Disability Studies and the Legacies of Eugenics

Potsdam Reading Session: July 6th

Readings:

Bauman, Zygmunt. Modernity and the Holocaust. Cornell: Cornell UP, 2000 [1981]. Chapter 1: “Sociology After the Holocaust.”

Burleigh, Michael. The Third Reich: A New History. New York: Hill & Wang, 2000. Chapter 5: “Extinguishing the Ideas of Yesterday: Eugenics and Euthanasia.”

(Transcript originally completed for accessiblity purposes and should not be considered a verbatim account of the proceedings. This transcription is meant to represent a general sense and may include gaps and mistaken information. Please request permission to quote)

Gallaudet U Press related to genetic conference from last year – will mail a special issue from the event with copies for all of us by the middle of July –
Willis has an article/short story on informed consent – something about killing a pig and he has sent us copies – and Georgina Kleege has an article on Berlin that Brenda has brought us to look at –

(Burleigh I’ll name as bur)

Death and Deliverance is his book – helps to summarize the earlier material – one of the first books that figures out where resistance appears among disabled persons during the Holocaust – the piece that we’re reading here is a summary of his work – it‘s a little sloppier than Death and Deliverance – gives a big overview – and Sandy’s leading us and then we’ll move to Bauman – and let’s “play this by “ear”

Sand 'O’Neill facilitates:

Interesting to watch Bur's trajectory – particularly about pwds – but he knows more in this piece than he does in the earlier work – he’s a character – he’s not a historian but a political economist – for example from 1900 to 1945 disabled people starved, after WWI he almost diminished the crimes by the way that he set that up – and he’s not doing that in this piece – but he doesn’t understand the connections – he keeps insisting that this doesn’t have anything to do with euthanasia today – he doesn’t seem very understanding or he has a lot of detail but doesn’t get disability politics – gets confused with holocaust historians – doesn’t know what to do with all the programs that involved disabled persons – T4 to children’s program but all the intersections with the “asocial” are clear in the piece

2 articles on prostitutes – and so there’s the overlap in their being rounded up at this time– one of the bridging things from sterilizing pwds and one of the first groups of Jews were half Jewish children that were killed – so the ways that these roles play out – how can one flesh out the different kinds of categories – are you in a camp because you’re disabled or because you’re Jewish? – and from Burleigh you can see how the categories expanded. And groups that were alcoholics didn’t get involved in fighting eugenics cause it didn’t apply to them – "first they came for the gypsies and I didn’t speak etc. and then they came for me" – the famous poem.This is a new aspect for Burleigh– he hasn’t wanted to criticize church stuff before – and wanted it all to just be about Nazis and that it can’t apply to anything other than that evil time that is tied off in history – but now he’s admitting that the catholic church signed a concordance with Hitler and then 5 days later sterilization started – I’m thinking that people may have a lot of reactions to this and I’d like to go around and get impressions so that we can start learning together

Walt – lots of reactions – one most useful to group is a methodological one – He didn’t realize that Bur wasn’t an historian – a great deal of information – methodologically he seems to have difficulty choosing agency – can’t decide on the individual versus the collective. A policy –Walt had trouble figuring out which cause – for an event that was complex and international – he would acknowledge journals or international agency but wouldn’t/ couldn’t tell us "how"or "who" – history of med has been traditionally founded – some value in taking on med journals, etc. as important players – but they’re not invoked and you don’t know how they’re brought into it or the role they play – an important point that is glossed over – if you couldn’t be a doctor in the US in the 30s you could go to Germany so lots of reciprocity was glossed over – clarity for causality became very opaque – he missed a great opportunity – for looking at professional roles – herr professor all these roles that are important .in German society –

Dave—to what extent was Nazism an aberration and to what extent is it pervasive ideas – and burleigh’s quite a case – because he cordons off Nazi phenomenon –

page 347 –a little bit past the middle – great Britain and Germany and why it took a much more multifaceted approach and in Germany there was a strong anti-intellectualism and that’s one of the ones that had a footnote – number 8 and number 9

Could I speak to that – 2 things that bounce for me – I couldn’t get past the first paragraph – it’s marred – it censors that there is a history or an origin– I was struck because of what I know about deaf eugenics and agriculture and animals and farming . Himmler was a farmer and he was very interested in plant and animal breeding – and Brenda – how and when it begins to shift from plants and animals into the human realm –

A big hill in Disability Studies, and we keep encountering it over and over again – methodology – how do we reach across methodological issues – phd specialized to do your thing in your way – and in dis studies we have to think about methodologies and what we’re going to do it in – and I don’t know much about archival research – just that they’re things in there, and brenda’s right, the methodology is really important and in an historical study one needs to know what came before it and eugenics has a great deal to do with horticulture breeding and husbandry of where we can improve species. But you can’t apply horticultural or breeding to humans until you have hereditary and you need an idea of something you can control as a unit – and then evolution – disabled persons are largely the proof of the Dose pri. Darwin ----

Sandy: demographics and statistics develop at the same time as eugenics – but for me – one of my bigger conclusions is that eugenics is what codified ableism in North American society – this made disability more than just impairment

nancy: a film came out around one of the big sterilization cases – sterilization of Lelan Mueller ? sp. Late 1800s to 50s and into 70s and how it was just a natural course of events that these inferior breeds coming over from Europe – and the same language was used – and the whole thing was conflated in the same way that statistics was conflated from the beginning – conflation of illness disability and disease with poverty.

Numbers are perfect and so you can take and apply this perfection to human beings, and it was believed that human beings could be perfect – a level of arrogance that came out of the victorian era that said, of course we can be perfect, and that’s how they moved it – and the terminology idiocy goes back to Romans – was meant to apply to all human beings who didn’t have citizenship status and they applied it as medical category – Pam: to some degree this author believes in science, that eugenicists/scientists were practicing pseudo-science and that real scientists weren’t participating in eugenics – he does not challenge the core issues of fragmentations diagnostic related groups. Iin some ways a medical person or scientist could read this article and come away pretty clean – Victorians – yes but they were obsessed – but for us, for exampel: How many of us have heard the percentage of population has mental illness – we all know this – Instead Bur makes eugenicists into excessively faithful or culpable and the rest were doing real science, which is okay.

gerry – The eugenicist movement in the US changed so that we had more people involved so that real geneticists moved away from publicly supporting eugenics – when ?

Sandy: I keep getting turned down by the American anthropology association because I keep wanting to do a panel on this – eugenics – Boas is rumored to have been a member of one of the eugenics societies – he quit because he realized it was racist – so it was widespread and then people moved away based on race – and yet, and I hate to make easy comparisons with today, but people don’t understand these issues with the clarity of the euthanasia or eugenics debates – in the mid 70s feminist groups wanted to push for sterilization freedoms – it’s my body etc. poor women and women of color needed that 48 hours because they weren’t getting that information – poor women were like the canaries and they had to ask middle class women to give up their right to have immediate sterilization – because of the difference – there is something that I never quite got is this why can’t the rest of the world get our issues a little better? Nicole: good question I don’t know if it’s a matter of methodology – or if it’s a matter of what’s not known or what people don’t want to known – I was surprised by the amount of material – if we all keep writing about this stuff – what effectively promotes or extends information is not a book but generations of scholars – someone has to get on Oprah – 60 minutes spot on American eugenics – pretty good – but set on themisconception – that eugenics was bad because people were misdiagnosed – a fatal flaw of recycling of this unuseful interpretation –

Sandy: The pseudoscience argument is so frustrating because I read this as a direct commentary on Bauman’s work – Burleigh is so catty even if this was all pseudo scientific but it still got passed off as true, rational, or whether or not it was good it’s

Faulty premise to begin with – pseudo science can’t become pseudo science without science to shake its finger – as you guys know origins, methodology idea of perfection, faith , work, all these – really the ADA is set up on this and the rescuers again. Perfection – faith in science as the problem , tied to that is the class and the poor thing -- one of the biggest uses I’ve found of Burleigh’s stuff is that he does tell some of the stories of pwds and those stories and I’ve found a few in other places and there is stuff right after the war – but then they’re submerged – but Bur retrieves the different stories – and how did all of you react to different stories?

Addendum by Walt – Michael Burleigh trained as a medievalist and wrote his professorship in medieval history in Cardiff and he’s now in US and now he’s shifted into Nazi-era work which may be some of the challenge – good at stories as a medievalist – and that may be why he’s good at stories – and he doesn’t seem to be struggling as I am at his own histories and the background of medieval history and political science – made it all too easy – whatever his particulars – especially in early 90s – except for Friedlander and Gallagher – not much and his story of one woman who is deaf and her effort to escape from hospitals – so he has stories in English of resistance – and that’s important. Because if you could write a letter or resist on the bus or fuss at all – so who could organize and how did resistance occur – so there is some evidence of that – so we also have the resistance but we also have cases of pwds who collaborated and that is a reality also – so that parallels very much social justice movement issues – and there’s a new book out from Gallaudet and one of the pictures is a deaf motorcycle unit – pro Nazi I think and then we have a person who was actually in the French resistance. And Lusseyren – he has some of the best descriptions of life in the camps – separate barracks for pwds in camps – he was at Buchenwald – and even before the sterilizations and the murders – someone with retinitis pigmentosa – couldn’t get married so agreed to get sterilized and then couldn’t get marriage certificate because he’d be wasting his seed – these stories – I just find very – they’re very – moving – why do we have this need to classify ? the large human question – I know it’s stupid and basic

Obviously that’s one of the major flaws in science and medicine – Burleigh kind of says they counted wrong but count again or count better or etc.
Shelly Tremaindoes some really useful stuff around quantification--=Brenda :

You’re right, except I realize that if it’s not counting than it’s some missing piece – my reaction is just simple and a gut reaction and that’s the business of the stories that are there and how it comes forward – archives or finding it or witnessing – it's personal. I don’t know if you know the holocaust memorial museum did a festival symposium on deafness and eugenics and the Nazi era and you can get the transcripts on line and you can get the academics and then testimonials. Looking ahead for Thursday night – and I’d like to look at crying hands – stories end up as examples and the analytical terrain that one might interpret with them – even the degree to which there was internalized oppression – there were blooming blind and deaf cultures throughout Europe that were obliterated –

Classification, counting, and who makes use of the stories and what – like Bauman – as a sociologist here’s what sociology does and I’m now going to analyze how it does it – okay we counted wrong let’s look at why it is that counting is the only way and almost none of the other people who talk about statistics don’t analyze it – are these stories sometimes provided in order to prove that those people didn’t deserve to be killed? Very dangerous – do we have to prove they’re human – one story also allows us to rest in singular remarkability of that story – losing sense of larger picture – politics of this – dangerous enterprise

Eugenics was international – Diane Paul has written 2 books that goes into countries – China and Brazil and goes into looking at eugenics programs – she says that in Brazil it’s not medicine – China the whole birth control movement with planned parenthood – population control – it’s racist in that it’s about economics, class, race, and also about agriculture – being able to produce the food – The story of creating the short stock of wheat and how it saved India – Malthusian – relationship between birth control was classist, racist, and international – Australia through the 1990s –

Walt: beginning to have trouble with conversation – some of the strands that we’ve been talking about – origins – pulling out tools vs. principles or guiding ideas – numeracy is a tool and perhaps distinguishes between us and them which is an anthropological origin—who’s using the tool – how do societies or individuals oppress or hurt individuals using those tools? I use this to come back to idea that eugenics codifies ableism – because my read on eugenics is that it’s only one application that occurs during 19th century – more collectivism – progressives were embracing tools of science such as numeracy

Agrarianism – Darwin – militarism – big thread here – actually endorses ableism – large conscripted army – able to have the best or most able which is why a large number of conditions get defined or redefined – IQ gets swapped around – state is making choices –

Subnormalcy – Goddard applied this to US army and changed his IQ measure because otherwise we’d loose too many population members – I love the provocative nature of eugenics codifying ableism – so we’re seeing a sequence of the eugenics movement into the Nazi regime – eugenics not as a thing but as something that galvanized many principles: Breeding theory applied to human beings, heredity applied to generational transfer or germ plasma so that generations had to be regulated, so that parents had to be controlled, continuity across kinds of defect – demographic idea that the nation was nothing more than the value of its population.

Evolutionary continuum – pwds came to be proof of the primitive that is overcome.

One idea that is key – the nation as the body – before one can have eugenics – every individual body is reflective of nation body – nation as a garden –

Degeneracy – perfection is too simple a term – The idea that species decline . One merely needs an idea that there is a lack of perfection, doesn’t have to be antithesis or a concept.

Trying to improve the organism –

Historical things – chronologically Malthus is important – same thing is true of Galton and Darwin – Malthus was really a social Darwinist – he was really class oriented – wealthier classes will pay fewer taxes and gets into whole idea of degeneration, that the unfit are breeding more – statistics – lots of that from Galton – biometrics from him but he also did lots of research in heredity – Darwin did same thing – Darwin did same experiments that Mendel did –

Then in terms of the nation as the body – very important metaphor – probably most significant – same as red scare – organism – pathogens that will infect social body – and that folks will multiply and infect it – biomedical research – Bauman’s work hit it on the contagion issue and psychiatric – real fear that madness is spreadable and that it’s the essence of disorder – but then to understand that disorder can be contained – that a person can be disordered – the early term for genes was gene plasm – disordered bodies in ordered space – we’re the manifestation of it – that’s how I felt at the Einstein institute, Bauman – anyone who hasn’t said anything – if you want the space.

Broader issues that have been raised about counting – body metaphors and gardening – global and international sense what’s interesting to me is the human rights discourse on how bodies are treated in nation states has become a matter of how nations are recognized in economic forums. Very ironically Mathew Forman has done interesting work in China and he talks about when China was seeking acceptance – one of the things that they came to understand was how were they treating their disabled people – the percentage of persons globally-- they felt that they needed to match and they kept falling short and they kept worrying that they needed to improve their statistical method.

One of the problems with the counting and classification system is that is changes on a regular basis. In education in order to receive funding school systems need to classify children and depending on how much funding there is at a certain time the level and classification system changes school.

Nazis had forms going out to schools and institution directors – the intent of the questionnaire wasn’t given so many directors falsified their documents thinking that it was for getting funding – This highlights that what you think your counting procedure is for can change the assumptions made about the results.

Counting and accounting for that seems to be about surveillance

Paul Weidling at the end of the 19th century there was a dream of a total surveillance of the population – the mass body would provide further exertion of control over another organism—

Walt – just came from DC – 25 pediatric emergency rooms doing work together – surveillance network – index cases of bioterrorism but could also be extended for naturally occurring epidemics and some of us got nervous about how data being generated and this is probably where HIPA is playing in our favor and in Boston at any one time there may be 1000 cases but you can’t track back to individuals – medical police dates back to the 18th century but could go and pull out someone with cholera or a sweeping condition – recurs in cycles and epicycles – Dept. of defense will be in there – and I don’t know how the counting politics will end up

Bauman – he would say that Burleigh missed the point – there’s all these other countries involved – implicating modernity. The holocaust stands out as a bizarre event because our society failed to examine its deeper meaning and causation.

Bauman talks about this idea in greater detail. That the holocaust was not necessarily unique, but to an expected outcome of modernity.
Convert, leave, kill: themes of treating otherness in Hillberg.
Dis. People change discussion; is this inherent to modernity?
Eugenics functions to give identity to someone to be acted upon.
Sara: ASSUMED objectivity in science; division of labor, smaller steps, reminded of Foucault, assumed neutrality or objectivity associated wih that.
Brenda: rhetoric of classification, not just counting but why you are counting. It doesn’t exist if it's only one; but you have to do something if the numbers get too high; but we have to have enough to make it matter.

Bureaucracies as places of residual power

Sandy: Mark you and I have to talk. I totally disagree with that reading of Weber and Foucault. I don’t think you can trace Foucault like that. He’s more Neitsche and Stalinism. That’s not Bauman at all. Weberian analyses of sociology ends up being slightly left of liberal. Oversimplification of Foucault. He did develop over the years. The Order of Things is against a Weberian; or the French who have taken up those readings of it. It will be an interesting discussion.

Bauman has some great quotes- for me itt hit the nail on the head. Auschwitz expands the human consciousness no less than landing on the moon. Is that true?

Saul Friendlander calls Auschwitz the touchstone of evil in the 20th century – barometer of evil itself. He wants to interrogate that.
My take – this was the literal evil; but for Foucault- not as attackable or present in one place.
Bauman- a lot of conflicts of modernity played out in concentration camps; helps us understand modernity.
You have that kind of opening up. Strikes me as interesting that such a need to contain an understanding of evil. People want to think about Auschwitz as singular and containable ; versus Bauman not saying that modernity is inherently evil but it is lurking in the background waiting to be released. Janus faced aspect of it. That is a Pandora's box for a lot of people, opens up a discussion of evil – have to look at every single organization – medicine, bureaucracy. Not just organizations but ourselves .

p.8 quote. One of the central ingredients of modernity is that it naturalises its own processes – being fully in keeping with our civilization, the way it forwards everything as if it has always been like this;

People from a post modern point of view – see end of meta narratives. But death is the meta narrative, for all of us.
We should break and start with Bauman tomorrow.
Only one essay on discussion tomorrow.
Sharon: we should define bureaucracy.

Sharon L. Snyder, Ph. D.,
Director, "Legacies of Eugenics" Summer Institute, Einstein Forum
Assistant Professor, Interdisciplinary Ph. D. Program in Disability Studies
Department of Disability and Human Development
University of Illinois at Chicago (MC 626)
1640 W. Roosevelt Rd. #207
Chicago IL 60608-6904 U.S.A.
E-mail: ssnyder@uic.edu Phone: (312) 413-1975 (Voice) Fax: (312) 996-0885