Disability Drama: Semiotic Bodies and Diegetic Subjectivities in Post-WWI
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Disability Drama: Semiotic Bodies and Diegetic Subjectivities in post-WWI German Expressionist Drama by Allison G. Cattell A thesis presented to the University of Waterloo in fulfilment of the thesis requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in German Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, 2014 © Allison G. Cattell 2014 Author’s Declaration I hereby declare that I am the sole author of this thesis. This is a true copy of the thesis, including any required final revisions, as accepted by my examiners. I understand that my thesis may be made electronically available to the public. Allison G. Cattell, 2014 ii Abstract In this dissertation, I examine discourses on disability and the body in three German Expressionist dramas written directly after WWI both for the discursive work they do in this context and for their relevance today: Ernst Toller’s Die Wandlung: Das Ringen eines Menschen (1918) and Der deutsche Hinkemann (1923) as well as Karl August Wittfogel’s Der Krüppel (1920). I analyze how these plays draw on ideas about disability in post-WWI Germany in the midst of a broad-ranging critique of the violence inherent in nationalistic, militaristic, economic, and rehabilitationist discourses. The analysis contributes to the current discussion on how to dismantle what are referred to in disability studies as “disabling discourses,” that is, those discourses that lend support to discrimination against bodies marked as disabled. I contend that the use of representation to subvert bodily norms and resist “the medical model of disability” did not begin only after the emergence of the disability rights movement. I demonstrate how these three Expressionist plays indeed resist disabling discourses in ways that were both feasible and intelligible in their context. I argue that not only was the discourse on disability in this time and place multiple, but also that the primary texts use of a variety of (literary) strategies to resist normative paradigms that privilege able-bodied, aesthetically-pleasing, and economically-productive bodies. The analysis shows how these representations pose a challenge the medical mode of understanding the body, critically engage the social stigma that often accompanies the presence of disability, and offer alternative ways of reading and valuing the body. I argue that literary representations of disability can serve to de-naturalize ideas about ability and other ideals of embodiment, and that iii even the hyperbolic bodies one encounters in these Expressionist dramas can help readers to better understand processes of disablement. This project will also demonstrate that literary representations of disability are of importance for disabled and non-disabled persons alike because they reveal and critically engage various techniques that are used to categorize and assign value to all bodies in a society in which ideals of ability, beauty, and utility are used to assess the value of life. iv Acknowledgements I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Michael Boehringer, for his feedback and guidance as I wrote this dissertation. I would also like to thank my friends and my family, without whose support I would never have come this far. v Table of Contents List of Abbreviations ............................................................................................. viii Part One ...................................................................................................................... 1 Introduction .................................................................................................................. 1 Managing the (disabled) body in the age of scientific-medical discourse ............. 16 Cultural disability studies: between reality and representation ............................ 19 Identity politics, (literary) storytelling, and strategies of resistance ..................... 23 Historical context, primary works, and questions for the analysis ........................ 26 Discourses on disability and the body in Germany (1918-1933) ....................... 27 Embracing metaphor and utilizing cultural meanings in socialist drama ......... 33 Theories, Terms, and Tools: Interpreting Textual Representations of Disability ...... 37 Major paradigms within disability studies ......................................................... 37 Scope and positioning of the analysis ................................................................ 43 Important terminology and conceptual tools ..................................................... 46 Methodology ....................................................................................................... 60 Part Two .................................................................................................................... 64 Disability and the Body in Post-World War I Drama ................................................ 64 Ernst Toller ............................................................................................................. 65 Karl August Wittfogel ............................................................................................. 71 Individual and collective crises in Expressionist drama ........................................ 72 Chapter 1: Disability, Revolution, and the Production of Knowledge on Disability . 81 Chapter 2: Embodied Experience and Re-appropriation as Resistance to Disabling Discourses ................................................................................................................ 113 vi Chapter 3: The Body that Lives, Moves, and Has Meaning in Text ........................ 134 Plot, characters, themes ....................................................................................... 136 Resistant reading: a re-valuation of diegetic bodies ............................................ 141 Disability myths and other common literary tropes ............................................. 148 Interactive and reflexive positioning .................................................................... 154 Fear, pity, disgust, and laughter .......................................................................... 160 Suffering, compassion, and the human/animal boundary .................................... 166 Crisis of modernity, crisis of identity, crisis of the body ...................................... 171 Conclusion ................................................................................................................ 175 Semiotic bodies, diegetic subjectivities ................................................................ 191 Identity, storytelling, and political strategy ......................................................... 193 Texts in discursive dialogue ................................................................................. 197 Beyond the author-function .................................................................................. 201 Positioning ............................................................................................................ 201 Complicating the boundaries ............................................................................... 203 Disability aesthetics as crip critique .................................................................... 205 Disability and the crises of self, alienation, poverty, and war ............................. 207 One hundred years of disability: paradigm shifts and resilient discourses ......... 210 Works Cited .............................................................................................................. 216 vii List of Abbreviations DdH = Der deutsche Hinkemann K = “Der Krüppel” W = Die Wandlung: Das Ringen eines Menschen viii Part One Introduction During and directly following the First World War, German society experienced a sudden, unprecedented increase in the number of persons with disabilities visible in everyday life. As thousands of soldiers returned home with a variety of acquired impairments and sought a return to civilian life, disability became not only more visible, but also a highly politically charged phenomenon. Because of the need to rehabilitate and reintegrate individual bodies in a society that was itself thoroughly broken, both physically and mentally, disability was theorized as never before in the fields of law, medicine, and rehabilitation science. In the realm of culture, too, artists, filmmakers, and authors were both portraying the physical presence of disability in their society as well as critiquing contemporary discourses on disability and the body. In short, the sudden appearance of thousands of men with physical, mental, and sensory disabilities acquired during the war had a significant impact on the discursive atmosphere of post-WWI Germany. As Carol Poore has emphasized throughout her 2007 book Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture, the bodies of disabled veterans often became a site at which national memory and collective identity were negotiated in both the political and cultural spheres. From the left, they were viewed as victims of an unjust society1 while from the right they were viewed as national heroes. These men were also caught up in broader discourses on the body. For instance, Eugenicists, who wanted to engineer a healthy body politic, were concerned that all of the “healthy, 1 Ernst Friedrich’s Krieg dem Kriege! (War Against War), originally published in 1924, constitutes one example of how the left utilized the bodies of disabled veterans in order to bolster the anti-war movement. 1 productive” men had been