H-Diplo ROUNDTABLE XXI-14

H-Diplo ROUNDTABLE XXI-14 Edith Sheffer, Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna. New York: W.W. Norton, 2018. ISBN: 9780393609646. 15 November 2019 | https://hdiplo.org/to/RT21-14 Roundtable Editors: Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins and Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii Contents Introduction by Benjamin P. Hein, Brown University, Samuel Clowes Huneke, George Mason University, and Michelle Lynn Kahn, University of Richmond .........................................................................................................................................................................................................2 Review by Kathryn Brackney, Vienna Wiesenthal Institute for Holocaust Studies ............................................................................................5 Review by David Freis, University of Münster .......................................................................................................................................................................8 Review by Dagmar Herzog, Graduate Center, City University of New York .................................................................................................... 11 Response by Edith Sheffer, University of California, Berkeley ................................................................................................................................... 14 H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-14 Introduction by Benjamin P. Hein, Brown University, Samuel Clowes Huneke, George Mason University, and Michelle Lynn Kahn, University of Richmond n 1 July 1941, Hans Asperger (1906-1980), then a not-yet-famous doctor at Vienna’s Children’s Hospital, transferred two-and-a-half-year-old Herta Schreiber to Spiegelgrund, a children’s medical center that was actually O the heart of Nazi child euthanasia efforts in Austria. Asperger had sent Herta there, noting that her disabilities “must present an unbearable burden to the mother” (145). Two months later, Herta was dead, pneumonia the cause listed on her death certificate. Asperger, on the other hand, would go on to enjoy a long and celebrated career as the creator of the autism diagnosis. In her new book Asperger’s Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna, Edith Sheffer delivers a compelling portrait of Nazi murder, its entanglements with the Viennese psychiatric profession, and its ramifications for how we think of autism today. Through careful analysis of the career of Asperger, whose eponymous diagnosis has made him a household name in recent decades, Sheffer makes the entire fascist eugenic program, which exterminated those who lived a so-called “life unworthy of life,” her subject (31). Asperger, a staunch Catholic and member of Vienna’s psychiatric profession, described himself in the wake of the Second World War as a resistor, someone who had fought to protect innocent children from fascist brutality. And for years, that story stuck. As Sheffer writes, “Asperger also has a reputation for defending disabled children from Nazi persecution” (16). But when Sheffer went to the archives of the Vienna Children’s Hospital, she discovered a very different man. There she found evidence that Asperger had sent children from his clinic to the infamous Spiegelgrund center, knowing full well that they would be murdered. Far from being a kind-hearted savior of disabled children, Asperger was in fact complicit in the Nazis’ crimes against the most vulnerable members of society. But Asperger’s Children is not simply a biography of a man. Through Sheffer’s account of Asperger’s life and career, readers are introduced to the killing apparatus that was Nazi Vienna: its professional networks, its intellectual universe, its institutions, and its victims. Much as in her previous monograph, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain, Sheffer excels at bringing her subjects to life through depictions of everyday interactions.1 In Asperger’s Children, those interactions are largely between victims of the Nazi euthanasia program and the doctors and nurses who murdered them. Through close readings of medical records, Sheffer brings the murdered children, whose voices and stories are absent from the historical record, back to life. In so doing, she intertwines intellectual history and the history of everyday life in the service of understanding Nazism as both ideology and practice. Perhaps the most chilling insight of Sheffer’s research regards the functioning of dictatorships. This book reminds us that much like the decision to enact a ‘final solution’ regarding the Jewish population of Europe, the decision to murder helpless children at Spiegelgrund required little coercion or explicit instruction from above. Instead, the idea to overdose children with barbiturates until they died of pneumonia emerged among a group of careerist physicians competing with one another over who could most effectively meet vague and ill-defined policy goals. It was no wonder that Asperger’s autism diagnosis, much like his definition of a human being’s inner spirit—what the Germans call Gemüt—for decades remained frustratingly broad and imprecise. In the world of Nazi child psychiatry, ambiguity was no accident. It was the midwife of state crimes and the enemy of the rule of law. Although written for a general audience, Asperger’s Children makes a number of historiographical interventions. By disentangling the social, intellectual, and professional networks of individuals active in the child euthanasia program, Sheffer not only contributes to the field of the Nazi history of science but also joins a growing number of historians who have turned 1 Edith Sheffer, Burned Bridge: How East and West Germans Made the Iron Curtain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011). © 2019 The Authors | CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US 2 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXI-14 to unexpected places to understand how Nazism worked.2 Much like scholars’ efforts in the 1990s to demonstrate the complicity of organizations such as the Wehrmacht, which had emerged largely unscathed from trials and denazification efforts, Sheffer reveals psychiatrists as complicit in murderous fascist programs.3 Her work also resembles more recent historiography, such as Wendy Lower’s Hitler’s Furies: German Women in the Nazi Killing Fields and Catherine Epstein’s Model Nazi: Arthur Greiser and the Occupation of Western Poland for its focus on less-known figures, places, and crimes.4 Likewise, Sheffer’s geographic focus on Vienna offers a fresh perspective on the Holocaust. Asperger’s Children reveals the renowned metropolis of Sigmund Freud and his cohort of liberal Jewish psychoanalysts simultaneously as the hotbed of racial ideologies and the actual ground on which the killings took place. Focusing on the peripheral spaces of Vienna and Austria helps decenter both Germany and Eastern Europe as the singular sites of Nazi extermination, providing further fodder to complicate Austria’s postwar ‘first victim’ myth. Sheffer’s chief contribution to Holocaust historiography is her characterization of the Third Reich as a “diagnosis regime,” in which “the state became obsessed with sorting the population into categories, cataloguing people by race, politics, religion, sexuality, criminality, heredity, and biological defects” (18). It is a compelling lens through which to understand fascism’s need to ‘other,’ to categorize individuals in terms of the herd. But, more provocatively, it also places Nazi Germany in an intellectual genealogy with other Western countries. During the nineteenth century and into the twentieth, Western science—and not just medicine—had become ever more interested in such sorting. New sociological and medical categories arose to describe supposedly aberrant behaviors. By naming Nazi Germany a “diagnosis regime,” Sheffer suggests Nazi Germany was not so much an outlier of Western modernity as its logical conclusion. The reviewers in this roundtable all appreciate the book’s accessibility and readability, celebrating Sheffer’s finesse at approaching the subject from both a scholarly and a moral standpoint. They all emphasize the usefulness of the concept of the “diagnosis regime,” but point out that it may have limitations. They use the book as a starting point for broader reflections on how and why the history of psychology, medicine, and diagnosis should be written. Finally, they all grapple with the question of what role history can and should play in our current discussions of autism: in other words, should Sheffer’s dark genealogy of the term ‘autism,’ with which many individuals self-identify, challenge our willingness to use the label? Kathryn Brackney highlights Sheffer’s argument about the gendered nature of the autism diagnosis, which paralleled the hysteria diagnosis for female patients. She questions, however, the extent to which autism can be attributed to Asperger versus the other doctors who further researched and popularized the diagnosis after his death. David Freis argues that the concept of a “diagnosis regime” may not be so unique to the Third Reich given that Europe was booming with new medical diagnoses throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries but finds value in Sheffer’s characterization of autism as the opposite of fascism. Dagmar Herzog praises the care with which Sheffer gives voice to the victims and captures the everyday complicity of the perpetrators, but casts doubt on whether individuals diagnosed as autistic, many of whom identify with the label, will support changing it. 2 For example,

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