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

Due to the efforts of the disability rights movement and the discipline of disability studies, people with disabilities are increasingly understood as "members of a minority community" (3) whose history and cultural representations should be studied accordingly. This is the approach taken in this collection of articles by scholars in a number of disciplines from Germany and the United States, which goes back to an interdisciplinary conference on "Dis/ability in Germany, Yesterday and Today" at the University of Cincinnati and Cincinnati's Holocaust and Humanity Center in 2019. The perspective of literary and cultural studies here focuses not only on disability, but also on the "normal" majority society, in order to question "ableism as an all-encompassing social concept" (13).

The three articles in the first section, "Negotiating Interpersonal Relationships: Historical Perspectives," focus in varying ways on how emotions and concepts of belonging enter into practices of including or excluding people with disabilities in a wide range of situations. In this context, Markus Dederich and Katherine Sorrels examine why inclusion in the classroom is often so difficult to achieve. Ashley I. Elrod's fascinating study of the concept of prodigality in German legal history as vacillating between crime and mental incompetence from 1600 to 1900 demonstrates the persistence of premodern discourses into the twentieth century. And Marion Schmidt investigates the power dynamics in the relationship between a non-disabled physician and his disabled patient at the Zurich School for the Deaf during the 1960s as being characterized by both efforts at integration and emotional reactions of rejection.

The next section, "Reckoning with the Past: Reconstruction of Memory," deals with the origins and legacy of eugenics and the Nazi murders of up to 300,000 people with disabilities in their so-called "euthanasia" program. Warren Rosenblum's differentiated, subtle article about the increasing institutionalization of "feebleminded" children in "idiot asylums" around 1900 explores how, before any concept of "mainstreaming" existed, these institutions were often considered to be places for inclusion rather than for eugenic segregation. By analyzing the research methods and reception of journalist Ernst Klee's "Euthanasie" im NS-Staat: Die "Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens" (1983), which was the first book to bring the "euthanasia" murders to widespread public attention, historian Dagmar Herzog focuses incisively on some of the reasons for the academic neglect of this topic and makes a significant contribution to Holocaust historiography. Finally, Lutz Kaelber presents a study of a number of memorials created by disability rights activists, survivors, and their descendants from the late 1980s to the present at children's "euthanasia" clinics and a gassing facility.

The final section, "Intersections and Diversity: The Lens of Culture," features analyses of several representations of disability in literature and film since the early twentieth century. Caroline Weist draws on crip theory to give a new reading of Else Lasker-Schüler's drama Die Wupper (1909), which, according to Weist, rejects concepts of heteronormativity and ableism by employing a "cripped" chronotope that points towards different possibilities of living in time and space. Linda Leskau focuses on the numerous "crippled" characters in works by Thomas Bernhard, which scholars have often neglected, and shows how they frequently unsettle expectations of embodied difference, thus offering a new reading of this major author. Turning to film and drawing on the scholarship of Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Tanja Nusser demonstrates how Ulrike Ottinger's Freak Orlando (1981) highlights differing modes of exclusion. Finally, Waltraud Maierhofer analyzes a recent novel by Alissa Walser, Am Anfang war die Nacht Musik (2010), which is a fictional portrayal of the blind pianist Maria Paradis (1759–1824), in terms of the relationship between women's emancipation and disability in the Age of the Enlightenment.

The heterogeneity of this book is precisely its strength. The wide variety of topics and time periods discussed shows that disability is everywhere in history and culture once...