Disability Studies and the Legacies of Eugenics

Thursday July 22- Screening of film Liebe Perla by Hannelore Witkokofski & Moritz Terfloth. Discussion with Moritz Terfloth.

(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)

David: I think we should probably start. There are a couple of announcements, so let’s start with those.

Rosemarie: there’s a summer concert at the botanical garden and some of you went before. It’s on Friday. You would take the botanical gardens stop on the s1 line into town. The s-bahn is pretty accessible. The concert is accessible too. I saw people who were using wheelchairs. It will either be outside at 6 pm or inside in the greenhouse depending on weather. The 9 euro reduced fare (13 euro) includes admission to the botanical gardens. There’s a soprano from Norway and a piano player, pieces from brahms, strauss. Afterward we could go to a biergarten not too far away from the garden.

On Monday after the T4 memorial, Brenda and I found a wonderful, accessible Greek restaurant close to the Rathaus/Steglitz s-bahn stop which would be on your way back. We can invite everyone who wants to go out to dinner after the meeting for the T4 visit. I can send around a sign up sheet and make a reservation.

There’s that and there’s a friend of mine who took me to a wonderful Indian restaurant in Berlin, in Kreuzberg, in Mitte, and somewhere else.

So, I’ll pass these around and I hope to see you all.
Rebecca: in terms of concerts, there’s a poster on the cup of chino store about organ concerts at the church right here. I think the next concert is July 28. we’ll have to check.

Rosemarie: someone also told me about a street that has a lot of used book stores, near the Einstein café. In Schoenburg, the street is motz strasse.

Mark: I found a Latvian book shop in town called Sputnik. It had a great section on anti-psychiatry.

Rebecca: also, my favorite spot in Berlin is Kreuzberg because it’s a very diverse part of Berlin, very beautiful, I just recommend that. It’s pretty interesting to see. A lot of bookstores there too, and a good Persian restaurant.

Mark: I was thinking of doing something, like going to monuments for the left wing revolutionaries, in the area. If anyone is interested in that. This weekend I think.

Rosemarie: many people have expressed interest in looking at the memorial for the book burning.

Sally: they’ve built a wall around it to protect it during construction, so you can’t see it anymore.

Mark: I found a memorial where a bunch of German women protested in 1942 around the treatment of their partners. It’s near the Polish and Hungarian museums.

There’s a film that just came out on that topic. “Rosenberg Strasse”

Rosemarie: place where they rounded up gays and lesbians, the pink list (Roselisten). Upside down pink triangle at the u-bahn strasse. Nollendorf platz station, Motz strasse.

David: discussion. Jerry you were going to lead us today.

Jerry: first off I have some stuff to pass around. 1. buck vs. bell.

David: does everyone know what this decision was.

Jerry: I’ll talk about it more. H.L. Menken’s “Utopia by Sterilization”. I’ll pass it around. Menken has a similar recommendation in 1937, interesting article.

Let’s see, I’ve got a few other handouts on German eugenics, especially previous to the Nazis. Before going into the reading I’d like to go into American eugenics (see Jerry’s computer for his intro).

Adrienne: Why was US eugenics being abandoned by 1930?

Gerry: because of the increasing knowledge that IQ tests were inaccurate, mendelian genetics much more complex than originally thought…not directly applicable to humans. In the U.S. eugenics propaganda really led eugenic efforts. In Britain on the other hand they let the research guide practices.

Walt: there may also be a component of interpretive framework. There were professionalization issues as well. Questions of numbers’ ability to attract people, the movement was losing energy. Biologists saw more opportunities going in other directions.

Gerry: geneticists were very concerned about their ties to eugenics. So they distanced themselves.

Adrienne: was it also because by 1924 immigration quotas had been passed, so they had succeeded?

Gerry: it’s interesting how two of the most important successes happened as it was faltering out: the passage of immigration issues, and the buck vs. bell.

David: I think this issue is very open. There’s a lot of arguments about why eugenics ended, if it ended, etc. My main argument is that they had accomplished everything they wanted it to accomplish, so in effect it failed by being so successful. If you think of eugenics as a hegemonic unit, an umbrella, once it accomplished its state policy function, there was no longer a need to keep everything together, bits and pieces could be broken off again.

Gerry: the great depression really seems to have had opposite effects in the US and Germany. The depression in Germany was much worse than in the US. It really hit home with people and solidified the eugenics position. In the US, the depression harmed the eugenics movement, because of the main argument that people were born in a specific space, and there is very little fluidity. Now we see a lot of fluidity, and that resulted in a loss of faith in the science of heredity.

(return to intro)

Mark: in Australia, many of these racist eugenic groups stayed around a lot longer. The white power movement, for example, stuck around throughout the 1970s. Eugenic sterilization of people with intellectual disabilities continues today in Australia. Susan Brady does research on this contemporary sterilization. She’s published some papers that are available online. www.wwda.org.au. There’s been many conferences on this topic. And so those cases still continue today.

Gerry: that happens in the states as well, especially girls with severe mental retardation in the states.

Mark: and she pretty much told me that she’s never been successful in stopping sterilization.

Debjani: Do they sterilize men at the same rates?

Gerry: the numbers are approximately the same, except in some smaller states, where women were more frequently sterilized.

Sara: the rhetoric however, is definitely focused on women as opposed to men. Feebleminded women are seen as most threatening and dangerous in this rhetoric.

Return to paper.

Phillip Reilly. _surgical solution…_

American association of the investigation of sterilization (1937)
Shows that sterilization was not as successful as originally hoped.

Gerry: Okay.

Sally: I just want to talk about the gender point that came up. I find the numbers and the focus on women really interesting. One of the things that comes up is the difference between an unfit mother and an unfit father. What kinds of narratives are there regarding wrongful sterilization on the basis of a “misdiagnosis”? Does such narratives even exist with men.

Nancy: If you want to look at rationalization, women are much more messy than men. It’s about getting rid of the mess.

Gerry: the primary rationalization now is the ease associated with a life free from menstruation.

Rebecca: in Germany there’s an interesting rational regarding sterilization. They say that we want these women to be as free as possible and have sex with whomever they want without having to worry about pregnancy. Of course, there’s a hidden argument lying underneath.

Gerry: few eugenicists did bring up the fact that sterilization was more worrisome with women. However, it’s interesting that most eugenicists don’t seem to pay much attention to the men involved in this practice.

Questions regarding female eugenicists:
-not so many
-birth control and feminist movements, Victoria Woodhull, Margaret Sanger.

Sally: Canada had a lot of female eugenicists.

Pam: I just wanted to make a small comment that since there’s so much sexual abuse within institutions that adds to the “messiness.”

Gerry: inadequate remarks in Proctor. Laughlin received an honorary doctorate. P. 141. He never actually traveled to Heidelberg. Laughlin never went. Clarence Campbell did go.

Another minor thing is later when he talks about IQ tests on p. 111. He talks about Wilhelm Stern. I don’t think he coined the term IQ. He was not a contemporary as Proctor voices him here. He was the first person to give a number to denote intelligence. Binet Simon did not do that and neither did Goddard. In 1912, Stern did apply a number. I think before it was age equivalence.

Rebecca: in the files we’ve seen in Hadamar, there were specific numbers based on very subjective questions. Very unobjective.

David: what I remember about Stern was that he came up with the idea that the ratio of the score needed to be flipped. There was some rational about calculation of the percentage regarding adequacy. I don’t remember the exact rationale.

David: any other comments on Proctor before we switch over to our guest.

Hello Moritz, welcome to the group. Hanne Lorre has not been able to come because of her fall, but he’s here to talk about his role in making the film.

Moritz: Hanne Lorre is very sorry not to be able to come and she sends here greetings. I can read to you our introduction, what we normally give to the audience before showing the film. I would like to offer this to you. As an intro into this film. The film is English subtitles, with German and Hebrew spoken language. Afterwards we can discuss it.

I’ve got the film. Hopefully you’ve got the technique.

The film and what I’d like to read is about 1 ½ hours. Should we take a little break.

Five minute break.

David: why don’t we start up again so that we can get going. Let me start by saying that we’ll open with an introduction. He promised to introduce himself. The other thing I want to do is rearrange seating, so before we watch the film we’ll do that.

Walt: popcorn?

Moritz: thank you. First some words about me. I’m a historian, Hannelore and I met in 1997. We became colleagues, friends, I work as her assistant sometimes. We worked together on her issue, the persecution of short statured people in the holocaust. I was generally interested in the treatment of so-called marginalized groups in this time. We became close colleagues as we began preparing for this film. The director called Hannelore to see if she would like to interview (short) Perla and the result of this is the film you will see. I will now read to you our common introduction. It is normally read by two or three of us. Longer very precise texts Hannelore has others read for her since

In the center of the following film stands my friend Perla. It is something outstanding that she and all members of her family lived the experiments of Mengele. This is due to the fact that he had a special interest (scientific) in their family. 7 of the family members had a height defined as “dwarfism”, he called them zwerge. He was especially interested in genes. He was assigned by his doctor vater to undertake comparative surveys on twins to see if there were specific genes in their blood that controls growth. Because of those studies he also had an interest in dwarfs. The Oberwitz family came into his hand this way. For the reason of documentation, Mengele presented the whole family at a symposium in 1944. while at this meeting, Mengele had done the shooting of the film showing the results of his studies. He forced members of the family to stand naked on the stage. It was Perla’s wish to hold this film in her hands, that’s why she begged Hannelore to find this film. Moritz and Hannelore went through much research to try to find this film.

I want to stick out some issues. The major problem of our task was that we had to search for an old film. The relics are mostly written papers, so we went to the archives first to find hints of what this family left behind. We attempted to figure out where the film could be found. We had to be aware that the system of genocide didn’t care for the names of its victims. The administration of mass murder was organized thru its institutions and not its victims, so we concentrated on searching out Mengele. The biggest archive on him is in Frankfurt. More than 40 folders were filled, containing testimonies of Auschwitz survivors. We had the presumption that Mengele may have brought this film to the Kaiser Wilhelm Institut in Berlin (institute for anthropology, genetics and eugenics). The relics exist in the Max Planck institute. Mengele’s advisor was also the head of the Kaiser Wilhelm institute. After the war he was in western germany where we found his papers in the university archives. We also know that there are a lot of personal correspondence, but they are in the hands of his family and not open to the public. Nowhere is there any good hint as to where he left his material after he fled. It is known and proved that Mengele used his time in Auschwitz to further his medical career. The conditions of Auschwitz were ideal for medical research, hundreds of thousands of people were there, and had no rights whatsoever. For physicians there, this was a big pool of “material” which they could abuse without fear. Mengele’s focus was twins and dwarves. This is often called pseudoscientific, but Mengele’s work followed international standards of his time, and was recognized as such. He wanted to support racist ideals through science. Our film is not about Mengele. Two goals: 1. set aside the oblivion, here the story of the Oberwitz family is an example of the many crimes. 2. show the continuities of the Nazi period into our times. Human genetics aim to prevent the existence of lives deemed burdensome. The characteristics of bodies or social behavior, the methods are to reach these objectives through prenatal diagnosis and in the future genetic therapy. In the Nazi period the theoretical basis was racism, today the gene is the basis for all characteristics.

Thanks to the director and all who helped with the film.

So I think at this point if there aren’t any questions, we should rearrange and begin the film.

Film.

Moritz: for me it is interesting to see the different audience reactions. In Germany, you never have people applaud afterwards.

Sharon: I think that you have applause because everyone is trying to figure out vehicles of expression for knowledge, and yours is so sublime.

Mark: I have a question. You say in the film that you still feel that the spirit that caused the Holocaust is still here. Can you elaborate?

Moritz: short question, long answer. What I feel is that I’m working as a historian not only dealing with the history of the shoah, but all social aspects of German history during this time. What I’ve learned is that there is still a feeling in society. No one wants to know in detail. For the average German, it is a must to know about German history, knowing abstractly about the holocaust, and the abstract number of 6 million, but if you are going into detail in the schools, I often teach adults and their reactions are that they don’t want to know precisely. They still fear the common presumption. People don’t want to know that this danger still exists. What happened in Germany was possible for most of the people. The nsdap has a large base in the people of Germany and they still had it up to Stalingrad more than ½ of the German people supported more or less what happened in the country. It’s still a debate as to how much people knew, but they knew a lot. What I feel is that until it is normal to discuss the issues of our history, there is a danger to fall back into it.

Brenda: I said at the start I’ve seen the film I think 6 times now. At Ohio state and at Galladet. I’ve showed it four times in class and every time, the young people in the audience, usually a young woman, why would she have wanted the film so bad and what would she have done with the film if she would have gotten it. How do you explain that to younger people? They can’t even understand her desire. How would you answer it.

Mor: it’s a very important question, sometimes asked after screenings. Hannelore and I try to figure it out. It has something to do with the main ambivalence with Perla’s life. It has something to do that they only survived because they were medical objects. They survived because of the grace of this person, but this has had an enormous result on the rest of the life of Perla. There is no real way to feel grateful for it, but it is something to be grateful for. They survived all together. They did it by paying a high price. For Perla, the whole story is also combined with painful medical experiments, it was very humiliated to stay naked. This was the focus of what happened to them and a symbol. For her it was very important not only for embarrassment but also for religious reasons that no one else could see those pictures without her consent. And she would have never allowed it. No one should have to see that film to prove that it happened. This is a discussion we often have: what kind of pictures should you show. Recently with the 60th anniversary of the assassination attempt, dealing with it, the German TV showed pictures of mass killings by shooting and for me it’s terrible to see. So, again and again these victims are brought back to the stage. We have discussions about the killings of American soldiers and the viewing. What’s the difference between an American soldier today and those people who died in the camps in Poland?

Rosemarie: I wanted to follow up on mark’s question. In the film Hannelore says that some people in Germany that people feel euthanasia was a good idea that was carried out badly. Is there a difference between this idea and racial extermination?

Mor: I agree with Hannelore and there is a big difference. Euthanasia is covered by humanity. My point of view is that there is no use to discuss easy ways toward death. No one has any interest in going before it’s their time. We have a cynical debate regarding sterbehilfe. What are we discussing about? We are discussing murder. What Hannelore feels is that if something must be changed in German law, it shouldn’t be to legalize sterbehilfe, but to make better conditions of life for all people, regardless of their case. People need help to live, not help to be killed.

Gerry: did you hope that you’d find the film?

Mor: I was at the beginning of the project, I started researching with Hannelore, and both of us were sure it was gone and we’d never find it. Either it was burned in Berlin, or it might be found in 25 years at the earliest, at Munster university. We know there is an attic, and we know there are some old things there, but no one has access there. Until now, they know how hot this heritage is and we have had very strong conflicts with these people. They still work closely with the institute. They offer genetic advice, so it’s very close to what Verschur did in the Nazi times. Ideas are the same, they have the feeling for it. People who are so close to the past as such refuse to discuss history. They know where the feeling comes from but they refuse to talk about it. There was a couple of years ago a thesis form a student dealing with something medical. Part of her statistic basis was from files from Vershur from the 40s, but we can’t get access to those. We also don’t know if Mengele and Verschur got together after 45. We don’t know.

Adrienne: what was Hannelore doing before this whole project?

Mor: she studied at first social work then psychology and then history. It was a part of her going through her life and acquiring knowledge. In the 80s she went to the memorial at Auschwitz and discovered there that there must have been short statured people in this camp, but nothing was mentioned in the museum. That’s why she started researching. She started in the archives at Auschwitz and continued in Hamburg. Here she found the Oberwitz family and she got in contact with Perla in 1992 to meet her. It was a few months after the last short sister, Elizabeth, died and she started writing to Perla. At the first meeting, Hannelore decided not to restart the same thing that Mengele did. She doesn’t want to turn Perla into a scientific object again, so she stopped interviewing her for science and began being her friend. The money ran out for her research project, and as you know we needed money, so she had to go back to the state of getting social welfare, trying to get a job, and in this time the director contacted her because he found out that there is a friend in Germany. The director also became a friend of Perla, here’s how the project started. Hannelore’s approach was knowing more about forgotten victims of Auschwitz.

David: there are several conflicts in perspectives between Perla and Hannelore. For example, the discussion regarding Mengele. At one point Perla mentioned that this was racial, and Hannelore actually mentions that it began in institutions. This seems to bring in another rationale, that there was a biological motivation that needed to be understood. Do you know Hannelore’s reading regarding institutional questions.

And to add to that could you add in your perspective.

Mor: there is no big difference between Hannelore and me. It is still open as to how interpretation will go on. It’s still open because it’s hard to deal, to bring it together in a line. This is what Friedlander does. He brought it into a line. 1. killing of unhealthy life. 2. the way to killing the Jews. This is definitely not the truth. It’s too simple, too linear. What all of us need to know when dealing with this history is that there are parallel movements, some of them fighting each other. We don’t have a straight, single ideology, a single way through those 12 years. We cannot deny that there was anti-Semitism and that there was a way to solve the problem. It isn’t clear when the final solution was decided upon. The methods were figured out by the institutional killing and they were tested, designed in those institutions and were brought into the large camps and into the extermination camps. We all know that but it’s very hard to make something or a hierarchy of victims and the reasons why several victims were brought to the camps or brought to death.

Third example, victims of racial persecution, mental or physical state, there are also other victims, political victims, homosexuals. From this point of view the debate is that when you start to bring a group into focus as victims, it is a special single value and you cannot go on to distinguish. 6 million is a number and on the other side, you have “only” some homosexuals who were killed. It’s horrible how society worked, but the number isn’t so important. What we should learn is the ideology behind it. And they are so close regardless of the population. The main idea is that they do not fit with in the future Aryan society. They are dysfunctional. They are not functional. There is no interest in having this burden. It costs a lot of money. They are not blond, blue, tall, etc. same with the Jews. If we are going close to this issue, we have to deal with what’s behind. Listing out various populations. From my point of view what is very important is to see what parts of this ideology was modernized after 1945. no one in western Europe or America, pronounces loudly we should kill the Jews. But short steps are always possible. More difficult because of the number of 6 million. People are careful, but the ideas behind it, designing perfect people still exists. These ideas are still in line not only in Germany.

David: I really appreciate that answer. I was trying to figure out if Hannelore and Perla understood motivations.

Moritz: it’s very hard to be sure about Perla. Hannelore of course, but with this film I’m not sure.. she was an actor also and she was very lowly in the last of her years. And for Perla, this was an option to stay on the stage and that was very important for her, and perhaps some of you noticed that every time she was in front of the camera she was acting. Hannelore doesn’t. for us it was a deal with the photographer that an assistant always told Hannelore when the camera was running. Hannelore in general didn’t care if she was on screen or not. Perla was a professional actress, this is partly why she signed on .. also trust in her friends. A lot of people in Israel know her and her family. She was very careful, though whom she could trust.

Walt: were you ever able to determine who the audience was for 1. the movie (the film by Mengele), and the audience of this congress? How does Perla’s awareness affect this document which is itself historical. Do you think the effect is different?

Mor: we only know about this film from Perla and her family and of course they had no background. They knew it was a stage close to Birkenau and people in the audience were wearing uniforms. The diary of mengele and his widow published a few lines of it and mentioned that there was a meeting between colleagues. We know several medicine men met, we don’t know who. What we can try to interpret, the year was September 1944. the front came closer, the infrastructure in Germany was coming down. It is not senseful to believe that they were high prominent people, the elite, because it was too dangerous. But what I guess was that they were colleagues from Auschwitz working in medical experiments and camp physicians. It was a normal job to be a camp physician. To deal with the health of the inmates, the SS, and troops. I believe that people from around the area came to meet, day trip distance would be okay, but not from Berlin.

But we only have those two sources and that’s not so much.

Second question, you can drive deep into postmodern theory about all this. What I feel is that in private conversations with Perla, off camera and just the two of us. Perla passed away in September 9, 2001. for me it was good timing that she also did not have to go through September 11. she had a very short, strong lung problem and died after 48 hours. Most of us knew it when we saw her in March , 2001 that it would be our last visit because she started changing her point of view again. She started making her peace with the whole story, she became distanced with the person and the figure of Mengele. Our last discussion was her feeling to get in peace with it. She felt close to the past and to her siblings. She shared funny stories about friendship in the camp. That was important for her. Warm connections to others and not the rough edges around her. But back to the question, what I feel is that it is only the attitude which changed with the camera, not the feelings or ideas or the person herself. Kind of a professional reflexion that she knew about the camera, but there was no difference between camera on camera off with our visits. The only difference would be different language barriers, no one of us had a common bridge language. It was very hard for Perla to switch, she would start in Hebrew and we would stop her, then she’d talk in German and the director would stop her. This film is a real document of her. Also that she cried sometimes, also that she switched in the middle of a sentence from how’s your dress, to how’s Auschwitz. For her this was all one level, so present in her life. No distinctions made.

Adrienne: hearing the sounds and getting the text as it was read I want to comment on how powerful it was to not see it. The life in Perla and the love in the friendship comes through strongly. I just wanted to say it’s really, she’s one of the people that you know about as having survived in the best sense of the word and that really comes through.

Moritz: thanks I will tell Hanne about this. As a blind woman she will be happy to hear this report.

Has she been blind for a long time?

She’s always had vision problems, but became blind later in life.

Has she been involved with other films?

No this was the first time for both of us. Our only other contact was dealing with journalists.

Sharon: 1. the reception of the film in Europe and internationally. 2. how you and hannelore and your team came to work collaboratively and how you negotiate this collaboration.

M: 1. the hard facts. The film was made for Israeli TV. In a very similar way it was shown on the shoah remembrance day in 1999. We heard that the percentage changed from 30% to 50% during the screening. When we were in Israel the next time people approached us on the street. Huge reception in Israel. Very important for the director because he tried to create a new documentary a new kind dealing with the shoah. It’s such a common issue that you need to invent new forms. He did it very well. ½ year later it was produced on German TV. German reception: the corporation partner was a large public broadcasting station located in Hamburg – ndr . They started to cooperate with a certain amount of $. When the film was shot and editing done and they decided that Israeli films were not as popular so decreased offer from 50,000 to 20,000 (ungefaehr). But they edited out some special scenes of the film, all scenes dealing with today’s Germany, scenes where we discussed late abortion of people with “negative diagnoses” this was also sad. It was brought in an external voice. A narrator, this is something which the director especially didn’t want to have..no external wise men telling the “truth”. They put it in and that’s why Hannelore and I are very upset, but it was shown many times, not at prominent times on television, but some people have seen it. It’s not film which is working very well in average German TV, it’s too special, and it’s too close to German’s problems with pwds, the German past, Jews, Israel, etc. that’s how it is. It’s too much. But we had many invitations to show the film in cinemas and we always do it in this version, because there is no German version the ndr version is not ours. We won’t work with it. It’s too bad.

There is mostly two main reactions. German audience: 1. how great that this sad story is told with so much heart, so warm, so easy to accept because the issue is reduced to normal people we can identify with, two friends and not abstract mass murder. That’s why I’m a bit proud of this film. 2. a kind of flight. Not to deal wit h the main issues. Oh, Hannelore is so strong and interesting. It’s unbelievable how strong you are. Behind this “I wouldn’t believe that a cripple can do this”, of course. I’m sure the side conversations when they come to me and not Hannelore. They come to me because I’m normal. Normals to normals , cripples to cripples. Etc. this is what I felt in general. There are so many interesting details that would take hours and hours.

International, we only have two experiences, 1. New York at a film festival. It was very overwhelming for us, because it was so short scheduled. We met Simi Linton and it’s been fantastic to work with her. Here there were two screenings, one framed disability and the other remembered the holocaust. Completely different audiences, questions, discussions resulted because of these two frames. We had a rough discussion about the memory of survivors. We had survivors in the audience, something you’ll never get in Germany. It’s bullshit that she has such a relationship to Mengele, is what survivors say. With the other frame, framing disability we had a long and interesting debate. How does it work, assistance, am I assistant am I colleague, am I friend, what’s my role in this whole project? How does it work when someone with various impairments, needing various accommodations, how can a person like Hannelore do scientific work. This was discussed openly in this context, but is always just underneath every time we show the film. These differences between “normals” and “disabled people” people believe that their mind is connected to certain body parts, for them its impossible to realize that mind is enough. Hannelore and I learned to discuss this. I did a lot of the research for the film on my own. For several reasons, for economical reasons, for one. It’s much more expensive if Hannelore comes along. She also had a lot of work to do in Hamburg. I did preresearch alone, and then for the main research, we come together. For us it started in 1997 with coming close as human beings, as scientists, as political thinking people. For more than a year, we tried to find out where our differences and commonalities lied. And how to work together with it. Then, coincidence that the director called and interviewed us for 10 minutes. We learned to work together by making more than the sum of each of us, but only by having separation between her work and my work. It’s still a problem of course. When we work together, 1. dictation, 2. comments as colleagues, 3. discussions as no more assistant and chief, but at the same moment if she wants to change something in her text, I have to switch to assistance mode before I can say, I don’t agree with that decision. Negotiation of boundaries. Without each of these relationships it doesn’t work. With every assistant she has special relation in dealing with what’s his or her special things he/she can do good or not. She knows it’s absolutely not useful to let me help her plants on the balcony. That’s not my job. I have a good hand to work with her with texts. That’s how we work together. Other people she loves to travel with on holiday.

Sharon: I was just struck by the collectivity. There’s no lead person, and you seem to get very far from.

We dream of a society where there is no leader.

David: what happened to the instruments?

Moritz: the instrument thing is that at this point in the film. The reason why Perla cried was the treatment of the instruments. Because when the Oberwitz family came to Israel, they started to perform (after the war). The posters were with Hebrew letters so from post045. They performed for a few years. Then it was too hard for them. They suffered a lot in the camp. Their bodies were tortured and couldn’t perform on stage anymore. They decided to buy a small area and open a cinema because they all loved films. They decided to make cinema and a café beside it. They did this for a couple of years, until both brothers dies, early 60s sold the cinema. In between, they had no more use for the instruments. Perla was not the head of the family, she was the youngest. She wasn’t involved in the decisions of the family business. She never had any precise information to what happened with the instruments. We assume they were sold. They were found in the attic of an antiques dealer and as the son was rearranging the shop, he found them. He had heard something about these instruments. He offered them to the memorial and got money for them. For perla, it was not transparent, why the memorial owned the instruments. For perla, she couldn’t play the instruments, she didn’t care about that, but she did care about the cane of her brother. It was with him in Auschwitz. This was with him the whole time, for the whole family there were special conditions. She cried because of the fact that [she lost her captioner]…..

We never found out precisely but we guess that she was never in Germany.

Adrienne: never mind I’ve forgotten.

Moritz: how did Perla learn German. 1. the region of Transylvania was very multicultural. It was part of Romania, Hungary, it was part of the Austrian Hungarian Reich and for the people living there it was normal for people to learn at least Roman and Hungarian, and then they were Jews so spoke everyday Yiddish, which is very close to German. She also started to read German literature. She had read Goethe, Schiller. It was a base of her education, which was at least in 4 languages.

Adrienne: when you were talking about the collaborative nature of your work. Did Perla see herself as a collaborator in this work?

Moritz: for Perla it was her film. Very simple, it was her film, and she had people around her helping her with this film. A funny guy with a camera, one with a microphone. And discussion stuff only she knew. Since this was a film about her, she invited her friends to be a part. After it was finished, and when she saw it for the first time, she saw what had happened without her. And afterwards it became something completely different, she became very thankful to Hannelore. They had a very close friendship. After long years, this was the first dwarf close to her. In a way, she felt Hannelore was a lost sibling.

We also can make a little pause, and having a cigarette.

I will stay will you as long.

How can we get this film?

We are not allowed to sell the film. The easiest way is that I will send the details to David on how to buy the film.

It may be available as dvd. It has to be ordered in Israel. But I don’t know the prices. I fear that it’s more than $100 but I don’t know.

Documentaries have such a small distribution that they are usually more expensive.

Many of us have been mentored from Simi Linton and we’ve seen or participation in her presentation. We have a gift for you. Presenting with photo.
And with Riva’s book.

She’s painted many people here. There’s Rebecca. And tekki. Here’s tekki lomnicki a short statured actress.

Thanks a lot.

So we’ll break and get together again to see how we can get food into this room.

How complicated would it be for you two to come to theUS?.

Usually it’s not complicated at all, just expensive, except for accidents like last weekend. Neither Hannelore or I have an economical base to come to the states, but if you arrange an invitation, we would be glad, but you should know that traveling for Hannelore means assistance. We tried to see if traveling with one assistance (me) works but it didn’t. if you invite us, you invite 3 people. No German official would pay any money, but it would be a pleasure.

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