Dagmar Herzog’s The Question of Unworthy Life tracks shifting discourses of mental and physical disability in Germany from the mid-nineteenth century to the present. Herzog’s methodologically innovative book begins in mid-nineteenth-century Germany, with the creation of residential institutions and remedial schools for people with disabilities. At this time, a hierarchy of the value of life emerged that was based on perceived usefulness. At the top were the “feeble-minded” who were considered only mildly disabled and thus deemed educable. Below them were those considered “trainable” for simple work. At the bottom were “care-cases,” who were thought of as wholly unproductive.
The concept of German peoplehood, or Volk, became prominent during the first third of the twentieth century. As mental and physical disabilities were deemed heritable, eugenic racial hygiene projects emerged. Herzog highlights the publication of the 1920 pamphlet “Permission to Annihilate Life Unworthy of Life” as promoting and justifying euthanasia for severely disabled people. Protestant leaders were receptive to the argument that certain lives were not worth living. Catholics, on the other hand, considered life and death to be the domain of the divine and rejected human intervention in these matters.
In the 1930s, the Nazi government began calling for the sterilization and murder of those deemed severely disabled. The directors of residential institutions for people with disabilities were often required to facilitate their sterilization or their deportation to death camps. After World War II, the West German state paid reparations for racially, religiously, and politically motivated crimes during the war. However, even in the 1960s, the West German government did not consider crimes against people with disabilities as “racially motivated,” thereby making them and their families ineligible for reparations. Worse, sterilizations continued into the decades after WWII. Only in the 1980s was the euthanasia project understood as a method of racial hygiene intended to “purify” the German Volk.
Things started to shift as disability advocates argued that the segregation of schools between disabled and nondisabled children hindered both the education and social acceptance of disabled people. In contrast, the self-described “cripple movement,” composed of people with physical disabilities, contended that this integrationist strategy created the expectation that people with physical disabilities should meet the expectations of the nondisabled, rather than negotiating a way of life that reflected their experience.
Even in West Germany, with its ostensible “socialist humanism,” disabled people were still being treated according to the nineteenth-century hierarchy of human life that measured one’s ability to contribute to the labor force and thus to society. As a result, “care-cases” were often pushed to understaffed and under-resourced institutions. Parents of disabled children were expected to have “normal” jobs, and they were stigmatized for providing appropriate care to their children if it limited their ability to work.
The treatment of people with disabilities in Germany has often been presented as a precursor to the Final Solution. This has the effect of suggesting that disabled people who were harmed, neglected, sterilized, and murdered before, during, or after the Holocaust are less significant than other victims. The Question of Unworthy Life attempts to restore dignity to people with disabilities who have been treated inhumanely — precisely because their humanity has gone unrecognized.
Brian Hillman is an assistant professor in the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at Towson University.
