Cordula/Frohne,Bianca/Halle,Uta/Kerth, Sonja (eds.) (2017):
Dis/ability History der Vormoderne. Ein Handbuch. Affalterbach: Didymos, 40-49.

Recommended citation:

Bettina Alavi / Ralph Höger (2019): A History of Psychiatry in Objects. In: Public Disability History 4 (2019) 1.

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Reclaiming Our History? Creative Responses to the Nazi Persecution of Disabled People, Part II

by Emmeline Burdett¹

My previous post looked at the ways in which organisations and individuals within the British disability movement have used references to, and symbols connected with, the Nazi persecution of disabled people. I argued that early references were intended both to encourage a sense of common identity amongst disabled people, and to demonstrate that they were an oppressed minority. This latter interpretation was radically different from the traditional view of disabled people as suffering exclusively from their impairments. In this post, I am going to discuss Tanvir Bush’s forthcoming novel CULL, and Liz Crow’s 2008 documentary, exhibition, and art installation, Resistance. In their different ways, both of these engage creatively with the Nazi persecution of disabled people and ask what relevance this has today.

Although Bush’s novel Cull is not due to be published until January 2019, she has written an as-yet unpublished article in which she explains the novel’s themes and how the Nazi analogy is used in it. Similarly, Crow’s website contains a number of articles shedding light on various aspects of the creation of Resistance. As Bush explains,

"CULL is a dark, satirical novel that hypothetically asks what could happen if the UK government sanctioned state-sponsored euthanasia as a social cost-cutting exercise?"²

‘Grave and systemic violations of disabled people’s rights’.
Bush explains in an afterword that she was inspired by the publication, in November 2016, of a United Nations report which found that the UK government was responsible for ‘grave and systematic violations of the rights of disabled people in the UK’³. The majority of the violations cited involved the UK government’s cuts to disability benefits and its relentless drive to get disabled people into work and ensure that benefits were not a so-called ‘lifestyle choice’⁴. The UN reiterated its findings in 2017, and Theresia Degener, the head of the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) stated that the government’s ‘fitness to work’ tests ‘totally neglected the vulnerable situation people with disabilities find themselves in’⁵.

Liz Crow in her wheelchair dressed as a Nazi

Liz Crow’s Resistance was motivated in part by similar concerns:

"For disabled people, we find ourselves in the midst of a new system of benefits that has been charged with contributing to the deaths of thirty-two disabled people every week, a tabloid press campaign that is portraying disabled people as fraudsters and scroungers … an associated hardening of public attitudes towards disabled people, and a chilling rise in hate crime. Within these events are knife-edge judgments of our place in the world, a step away from whether we even deserve to exist at all."⁶

Despite these similarities, Crow and Bush take very different approaches to the question of the Nazi persecution of disabled people. Crow tackles it directly, whilst Bush alludes to it, and explores how cavalier dismissals of the value of life may come to develop, and then to become virtually unquestioned ‘facts’. Crow’s installation comprises two short films – one scripted by Crow herself, and telling the story of Elise Blick, a character inspired by an account given by Hugh Gregory Gallagher in By Trust Betrayed: Patients, Physicians, and the Licence to Kill in the Third Reich, his 1990 book about the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme.

Elise makes her bid for freedom © Roaring Girl Productions

Gallagher had mentioned a woman whom he referred to as ‘EB’, a patient at an institution in Nazi Germany, who was employed there as a cleaner. Gallagher wrote that ‘EB’ made a bid for escape, going around rather than inside the bus which had arrived to take her to her death.⁷ By the time of her posthumous arrival in Liz Crow’s Resistance, ‘EB’ had morphed into the pivotal character of Elise Blick. As Crow shows, the character’s surname was chosen quite deliberately: 

"EB became Elise Blick, her last name translated from the German for to look, to see. Elise does not speak and the staff assume she does not comprehend, but she watches as the buses filled with patients leave and return empty."⁸

The Importance of Names.

‘Resistance’ is a fictional film, but, being inspired by real events, it offers an interpretation which is radically different from that to be found in the overwhelming majority of history books about the Third Reich. In doing so, it further answers Paul van Trigt's question about whether the investigation of historical violence against disabled people can lead to the emancipation of disabled people.

Elise and her broom outside the institution © Roaring Girl Productions

Crow’s film does – taking its cue from Gallagher’s By Trust Betrayed, it brings the possibility of disabled resistance to a much wider audience, and – crucially – shows disabled people valuing their lives and wanting them to continue. Crow further took the decision to name all the disabled characters in Resistance, while leaving the institution staff anonymous – a further act of reclamation, showing that the people who were killed are more worthy of remembrance, than those who facilitated their murder.

Frontcover of Bush’s novel CULL

Names are also of importance in Tanvir Bush’s novel CULL. Bush includes various references to the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme and to the ideas and persons which helped to facilitate it. Two of her characters – a celebrated physician and his daughter, a rising politician – have the surname Binding. This is a reference to Karl Binding, who, with his colleague Alfred Hoche, wrote Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens (The Granting of Permission for the Destruction of Life Unworthy of Life), published in Leipzig in 1920. Bush describes this tract as ‘the blueprint for the Aktion T-4 Plan and the staunch defence of many of the doctors.’⁹ There is also an incidental character called Dr Julian Hallywooden, whose unusual surname came about because it refers to Julius Hallervorden, the German neuroscientist whose glittering research career was not impeded by his having participated in the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme.  Bush states that her aim in doing this was not to test her reader’s historical knowledge, but that "readers who made the connections might receive a jolt of pleasure, like finding a key clue to a crossword"¹⁰. 

The grey ‘murder-box’ bus © Roaring Girl Productions

Bush’s image of finding a key clue in a crossword is apposite, but I wonder if instead of receiving a jolt of pleasure, a reader might be motivated to think more deeply about why Bush had chosen to allude to persons instrumental in the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme. The decision was clearly taken to make a point. The same is true of the grey Community Transport ambulance which makes its first appearance at the beginning of the novel, and which Bush writes is "based on the very ones in Germany that had picked up the disabled children and adults for euthanasia … in the 1930s"¹¹.

That Bush’s novel is set in modern-day Britain, but alludes to the Nazi ‘euthanasia’ programme, is particularly striking, showing that there are things for every society – not just Germany – to consider. In fact, both Bush and Crow make this explicit. Bush’s novel shows how policies which make life avoidably harder for disabled people facilitate lack of understanding, foster the growth of stereotypes and hate crime, and allow a cavalier attitude towards the value of disabled lives. The novel also shows that these attitudes would be much harder to sustain without a complicit media, and of functionaries who either actively believe that people from targeted groups are merely representatives of types, or who simply do as they are told without question.¹²

Bush’s novel, then, advocates constant vigilance, and an awareness that seemingly small violations can often be part of something bigger. By contrast, Crow emphasises the need to create a society which is so strongly united that attempts to sow division are doomed to failure. The companion film to her ‘Resistance’ drama begins with two of the actors from the film discussing what visiting the death centres and portraying victims of the ‘euthanasia’ programme meant for them as disabled people. Then it moves on to

"A soundtrack of voices, disabled and not, talking about their experiences of discrimination … they speak of practical and emotional cost, but also describe the elation of being included. Audiences glimpse a starting-point for making that inclusion a reality and are shown the possibility of their own role in this."¹³

The differing approaches of these two works, and the different solutions they offer, makes the idea of seeing them as companion pieces, with each illuminating aspects of the other, attractive. They also demonstrate beyond doubt that the subject of the Nazi persecution of disabled people is one to which is still relevant, and also one to which disabled people are continuing to bring new and important insights.

Emmeline Burdett (emmelineburdett@gmail.com) is an independent researcher.

___________________

^{[1] I would like to thank Pieter Verstraete for his comments on a previous version of this post.
[2] Tanvir Naomi Bush, unpublished article explaining the genesis of CULL, 1.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Quoted in ibid, 2.
[6] Liz Crow, ‘Resistance: The Art of Change’, www.roaring-girl.com/ wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Resistance-The-Art-of-Change.pdf , 4.
[7] Ibid.
[8] Ibid,14
[9] Bush, 5.
[10] Ibid, 7.
[11] Ibid, 8.
[12] Ibid, 4.
[13] Crow, ‘Resistance: The Art of Change’, www.roaring-girl.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/Resistance-The-Art-of-Change.pdf.}

Recommended Citation:
Emmeline Burdett (2018): Reclaiming Our History? Creative Responses to the Nazi Persecution of Disabled People, Part II. In: Public Disability History 3 (2018) 15.

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Euthanasia enthusiasm

by Jan Grue

I was never a great admirer of D.H. Lawrence, even as a teenager. I read Lady Chatterley’s Lover, probably expecting some sort of frisson, some Vitalist thrill, even though the book could hardly carry the same impact in the 1990s as it had on its original publication. That thrill, however, depends entirely on one’s capacity for literary identification – with Lady Chatterley’s erotic awakening, or with Mellors the gamekeeper’s forceful physicality.

Unfortunately I was a wheelchair user, and so instead I couldn’t help identifying, on some level, with Clifford Chatterley. Unlike any other character I’d encountered in the Western canon, he even used a power wheelchair – inexpertly built and prone to breakdowns, but clearly a distant ancestor of the Permobil Trax chair I used – and still use – every day.

Clifford Chatterley is not what literary scholars would call a round character. He is perhaps best understood as a cobbled-together set of neuroses, hostility, and bitterness, the very model of what Tobin Siebers critiqued as the Freudian caricature of a disabled person: Wrapped up in narcissistic anxiety over an equally damaged body and soul.

I reacted to Lady Chatterley’s Lover more or less instinctively, with visceral unease, while reading it in my teens. On the level of comprehension and analysis, things fell rather more solidly into place a few years later, when I came across John Carey’s book The Intellectuals and the Masses. There, Carey quotes the following words from Lawrence’s letters (written in 1908, a full two decades before the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover):

"If I had my way, I would build a lethal chamber as big as the Crystal Palace, with a military band playing softly, and a Cinematograph working brightly; then I’d go out in the back streets and main streets and bring them in, all the sick, the halt, and the maimed; I would lead them gently, and they would smile me a weary thanks; and the band would softly bubble out the ‘Hallelujah Chorus’."

Historical colour lithograph of the Crystal Palace in London,
overlooking a vast park with picknicking groups.

There it is: An uplifting, well-orchestrated take on eugenically motivated genocide. Clifford Chatterley, it seems, got off easy. It may be because he was injured in the war, not burdened with a congenital impairment.

John Carey’s point is not that D.H. Lawrence was unique in holding murderously eugenicist views, it is rather that he was fairly representative of his time and milieu. A blog post is not a sufficient format for discussing that history in detail; here, I will merely draw some attention to the enthusiasm of his position, the softly bubbling music that accompanies the march toward the death chambers. And will point this out because of a recent spate of media stories with a similarly enthusiastic view of the deaths of people with impairments and serious illnesses.

Many of these stories have already been subject to some controversy, with disability activists and advocates of euthanasia or assisted suicide joining the debate. The two stories I will refer to here are readable in different ways, depending on one’s politics. My interest in them is chiefly centered on the intersection of aesthetics and morality – in how a certain kind of death is presented in the media as both beautiful and just, and therefore perhaps also necessary.

The first story can be read here: http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation-now/2016/09/22/following-last-dance-prom-wisconsin-teen-jerika-bolen-dies/90855656/

Jerika Bolen, a 14-year old girl “followed through on her decision to enter hospice and end an arduous, lifelong fight against Spinal Muscular Atrophy Type 2, an incurable and progressive disease that racked her body and brought continual pain”. It should be noted that SMA type 2, Bolen’s diagnosis, is generally consistent with a life expectancy well beyond late middle age.

In the article linked to, as in multiple other interviews and media texts, Bolen is presented as a rational agent making a rational choice – death over life – because of circumstances that, ultimately, cannot be changed. In the media optics, social and economic factors belong to these immutable circumstances. The “fight” cannot be won by living, only by dying. A celebratory tone ran through many of the news items that covered Bolen’s last few months. The stress was put on her “bravery” and on her autonomy.

Another story, perhaps even more striking because of the accompanying images, can be read here: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/nationworld/ct-final-party-assisted-suicide-20160811-story.html

Betsy Davis, a “41-year-old artist with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, held the gathering to say goodbye before becoming one of the first Californians to take a lethal dose of drugs under the state's new doctor-assisted suicide law for the terminally ill.” The images showing her saying her goodbyes, surrounded by friends and family, are in their way even more striking than the portraits of Jerika Bolen. Death not only represents a victory, but a cause for celebration.

This is how the case for assisted suicide is put in the age of individual rights: As a triumph of autonomy, a celebration of self-chosen death. There are myriad differences between Bolen and Davis, between their conditions, their decisions, ultimately, of course, between their lives. In the media, however, a number of distinctions and differences collapse. The story remains the same, however, and can be paraphrased as follows: In the struggle against disability and disease, death can be a victory.

Euthanasia and assisted suicide are not, currently, framed by their advocates as state responsibilities or as arenas for state agencies. There will be no lethal chambers as big as the Crystal Palace. Death is a private matter, subject to the autonomous decisions of private citizens. In a word, it has been privatized.

There are distinctly national and regional approaches to the matter of voluntary death, ranging from the libertarian assisted-suicide approaches of the Western United States to the more paternalistic, euthanasia-inflected approach of Belgium. Generally, however, arguments in favor of the facilitation of such death are contingent upon an atomistic conception of “voluntary” – divorced from political structures, economic conditions, and social attachments. Divorced, in short, from nearly everything that shapes the reality of living with impairment or illness. While the band is softly bubbling the Hallelujah chorus, benefits are being cut and safety nets removed all over the developed world. There is every reason for disability scholars, advocates, activists, and for disabled people, to be wary of the current media enthusiasm for euthanasia and assisted suicide.

Recommended Citation:
Jan Grue (2016): Euthanasia enthusiasm. In: Public Disability History 1 (2016) 22.

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Who belongs in the murder clinic? The trouble with Nebel im August

By Ylva Söderfeldt

Germany is obsessed with narratives – movies, TV-series, novels – about its 20th century history. The most successful exports in later years have dealt with Nazi crimes and GDR oppression, not to mention the many productions directed at national audiences. No doubt, several of these works have been both of an outstanding artistic quality as well as having contributed to public awareness about the past, not least also about the continuities into and effects on the present German society.

One of the current movies on this theme (in the theatre where I watched it, there were at least two other films about Nazi Germany currently on the program) is somewhat unusual in that it addresses the murdering of sick and disabled people during the Second World War. Based on a novel that was in turn based on an actual biography, Nebel im August (Gloom in August) tells the story of Ernst Lossa (Ivo Pietzcker), who was murdered at the age of fourteen in a clinic in Irsee on August 9, 1944.
Lossa was Yenish, a minority that suffered persecution under the Nazis, had lost his mother, and was furthermore considered to have behavioral problems, all factors contributing to his institutionalization. We encounter him in the movie as he is transferred to the clinic in Irsee after having been in a series of other facilities. The initial impression is twofold: Lossa appears relieved at the friendly attitude he encounters from the head clinician Walter Veithausen (Sebastian Koch), but reacts with fear and contempt when he meets his fellow inmates, protesting that he doesn’t belong among "idiots".

A young boy with shaved head Ernst Lossa (Ivo Pietzcker)  is being
viewed by a doctor Dr. Werner Veithausen (Sebastian Koch) standing behind him. Courtesy of StudioCanal.

Between working in the fields and daydreaming of emigration, Lossa however soon comes to witness what quietly goes on in the clinic: inmates are being killed. At first, they disappear in enigmatic transports, then given lethal doses of medicine or deliberately starved on the premises.
The story is told at a slow pace and offers the viewers an almost excessive amount of scenic footage. At the same time, it is packed with information. When the camera doesn’t sweep over a beautiful landscape or interiors reminiscent of Vermeer paintings, it follows the protagonists in dialogues that painfully incorporate as many facts as possible about the ‚euthanasia’ programs. The ideological backdrop, the bureaucratic particulars, the role of scientific research as well as the Catholic church: it’s all in there, represented in the clearest way possible. This makes the viewing tedious, and the experience more like reading a Wikipedia entry than following a story. It is thanks to the generally very good acting and in particular Pietzcker’s brilliant performance, as well as David Bennent in an outstanding supporting role, that the movie still manages to engage and touch the viewer beyond the mere telling of historical facts.

A nurse (Henriette Confurius) hands a drink to a boy in a hospital bed. Courtesy of StudioCanal.

This tendency to be overly pedagogic is a common trait for the genre and for German film in general (in a German detective story, you always know who the killer is, no mystery is tolerated). But it might also be due to the specific topic. The makers cannot anticipate that the viewers bring much previous knowledge into the theatre, and obviously felt it necessary to clearly lay out the facts in order to tell the story.

More troubling is the message that follows Ernst Lossa’s story throughout, and is articulated by one of his caretakers – and possibly, his killer  – "but he is a healthy boy!" The idea that Lossa "does not belong there" never quite leaves us even though his alliance shifts away from the staff and to his fellow inmates as the plot unfolds. This trope is all too familiar in narratives about the Nazi crimes against the sick and disabled: outrage tends to be directed especially at the abuse and murder of those who ‘weren’t even actually sick’ but ‘just’ labelled antisocial and degenerate. That line of reasoning, of course, implies that some people did ‘belong there’ and that certain illnesses and disabilities were, if not rightful, at least understandable grounds for extermination. From a public disability history perspective this particular presupposition  is precisely what needs to be questioned, and it is unfortunate that this production does not take the opportunity to do so.

Two boys with shaved heads(Niklas Post and Ivo Pietzcker) and a man (David Bennent)
sit outdoors by a pile of potatoes looking amused and shocked. Behind them, men are making baskets.
Courtesy of StudioCanal.

Nebel im August
StudioCanal, Germany, 2016
Director: Kai Wessel
Screenplay: Holger Karsten Schmidt
Lead cast: Ivo Pietzcker, Sebastian Koch, Thomas Schubert, Fritzi Haberlandt, Henriette Confurius

Recommended Citation:
Ylva Södrfeldt (2016): Who belongs in the murder clinic? The trouble with Nebel im August. In: Public Disability History 1 (2016) 18.

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T4 and public disability history in Sweden

By Matilda Svensson Chowdhury

The boy in the black and white photograph is smiling widely at the camera. He is well-groomed and well-dressed in a white shirt and a dark jacket. His eyes are glistening. This photograph is the first picture in a Swedish exhibition on Aktion T4. Across the boy's chest there’s a turquoise text: “Aktion T4 – on the view of human beings in Nazi Germany”. The boy in the picture is named Robert and a little further in the exhibition, we learn how his mother cunningly was able to could save him from becoming a victim of T4.

Picture of Robert, exhibition on Aktion T4

The Living History Forum (The LHF) is a Swedish public authority [myndighet] which, on behalf of the Swedish government, shall “promote work to enhance democracy, tolerance and human rights with special focus on the Holocaust.” It might seem a bit strange to have a public authority working with these issues, but this is the way it has been in Sweden for the last almost 20 years. A large part of the work the LHF is doing is directed at school children and thus there is almost always an educational framing to the produced material, for example in the form of teachers’ guides. One of the first information materials, which was developed already in 1998, was the book “Tell Ye Your Children...”. This book was however intended primarily for an adult audience and came about as a part of the first information campaign, Living History. To date, more than 1.5 million free copies have been distributed in Sweden.

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Online media representations of the memorial for victims of the National Socialist “euthanasia”

By Robert Parzer
Translation: Ylva Söderfeldt

Workers at the T4 memorial in Berlin. Photo © Robert Parzer.

Public discourse and collective memory have tended to neglect the National Socialist killings of mentally ill and disabled people. Still in the 1990s the position towards victims of the so-called “euthanasia”-programs was defensive, until in the early 2000s the debate surrounding the Berlin Holocaust memorial led to other victimized groups being recognized at the highest political level. This started a process that finally in 2014 led to the inauguration of the memorial for the victims of the National Socialist “euthanasia” killings. The memorial was supported by an exhibition project funded by the German Research Foundation.

Since the practice of “writing onto the internet” has become popular and commonly accepted, different online media have also become platforms for remembering Nazi crimes. However, the murdering of mentally ill and disabled people is an exception that rarely finds its way online. For instance, the Hashtag #Krankenmord [“murder of the sick”, a German term often used for the killings of mentally ill and disabled people under the Nazis] yields less than 1000 results on Instagram, probably the most popular photo platform on the web. Of course, there are exceptions, such as the platform gedenkort-t4.eu or singular projects, among which the highly professional, interdisciplinary and transcultural documentation of a field trip by George-Washington University students is worth mentioning.

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