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Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture
By Carol Poore THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS
Copyright © 2007 University of Michigan
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-472-11595-2
Chapter One
Disability in the Culture of the Weimar Republic How did disabled people fit into the era of war and revolution, cultural experimentation, economic turmoil, and political crisis that was the Weimar Republic? What was old and what was new about the options open to them? On the one hand, many remained objects of charity or social outcasts. Some lived their lives as invalids hidden away by their ashamed families, and about seventy thousand starved to death in psychiatric institutions in the hunger years during and after World War I. The presence of "crippled beggars" on the streets still recalled medieval scenes at times. Others appeared in freak shows at fairs such as Uncle Pelle's Rummelplatz in the working-class Berlin district of Wedding, where the artist Christian Schad painted Agosta, der Flügelmensch und Rasha, die schwarze Taube (Agosta, the Winged Man, and Rasha, the Black Dove, 1929). But, by contrast, many other disabled people received competent medical care, rehabilitation for work, and education in regular schools or institutions for "crippled children" to become as self-supporting as possible. They lived conventional lives or more audacious ones as it suited them, finding circles of friends, acquaintances, workmates, colleagues, and comrades in which they moved and were accepted with relative ease. In a society struggling to make the transition from authoritarian empire to democracy, the life possibilities open to disabled people oscillated between limited forms of stigmatized existence and more expansive choices shaped by commitments to solidarity.
In the unstable Weimar Republic, disability became a focal point for sociopolitical and cultural controversies in newly intense ways, and ascertaining the positions of disabled people in society was a means of measuring the success of the new democracy. The Weimar constitution proclaimed the ideal of equality, but who would actually enjoy all the privileges of being a citizen in the German nation? Were people with certain types of bodies going to have fewer rights than others? And who would decide? The masses of disabled veterans returning from World War I presented a new challenge to goals of social inclusiveness. Before the war, the problem of disability had seemed bound up to a great extent in the social question. At that time, disabled people were disproportionately poor children and adults or workers injured in industrial accidents, and the churches had taken the lead in caring for them before government welfare programs began. While the relationship between disability and class background never ceased to be significant, the war created large numbers of disabled veterans from all social classes. This meant that providing for disabled people could no longer be viewed as primarily a charitable endeavor for the poor. Rather, since healthy young men from all across the socioeconomic spectrum had suddenly become disabled in the service of the fatherland, they seemed to have an unquestionably legitimate claim to the moral and financial support necessary for reintegrating them into society. Consequently, rehabilitation professionals who had previously worked mainly with "crippled children" began to apply their expertise to the needs of disabled veterans. Furthermore, plans to rehabilitate veterans often intersected with new sorts of discourses about rehabilitating disabled workers. Improvements in prosthetic technologies, along with increasing emphasis on efficiency and modern production methods, meant that a wider range of occupations opened up to many persons with functional impairments. These transformed interrelationships between human bodies and machines had both liberating and oppressive aspects that were constant sources of political and cultural tensions.
Competing with discourses that called for rehabilitating and reintegrating disabled veterans, workers, and young people were various types of stigmatizing, eliminationist discourses that challenged the right of some disabled people to a place as equal citizens and even their right to exist. The "cult of health and beauty" associated with the life reform movement since the late nineteenth century still flourished after the war, serving in many ways to create a hostile atmosphere toward those viewed as ill, disabled, or ugly. Similarly, the discourses of degeneracy and eugenics had also begun in the late nineteenth century. The perception that the war had killed or disabled many of the healthiest young German men, however, gave a strong impetus both to postwar advocates of eugenics, who opposed squandering the nation's resources on the "unfit" and thus wanted to limit their reproduction, and to proponents of outright "euthanasia" such as Karl Binding and Alfred Hoche, who entitled their influential pamphlet of 1920 Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens (Permission for the Annihilation of Lives Unworthy of Life). These eliminationist discourses became even stronger after the onset of the world economic crisis in 1929.
All of these debates-whether well intentioned or hostile-about the proper place for disabled people in society were carried out largely by rehabilitation and medical experts, government officials, and cultural critics. That is, they were for the most part opinions of people who were not disabled about what should be done with those who were. But in the new democracy some disabled people began to assess their own situations and assert their rights in a number of ways. Disabled veterans formed large self-advocacy organizations, and disabled civilians created self-help groups that were small but significant exercises in democracy. Struggles occurred over hierarchies of disability having to do with cause (military or civilian, acquired or hereditary) and type (physical or mental). Yet for the first time some disabled people united to define their own needs, claim their civil rights, and oppose those who wanted to curtail their opportunities. In this manner, they challenged many opinions of the self-proclaimed experts.
Just as significant sociopolitical controversies were occurring over the place of disabled people in the German nation, the question of representing disability took on new dimensions in the Weimar Republic. Representations of disability were plentiful and conspicuous throughout the cultural sphere-from popular culture to high culture, from events designed for the masses to the most sophisticated works of art. Interpretations of the bodies of disabled veterans intersected with depictions of other disabled people in multitudes of ways. Large fairs and exhibitions brought disability and illness to the attention of mass audiences. For example, a Reichstag exhibition in Berlin entitled "The Wartime Care of Sick and Wounded Soldiers" drew up to 100,000 spectators in the winter of 1914-15. Later the "Gesolei" hygiene exhibition ("Gesundheit, Sozialfürsorge, Leibesübungen" or Health, Social Welfare, Exercise), which emphasized eugenics, attracted 7.5 million visitors in Düsseldorf in 1926. Popular magazines, films, and lectures interpreted the bodies of disabled veterans for a wide public. Rehabilitation manuals presented photographs of men (rarely of women) enabled to work again through the wonders of medicine and prosthetic technology. Progressive and leftist artists, photographers, and writers created a flood of images of impoverished "war cripples" and horribly wounded soldiers in order to critique militarism and social injustice. In their copious publications, advocates of eugenics attacked some disabled people as "useless eaters" and aesthetically repellent. And for the first time significant numbers of disabled people undertook to represent themselves in a variety of ways. Disabled veterans' organizations challenged outdated stereotypes of invalidism and dependency, creating forums for dialogue and information sharing in their publications. Tens of thousands of these men participated in carefully choreographed mass demonstrations throughout Germany, confronting the public with their disabled bodies in an attempt to voice their grievances effectively. And a few better-educated disabled people wrote autobiographical texts, historical analyses, or scholarly articles, giving their own views of their lives and the world around them.
As in the sociopolitical arena, all of these cultural representations of disability oscillated between the old and the new, between depictions of disabled people as pitiful, ill, ugly, repellent, or uncanny and those that began to imagine them as more capable, healthy, and ordinary, particularly with regard to the sphere of work. Yet the tensions between these two ways of looking at disability were not simple contrasts in black and white. In texts drawing on older iconographies of disabled people as pathetic victims, strange creatures, or human monstrosities, even these traditional figures often resonated with new meanings in the rapidly changing society that was Weimar Germany. And in innovative depictions linking disabled people and the working world-whether in photography or art-a new trend toward inclusiveness frequently seemed to come at the price of molding the compliant human body to fit into rigidly Taylorized production.
In controversies over how disability should be represented in the cultural sphere, conservative nationalists were often pitted against progressives and leftists. Believing that art should uphold the "ideal," specifically the ideal of a strong, healthy, authoritarian nation, the conservative camp generally wanted to eliminate representations of disability, along with all other extreme images of misery, from the cultural sphere. These circles still agreed with Emperor Wilhelm II, who had condemned modern art in a speech on December 18, 1901 as follows: "If art does nothing but portray misery as even more disgusting than it actually is (which frequently happens now), art commits a sin against the German people. The cultivation of ideals is the greatest cultural task." By contrast, progressive and leftist artists and writers did not want to blot out images of disability but rather made it into one of their most significant themes. Intensifying culturally familiar discourses about disabled people as pitiful or grotesque, they created shocking representations of disabled and wounded veterans in order to confront the public with the hollowness of nationalistic, militaristic ideals. And with their portrayals of disabled workers as functional assemblages of mechanical, prosthetic parts they created unforgettable anticapitalist images.
As is characteristic of most eras in which those creating the memorable images generally do not belong to the group they are representing, it was the ways in which disability appeared to constitute some kind of pressing social problem that caught the attention of artists, writers, critics, and other intellectuals. This means, however, that the most famous images of disability from Weimar culture should not be misconstrued as giving a true picture of the range of experiences open to disabled citizens at this time. The bodies of disabled veterans could be infused with symbolic meanings to make statements about the German nation. The bodies of disabled workers could be depicted to make statements about the promises and perils of technology in a time of rapid social change. The bodies of those with congenital or hereditary impairments could be presented in eugenic terms as threats to the health and even the survival of the German people. But in general these well-known cultural discourses about disability were quite selective and hardly made room for other types of stories that might have shown disabled people simply as ordinary human beings. In a unique survey of a group of physically disabled people carried out by a disabled teacher in Berlin in 1932, for example, along with sad and difficult experiences, many respondents told of being accepted and supported by family and friends, finding satisfying work, and living rather contented, happy lives. Much more historical research that makes creative use of documents is needed if we are to understand how such positive experiences came about and how typical they were. Any discussion of disability in Weimar culture, however, needs to complement canonical representations by taking into account as much as possible how disabled people themselves viewed their lives and the world around them. No group of representations yields the one truth about disability, but taken together they create multilayered interweavings of embodied relationships.
This chapter focuses on the major ways in which disabled people appeared in the public sphere, were represented by others, and represented themselves during the Weimar Republic. First, I discuss the significance of disabled veterans as a large, new social group, the goals of the German rehabilitation system for them, and some culturally important reactions of these veterans to becoming disabled. Then, after briefly describing how disability and illness appear in prewar expressionism, I analyze depictions of disabled veterans in Weimar art and literature that show these figures in a socially critical manner as impoverished, pitiful, or grotesque. Next I explore the intersections between such portrayals of disabled veterans and those of workers, including photography, rehabilitation manuals, and other texts. Here the main tendency was to reflect from several perspectives on how these figures were connected through their prostheses with the technological world of machines and industry. The following sections focus on disabled civilians, particularly those groups that eugenicists targeted for elimination. Here I bring out the major ways in which the advocates of eugenics conceived of disabled people as defective and, linked to this, held much of Weimar art to be degenerate. Finally, I present some significant examples of how disabled people formed self-advocacy organizations and wrote about their own lives and perceptions of the world around them during this period.
The Disabled Veterans Return
Organ Grinders or Respectable Citizens?
With the 2.7 million disabled or permanently ill veterans who returned from the battlefields of World War I, disability came into view in the public sphere in Germany in a different way and to a greater extent than ever before. Fifty years earlier, during the Franco-Prussian War, 80 to 90 percent of seriously wounded soldiers had died of infections and other complications, and only about 70,000 "war invalids" lived through that conflict. Receiving insufficient government pensions, many of these men had no alternative but begging-traditionally the only means of survival for many disabled people throughout history-and so the sight of disabled veterans playing their barrel organs for a handout or selling matches and other sundries became common throughout Germany in the late nineteenth century. By World War I, however, medical advances enabled many more soldiers to survive previously mortal wounds, and advances in rehabilitation technology made it easier for more disabled veterans to return to work. Yet in the economic and social turmoil of the postwar years the government struggled to provide the substantial resources necessary to reintegrate these men into society. In spite of great efforts to meet their needs, both economic exigencies and problematic welfare policies increasingly alienated these men from the Republic, often making them susceptible to Nazi recruitment in the later Weimar years.
Accordingly, the sudden presence of masses of newly disabled men was one of the most pressing tests facing the new Weimar democracy. Could men with these multiple kinds of disabilities be reintegrated into the defeated nation and, if so, how? Were men with such bodies to be viewed as heroes, pitiful victims, or ordinary citizens? What was the relationship going to be between the "war disabled" and those whose disabilities had other causes (the "civilian disabled" or "peacetime disabled")? The barrel organ became an icon of the controversies over these questions. In the tradition of the nineteenth century, hundreds of these instruments were produced in Germany as soon as the war began in 1914, indicating the widespread assumption that newly disabled veterans would soon need to be playing them on the streets for alms. An older artist, Heinrich Zille, drew disabled organ grinders and other "crippled beggars" in their Berlin milieu in a naturalistic style that demonstrated his sympathy for these poor outcasts. An expressionist artist, Max Beckmann, however, in his Leierkastenmann from the Berliner Reise ("Organ Grinder" from the "Berlin Journey," 1922), heightened the feelings of social fragmentation and physical grotesqueness through elongations and distortions of the disabled figures. From many quarters, voices were heard rejecting the barrel organ as an unworthy, humiliating fate, including trade union activists, rehabilitation experts, and many disabled veterans themselves. These persons argued that it would be advantageous for both individuals and society in general if these men would become self-supporting again. Social outcast or respectable citizen-these were the poles between which attitudes toward disabled veterans-and other disabled people as well-moved in the new democracy.
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Excerpted from Disability in Twentieth-Century German Culture by Carol Poore Copyright © 2007 by University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission.
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