Linda Leskau & Tanja Nusser 
Disability in German-Speaking Europe 
History, Memory, Culture

This collection reflects on the development of disability studies in German-speaking Europe and brings together interdisciplinary perspectives on disability in German, Austrian, and Swiss history and culture.


Ableism remains the most socially acceptable form of intolerance, with pejoratives referencing disability – and intellectual disability in particular – remaining largely unquestioned among many. Yet the understanding, depiction, and representation of disability is also clearly in a process of transformation. This volume analyzes that transformation, taking a close look at attitudes toward disability in historical and contemporary German-speaking contexts.


The volume begins with an overview of the emergence and growth of disability studies in German-speaking Europe against the background of the field’s emergence a decade or so earlier in the US and UK. The differences in timing, methodology, and research concentrations bring into focus how each cultural context has shaped the field of disability studies in its multiple and diverse approaches. Building on recent scholarship that uses a cultural studies approach, the volume’s three sections analyze constructs of disability and ability in history, memory, and culture. The essays in the history section examine how the emotions, morality, and power have played into – and still do play into – the individual’s experience of disability. Those in the memory section grapple with the origins of the Nazi persecution of people with disabilities, the fight for recognition of this genocide, and the politics of its commemoration. Finally, the culture section offers close readings of disability in literary and filmic texts from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Table of Content

Acknowledgments

Disability Studies in German-Speaking Europe, an Introduction

Linda Leskau, Tanja Nusser, and Katherine Sorrels

Part 1: Negotiating Interpersonal Relationships: Historical Perspectives

1: Inclusion, Emotion, and Disability


Markus Dederich and Katherine Sorrels

2: ‘Moral Madness’: Representations of Prodigality, Disability, and Competence in German Legal History


Ashley L. Elrod

3: Deafness and ‘Disfigurement’ as Relational Disorders: Aron Ronald Bodenheimer’s Psychotherapy at the Zurich School for the Deaf during the 1960s


Marion Schmidt

Part 2: Reckoning with the Past: Reconstruction of Memory

4: The Romance of the Institution: Educational Optimism and the Confinement of the ‘Feeble-Minded’ in Modern Germany


Warren Rosenblum

5: From the Disability Murders Archive: Ernst Klee’s Confrontation of the Public with Nazism’s First Genocide


Dagmar Herzog

6: Disability in Nazi Germany: Memory of ‘Euthanasia’ Crimes and Commemoration of Their Victims

Lutz Kaelber


Part 3: Intersections and Diversity: The Lens of Culture

7: A Crip Chronotope: Time, Disability, and
Heimat in Else Lasker-Schüler’s
Die Wupper

Caroline Weist

8: Disability in the Narrative and Dramatic Work of Thomas Bernhard

Linda Leskau

9: Freaks, Capriccios, Monstrosities: Ulrike Ottinger’s
Freak Orlando: Kleines Welttheater in fünf Episoden

Tanja Nusser

10: Disability as Opportunity in Alissa Walser’s Novel about the Blind Maria Theresia Paradis

Waltraud Maierhofer

Notes on the Contributors

Index

About the author

KATHERINE SORRELS is Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati.