Abstract
From Michael Foucault’s deconstructions of clinical power to Robert Jay Lifton’s The Nazi Doctors, Nazi medicine’s nefarious influence on the last 100 years of mental health research assaults our trust in scientific objectivity. Into this mix comes Edith Sheffer’s study of Hans Asperger, a pediatrician and leader of the renowned Children’s Hospital at the University of Vienna through the Second World War. Sheffer, an historian of Germany and central Europe at the University of California, Berkeley, assembles her story from three angles. One is a study of Asperger’s life and tangible clinical research with compromised children; the second looks at the deeply racialized violence of Germany’s annexation of Austria in 1938, as seen in the hospital’s killing wards; and the third is a particular rendering of interwar Vienna’s social work history that, Sheffer concludes, makes Asperger’s namesake diagnosis as toxic as his career.
Hans Asperger did not start out as one of the most significant psychiatrists at Spiegelgrund, the site where over 700 mentally and physically disabled children were murdered on the grounds of Am Steinhof, Vienna’s sprawling psychiatric facility. But beginning in the late 1930s, as his ideas of “curative education” for children with “autistic psychopathy” aligned ever more stridently with eugenicist Nazi rhetoric, so too his diagnoses may have expedited the brutal racial hygiene laws’ impact on the lives—and deaths—of disabled children. While it is not clear (despite the Sheffer’s archival research) just how many children Asperger may have condemned, ultimately that matters less than his acceptance by Vienna’s even more sadistic colleagues in Nazi child psychiatry. Imbued with pseudo-Darwinian theories of “race hygiene” and longing for unification with an idealized Germany, Asperger joined the Nazi Party (NSDAP or National Sozialistische Deutsche ArbeiterPartei) in spirit if not fact. What emerges is a figure fully complicit in the killing systems, the Hereditory Inventory among them, that categorized children according to their ability to obey the Reich’s highly regimented social norms.
Asperger came of age between the two world wars, at a time when Julius Tandler, dean at the University of Vienna Medical School, was appointed by the Social Democratic government to transform Vienna’s Welfare Department into a system of professional assistance for families and children. With the creation of a new occupation, the Fürsorgerin, Tandler vastly extended the municipal health and mental health services while keeping child protection within the context of community and family. Midway between a public health nurse and a social worker, but more influential than both combined, the title of Fürsorgerin had no actual counterpart in the United States. In 1927 alone, the community-based Fürsorgerinnen 1 made over 16,000 home visits to enrolled infants and preschool children in Vienna (French & Smith, 1929). The home visits were key to their effectiveness but, then as now, subject to ideological interpretation: to the progressive leadership of “Red” Vienna, their affiliation with local health stations ensured the health and safety of children; and to the (eventually triumphant) “black” conservatives, the Fürsorgerinnen intruded on family boundaries and undermined parental and religious authority.
Because Sheffer aligns herself to the latter position, her otherwise informative book is undermined by a flawed hypothesis. She writes, “The socialism of Red Vienna in the 1920s led to the interventionist social work that established Asperger’s clinic…. The social workers of interwar Vienna created a renowned welfare system that ultimately destroyed the children it cared for.” (p. 244)
