Thank you so much to Dr. Susanne Knittel of Utrecht University for graciously agreeing to write the foreword for my book. Can't thank her enough! See foreword below. (Book will be coming shortly.... stay tuned!!)
How can we recover memories of a traumatic event and its victims when no traditional written testimonies are available? Is it possible to construct a narrative from incomplete fragments? And how do we deal with the silence of the archive? These are some of the burning questions at the heart of Finding Ruth.
The Nazi mass murder of people with disabilities and mental illnesses (which they euphemistically termed the “euthanasia” program) remains a forgotten and poorly understood aspect of the history of the crimes of Nazism, especially in the English-speaking world.
The reasons for this forgetting – and silencing – are complex and manifold. Certainly the most disturbing is the lingering misconception that these killings were a justifiable medical intervention rather than murder. Until very recently, the persecution of people with disabilities and mental illnesses was generally regarded as completely unrelated to the persecution of Jews, Communists, Sinti and Roma, and homosexuals. At the Nuremberg trials it was decided to exclude Nazi “euthanasia” from the purview of the court, which reinforced the idea that these killings were of a different order and did not fall under the rubric of crimes against humanity. This distinction was upheld in all subsequent trials. The doctors and nurses who oversaw and carried out the killings were either acquitted or received extremely lenient sentences, and all were able to carry on working in their professions after the war. This absence or avoidance of a public engagement with the role played by the medical profession in the euthanasia crimes, coupled with the persistence of eugenic thinking and the medicalization of disability, long stood in the way of a proper politics of compensation. In Germany, the victims of coercive sterilization and of the “euthanasia” program were excluded from the 1953 Law for the Compensation of the Victims of National Socialist Persecution because they were not considered victims of this specific form of racial, religious, or political persecution. The victims themselves and their relatives and descendants were not consulted on this matter – evidently, they were not considered legal subjects who could speak for themselves. Furthermore, when these victims tried to sue for compensation, the experts called upon to evaluate their claims were often the same doctors who had pronounced them “deficient” in the first place. This systemic discriminatory politics has only changed over the past two decades when steps were taken to grant these victims equal rights: amazingly, the Nazi Sterilization Law from 1933 was not officially overturned until 2007, which finally paved the way for the victims to receive financial compensation and official acknowledgement of their victimhood in 2011.
Another reason that these victims were forgotten for so long was the failure, or refusal, to see the Nazi “euthanasia” program as part of the broader international eugenics movement, which enjoyed fervent support throughout the Western world, also among the Allied nations. The scientific roots of the eugenics movement stretch back into the nineteenth century, and versions of eugenicist thinking in various guises persist to this day. This decoupling of the Holocaust and of Nazi medicine from this broader historical context allowed for it to be presented as an aberration. This gave the idea that the events in Germany were utterly unrelated to the situation in the rest of Europe and North America.
The final, most important reason for the forgetting of Nazi “euthanasia” is the fact that, until very recently, there was no real community of memory to promote the commemoration of these victims. There were very few survivors, and patients at institutions who witnessed deportations either did not or could not testify to what they saw. Even the small handful of survivors who did write accounts of their experiences found it almost impossible to get them published.[1] The victims’ own families often refused to discuss the topic, out of a sense of shame or fear of stigmatization. Hence the only witnesses that remained were the perpetrators themselves – the nurses, doctors, and administrators of the killings. In many cases, the medical files written by the perpetrators are the only traces left of their victims. The majority of these files were destroyed or lost, and the few that remain provide only a partial and dehumanizing picture of the people behind the names. For decades following the war, historians and even family members were denied access to these files on the grounds of doctor-patient privilege.
But the question of who is there to tell the story is only part of it. Just as important is the question of who is there to listen. It is not only the silence of the victims that has prevented them from being heard, but also the process of silencing that is imposed on them by our culture of able-bodied-ness and able-minded-ness. As Michel Foucault observes in his influential study Madness and Civilization, the social mechanisms whereby those deemed weak, ill, or deviant (irrational) are separated off from the rest of society necessarily result in their silencing and their being rendered invisible. Deprived of their own history because of their supposed inability to legitimize themselves through narrative, people with disabilities and mental illnesses have instead become the objects of the master narratives of medicine and psychiatry. Until recently, the victims of Nazi “euthanasia” were thus seen as radically different (also radically different from the other victim groups of the Nazis), and among scholars and the public there were few if any who were really interested in their stories.
Since the turn of the millennium, this has slowly begun to change, as subsequent generations – historians, journalists, artists, and writers, but also, importantly, relatives of the victims – have adopted this history and have become advocates for this memory. In Germany, authors such as Helga Schubert or Robert Domes, and family members such as Sigrid Falkenstein or Julia Gilfert, have taken on the difficult task of recovering the names and stories of those whose voices are irrevocably lost. In my book, The Historical Uncanny, I call this “vicarious witnessing”. It is an act of testimony by proxy, of reclaiming the memory and identity of these victims from the impersonal, bureaucratic, and dehumanizing language of the perpetrators. Vicarious witnesses rescue individual victims from oblivion and anonymity and make their life stories accessible to a wider audience, all the while taking care not to appropriate their trauma and suffering or to center their own voices and agency which might amount to a new form of silencing. Typically, they document the often difficult process of recovering the victims’ stories, allowing traces of their individuality and personality to emerge through the gaps in the historical record. Family photographs, letters, diaries, postcards, and other archival records play an important role in piecing together these stories. Often, these traces are incorporated into the accounts, which creates a multi-layered and poly-vocal space in which the lives of these victims are carefully reconstructed and remembered. In their montage-like incorporation of various media and discourses, these texts are inherently fragmented, leaving gaps in the story, and raise many questions that remain unanswered. What is more, they compel others to become witnesses to these lives that they would otherwise have been unable or unwilling to see and know about. Vicarious witnesses actively contribute to shaping and developing the memory of Nazi “euthanasia”.
Ilka Knüppel is such a vicarious witness. Over the course of many years, she has carefully researched the history of her great-aunt Ruth, and with it, of her entire family in Germany and the US. Finding Ruth is, to my knowledge, the first victim memoir in English. This is important, especially because, as I noted above, the memory of Nazi “euthanasia” is still obscure and largely forgotten outside the German-speaking world.
A key contribution vicarious witnesses make beyond recovering the stories of individual victims is that they also bring the larger historical context to life. Ilka skillfully combines documentary elements with those of historiography, biography, and family memoir, connecting the story of multiple generations of an individual family to the larger-scale, world historical events.
But Finding Ruth is also a deeply personal and moving tribute. As Ilka emphasizes, this book is a communal effort: many of her relatives and friends, as well as archivists and researchers in Germany and the US have contributed to the making of this book. But it is first and foremost Ilka’s dedication and unwavering determination that has brought this book into being. She has conducted a staggering amount of research, amassing hundreds of pages of documents and other materials pertaining to Ruth’s life and death. She has traveled to Germany on several occasions to visit archives and sites important to her family’s history. Furthermore, she is very aware of her own role as a vicarious witness and reflects on it throughout. In this way, Ilka has inscribed herself into the text, as it were, telling the story of the research and writing process, connecting the past and the present and converting the absence and silence surrounding Ruth and the “euthanasia” program into something tangible and present. This enables a belated process of mourning and recognition.
Finding Ruth also raises difficult questions about responsibility in the here and now. And in so doing makes it clear why it is so important to remember this history. The reasons for the great silence surrounding Nazi “euthanasia” have not gone away. There is still a stigma attached to disability and mental illness, and eugenicist ideas continue to linger in our societies. Ilka’s book is a valuable contribution to changing the narrative.
[1] The most prominent accounts are Ich, die Steri [I, Sterilizee] by Elisabeth Claasen (1969), Totenwagen. Kindheit am Spiegelgrund [Death Cart: Childhood at Spiegelgrund] by Alois Kaufmann (1986), and Elvira Manthey’s Die Hempelsche. Das Schicksal eines deutschen Kindes, das 1940 vor der Gaskammer umkehren durfte [The Hempel Girl: The Fate of a German Child Who Was Allowed to Walk Away from the Gas Chamber in 1940] (1994). I discuss these memoirs at length in my article, “Autobiography, Moral Witnessing and the Disturbing Memory of Nazi Euthanasia,” in Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond, edited by Stephanie Bird, Mary Fulbrook, Julia Wagner, and Christiane Wienand (Bloomsbury, 2016), pp. 65–81.
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