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Preface
- University of Michigan Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Preface The goal of this book is to write disability into a central place in the German cultural history of the twentieth century. It is actually surprising that this has not been done before. After all, many leading artists, writers , ‹lmmakers, and others have taken disability as one of their most signi‹cant themes. Intense debates have occurred in many sociopolitical contexts over how to interpret and evaluate particular kinds of variations in human bodies. In these controversies, disability has often been a focal point for clashes between more inclusive, democratic visions of citizenship and intolerant, authoritarian standpoints. And fundamental ethical questions about the value and quality of human life have frequently revolved around issues related to disability. Even a cursory survey can easily show that both cultural representations of disability and debates about the proper places for disabled people in German society have often been central to major controversies about aesthetics, normality, individuality, citizenship, and morality. Yet, with a few notable exceptions, disability has remained outside the focus of most cultural historians in German studies.1 This is so for a number of reasons. First, until recently most scholars have considered disability mainly from a medical rather than a minority perspective. That is, they have viewed disability primarily as a problem of individual impairment and thus as a subject for experts in medicine, rehabilitation, or education rather than as a cultural, political, and social phenomenon having to do with the meanings given to particular kinds of bodies. Second , when historians have dealt with disability, they have usually de‹ned their research according to its cause. For example, there are historical studies about disabled veterans, the social welfare system for disabled workers, and the development of eugenics. Monographs recount the history of treating and educating various groups such as people who are mentally ill, blind, or deaf. And there are even a few analyses of how members of some of these groups have been represented in the cultural sphere. The main drawback of such partial approaches, however, is that they do not tie these phenomena together as comprising general dis- courses about disability and disabled people. Third, it is still a relatively new idea to most cultural historians that ubiquitous one-sided representations of disability have real consequences for people who are disabled —in contrast to more generally accepted views about the harmfulness of, say, anti-Semitic, racial, or gender stereotypes. It is all the more surprising that German cultural historians have neglected to focus on disability because struggles over de‹nitions of normality—which has often been held up as the antithesis of disability—had such grave consequences in twentieth-century Germany. Scholars who are themselves members of previously excluded groups—such as women, racial and ethnic minorities, gays and lesbians, and sometimes even working-class people—have generally taken the lead in challenging and transforming outmoded interpretive paradigms rooted in paternalism or prejudice. Linked to the disability rights movement that began in the United States in the late 1960s, disabled scholars have been hired as American university faculty in somewhat more signi‹cant numbers in recent decades. Some of these colleagues, along with nondisabled researchers who share their perspectives, have been engaged in developing disability studies in the humanities, though more so in areas such as English and American cultural studies and history than in German studies. Scholars in this rapidly growing interdisciplinary ‹eld consider disability not in terms of medical issues but with regard to far-reaching questions about how bodies are represented in culture. Viewed like this, disability becomes a category of human variation to be studied in the complex ways accorded to race, ethnicity, class, gender, or sexual orientation. Informed by this perspective, my book has two main trajectories. In political terms, I focus on the struggles among advocates of charity, rehabilitation experts, and proponents of segregation or elimination, on the one hand, and the increasingly successful efforts of disabled people and their allies to create more democratic models of inclusion on the other. In cultural terms, I trace a development from the traditional use of disability as a negative metaphor to more realistic depictions of disabled people as ordinary human beings and to the growing participation of disabled people in creating cultural texts. My book shows how disabled people in Germany have moved from being relatively passive objects to more active subjects and from being represented mainly by others to telling their own stories. I have found it easier to bring disability into focus...