Asperger's Children: The Origins of Autism in Nazi Vienna

This was a very interesting look at not just Hans Asperger, but autism, eugenics, and Nazi science.

In the 1920s, Vienna pioneered an interventionist approach to child development. Eugenics was in vogue, but didn't mean only the negatives we associate it with today--rather, it was a two pronged approach, with active medical, social work, and education departments designed to improve the lives of children and families. One element of this approach was the Curative Education Department where Hans Asperger came to work. Autism had already begun to become recognized at the clinic.

Under the Third Reich, however, this took a darker turn. As Asperger, already a committed Catholic and conservative, took over the department, the two prongs show more became a selection process for children. Were they "educable"? Could they be saved and turned into a useful part of the Volk? Or were they unfit? Despite his later protestations, Asperger became a part of that selection process--sending children to Spiegelgrund, home of the Nazi child euthanasia program.

This is both a disturbing history of Nazi child euthanasia and an insight into how Asperger's diagnosis was developed. While he highlighted the successes of some of the children, in an effort to present them as worthy of salvation, he increasingly stereotyped the behaviors of the children. He only recognized autistic behavior in boys (a prejudice that continues today). And he defined it as "autistic psychopathy"--with connotations in German similar to those in English.

Despite his later protests, and some distancing away from his earlier statements, Sheffer shows that Asperger's work cannot be completely separated from its context of Nazi psychiatry. show less

‘The aim of this history is not to indict any particular figure, nor is it to undermine the positive discussion of neurodiversity that Asperger’s work has inspired. Rather, it is a cautionary tale in service of neurodiversity -revealing the extent to which diagnoses can be shaped by social and political forces, how difficult those may be to perceive, and how hard they may be to combat.’

What a brilliant book!

What constitutes a mental disorder or a mental illness? Where is the line between normal/ functional and abnormal/ dysfunctional? Is there even a clear-cut line at all, or is everything just positioned on a blurred spectrum? Does it even make sense to speak about ‘normal’? These are burning questions, especially considering show more that our most widely recognised guide tools when it comes to mental illnesses and disorders is the DSM, a book which has been ever changing, contradicting, controversial, with labels disappearing and other being added, more, it seems, according to societal acceptance and expectations of the times than proper objective scientific assessments. Nothing illustrates this better than the so-called 'autism spectrum' itself, and, more especially, Asperger syndrome.

Asperger syndrome was named after Hans Asperger, the Austrian clinician who first described it while working with children with learning disabilities. Hans Asperger, working under the Nazi regime in annexed Austria back in the 1930s, also remains to this day a highly controversial figure.
A Catholic who never denied his faith under a regime which at times had persecuted Christians, and an academic who refused until the end to join the Nazi party, the man was credited for having a more positive outlook than his peers on learning disabilities. He, in fact, was not scornful of all disabled children; some (like the ones who will come to be labelled as having Asperger, then) he deemed capable and intelligent enough to be worthy of an education and integration, even under a regime which would have been quick to murder them otherwise. Yet... He was also a doctor who made the conscious choice to stay in Nazi Vienna, working in academia hijacked by Nazis ‘scientists’, besides being first and foremost a strong Austrian nationalist, as anti-Semite as any other nationalist of the time (he belonged to the Fatherland Front). More than that, caught up in the euthanasia program whereas children with learning disabilities who were deemed ‘useless mouths’ were sent to death, Asperger, as a clinician working with such children, had also assessed such disabled kids, sending personally several hundreds of them to institutions where, it was no secret, they would be executed. How do you reconciliate both parts of such a complex personality?

Now, again, the purpose of this book is neither to indict nor to laud the man. What Edith Sheffer does, though, and brilliantly at that, is, from a purely biographical standpoint, to put things back into context, an historical perspective which is more than needed in our privileged times where we have no idea of what it feels like to live under a totalitarian regime such as the Third Reich was:

‘…the Nazi era invite judgement of individuals. It is tempting to classify people’s actions as moral or immoral, innocent or criminal, rating each deed on a balance sheet with a positive or negative accounting at the end. For many people living under Nazism, however, life was not lived in terms of abstract principles…. Caught in the swirl of life, one might conform, resist, and even commit harm all in the same afternoon. The cruelty of the Nazi world was inescapable.’

Hans Asperger, trapped as he was (willingly or not -the reader will judge...) didn’t escape such ‘swirl’. He wrote positively about some disabled children, which he therefore saved from certain death; but he was also uncompromisingly disparaging of others, of whom he consciously signed the death warrants. The author reminds us of all that, and, as such, had it been just a biography, this ‘Asperger’s Children’ would have been thought provoking enough. However, it goes beyond that.

The main purpose here is indeed to demonstrate how the Asperger diagnosis came to be, a diagnosis originally rooted into Nazi values. Nazism indeed was a negation of individualism. People were required to be fully integrated within an homogenous society, to bond with each other and be productive as per Nazi expectations, and whose deemed useless or outsider (the mentally ill, the disabled, the outcast, the ‘racially inferior’) were purely and simply eliminated. Children didn’t escape such expectations, being brainwashed from a young age into various Nazi organisations to enlist them into such a unified world. This posed a problem: what to do with those intelligent, capable, and competent enough (even, for some, remarkably so) to be productive and part of Nazi society, yet struggled with social interactions to the point of seeming to be unable to integrate? What to do, in other words, with those that Nazis doctors diagnosed as lacking in ‘Gemüt’, ‘the capacity to form deep bond with other people’? Should they be eliminated? Should they be ‘treated’?

Asperger opted for the second option. His assessment of such children, then, had more to do with politics and a social statement fitting the Third Reich ideology than with medicine per se, which pose us a considerable ethical questioning. Indeed, the Third Reich is no more; nevertheless, when it comes to Asperger’s syndrome, our understanding is still framed by Asperger’s own assessment and definition, themselves inseparable from Nazi standards in terms of conformism. At a time where we pride ourselves in embracing equality and diversity, and when neurodiversity is a concept which has been reshaping our understanding of the human brains and, beyond, human behaviours in society, such roots remain a moral minefield as tricky to grabble with as the biography of the man who gave it its name.

Here’s a fascinating book. It’s more than a biography, it’s more than history, and it’s more than the retelling of how a diagnosis came to be defined in the first place. It’s a stark reminder that, when it comes to experts in psychiatry and psychology labelling people, the line is very thin indeed between objective science and subjective societal expectations. We might wonder, in fact, if there is any escape to political and societal zeitgeists when assessing human behaviours! We might also ask: should Asperger’s syndrome be renamed because of the criminal past of the man who first defined it? Should the autism spectrum itself be (again!) completely redefined? The book doesn’t address such questions, yet we close it with just such questions in mind, a powerful testimony to how though provoking such read is.

Absolutely gripping, here's a highly recommended to anyone interested from history to science, and from medicine to eugenics and so-called learning disabilities, mental disorders and else. Brilliant! show less

This is the story of how a fuzzy psychiatric diagnosis was given to unfortunate children by doctors who knew they were condemning these children to horrible deaths.

It's the story of how these children's honest, heartbreaking, willingly given, naive answers to questions posed by their doctors could mean the difference between being allowed to live or condemned to die.

It's a story about how killing a child became a completely reasonable way to treat a diagnosis of asocial behavior.

Sheffer lays out a meticulously-argued and well-documented case that the work of Hans Asperger was grounded in the racial-purity ideologies of National Socialism.

It's a chilling book not only for the documentation of atrocity, but also for the way Sheffer show more draws correlations to the present--how these same prejudices against children who are different continue to affect child psychiatry today, where unusual behavior is still pathologized. 'Social skills' have continued to be an unqualified good in the psychiatric treatment of children, and it was in Nazi Germany and Austria that asociability first became a pathology in need of a cure. Sheffer spends a long time pulling together the way an autistic-spectrum personality was id'd as deviant in large part because these children weren't attracted to group activities like the Hitler Youth--a deviation from the norm that could not be tolerated. It feels that these threads of dominant-culture prejudice still exist today, where practitioners assume a priori that it is better for a child to be part of a group, and to behave like the group behaves, no matter how uncomfortable the group makes the child feel.

Sometimes a small lens allows the greater horror to be seen and understood, if only fleetingly. Asperger's diagnostic program sent at most 10,000 children to their death, and what is that when compared with 6 million? But Sheffer makes an important connection between this relatively small tragedy of autistic children and the fate of six million Jews. She reminds us that the same notion of eugenic purity drove all of these horrific decisions: the National Socialist murder of Jews, homosexuals, mentally ill, and asocial deviants all stemmed from a pseudo-scientific thesis about eugenics and social improvement, a thesis that allowed people who committed atrocious acts to claim their actions were scientific and rational and therefore justifiable. show less

Interesting history of Asperger's diagnosis of autism during the Nazi regime in Vienna. I found it a little dry going over the medical information but most of this is history of how children were diagnosed and sent to hospitals where it was determined if they lived or died. The extent of how it was done and covered up was mind-boggling. I was shocked by how many doctors, nurses, social workers, and parents were involved and very few said no. I particularly liked the survivors stories but they were scarred for life. I also liked that I was told what happened to the main perpetrators, though few ended up paying for the crimes they committed. I'm glad I read it but it was a painful read.

Il mio voto è più sulle 4 stelle, comunque contenuto molto interessante, ben calibrata la parte storica con tutta quella legata alla psichiatria degli anni 40. Poco spazio invece alle storie e ai casi singoli dei bambini,cosa che sarebbe stata molto più interessante e particolare che nn leggere la situazione generale e condizioni di diagnosi legate al determinato Istituto o scuola speciale.

Il mio voto è più sulle 4 stelle, comunque contenuto molto interessante, ben calibrata la parte storica con tutta quella legata alla psichiatria degli anni 40. Poco spazio invece alle storie e ai casi singoli dei bambini,cosa che sarebbe stata molto più interessante e particolare che nn leggere la situazione generale e condizioni di diagnosi legate al determinato Istituto o scuola speciale.

A little more dry and dense than I was expecting. I wish it had been an easier read, because it contains a lot of important information!