Disability in German-Speaking Europe: History, Memory, Culture ed. by Linda Leskau, Tanja Nusser, and Katherine Sorrels

Abstract

Reviewed by: Disability in German-Speaking Europe: History, Memory, Culture ed. by Linda Leskau, Tanja Nusser, and Katherine Sorrels Petra Watzke Disability in German-Speaking Europe: History, Memory, Culture. Edited by Linda Leskau, Tanja Nusser, and Katherine Sorrels. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2022. Pp. 249. Hardcover $99.00. ISBN 978-1640141087. German-speaking Europe has a complicated relationship with disability. Although roughly 10–20% of the population in German-speaking countries is disabled, disabled people are often treated as an afterthought in efforts to achieve diversity, equity, and inclusivity. The lackluster media response to the murder of four disabled people by a caregiver in Potsdam in 2021 emphasizes the role that ableist attitudes play in the disdain for disabled people. Even though the general reaction to this tragic event indicates persistent prejudices about disability, attitudes are slowly changing. This change is due to general societal shifts, continued disability activism, and, at least partially, the increased presence of Disability Studies in the academic institutions of German-speaking countries, where it has grown into an established interdisciplinary method of inquiry since the early 2000s. This volume builds upon and engages with discourses of disability studies in German-speaking Europe and is overall informed by a literary and cultural studies approach to this topic. The volume traces sociocultural attempts to define, frame, and control disability from the Middle Ages to the present. The individual contributions are from scholars in Canada, Germany, and the United States and cover a wide range of academic disciplines, including history, German studies, and sociology. This interdisciplinary approach suits the complexity of the topic and allows the reader to see continuities in the conceptualization of disability in different time periods, genres, and methodologies. The individual contributions are divided into three sections that are largely informed by the methodologies of their different disciplines. The first section, "Negotiating Interpersonal Relationships: Historical Perspectives," examines the processes by which normative definitions of disability are negotiated on the individual level. The articles' subject matters range from the pre-modern to the mid-twentieth century in judicial and educational settings, and in a doctor-patient relationship. Ashley Elrod's article "Moral Madness: Representations of Prodigality, Disability, and Competence in German Legal History" uses two legal cases from the seventeenth to the early twentieth century to trace the liminal category of prodigality between impairment and moral failure. The case studies not only demonstrate changes in the categorization of disability, especially with the establishment of psychiatric and psychoanalytic professions, but also show how pre-modern attitudes stigmatizing disability as deviant survived into modern times. The unreflected stigmatization of disability is examined in the other two articles in this section. The second section, "Reckoning with the Past: Reconstruction of Memory," engages with the institutionalization, pathologization, and persecution of disabled [End Page 179] people in the first half of the twentieth century in order to demonstrate how this difficult history has been dealt with (or ignored) since. Dagmar Herzog's article, "From the Disability Murder Archive: Ernst Klee's Confrontation of the Public with Nazism's First Genocide," excels at demonstrating how traumatic past events have informed ableist attitudes throughout the twentieth century. Her article discusses the work of the journalist and disability activist Klee who, in the 1970s and 80s, uncovered extant documentation of the Nazi's eugenics program aimed at the annihilation of disabled persons, commonly referred to as the T4 program. The article emphasizes Klee's important work Euthanasie im NS-Staat: Die Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens for confronting the public with the Nazis' widespread euthanasia program, even though the work was dismissed by academics in its own time. Tracing Klee's research process and the narrative structure he builds around the case files he discovered, Herzog reevaluates Klee's work as an important contribution to reckoning with the past in disability activism and disability studies. The third section, "Intersections and Diversity: The Lens of Culture," includes articles by German studies scholars focused on close readings of a variety of very different texts that provide mostly intersectional approaches to disability. Waltraud Maierhofer's reading of Alissa Walter's novel about the blind Maria Theresa Paradies, entitled Am Anfang war die Nachtmusik (1992), exemplifies this. The novel is...