Unfolding Transatlantic Eugenics in Disability Scholarship

Articles

“[L]ess than accessible and seriously disheartening”: Unfolding Transatlantic Eugenics in Disability Scholarship

Gesine Wegner

Abstract As a discussion between American historian Ruth Schwartz Conan and Disabil- ity Studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson illustrates, reaching consensus on what a term like eugenics means and how it might be used accurately in contemporary discourse proves to be highly difficult. This article shows that Disabil- ity Studies methodologies enforce a reassessment of the United States’ eugenic past, and, further, that by looking at the ‘long arm’ of this eugenic ideology, Dis- ability Studies has provided ample ground for the reconsideration of eugenic discourses of normalization and their influence on biopolitical questions of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Looking at these discourses through a Literary Studies lens, I aim to stress the importance of creative nonfiction within Disability Studies writing. Disability Studies scholars challenge academic forms of knowledge production through unconventional aesthetics and change how questions of eugenics (past and present) are being addressed in the United States and beyond.

1 Introduction

From heated discussions about genetic diagnosis and prenatal screening to questions of assisted suicide and life support: whenev- er eugenics are brought into the equation, the term most frequently functions as a means of accusation, subsequently leading to debates about the appropriateness of the word for current bioethical discussions. In what contexts is it justified to call a practice eugenic, and, more importantly, how do we define the term in the first place? These fundamental questions characterize an online debate about the past and present of eugenics held by Disability Studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and historian Ruth Schwartz Cowan (Cowan and Garland-Thomson). As a specialist in the History of Science, Technol- ogy, and Medicine, Cowan defines eugenics as a social movement of

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1 Developments made the past, which gained worldwide popularity during the first half of in the medical sciences include practices of genetic the twentieth century. In line with her book Heredity and Hope: The engineering, prenatal test- Case for Genetic Screening (2008), Cowan moves on to emphasize the ing, and assisted suicide— to name just some of divide between “negative eugenics” and “positive eugenics” that has the issues that are also historically been used by policymakers to differentiate between dif- prominently discussed in public media. Less often ferent eugenic practices (Bland and Hall 219). While negative eugenics addressed in public dis- seek to reduce certain parts of the population through measures such as course are the implications for disabled lives that arise immigration restriction, institutionalization, sterilization, and ethnic from the development of cleansing, the term positive eugenics refers to discourses and measures stem cell treatments and the adoption of regenera- of normalization that seek to supposedly optimize the genetic progress tive medicine. According of a population. In light of current biopolitical discussions that arise to a 2008 article by Shelley Tremain, some of the recent from far-reaching developments made in the medical sciences (see and most contentious Kuczewski 36-44; Tremain 102; Goering 126-29; Shildrick, “Deciding” 1 discursive objects within the discussion of these 212), it seems striking that Cowan explicitly accuses practices of ‘nega- very different practices are tive eugenics’ of having “give[n] eugenics a bad name” (Cowan and “quality of life,” “end of life,” “normalcy,” “enhancement,” Garland-Thomson). By not simply condemning these practices but by and “futility” (102). Mark purposefully alleging that they have brought eugenics into disrepute, Kuczewski claims that scholars of bioethics focus Cowan legitimizes practices of “positive eugenics.” While advocates of too much on debates of eugenics in the twentieth century certainly tried to enforce their ideas whether and when disabled people should be allowed through the implementation of very different practices that cannot and or assisted to die instead should not easily be equated, all of these practices—positive and nega- of considering disabled life as it is lived (36). Indeed, tive eugenics—were rooted in a strictly evaluative logic and the idea of conflicts between bioethi- human selection. Early twentieth-century publications such as Caleb cists and disability theorists often arise over the permis- William Saleeby’s Parenthood and Race Culture: An Outline of Eugenics sibility of euthanasia and (1909) draw attention to the fact that, from its early stages, positive and physician-assisted suicide. Far from merely criticizing negative eugenics were understood to be different sides of the same new medical treatment, coin, following the same principle: “one [positive eugenics] would seek Disability Studies scholars have also pointed out a to encourage the parenthood of the worthy, the other [negative eugen- reluctance to use medical ics] to discourage the parenthood of the unworthy” (172). Eugenics in developments in the treatment of disabled people. its entirety has always had, as Philippa Levine and Alison Bashford Abortion, for example, is assert, “an evaluative logic to its core. Some human life was of more frequently justified on the grounds of disability while value—to the state, the nation, the race, the future generations—than treatment of medically other human life” (3-4). In reducing her analysis to concentrate merely correctable conditions can be denied on grounds of a on the differences between negative and positive eugenics, Cowan ne- fetus’s disability, e. g., in the glects to acknowledge the shared politics of normalization that under- case of Down syndrome. lie both types of practices as well as their mutual goal of regulating This case, as brought for- 2 ward by Margrit Shildrick, is populations. only exemplary of the ways in which biomedical prac- In conversation with Cowan, Literary and Cultural Studies scholar tice has come to operate Rosemarie Garland-Thomson sheds light on this problematic divide as against the disabled body (Shildrick, “Deciding” 212). she ultimately uncouples eugenics from its historical usage related to the 2 Due to its early devel- Nazis. In contrast to her counterpart, she understands eugenics more opments in prenatal care, France is used by Cowan broadly as a “way of shaping human communities or shaping human as a desirable example of populations” (Cowan and Garland-Thomson). In redefining eugenics as positive eugenics. This choice seems at least a specific, culturally determined mode of thinking about community, surprising, considering Garland-Thomson destabilizes Francis Galton’s original understanding France’s history as the first of eugenics as “the science of improving the human stock through selec-

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3 tive breeding” (Galton 24-25). Instead of understanding eugenics as a rational, semi-scientific mode of thinking about different bodies, a relic of the past, Garland-Thomson refers to eugenics as a complex biopolitical regime. She rejects the claim that eugenic ideas and practices can only be considered as phenomena of the past:

Although eugenics itself—the word, as you well know and have pointed out—comes from a very specific history within the development of medicine and science, in some sense what we might call eugenics—that is to say the shaping of human communities—has been practiced in lots of different ways over the course of history. (Cowan and Garland-Thomson)

While the scientific character of eugenics has long been discredited, it is precisely this discrediting of eugenics after the Holocaust that has led scholars of American Studies and other fields to miss the continuous country where eugenic 4 violence against disabled impact of eugenic ideology on American and other modernities. For people took place (Mitchell and Snyder, “The Eugenic Garland-Thomson, eugenic thought and its prevalence in contemporary Atlantic” 852). Indeed, thinking raises the question: whom do we talk about when we concep- “educational techniques” from France would be tualize the “human” and its place in different socio-cultural settings, directly exported to the past and present? The notable tension and disagreement between Gar- United States to treat so called “idiocy” (854). As land-Thomson and Cowan—and by extension between Disability Stud- this article will further re- ies and traditional research in History—are emblematic for discussions veal, when looking at these countries and their eugenic about eugenics, which frequently seem to generate more questions than histories in isolation, one they are able to answer. Failing to find a shared language with which does not only risk missing the importance of their to define eugenics, their discussion further illustrates that, thus far, no transatlantic engagement consensus can be found regarding a definition of “eugenics” and how in eugenics but might also overlook parts of today’s the term relates to contemporary discussions in bioethics. Reaching far critical scholarship on beyond questions of mere terminology, such discussions make differenc- eugenics that has developed within the context of es between the embodied epistemologies of Disability Studies, on the Transatlantic Studies. one hand, and the seemingly disembodied epistemologies of traditional 3 In the North American context, it is im- studies in History, on the other hand, blatantly clear. Last but not least, portant to note that even Cowan and Garland-Thomson’s eager debate as well as the scholarly before British scientist Francis Galton coined the responses to it by Rachel Adams, Paul A. Lombardo, Marisa Miranda, term “eugenics” in 1883, and Gustavo Vallejo reveal what it means to engage in conversations eugenic ideas circulated in North America, arising about eugenics and its continuing presence in contemporary culture: it through eugenic family frequently requires scholars to perform both intellectual and emotional studies such as Richard L. Dugdale’s 1877 The Jukes labor. This holds particularly true for those who might inevitably come (cf. Eugenics Archives). to justify their own existence as scholars and people with disabilities For further information, 5 please also see the “Intro- within these controversial debates. duction” to this special In the following, this article sets out to show that Disability Studies issue. 4 For further informa- methodologies enforce a critical reassessment of the United States’ eu- tion, please see the genic past. And further, looking at this “long arm” of eugenic ideology “Introduction” to this special issue. (Doyle 520), Disability Studies has provided ample ground for the re- 5 See also Johnson, consideration of eugenic discourses of normalization and their influence who offers a critical and yet highly personal reflec- on biopolitical questions in the late twentieth and twenty-first century. tion on a previous debate Looking at these discourses through a Literary Studies lens, I aim to between Johnson and stress the importance of creative nonfiction within Disability Studies philosopher Peter Singer.

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writing. I argue that Disability Studies scholars challenge academic forms of knowledge production through unconventional aesthetics and have thus changed how questions of eugenics (past and present) are being addressed in the United States and beyond. Perhaps most importantly, Disability Studies draws attention to the crucial role that the United States played within the eugenics movement of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and reveals the continuing hold that this history has on biopolitical practices up to and including today. I will start off by looking at how Disability Studies’ methodology and the field’s exploration of the transatlantic history of disability have brought about a rethinking of the history of eugenics and its implications for modern discourses of the non-normative body. Then, I will analyze some of the writing that has been produced by U.S.-American disability scholars and activists on “Aktion T4,” a program of systematic murder that the Nazis carried out on disabled adults from 1940 to 1941. I propose that, through their transatlantic engagement with the history of the T4 program and of the commemorative culture surrounding it, American scholars and writers have come to produce knowledge that derives directly from the affective subjectivity of their works’ narrators.

2 The Ideology of Ability and the Gain of Disability (Studies)

While Rosemarie Garland-Thomson urges us to question past and

6 This truism has present conceptualizations of the human, fellow Disability Studies schol- recently been challenged ar Tobin Siebers encourages us to rethink future visions of the human by Jasbir K. Puar. In Right to Maim, Puar argues celebrated in Western culture. If history reveals one inescapable truth that, depending on our about human existence, Siebers asserts, then it is the fact that human circumstances, we will not all be disabled. In fact, beings and the world they inhabit are fragile (“Complex Embodiment” the risk of death precedes 278-79). Visions of a future in which we triumph over illness and disabil- the chances of becoming disabled for some ity indeed seem to contradict one of the prevalent lessons that history marginalized groups. teaches us about the unpredictability of natural catastrophes, epidemics, Puar’s argument provides a crucial intervention in and mass injuries afflicted by human hands, as well as about their conse- dominant Disability Stud- quences. Yet even without such large-scale events, all humans, as Susan ies discourses and urges the field to consider some Sontag aptly reminds us, hold “dual citizenship” in what she calls “the of the privileged position- kingdom of the well and […] the kingdom of the sick” (3), a finding that alities that have shaped said discourses. At the also holds true to our experiences of disability. One central truism of same time, pointing out Disability Studies scholarship has thus been the acknowledgment that, the given possibilities of a person becoming disabled if we are lucky to live long enough, each one of us will become disabled remains important as such at some point in life (cf. Garland-Thomson, “Integrating Disability” 5; a reminder stresses the Siebers, “Disability in Theory” 176; Brueggemann, “Disability Studies” fluidity of disability. 6 7 The tendency to ne- 284; Bolt, “Introduction” 1). In line with this logic, we can observe that glect disability as object of American culture indeed abounds with experiences of disability—a fact critical analysis in Cultural 7 Studies is, as David Bolt that has often been overlooked in American Studies. According to the points out, a far-reaching academic phenomenon latest census, Americans with disabilities make up over 56 million people and by no means distinct and thus present the largest minority group in the United States (Brault to American Studies (2). 4). In light of these numbers, one of the most crucial tasks of Disability

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Studies has been to move beyond an imperative to cure non-normative bodies and to rethink disability in its most simple definition as part of human life. Furthermore, Disability Studies critiques common under- standings of disability as loss, shedding light on the gain or advantages that people with disabilities bring to society (Garland-Thomson, “My Orphan Disease”). In stark contrast to medicalized and psychologized notions of disability and illness, Disability Studies relocates disability to social, cultural, economic, and political realms (Goodley 84). Instead of promoting the mere tolerance or acceptance of bodily differences, the interdisciplinary field calls for an appreciation of disability as a positive identity category, an embodied experience that also enriches scholarly practices (Bolt, “Enabling the Classroom” 562). I propose that this very premise of Disability Studies—to not think of disability in terms of loss but in terms of gain—challenges the eugenic mode of thought at its very core. By moving its primary focus away from the embodied materiality of impairment to the socio-historical construction of the non-normative body, Disability Studies further reverses some of the underlying assumptions with which eugenics operate. It is not the body that needs to be optimized to shape a desirable future for the individual and society, but the social environment—both physical and attitudinal—that needs to be changed to accommodate human variation. In replacing the medical model with social-model approaches to disability, culture has been revealed to be the driving force in how we understand physical differences. Such recognition forces us to reconsider the naturalizing effects with which medical sciences have talked and continue to talk about the body and experiences of disability—falsely equating the latter with notions of suffering and pain. By exposing American culture’s general dependence on an “ideology of ability” (Siebers, Disability Theory 7), Disability Studies has revealed the close and frequently dangerous entanglement of Western notions of modernity with utopian fantasies of a society in which disabled bodies no longer exist (Mitchell and Snyder, “The Eugenic Atlantic” 851). Trans- gressing national borders, the improvement of the human body seems to function as one of the most long-lasting, common denominators of ne- gotiations of utopia in Anglophone literature (Parrinder 67). While clas- 8 In one of his lectures at the Collège de France, sics of American literature such as Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Michel Foucault proposed Time (1976) have imagined a future world which values different gen- that utopia “is a place where I will have a body ders, ethnicities, and sexual orientations, disability remains a feature of without body” (229). human variation that—even long after the peak of eugenics—has been Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell use this notion of eliminated within utopian visions of the future (Kafer 221). Ever since a “world without bodies” the 1930s, eugenic writing in American popular culture, in line with the as a title for their 2001 eugenic literature of its time, has increasingly contemplated visions of “a documentary, in which 8 they effectively illustrate world without bodies” (Troschitz 52-53). In an attempt to steer attention the fatal consequences of such thinking for the lives away from present insecurities, such visions have frequently been used to of thousands of disabled create illusions of a secure, predictable future (Cogdell 203). In the last people during the exis- 15 years, Disability Studies scholars, among them most prominently lit- tence of the Third Reich.

Amst 64.2 (2019): 189-214 193 Gesine Wegner erary scholars such as Rosemarie Garland-Thomson and David Mitch- ell and Sharon Snyder, have put considerable effort into shedding light on the ubiquity of eugenic assumptions in contemporary U.S. culture. Tracing the history of eugenics, Mitchell and Snyder have revealed that, though different in shape and intensity, contemporary discourses of the non-normative body are based on eugenic ideas and their persistence within American culture since the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (“The Eugenic Atlantic” 844-47; Biopolitics 125-27). According to Christina Cogdell, one of the reasons for the early popularity of eugenics in the United States was the allure of control, both over evolutionary progress and over the future (5). Yet far from being disenchanted, the appeal of control continues to generate what Garland-Thomson calls a “cultural logic of euthanasia” (“The Cultural Logic” 779), producing certainly different, yet complementary, sets of practices that American culture directs at disability. These two sets of practices are based on the assumption that disability is either something that can be overcome or something that takes away all quality of life. Far from merely questioning or criticizing practices of assisted suicide, Gar- land-Thomson uses the notion of a “cultural logic of euthanasia” as an umbrella term to denote a general “mode of thought manifest in particular notions of choice, control, happiness, and suffering” (“The Cultural Logic” 779). In an effort to distinguish contemporary practices such as selective abortion from eugenics’ historical roots, scholars in other fields have, in the meantime, followed very different directions. In line with neoliberal consumer culture, philosopher Nicholas Agar suggests thinking of contemporary practices as “liberal eugenics” and emphasizes the individual choice that modern medicine grants its patients through reproductive technologies (148-49). While feminist Disability Studies scholars like Garland-Thomson by no means speak against women’s reproductive freedoms and the importance of choice, the field draws attention to the ideology of ability that culturally shapes such decision- making processes, locating them outside the realm of the individual. As Margrit Shildrick demonstrates in her 1997 book Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)Ethics, Disability Stud- ies is able to enrich discourses of pro-choice feminism, as it stages important interventions with regard to the movement’s frequently ableist undertones (25). Such a critical Disability Studies questions the meaning of core American ideas such as “independence” and “freedom” in order to not only highlight the socio-cultural construction of disability but to further disclose the ableist fictions that underlie American culture. While disability is still predominantly seen as a medical matter in American culture (Brueggemann, “Disability Studies” 283), ability can be attributed to an almost endless list consisting of talents, intelligence, and physical strength, which can, in turn, be related to ideas of a human essence. Such “ideology of ability” (Siebers, Disability Theory 7) not only enforces

194 Amst 64.2 (2019): 189-214 “[L]ess than accessible and seriously disheartening” a clear preference for able-bodiedness but places ability as the baseline by which individuals become intelligible as human beings. That some disabled bodies are imagined in American culture as redeemable while others are considered disposable reveals, as Tobin Siebers remarks, “the fact that we are always dreaming about it [ability] but rarely thinking critically about why and how we are dreaming” (Disability Theory 9). Put differently, Disability Studies invites us to critically reflect on how we define suffering and visions of a supposedly better future. Looking at the broader historical developments of the last century, we can detect a definite shift from the state interventions practiced as part of negative eugenics in the twentieth century to a belief in self- surveillance and self-quantification that dominates American culture at the beginning of the twenty-first century. At the current moment, ideas ranging from the control of nutrition, to tracking of physical exer- cise and sleep, to health check-ups and screenings are indicative of the United States’ ever-growing “imperative for healthy living” (Nettleton 1). Enforced through new technologies, this “imperative for healthy living” follows the same principles of controlling the future through the control of one’s body that early eugenics advertised in contexts of both 9 personal and “race hygiene.” During the 1934 Chicago World’s Fair, for instance, visitors would learn the essentials about their own bodies primarily to be made aware of “the relation of those bodies to the greater body politic” (qtd. in Cogdell 87). To put it differently, the lessons of both self-enhancement and the enhancement of populations are historically deeply intertwined and part of a more extensive network that developed across transatlantic borders. World’s Fair committee mem- bers would travel to Germany to purchase copies of exhibits such as the Transparent Man. First at display at the Deutsche Hygiene Museum in Dresden, the Transparent Man stood on a raised podium at the center of the World’s Fair to teach visitors about the alleged standards of the human body (Cogdell 87). Today, complemented by a Transparent Woman as its counterpart, the display continues to be a popular exhibit in Ger- man and American museums. While such displays indeed provide valuable knowledge of the body, they continue to enforce standardized ideas of the body as non-disabled and young. However, rather than pointing 9 The extent to which economic factors are uti- fingers at individual institutions, the popularity of the Transparent Man lized by public discourses and its history serves to illustrate the extent to which contemporary no- about the body are indeed frightening. Closely tions of the human depend upon the normalizing discourses developed resembling the narrative throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. strategies of the 1920s and 1930s, people with non-normative bodies, 3 Disability as Default Category for Human Intelligibility particularly those deemed obese, are frequently shamed for their failure to While we have come to understand categories of race and gender as self-enhance and blamed for the costs that derive culturally constructed, disability continues to be used, as David Mitch- from such failure for ell and Sharon Snyder remark, as a “default category of ‘real’ human society (Kim & Basu; Tsai incapacity” (“The Eugenic Atlantic” 851). In a culture that idolizes physi- et al.; Leonhard).

Amst 64.2 (2019): 189-214 195 Gesine Wegner cal strength, beauty, and intelligence, disability is to be avoided or fixed, or, as a reminder of human vulnerability, comes to signify the “Other” that constitutes dominant culture. While disability shares this position with other marginalized identity categories (Brueggemann, “Disabil- ity Studies” 283), Lennard Davis cautions us to note that disability is a shifting notion of identity that distinguishes itself from other identity categories in that it has not developed “a certain rigidity in definition” (35). For Davis, disabled people are the ultimate intersectional subject, a universal image and important modality through which we can understand processes of exclusion and resistance. Indeed, the idea of biologically inferior bodies not only preceded the belief in a racialized and therefore inferior body but gave justification to such a racialization in the first place (Ervelles 40; Mitchell and Snyder, “The Eugenic Atlantic” 847). As Jasbir Puar argues in The Right to Maim, disability has been used to police and institutionalize racialized bodies from the time of slavery to the current prison-industrial complex (38). Looking back at the racist past of the United States and Canada, such markers of disability are indeed omnipresent. In 1920s Canada, state officials like Helen MacMurchy argued for stricter immigration laws on the basis of immigrants’ mental health: “The number of recent immigrants that drift into institutions for the neuropathic, the feeble-minded and the insane is very great” (qtd. in Strange and Stephen 529). Questioning the suitability of such immigrants for the nation, MacMurchy conceals her demand for stricter, clearly racialized immigration policies by using the language of disability. She emphasizes a supposedly inherent tendency of these immigrants to become “feebleminded” and thus marks these groups’ bodies as biologically inferior. In doing so, disability becomes once more naturalized. On the one hand, MacMurchy uses these naturalized categories of mental disability to socially construct certain immigrants as the ultimate “Other.” On the other hand, the report fails to consider the conditions that disable these immigrants in the first place and that might indeed have caused some immigrants to acquire a mental or physical impairment. As becomes evident in reading this account, a dominant ideology of ability is here clearly used to legitimize the actions of a racist system. In many ways, white culture did not only project, as Mitchell and Snyder argue, its own “prehistory” and a lack of modernity onto people of color through using disability (“The Eugenic Atlantic” 848), but also conflated disability with a pre-modern state to further enforce the il- lusion of a non-disabled future for Western societies. As the previous account illustrates, the conception and construction of racial differences often relied on mental and psychological diagnoses. Author of The Al- most: A Study of the Feeble-Minded (1920), Helen MacMurchy indeed served as Canada’s first official “inspector of the feeble-minded” (Strange and Stephen 527). Immigration issues being one of MacMurchy’s con- cerns, the title of her position as “inspector of the feeble-minded” is

196 Amst 64.2 (2019): 189-214 “[L]ess than accessible and seriously disheartening” more than striking. The title reveals that not only have “denominations of bodily difference […] been incorporated into racial and other hierarchies” (Quayson 176), but that notions of disability were used as the basic terminology on which racial hierarchies were built, justified, and, to certain extents, concealed. It is important to note that, as Nirmala Erevelles reminds us in Disability and Difference in Global Contexts, “the conceptualization of black subjectivity as impaired subjectivity is neither accidental nor should it be conceived of as merely metaphorical” (40). Instead of being metaphorical, Black bodies become disabled bodies in specific moments in history. In his analysis of the history of Ellis Island, Jay Dolmage emphasizes the role that categories of disability played in the alienation of racial groups and individuals in the United States. As in Canada, “feeblemindedness” and “regression” became the dominant notions used by U.S. officials in their endeavor to restrict -im 10 migration. In turn, people with disabilities became increasingly and continuously stigmatized through processes of racial selection: “[a]t Ellis Island, the categories of defect and disability that adhere today were strongly grounded if not created, as was the diagnostic gaze that allowed for the nebulous application of the stigma of disability as we know it today” (Dolmage 26). In the context of U.S.-American slavery, categories such as “dysaesthesia aethiopica” and “negritude” were used to “diagnose” laziness and a mild form of leprosy in Black people (Stuckey). That disability appears to be a common denominator in these different historical accounts points to a key conflation of ableism with nation-building processes, something that Mitchell and Snyder—with a detour to Puar’s important notion of “homonationalism”—have called “ablenationalism” (Biopolitics 113). While the history of white disabled people certainly differs from the histories of the various (disabled and non-disabled) groups of Color who immigrated to or were forcefully brought to the United States, their shared social marginality occurs through references to the disabled body as that which automatically dis- qualifies individuals from participation in society (Mitchell and Snyder, “The Eugenic Atlantic” 851). In this process, a range of very different bodies were turned into undesirable “Others.” Bodily traits and thus the language of disability served as a primary tool for making individuals or entire groups unintelligible as human beings. 10 Furthermore, As one of the master tropes of eugenic endeavors, “feebleminded- People of Color with a mental disability would ness” not only came to produce racialized bodies but was also used to rarely receive a proper portray certain classed, gendered, and sexualized bodies as useless or psychiatric diagnosis and were thus provided with even harmful to the future of the nation. In 1907, Indiana was the first less adequate treatment state to adopt sterilization laws as a central measure against the “menace than white patients. This medical malpractice is of feeble-mindedness” (Bashford and Levine 18). In addition to its many also known as “colonial disabled victims, such legislation allowed for the forceful sterilization of psychiatry,” a racial hier- archy that located people poor people based on their extent of “dependency” and for the steriliza- of color at the bottom and tion of women considered too promiscuous (Cohen 6). Records show determined diagnosis and that by the late 1920s, forced female sterilization indeed surpassed the treatment (Stuckey).

Amst 64.2 (2019): 189-214 197 Gesine Wegner number of coercive sterilizations practiced on men (Largent 21). Next to female promiscuity, homosexuality among women and men was treated by sterilization under the pretext of treating mental disability. In 1953, Karl Bowman and Bernice Engle argued in the Journal of Social Hygiene for the “therapeutic castration” of gay men, explicitly referencing the success of such practices in a number of European countries, among them the Netherlands and Switzerland (Largent 21). Ongoing practices of conversion therapy in the United States, advertised by studies that continued to be conducted by some high-ranking psychiatrists until the beginning of the twenty-first century (Ritter), indicate the dangerous effects that eugenics have had on contemporary “scientific” findings. The previous accounts are exemplary for the enactment of sterilization laws across thirty-two states of the United States, continuing well into the second half of the twentieth century and leaving more than 60,000 people, many of them women of color, unwillingly sterilized (Lewy 265-67; Schweitzer 16). The public support of such measures shows how eugenic ideology had spread far beyond the realm of academia and scientific discussions. Familiarized with eugenics through local lectures, many Women Clubs across the United States would not only discuss the need for marriage laws and baby contests but also openly considered passing resolutions in favor of forceful sterilization (Cogdell 101). Far from being only the work of individual scientists, reformers, and politi- cians, eugenic ideas were infused within all areas of white middle-class culture. Sterilization laws were supported by universities like Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Princeton; financial support came from institutions such as the Rockefeller Foundation and influential industrialists such as Andrew Carnegie, who invested a total of 12 million dollars in the cause of eugenics (Schweitzer 15-16). What the accounts of enforced sterilization under the pretext of treating mental disability and the popularity of these practices illustrate is that, for the general (white) public, notions of disability as they relate to medical diagnoses were able to gloss over the racial and gendered implications of these practices.

4 Disability as Transnational Modality

Thinking about eugenics, we can understand disability as a modality that transgresses national borders. Disability served as a primary catalyst for international collaboration within a space that Mitchell and Snyder, borrowing from Paul Gilroy’s concept of the Black Atlantic, have called the “Eugenic Atlantic.” On the one hand, modern nations decided in- dividually on measures such as institutionalization and sterilization to dispatch their disabled and deviant populations. On the other hand, the ideas for such measures derived from a complex web of supposedly scientific as well as popular discourses that spun itself across the Atlantic Ocean. Within this Eugenic Atlantic, eugenicists in the United States belonged to the strongest foreign supporters of Nazi race policies (Kühl

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37). In turn, the early enforcement of eugenic practices in the United States, most specifically its sterilization laws, served as a blueprint for the development of race policies in the Third Reich (38). The Nazis’ admiration for American eugenicists led doctors of the Third Reich to award a doctorate to American sociologist Harry H. Laughlin in an effort to honor his work in the development of sterilization laws and coercive institutionalization policies in the United States (Lifton 40). In reverse, traces can be found that illustrate American eugenicists’ admiration of Nazi policies. Following the developments of eugenic measures in Ger- many with rapt attention, Joseph S. DeJarnette, member of the Virginia sterilization movement, most notoriously exclaimed: “[t]he Germans are beating us at our own game” (qtd. in Kühl 37). As previously demonstrated for eugenic discourses within the United States, the transatlantic exchange of eugenic ideas and practices was by no means restricted to discussions among scientists, but also took place within the realms of popular culture. Films like the German propaganda movie Erbkrank (Herbert Gerdes, 1936; The Hereditary Defective) traveled across the At- lantic and were used to inform Americans about the need to sterilize “the feebleminded.” In Schloss Hartheim, one of the sites where Nazis mur- 11 The Nazis made use of various popular media, dered thousands of disabled people, visitors will come across an Ameri- ranging from exhibitions, can photograph propagating the eugenic ideas of its time (Brueggemann, to films, newspaper, and 11 radio, to, as Reichsmi “Hartheim”). Indeed, traces of German-American cultural exchange nister Joseph Goebbels on eugenics can be found to have existed well into the 1930s and 1940s. demanded, “hammer [the eugenic idea] into the In the late 1930s, Secretary of the American Eugenics Society Leon F. head of every single per- Whitney happily recorded a steady increase in public interest in eugen- son” (Böhm 54; trans. We- gner). Particularly among ics. He saw the sustained popularity of eugenics in the United States as children, songs and poems resulting directly from the in-depth coverage by American newspapers such as “Dein Erbgut hast 12 du von deinen Vätern” of Hitler’s extensive sterilization program (Kühl 53). Some contempo- (your genetic inheritance rary scholars, among them biologists working in embryology, consider derives from your fathers) would be used to playfully the closing of the Eugenics Record Office in 1939 and the difficulties teach eugenic ideas from a experienced by some eugenicists around this time as signs of a rather very early age (56). 12 Only a few months rapid end to eugenics in the United States (Farber 244). Yet as the previ- after Hitler’s inauguration, ously quoted numbers of sterilization in the United States have shown, the Nazi government launched its strict steril- certain eugenic measures did in fact increase during this specific period. ization law, “Gesetz zur From the 1940s onward, journalist and popular radio host William L. Verhütung Erbkranken Nachwuchses” (Law for Shirer would inform the public about the Nazis’ “fantastic ‘mercy kill- the Prevention of Geneti- ings’” on several occasions, most notably in his 1941 best-selling book The cally Diseased Offspring). Between 1933 and 1945, Berlin Diary (Noack 433). The Berlin Diary was met with much interest by approximately 400,000 newspapers and magazines in the United States, yet most of the reviews people were forcefully sterilized in the Third paid little or no attention to the institutional murders it mentioned. This Reich. On June 26, 1935, lack of critical response reveals the maintenance of eugenic thinking in the law was expanded to also allow for coercive the United States even after the beginning of the war. As the work of abortions. As a result, an sociologist Stefan Kühl demonstrates, the 1930s can be viewed as a time estimated 30,000 abortions took place without in which U.S. eugenics underwent a process of transformation, from the the consent or knowledge closing of institutions like the Eugenics Record Office to a widespread of the women involved diffusion of eugenic ideology into other scientific fields, such as popula- (Böhm 47).

Amst 64.2 (2019): 189-214 199 Gesine Wegner tion science and psychiatry (82-83). On the basis of their analysis of edi- torials published in the New England Journal of Medicine and the Journal of the American Medical Association from 1930 to 1945, André N. Sofair and Lauris C. Kaldjian conclude that the alliance between the Ameri- can medical profession and the international eugenics movement was far from short-lived (312). While the relocation of eugenic authority onto population science and psychiatry was based on the opposition to the totalitarian Nazi regime and its affiliation with eugenics, an extensive critique of Nazi eugenics failed to materialize (Mehler 289). By adopting a catalog of ‘defective’ conditions, transatlantic eugenics, whether dis- guised by other supposedly scientific practices or operating in the open, was characterized by its shared campaign of biopolitical targeting, at- tempting to permanently eliminate specific bodily differences in Europe and North America (Mitchell and Snyder, “The Eugenic Atlantic” 845). Disability thus became a shared target as well as a common modality through which transatlantic eugenics operated. American sterilization laws and their adoption by Nazi Germany vividly illustrate that eugenic ideas were long prevalent within Ameri- can society and continued to shape actions well after the end of World War II. The lively exchanges between German and American eugenicists far into the 1940s reveal that even between countries that were active military enemies at the time, scientific and cultural agreement about the harm caused by disabled people to the human cause continued to blossom as a unifying ideological formation (“The Eugenic Atlantic” 846). Even after the outbreak of the war, famous American eugenicists such as Lothrop Stoddard visited Germany and met with high-ranking German officials such as Heinrich Himmler, Joachim Ribbentrop, and even Adolf Hitler himself (Kühl 61). Perhaps more than anything else, Hitler’s personal correspondence with American eugenicists reveals the importance that these eugenicists held for the propagation of race policies in the Third Reich (86). In turn, the first-hand information that -eu genicists, as well as journalists like Shirer, carried home from their visits to Germany shaped the image of Nazi race policies in the United States. This image stood in direct contrast to the negative reports brought by Germans coming to the United States to seek refuge from the cruel and destructive measures of Nazi policy (63). Such discrepancies in report- ing and the clear privileging of medical views highlight the extent to which disabled people were effectively held back from participating in and shaping discourses on their own bodies. Resisting these exclusionary practices, scholarship generated in Dis- ability Studies teaches us the value of the diverse perspectives those targeted by eugenics bring to the table. Yet it is precisely these perspectives, as Emmeline Burdett reminds us, which have too often fallen into oblivion—frequently in an attempt to hold on to scientific standards that do not allow the personal and the professional to mix (45-46). Histori- cally, knowledge about illness and disability has been divided into two

200 Amst 64.2 (2019): 189-214 “[L]ess than accessible and seriously disheartening” categories, the subjective on the one hand and the objective on the other hand. Individuals’ qualitative perceptions have clashed and quarreled with medical data and ostensibly more accurate observations about their bodies (Morris 39). All too often, they have been silenced and kept from the public and political realms. Disability Studies is based on the contention that the exclusion of disabled people, and thus their social location, creates “identities and perspectives, embodiments and feelings, histories and experiences […] that offer valuable knowledge about the powerful ideologies that seem to enclose us [disabled people]” (Siebers, “Complex Embodi- ment” 279). In this vein, Disability Studies questions and problematizes how knowledge about disability and illness is gathered and circulated. This profound reassessment vanguarded by Disability Studies also holds true for the scholarship on eugenics pioneered in this field. As will be shown in the following sections of this paper, research on eugenics in Disability Studies often oscillates between the personal and the professional. Acknowledging the function of disability as a transnational modality, Disability Studies scholarship has become increasingly international in its efforts to reconstruct and retell disability history. Since the early 2000s, scholars from the United States have been working closely with German Disability Studies scholars such as There- sia Degener, Anne Waldschmidt, Heike Raab, Rebecca Maskos, and Swantje Köbsell. Such transatlantic cooperation is indeed necessary to make knowledge available and accessible across the Atlantic. After all, research on eugenic history through a disability lens is frequently im- peded by issues of inaccessibility, most profoundly by a lack of physical access to specific historical sites and material. Furthermore, much of the German literature on eugenics has not yet been translated into English, creating additional linguistic barriers. Collaboration between German and American scholars has thus been crucial for the success of research in both countries. Such collaboration materializes not only in traditional academic output (e. g., the Disability Studies Quarterly published a special section on Disability Studies in German-speaking countries in 2006), but also takes on more creative forms, as evidenced by documentaries such as Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell’s A World without Bod- ies, which I will return to shortly. What these various types of German- American collaboration demonstrate is that research on non-normative bodies and eugenics requires scholars to look beyond national borders. Due to disability’s function as a transnational modality, such collabora- tive approaches are required to truly disentangle the intricate web that developed within the Eugenic Atlantic.

5 Reading and Writing T4

As a result of transatlantic scholarship on eugenics within Disabil- ity Studies, German-American research on T4 has multiplied since the early 2000s. The term “T4” refers to the program of systematic murder

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that was carried out on disabled adults in the German Reich between 1940-1941. The central planning staff of the program was located at the titular Tiergartenstraße 4 (T4) in Berlin (Böhm 59). Up to the official end of the so-called “euthanasia” campaign in August of 1941, 70,273 people were murdered (Böhm 101). The released personnel and parts of the killing technology were directly relocated to the East. Carried out in six psychiatric clinics and nursing homes in Brandenburg / Havel, Bernburg, Hartheim / Linz, Pirna-Sonnenstein, Grafeneck, and Ha damar, the T4 murders served as personal, conceptual, and institutional bases for the mass killings that later took place in the extermination camps (Böhm 111). In the meantime, the mass murder of disabled adults in institutions through indirect methods of killing (e. g., starving, over- or under-medication) and the “euthanasia” program for children continued. During this phase of “wild euthanasia,” approximately 200,000 more people were killed before the end of the war (Hechler). As the most drastic and fatal consequence of ableism, the T4 program is discussed in an impressive number of scholarly articles, book chapters, documentaries, and online blogs produced within Disability Studies. Disability Studies writing on T4 frequently challenges academic forms of knowledge production by utilizing unusual aesthetic forms and different media as well as by mixing personal and professional, non- fictional and fictional, and non-biographical and biographical forms of writing. In doing so, Disability Studies writing on T4 has changed how questions of eugenics are being addressed in North America and 13 In 2002, a group beyond. Transatlantic Disability Studies scholarship on T4 has gener- of 17 scholars from the United States, Canada, ated a new awareness of the systematic arrangement of the T4 murders and Australia—among and their profound role within the enforcement of further mass killings them Brueggemann, Garland-Thomson, Mitch- during the Holocaust (Fries, “The Nazis’ First Victims”). Further, such ell, and Snyder—took part writing frequently challenges the singularity of these mass killings by in a summer-long research journey to study the his- revealing the prevalence and transnational acceptance of eugenic knowl- tory of the T4 program. edge and practices at the time. In the context of this scholarship, the 14 Published in 1997, Fries’s Staring Back: The sites where the T4 program was carried out serve not only as a reminder Disability Experience of past horrors but as a shared point of departure, a communal space of from the Inside Out is the first anthology of texts remembrance from which transatlantic cooperation derives. about disability written Repeated visits by American disability scholars to various T4 sites by disabled authors in the United States. speak to the success of such cooperation, including research excursions 15 I would like to thank by Brenda Jo Brueggemann, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and Geor- Kenny Fries for providing this information. His writ- gina Kleege to Schloss Hartheim (Brueggemann, “Hartheim”) and vis- ing (including memoirs, its by David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder, who have organized further poetry collections, and educational trips to Germany and different T4 sites as part of their Dis- numerous newspaper 13 articles), his rich knowl- ability Studies classes (Mitchell and Snyder, “T4 Memorialization”). edge and understanding of disability art, and, most Although not primarily pursuing academic research, the well-known importantly, his friendship writer and editor Kenny Fries is investigating the history of T4 even 14 have been an invaluable source for the develop- further. As a former Fulbright scholar, Fries is currently located in ment of my own research Berlin, where he is working on his new book project Stumbling over His- 15 within Disability Studies. tory: Aktion T4, Disability, and the Holocaust. These creative as well as

202 Amst 64.2 (2019): 189-214 “[L]ess than accessible and seriously disheartening” scholarly endeavors are indicative of a wide disability community redis- covering its own history—a history that transgresses national borders. As places where, initially, people experiencing a multitude of different conditions were lumped into the category of “the disabled,” T4 sites are now reclaimed as communal spaces by disabled activists and scholars who refuse simple medical diagnoses and instead embrace their disability identities. Through transatlantic engagements with the history of the T4 program, American scholars and writers have thus come to produce critical knowledge informed directly by the affective subjectivity of these works’ narrators. In their research, scholars like Brenda Brueggemann, Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, and David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder openly address their own positionality within eugenic discourses. In doing so, they draw attention to the fact that, to engage in conversations about eugenics and—as in the case of T4—its ultimately fatal consequences, scholars frequently have to perform intellectual as well as emotional labor. In A World without Bodies, Sharon Snyder boldly states that, in talking about the T4 program as a parent of a disabled child, “I am not afraid of being accused of sentimentality.” In a similar vein, Kenny Fries openly remarks in his journalistic writing on T4 that “I have a personal stake in making sure this history is remembered” (“The Nazis’ First Victims”). Placing their embodied positionalities at the center of their work, Snyder and Fries immediately draw attention to the implications of their historical research on the contemporary lives of disabled people. The naming of the disabled subject position invites readers to sympathize with the researching subject and to enter the affective realm in which his or her research is pursued. Such an approach to writing emphasizes the fact that ratio and emotio are not separate enti- ties but inherently connected. In the introductory video to her blog on T4, Brenda Brueggemann confirms the “intense and emotional work” that makes scholarly encounters with T4 so “logically and emotionally difficult” (“Aktion T4”). A work in progress, Brueggemann’s blog is fragmentary and, in a highly self-reflective move, questions the logic of its own narration. The very structure of Brueggemann’s blog is testament to the fact that the story of T4 is never entirely told and can never be sufficiently analyzed, provoking its readers to reflect on the gaps and leaks that accompany such research. Last but not least, Brueggemann’s initial comment draws attention to the affective subjectivity that, although often denied, underlies all academic work. In contrast to the majority of Disability Studies writing published in Great Britain, American Disability Studies scholars openly draw on 16 16 I would like to thank such affective subjectivity to generate knowledge. According to Jessica Ana Bé for patiently listen- ing to my contemplations Yakeley et al., affective subjectivity can be defined as “the awareness of on this paper and, most and reflection on our emotional responses and their influence on our importantly, for pointing out the cultural specificity work” (97). However, I would like to propose that, more than merely of this form of writing affecting scholarly work, the affective subjectivity present in Disability in American Disability Studies writing allows for the creation of new forms of knowledge and Studies.

Amst 64.2 (2019): 189-214 203 Gesine Wegner embodied epistemologies that bear resemblance to the positionalities of feminist, queer, and postcolonial writing. These affective epistemologies of Disability Studies urge us, along the lines of Gloria Anzaldúa’s popular demand for postcolonial feminism, “to move beyond confining parameters of what qualifies as knowledge” (230). Instead of employing an overly covert, non-embodied narrator in their work, much of Dis- ability Studies writing on T4 emerges from within a great variety of disability experiences. One such experience is introduced by Kenny Fries in his reflections on the commemoration of the Holocaust and T4. Mostly situated in the genre of life writing, Fries’s work reflects on historical research, Dis- ability Studies concepts, and personal experience alike. This becomes particularly evident in his second memoir. Published in 2007, The His- tory of My Shoes and the Evolution of Darwin’s Theory traces the history of Darwin’s theory by intertwining historical research on Darwin with accounts of Fries’s own life. Over the course of the book, Fries explores the history of the phrase “survival of the fittest” from its first mention by Wallace to its appropriation by philosopher and key proponent of Social Darwinism Herbert Spencer. Following the protagonist on his emotional quest to make sense of his own story, the reader is confronted with the history of how social Darwinism transformed into eugenics in the United States in the late nineteenth century. As Fries recounts his journey, he realizes that ‘survival of the fittest’ is only part of the story. Referencing Disability Studies scholar Lennard Davis, he argues that “[a] gene or an individual cannot be called ‘fit’ in isolation but only in the context of a particular environment” (The History 50). In the end, Fries provides an affirmative twist to his narrative by concluding that, due to their adaptability, disabled people are, indeed, “at the cutting edge of the social trend of the broader use of assistive technology” (180). His thoughts are echoed by Garland-Thomson, who argues in a 2018 article that “genetic variation is what moves evolution forward, yielding new forms that are fresh solutions to changing environments both natural and human designed […]. The challenges of living in a world not built for us are occasions for resourcefulness and adaptability” (“My Orphan Disease”). In line with Fries’s writing, Garland-Thomson affirms experiences of disability as being of value to human evolution rather than, as presented in eugenic thinking, posing a danger to the development of humankind. This drastic rethinking of disability provokes appreciation instead of mere acceptance and is emphasized through the subjective positionality of both writers. It is through this interaction of life writing, creative non-fiction, and academic research that new ideas are brought to the forefront of Disability Studies. Disability Studies thus uses the “experiential knowledge” (Bolt, “Introduction” 1) of its writers as a pro- ductive epistemological tool. Furthermore, Disability Studies scholars reveal the normative standards and value judgements underlying other research by making their own positionality transparent to the reader.

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In the context of the Nazis’ mass killings, these alternative methods are particularly important since the T4 program has widely fallen into oblivion. As a German scholar working at a university located only 15 miles from the T4 site Pirna-Sonnenstein, I am painfully aware of the lack of knowledge about the T4 program in my general surroundings. It seems surprising that, during my undergraduate studies in History at the same university, we never visited the site as part of one of our classes nor discussed “Aktion T4” in the multiple lectures and seminars I took on the history of the Third Reich. This observation is echoed by historians who have argued that until the late 1980s, even citizens of Pirna—at least those who were born after the war—knew little about their city’s historical role as a site of mass murder (Böhm 123). In light of these observations, I argue that redirecting our academic attention to this part of history requires not only traditional forms of scholarly investigation—indeed, historical research has increasingly and suc- cessfully been pursued on T4 program for years. Instead, as Disability Studies scholarship illustrates, encounters with such history from a disability perspective provide the chance of addressing the consequences and implications of the T4 program for the lives of disabled people today. By providing a disability perspective, the inclusion of life writing and creative non-fiction in academic practice can thus bridge the divide between frequently separated elaborations on the past and present of eugenics. Due to its horrific consequences, encounters with a disability perspective on the Holocaust are indeed infrequent—Harry and Eleanor Dunai’s Surviving in Silence: A Deaf Boy in the Holocaust presenting a rare 17 exception. After all, the mass murders of the T4 program left virtu- ally no survivors. Snyder and Mitchell’s documentary A World without Bodies makes this blatantly clear: “[t]here was no liberation because none were left to liberate.” After the killing sites were rediscovered by historians, almost no personal belongings like diaries or letters belonging to the victims of T4 could be found (Hechler). Indeed, means of writing were not made accessible to many of the victims and, in the aftermath of WWII, access to publishers would have been very unlikely due to poverty and stigmatization (Hechler). It is due to this general inaccessibility, the historical marginalization of T4, and the continuing stigmatization of disabled people that, although the Holocaust reserves such a widespread remembrance in the collective memory, it is rare “that I en- 17 As a student at counter someone, a mutual academic colleague, a student, a fellow U.S. a residential school in Budapest, Harry Dunai citizen who already knows about T4,” as Brenda Brueggemann notes survived the Holocaust (“Aktion T4”). Yet survivors and their narratives are important aspects while his parents and two of his brothers in Czecho- of teaching and learning about National Socialism, as well as the pro- slovakia were taken to the cesses of memorial politics. gas chambers. Dunai was close to death from star- In contrast to dominant commemoration practices, almost all T4 vation when he was liber- memorials in Germany were founded by non-disabled people, most of- ated by Russian soldiers ten by precisely those groups and professions who had taken part in on January 18, 1945.

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the murders at the time (Winter 484). Disabled people were not only excluded from the conception of these memorials, but some disabled groups were even initially excluded as visitors. Under the pretext that T4 sites would be emotionally and intellectually “too demanding” for mentally disabled visitors, some of the most likely victims of euthanasia were forbidden entry to T4 memorials (Hechler). More recently, disability scholars and activists have openly reclaimed their role within T4 commemorative culture. Among others, their engagement has led the German Bundestag to vote in favor of the construction of a central T4 memorial that was erected in Berlin in 2014 (“Die nationalsozialistischen ‘Euthanasie’-Morde”). In recent years, a few Anglo-American writers have also shown an interest in the history of T4. Yet their perspective frequently mirrors early historical research that concentrated on the role of the medical profession and the church-led protest against T4, and does not take the 18 victims into account (Burdett 44-45). Such an approach is most evident in Stephen Unwin’s 2017 play All Our Children. A play about the T4 crimes, All Our Children presents its audience with the perspectives of a pediatrician, a young SS officer, and a bishop, the latter serving— together with the mother of a disabled son—as moral counterpart and 19 compass of the play. While the characters engage in long and certainly important discussions about T4 and its moral implications, its victims are silenced once more.

18 This research has It is through Disability Studies’ shift of perspective, its embodied largely been driven by an and affective subjectivity, that its writing succeeds in breaking this si- interest in the workings of Nazi medicine and its violence. Although they cannot and do not try to speak for those that have lation of the Hippocratic been killed, Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell’s 2001 documentary Oath. While certainly providing important historical A World without Bodies presents its audience with a powerful example insights, this approach of how Disability Studies critically intervenes in academic and public has frequently ignored the victims and failed to shed discourses on T4 and the Holocaust. The documentary’s narration and light on the prevalence of focalization through Snyder and Mitchell allow viewers to reflect on eugenic thinking outside of the medical realm the horrors of the T4 program from a scholarly as well as personal per- and outside of Germany spective. Giving their trip to Bernburg the very telling, communal con- (Mitchell and Snyder, “The Eugenic Atlantic” 846). notation of a “pilgrimage,” the documentary’s female voice-over notes 19 The character at the beginning: “[w]e are thinking about how bodies like our own Bishop von Galen serves as a direct reference to have been made targets for enforced rehabilitation, segregation, con- the historical figure of finement, sterilization, and, under the Third Reich, medical murder.” Clemens August Graf von Galen, a Bishop in From the very beginning, Snyder and Mitchell overtly draw attention Münster. Overemphasiz- to their own subject positions and the fundamental impact that ques- ing the protest against the T4 program (and dismiss- tions of eugenics have on their lives. Their mere presence thus invites ing its wide acceptance), the audience to not only think about the victims of the past but to earlier historical research claimed that the official contemplate the potential consequences of eugenics for people with dis- termination of the T4 abilities today. program was directly related to Graf von Galen’s Following a basic introduction to the six killing sites via a montage critical sermons (cf. Hinz- of historical images, the documentary refrains from immediately mov- Wessels). ing on to the T4 site in Bernburg. Instead, the first scenes of the film

206 Amst 64.2 (2019): 189-214 “[L]ess than accessible and seriously disheartening” follow Snyder, Mitchell, and three other people on their way to the T4 site. On their way to the site, the camera zooms in on the different advertisements along the road. While this mise-en-scène emphasizes the spatial dimensions of commemorative culture, the narrator eerily reminds the audience that these are the roads on which disabled victims 20 were brought to the T4 killing center in notorious grey buses. The roads are given commemorative as well as metaphorical meaning. After all, the roads also seem to symbolize the historical path of eugenics, which made killings in the name of “mercy” possible. The narrative beginning and further development thus indicate that the T4 killing sites cannot be looked at in isolation—their historical roots, as well as the long shadows they cast, must be considered. The documentary further draws attention to these spatial and temporal intersections by repeatedly leaving its immediate space. Early on in its narrative development, the documentary emphasizes the fact that Americans, too, participated in two of the three stages of eugenics: incarceration and sterilization. The narrator does not shy away from remarking that, although no systematic killing took place in the United States, many disabled people died in confinement due to the harrowing conditions. Far from equating the fates of disabled people in these institutions with the T4 killings, the documentary rather sheds light on the historical continuities that have frequently been glossed over by the singularity that the T4 killings evoke as an event of systematic mass murder. Upon their arrival at the Bernburg site, the camera focuses on the five travelers who are “mak[ing] this pilgrimage to commemorate the forgotten victims of the Nazi Holocaust.” While it functions as an educational tool, the documentary also explicitly contemplates its role within the commemorative culture of the Holocaust. Indeed, the documentary not only raises awareness of the horrors that took place in Bernburg, but the group of disabled visitors depicted reclaims a space that historically stripped away disabled people’s agency in a most cruel and fatal fashion. Two of the people featured, German psychologist Rebecca Maskos and American Cultural Studies scholar David Mitch- ell, show viewers around the site. Unlike in other documentaries about the T4 project, the disabled body is not merely the object of this film but becomes the active agent, the subject through which the story of other disabled people is told. This reclaiming of space can be read as a reclaiming of power by disabled people over their own history. As they move around the memorial space in their wheelchairs, the scholars be- 20 The documentary come active agents whose very embodiments challenge the eugenic dis- mistakenly mentions black courses materialized in this historical site. By including their physical buses at this point. The notorious buses, which presence in its final shots, the documentary invites audiences to think were entirely grey, were about contemporary implications of the Holocaust and the persistence well-known among those living near the T4 sites and of eugenic ideas. were commonly referred to Throughout the documentary, a photo montage complements the as “Flüsterkutsche” (Klem- scenes featuring David Mitchell and Rebecca Maskos. This montage perer qtd. in Böhm 99).

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is arguably problematic in that it repeatedly displays the naked bodies of the killing center’s victims. In doing so, the documentary further enforces an iconography of the Holocaust in which the victims exist as nothing more than a huddled mass. While the pictures indeed emphasize the extent of Nazi cruelties, the victims are, very vividly, stripped of their identities and forced to remain anonymous. Well into the 2000s, the names of the victims of Nazi ‘euthanasia’ were not mentioned at 21 events or in texts (Hechler). Unfortunately, the fast pace at which Snyder and Mitchell’s documentary moves through these sequences of historical photographs does not allow for a personalized engagement with the victims of the T4 program. As so often happens, the victims’ personal stories, as well as their very names, remain unknown. In a short interview-like section of the documentary, David Mitch- ell compares the group’s pilgrimage to the practice of African Ameri- cans visiting sites of slavery. In making this comparison, Mitchell em- 22 21 Due to pressure from the German govern- beds the history of the T4 program in discourses of collective trauma. ment, the United States In Germany, some disability initiatives like “Encounter with a Possible Holocaust Memorial Mu- seum had to temporarily Past” have indeed made it their aim to travel to all T4 killing facilities delete all previously pub- in an open “confrontation with a collective trauma” (Hechler). Iden- lished names of T4 victims from its network (Aly 17). tifying and sympathizing with the murdered disabled people, they A small list of 38 names understand the history of T4 as their own: the very pilgrimage thus is now available again (Holocaust Survivors and becomes a commemorative practice for them. The meaning of such Victims Database). a commemorative practice and the relevance of the Nazi euthanasia 22 In line with this argument, Mitchell rightly program for contemporary discourses in the United States is, however, criticizes the fact that, highly contested. In “What the Nazi ‘Euthanasia Program’ Can Tell except for a small portion, the rest of the T4 building Us about Disability Oppression,” Hugh Gallagher concludes that con- is still being used as a nections to an American context should not be drawn (99). In sharp prison and psychiatric ward. Until the 1980s, contrast to Gallagher’s view and in line with this article, Suzanne E. the “death apparatus” at Evans argues that remembrance of the mass murder of people with the Bernburg site stayed intact behind closed disabilities during the Holocaust is indeed crucial to understanding doors. The fact that the how and why people with disabilities continue to be marginalized in rest of the building serves as a psychiatric ward and contemporary society (20). prison illustrates the lack Snyder and Mitchell’s documentary invites us to reflect upon the of critical reflection that has characterized the ways in which scholars in the fields of History and Cultural Studies commemorative culture usually present their research. Far too often scholars are not shown as of the T4 program. Other T4 sites like Pirna-Sonnen active agents, denying the impact that their individual perspectives bear stein are now used as on the ways in which history is told and futures are imagined. The docu- memorial sites and as so called “Behindertenwerk- mentary’s theme music, the 1980s experimental song “Big Science” by stätte” (“workshops for Laurie Anderson, further draws attention to academia’s false promise of the disabled”). This specific use can arguably be objectivity. Using a mixture of soft percussion, existentialist lyrics, and understood as a reclaim- eerily clinical vocals, Anderson’s song criticizes science for enforcing ing of space (Böhm 16); however, considering the futuristic visions that merely aim at expansion. The promise of “big sci- fact that the site is located ence” is shown to have generated a religious appeal that is not called into outside the city center, the institution also continues question. But the song’s initial and embracing “Hallelujah” of science is to be a means of exclusion revealed to be unwarranted as it bears the risk of radical individualism: from society. “[e]very man, every man for himself” (Anderson).

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Conclusion: Affective Scholarship and the Embodied Knowledge of Disability

“I never know how but I must begin” (“Aktion T-4”)—so begins Brueggemann’s ongoing blog about the T4 murders. Her statement overtly draws attention to the fact that scholarly writing, like all forms of writing, adheres to the rules and limitations of narrative structure. At least in traditional media such as books and (online) journals, this narrative logic requires scholars to provide a clear beginning and the result of their scholarly endeavors. Yet perhaps more than anything else, the wide range of research on the history of eugenics illustrates that history always unfolds as a complex narrative. The research on eugenics provided by Disability Studies adds to this complex narrative in that it provides embodied perspectives used to relate transatlantic research on Germany and America’s eugenic past to current biopolitical questions. Far from neglecting discontinuities in historical developments, the field thus sheds light on the continuities of eugenic thinking in American and transatlantic thinking. In doing so, scholars like Brueggemann, Garland-Thomson, and Mitchell and Snyder have met a demand formu- lated by Laura Doyle, who argues that “our narratives about it [eugenic past] should take full measure of the eugenic currents” (535). Revealing the ideology of ability that underlies past as well as contemporary American culture, Disability Studies has demonstrated how negative eugenics were able to flourish through the employment of disability terminology. As shown by the belated recognition of eugenic crimes, disability provided the perfect, supposedly scientific cover to justify racist, sexist, and homophobic attitudes, as well as mass murder. The fact that many of the perpetrators of T4 crimes have never been sentenced is a painful testament to the persuasiveness and insidiousness of an ideology of ability. The missing legal consequences of these crimes further enforce the need to raise awareness of this often-forgotten history. More than a mere recognition of T4 cruelties, the act of tracing the history of disability and eugenics helps us to better understand the Holocaust’s entire system of mass murder—a system that was first es- tablished and tested through the killing of thousands of disabled people. Yet, prior to and, perhaps even more importantly, after these killings, disability serves as a default line for human intelligibility. As this article has demonstrated, eugenic pasts and presents can only be understood if we consider the crucial importance of disability for the racialization and sexualization of bodies. Put differently, by looking at disability and the construction of normalcy through the supposedly non-normative body, we are able to understand a system that not only underlies the Nazi crimes but reaches far beyond the T4 project, with eugenics underlying conceptions of modernity throughout Europe and the United States. What the different scholarly explorations in Disability Studies have in common is that they carefully deploy their research on the history

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of eugenics to reflect on the status quo. It is only in the breaking with past taboos, as Theodor Adorno once remarked, that we are truly free to shape our present. In his essay “The Meaning of Working through the Past,” he notes that “the past will have been worked through only when the causes of what happened then have been eliminated. Only because the causes continue to exist does the captivating spell of the past remain to this day unbroken” (572). As for the far-reaching consequences of eugenics and its continuation in current ideologies of ableism, removal of causes requires profound changes in all areas of public life. To look back and demand these changes seems particularly important in the context of medical, political, and educational practices, as well as in practices of caregiving—those professional areas most deeply involved in negative eugenics. While these professions’ engagement with the history of eugenics seems crucial for the overall quality of their professional practices, discussions of the impact of eugenics on contemporary practices 23 are frequently not a mandatory part of the respective curricula. Far too often, the crimes committed by the Nazis are used only as a reference point in discussions of the ultimate consequences of eugen- 24 ics. Yet while the horrors of the Nazi era are often referenced, they can only serve as one, albeit essential, point of departure. Erika Dyck notes that, although a comparison to Nazi eugenics is undoubtedly ef-

23 The consequent fective, the widespread use of eugenic practices such as institutionaliza- lack of knowledge became tion and sterilization in North America has its own history, arguably very evident in a meeting between Kenny Fries and one separate from Nazi eugenics and extermination. Looking closely at a German neurologist, eugenic practices as a more common feature of America’s past, Disabil- which Fries describes in a 2017 New York Times ity Studies has been able to define both continuities and discontinuities article. A quick look at dif- in these historical discourses. Memory, it has become clear throughout ferent curricula in German as well as American medi- this paper, is not detached from its socio-cultural conditions. And far cal schools reveals that, from being static, memory is constantly renegotiated as part of social while courses on medical history, theory, and ethics and emancipatory processes, as this paper has demonstrated in the con- are generally offered, they text of Disability Studies. are rarely mandatory. 24 In their discussion America’s eugenic past points at the dangers of an “anonymous” sci- of the Nazi murders, stu- entific discourse that neutralizes human life. By changing perspectives, dents and scholars alike tend to unconsciously scholars in Disability Studies have been able to further remove eugenics echo some of eugenics’ from the supposedly scientific context in which it initially developed. tragic characterizations of disabled people as By bringing historical research and cultural analysis together, Disability pathetic victims (Mitchell Studies writing highlights the need to reflect on one’s own scholarly re- and Snyder, “The Eugenic Atlantic” 846). search and positioning. This writing invites American Studies scholars Furthermore, as Emmeline of all disciplines to question their specific research aims and the social Burdett illustrates, Anglo- American historians have conditions in which these aims are embedded. As they draw attention to for a long time concen- affective subjectivities in their scholarship, disability scholars articulate trated their attention on protests against the Nazi the fact that scholarship on eugenics has too often been aggravated by euthanasia program, while physical and attitudinal barriers, making it, as Mitchell and Snyder have its victims, and its implications for contemporary rightly noted, “less than accessible and seriously disheartening” (Bio- discourses, have been politics 15). It is through their engagement in Transnational Studies that largely ignored (44). American Studies scholars in Germany might indeed be able to play a

210 Amst 64.2 (2019): 189-214 “[L]ess than accessible and seriously disheartening” key role in making such scholarship more inclusive and visible to the general public.

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