Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna by Edith Sheffer

Abstract

Reviewed by: Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna by Edith Sheffer Katherine Arens Edith Sheffer, Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna. New York: W.W. Norton, 2018. 320 pp. Edith Sheffer, a historian of Germany and Central Europe at UC Berkeley, has provided an important book: Asperger's Children, a case study in the ideologization of institutions and institutional discourses. Its focus is physician Hans Asperger (1906–1980), who evolved the standard diagnosis of autism, and how a public welfare debate in Vienna fell under the influence of Nazi ideologies through a combination of opportunism and willful malfeasance. Eugen Bleuler had introduced the term autism in 1911, but child psychiatrist Leo Kanner, a 1940s Austrian refugee working in the United States, specified in 1943 its most compelling cause: poor parenting, especially "refrigerator mothers." His essay cited Asperger's 1944 postdoctoral thesis, "The 'Autistic Psychopaths' in Childhood," which had drawn on Asperger's work at the Am Spiegelgrund pediatric psychiatric clinic in Vienna (a part of the Steinhof complex). There, German and Austrian social politics intertwined with the Nazi T4 euthanasia programs from 1940 until war's end. Sheffer, however, is less focused on Asperger's possible individual guilt than on how Vienna's extended medical and social welfare establishment assimilated to Nazi psychiatric standards under the Nuremberg Laws, when [End Page 90] "two-thirds of all Vienna's 4,900 doctors and 70 percent of its 110 pediatricians lost their positions" (74), and many more emigrated, leaving a vacuum soon filled by Nazi ideologues. The Steinhof Psychiatric Institute had opened in 1907 as a progressive institution (it still exists on the Baumgartnerhöhe, topped by Otto Wagner's church). Yet under pro-Nazi leadership after 1940 and the start of the T4 programs, Steinhof was implicated in at least 7,500 deaths, starting in that year with the deportation of over 3,000 patients to the gas chamber (probably Hartheim). That made room for the "Vienna Municipal Youth Welfare Institution" at Spiegelgrund. The 640 beds of Steinhof's youth ward retained a pediatric euthanasia unit even after T4 was abolished in 1941, ultimately responsible for almost 800 deaths. Red Vienna's 1920s positive response to the lingering effects of World War I and the depression had turned deadly. Between 1923 and 1934, Vienna had innovated in social welfare, including building 380 apartment buildings housing 220,000 persons (a tenth of the city's population). Some measures were educational: Erwin Lazar's "Curative Education Clinic" (founded in 1911) had introduced innovations in the state school structure for social workers, teachers, and doctors; from 1918 to 1925, he consulted for the new Ministry of Public Health. Yet "social welfare" became in the 1940s a way to manage populations in increasingly normative ways. "Problem children" and school surveillance became boom industries, part of what Sheffer calls a "diagnosis regime" that "sort[ed] the population into categories, cataloguing people by race, politics, religion, sexuality, criminality, heredity, and biological defects" (15) that converged with Nazi eugenics. Asperger, who had been a member of the Nazi youth movement, helped Red Vienna's "curative education" turn into "positive eugenics"—triaging individuals for desirable traits (25–27) while also facilitating eventual turns toward the negative eugenics of extermination. Lazar had distinguished physiological causes from social causes for a lack of "community competence" (Gemeinschaftsfähigkeit), but, as "community competence" turned into an ideology of "national community" (Volksgemeinschaft, 16) in Steinhof, poverty and child neglect came to be defined as a threat to the community. "By 1936, an average of twenty-one children a day were removed from families into Vienna's Child Foster Care Service" (33), and from there to Spiegelgrund and its regimented "therapeutic" regimen, and not infrequently to medical "research" (including twin research). [End Page 91] By spring 1944, the city's Public Health Office had compiled a medical index that included 767,000 people (a quarter of the city's population). A staff of seventy went through "birth records, Youth Office records, medical records, police records, Steinhof records, Nazi Party records, and city registries of prostitutes and alcoholics" and identified 12,000 disabled children and 40,000 "difficult...