The Historical Uncanny

Disability, Ethnicity, and the Politics of Holocaust Memory

Susanne C. Knittel

• Publisher: Modern Language Initiative
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780823262786
• eBook ISBN: 9780823262793
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The Historical Uncanny explores how certain memories become inscribed into the heritage of a country or region while others are suppressed or forgotten. In response to the erasure of historical memories that discomfit a public's self-understanding, this book proposes the historical uncanny as that which resists reification precisely because it cannot be assimilated to dominant discourses of commemoration.Focusing on the problems of representation and reception, the book explores memorials for two marginalized aspects of Holocaust: the Nazi euthanasia program directed against the mentally ill and disabled and the Fascist persecution of Slovenes, Croats, and Jews in and around Trieste. Reading these memorials together with literary and artistic texts, Knittel redefines "sites of memory" as assemblages of cultural artifacts and discourses that accumulate over time; they emerge as a physical and a cultural space that is continually redefined, rewritten, and re-presented.In bringing perspectives from disability studies and postcolonialism to the question of memory, Knittel unsettles our understanding of the Holocaust and its place in the culture of contemporary Europe.

Part One

1. Remembering Euthanasia: Grafeneck as Heterotopia

Dear Brack,

I hear there is great excitement on the Alb because of the Grafeneck Institution.

The population recognizes the gray automobile of the SS and think they know what is going on at the constantly smoking crematory. What happens there is a secret and yet is no longer one. Thus the worst feeling has arisen there, and in my opinion there remains only one thing, to discontinue the use of the institution in this place and in any event disseminate information in a clever and sensible manner by showing motion pictures on the subject of inherited and mental diseases in just that locality.

May I ask for a report as to how the difficult problem is solved?

Heil Hitler!

H.H.

Heinrich Himmler, letter to Viktor Brack, 19 December 1940

I can’t remember exactly when I first heard about Castle Grafeneck or what happened there. As a landmark in the geography and history of the area it is almost as if the place has always been there. In high school I remember going on excursions to Grafeneck and listening to in-class presentations by fellow students on the place and its history. I remember going to the Schlosskonzerte and listening to jazz or classical music on the castle’s terrace. I remember a party that was thrown for the residents one summer. These are pleasant memories, joyful and alive, but the memories I have of Grafeneck as I experienced it growing up are haunted by the knowledge of what that place once was and of the terrible things that happened there just over half a century ago. The castle has long been a home for the mentally ill and disabled, but it is now also a memorial to the crimes committed there against that same group of people in 1940 when Grafeneck was used as a killing center by the Nazis. The contiguity of past and present at Grafeneck has always puzzled me, and so in revisiting that place now after so many years, I am looking for a way to address its paradoxical status and also to understand how the place and its history have shaped the region where I grew up and that I still in many ways consider my home.

The baroque structure of Castle Grafeneck is about an hour’s drive from Stuttgart, tucked away on a lushly wooded hill in the heart of the Swabian Alb, one of the most picturesque regions in southern Germany (fig. 1). The drive up there is pleasant. It is the beginning of June, and the wildflowers covering the rolling hills provide a splendid accompaniment to the brilliant yellow of the rapeseed fields. It is hard to imagine that this was the same route taken by the gray buses seventy years ago as they transported people here from all over southern Germany to their death. Looking at the site today it is almost impossible to get a sense of how it looked in 1940. Apart from the castle itself, none of the structures that made up the killing complex remain. Instead, there are many new buildings related to the care facility: small houses for those residents who are able to live independently in Wohngemeinschaften (shared housing), the administrative building, and a sports hall; barns and stables.

Castle Grafeneck has a history stretching back almost a thousand years.¹ The fortress that stood there in the Middle Ages was replaced around 1560 by a Renaissance-style hunting castle. For several hundred years it remained a summer residence for the dukes of Württemberg, and in the eighteenth century Duke Carl Eugen expanded the castle into a luxurious baroque summer retreat that included a chapel and even an opera theater. After the decline of the duchy in the nineteenth century the castle became a forestry office. In 1929 it was acquired by the Lutheran Samaritan Foundation and became a home for the disabled. In 1939 the National Socialist government seized the castle and turned it into the first of six institutions for the Aktion T4 killing program, committed to the extermination of people with supposedly hereditary illnesses, in the interest of so-called racial hygiene. The first to be outfitted with a gas chamber and crematorium, Grafeneck became the point of departure for the systematic destruction of human life that led ultimately to the “final solution.” During the eleven months of its operation (18 January–13 December 1940), 10,654 people were gassed and cremated there. After it was closed down in the winter of 1940, the castle was used for the evacuation of children from cities at risk of being bombed (an operation known as the Kinderlandverschickung), and after the end of the war, since it was situated in the French occupation zone, it was used as a vacation home for French children. In 1947 it was returned to the Samaritan Foundation. Today Grafeneck is a lively community that has established close ties to the region: about one hundred people with disabilities and mental illnesses live there, and many of them go to work in the surrounding towns. At the same time Grafeneck is a memorial site that receives more than twenty-five thousand visitors each year.

Figure 1. A view of Grafeneck from the south. Photo: Susanne C. Knittel

Grafeneck is a place where the past is always present. While the care facility is necessarily concerned with the well-being of its residents in the present, the memorial serves as a constant reminder of the crimes that were committed there in 1940. It is impossible to isolate one of these identities from the other: they mutually influence, challenge, and shape each other and thus the nature of the site as a whole. The overall effect of the site is less that of a multistable image in which the human eye perceives either a vase or two faces in profile, for example, but never both at once, and more of a palimpsest where traces of one infiltrate our perception of the other. The palimpsestic structure of the experience of Grafeneck renders this site inherently uncanny, by which I mean that the omnipresence of traces of the past contributes to an unsettling of our perception or understanding of the present we inhabit. If Grafeneck is uncanny in this sense, it is because it triggers (or at least has the potential to trigger) in a visitor an intense psychological reaction resulting from an inherent and irreducible ambiguity, which the mind is unable to resolve.

Buried in the words heimlich and unheimlich is the word heim, meaning “home,” which is also the root of the term Heimat, which denotes a set of spatiotemporal relations between the subject and his or her surroundings. A person’s Heimat is a place where he or she feels “at home,” invested with an affective sense of belonging and rootedness. Heimat is thus a point of orientation for a person’s identity and self-conception. Certain places have the power to challenge or disrupt our conception of “home” as a coherent and familiar point of orientation, which precipitates an intense experience of the uncanny: the Heimat is suddenly rendered unheimlich. At a site of collective memory like Grafeneck, the oscillation between the familiar and the strange resulting from the return of something in the past that has been repressed or forgotten is particularly powerful. Moreover, it invites us to confront and question the underlying assumptions of our relationship to our past and our surroundings.

The traumatic past that seeps through the fabric of the present at Grafeneck is especially apt to produce an uncanny effect in the visitor because there are no physical remnants of the horrific events that transpired there. Unlike at many other memorials to the Holocaust, none of the original structures, such as a gas chamber, a crematorium, or prison cells, are preserved, and instead the site has been completely adapted to the needs of its present-day residents. There is a small plaque and a cornerstone to mark the spot where the gas chamber once stood, but the visitor is required to re-create the structure in his or her mind, thus creating a mental image that must be superimposed on the current layout of the site, often resulting in jarring juxtapositions and overlaps. At base, there are two contradictory impulses that have constituted the site as it stands today. On the one hand, the decision immediately after the end of the war to reclaim the site as a home for the disabled led to the demolition of the former killing complex, presumably in the interests of shielding the residents from the constant awareness of what happened there under National Socialism. On the other hand, the later decision to convert part of the site into a memorial to the Nazi atrocities committed there was geared toward recovering and maintaining precisely this kind of historical awareness, which was seen to be in danger of disappearing. Visiting the site today, one inescapably feels the push and pull of these opposite impulses.

The site’s twofold function makes it necessary constantly to negotiate the duty to commemorate its past and the duty to care for its present-day residents. The Grafeneck Memorial Association (Verein Gedenkstätte Grafeneck) runs the memorial and the documentation center in close cooperation with the Samaritan Foundation, which runs the care facility. The catalog accompanying the documentary exhibition emphasizes the Gedenkstätte’s multiple functions: it provides information for relatives and family members of the people who died there and commemorates and documents the fate of the numerous anonymous victims. As a center for research and education it provides an archive, a library, a permanent exhibition, tours, and seminars, which focus on fostering historical and political awareness (Gedenkstätte Grafeneck, 68). The Samaritan Foundation, on the other hand, presents the site as a place of life, a Begegnungsstätte, where remembering the past goes hand in hand with taking responsibility for the future and initiative for the social integration of the disabled.

Although there is a large body of scholarship dealing with memorials to the victims of the Nazi regime, there is very little scholarly discourse on euthanasia memorial sites and no in-depth discussion of the specific problems posed by Grafeneck.² As a site of memory, Grafeneck is unique in the way it blends past and present, a characteristic that makes it an emblem of the historical uncanny. Through my analysis of this site, I explore the historical reasons for the marginalization of the memory of Nazi euthanasia within the discourse on the Holocaust, as well as the various steps that have been and are being taken to overcome this marginalization. I begin with a brief outline of Grafeneck’s role in the Nazi euthanasia program before moving on to consider its postwar history and the process of memorialization. Then I give an account of its present-day existence as a home for people with disabilities and mental illnesses and a memorial to the victims of Nazi euthanasia and consider how the site negotiates the contradictions inherent in these two functions. I discuss how Grafeneck connects to and participates in contemporary discussions about the memorialization of the victims of Nazi crimes and how it relates to other sites of the memory of Nazi euthanasia. I analyze how Grafeneck places itself within local, regional, and national commemorative cycles and networks as part of a broader landscape of memory and how it challenges our assumptions regarding how commemoration can and should take place. Finally, I propose a reading of Grafeneck as heterotopia, a concept borrowed from Michel Foucault. His conception of the heterotopia as a liminal space suspended between reality and unreality, past and present, offers a key to understanding the uncanny character of the site. Throughout this chapter, the notion of the uncanny as the dominant mode of experiencing Grafeneck informs and guides my analysis. It is important to note that at Grafeneck the uncanny functions on several different levels and in several different directions. First, as I already suggested, the uncanny effect produced by the site on its visitors results from the perception that the past is encroaching upon the present. Second, Grafeneck’s active present disrupts the form of solemn contemplation traditionally associated with sites of memory. Visitors coming to Grafeneck in the hope of “soaking up” the aura of the historical site are instead confronted with the reality of a busy care facility that has not remained frozen in time. In this case the present exerts an uncanny influence on the visitor. Finally, although the primary focus of my analysis is the experience of visitors to Grafeneck, I want to take into consideration how the site must be uncanny for its residents as well.

The History of Grafeneck

As outlined in the introduction, the idea of excluding or even exterminating people deemed “unfit” for society as a means of “racial hygiene” was the subject of debate in medical and anthropological literature even before 1900.³ These discussions became more concrete during the economic crisis after World War I when, for instance, the lawyer Karl Binding and the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche published a treatise advocating the destruction of “life unworthy of life” in 1920. By the time the Nazis seized power in 1933, a wide array of studies and scholarship, as well as institutions and practices advocating the killing of people suffering from terminal or mental illnesses, was already in place. The problem of disposing of “unnütze Esser” (useless eaters) subsequently became central to National Socialist health, social, and race politics. Numerous studies on the subject illustrate the different stages of “healing” the body of the Volk and “cleansing” the nation by destroying “degenerate” life: from coercive sterilization and the euthanasia of children to carefully administrated mass murder under the codename Aktion T4 in six killing centers.⁴ Jews and “criminals” were automatically deported, whereas for all other patients the ability to work was the determining factor; if a patient could not perform manual labor, he or she was placed on the deportation list. During the relatively short centralized phase of the euthanasia program between the fall of 1939 and the fall of 1941, about 5,000 children and more than 70,000 adults were killed. Beginning in fall 1941, the euthanasia program entered its final, decentralized phase in which over 200,000 people were killed by lethal injection or starvation at more than one hundred institutions throughout Germany and Austria. The systematic killing of people with mental and physical disabilities was extended also to the occupied territories in France, Poland, and Russia (Schmuhl, “Patientenmorde” 297). In all, approximately 300,000 people were murdered between 1939 and 1945 (Hamm 7). Even after the end of the war patients continued to die in large numbers from chronic malnutrition, the indifference of the occupying Allied forces, and, last but not least, the fact that the medical staff was in large part the same. It is estimated that roughly 20,000 patients died at institutions after the end of the war (Faulstich 712–17; Schmuhl 316).

In preparing Grafeneck for its role as the first euthanasia killing center, the Aktion T4 relied heavily on the cooperation of the state administrations of Baden, Württemberg, and Bavaria. Together with Herbert Linden from the Reich Ministry of the Interior, Eugen Stähle, undersecretary for public health of the Württemberg Ministry of the Interior in Stuttgart, chose the remote castle as the ideal site for such a center in October 1939. Within weeks, Grafeneck was expropriated and all its residents moved to a different institution in the area. In the months that followed, the killing complex was installed, a few hundred meters away from the castle, which was reserved for the administration and other personnel. The killing complex was composed of a barracks containing dozens of beds (which were never used), a garage for the buses, the building housing the gas chamber, disguised as shower room, and a crematorium with two ovens. The entire area was shielded from view not only by the surrounding forest but also by a tall wooden fence patrolled by SS officers with dogs. In addition, any would-be trespassers were scared away by signs that read, “Betreten wegen Seuchengefahr verboten” (Contagious area. No trespassing). Despite attempts to keep the killings a secret, the local population eventually caught on to what was going on at Grafeneck. Family members of victims sent letters of protest demanding more information, members of the clergy delivered protest sermons (most prominently Württemberg’s Lutheran bishop, Theophil Wurm) and even members of the Nazi Party—such as NS-Frauenschaft Leader Else von Löwis—openly criticized the euthanasia program.⁵ Until very recently, it was assumed that these protests had been directly responsible for the closing of the six killing centers in 1941. In fact, as recent scholarship has conclusively shown, the main reason for the discontinuation of the centralized killings was the fact that the preestablished killing quota had been reached (Stöckle 170–72).

The direct links between the euthanasia program as a systematic attempt to eliminate “life unworthy of life” and the “final solution” are by now well established. For example, after 1941 most of the personnel of the euthanasia killing centers were transferred to the extermination camps in the East, where they became involved in the administration or supervised medical experiments. Horst Schumann, for instance, served as director of Grafeneck before becoming head of the killing center Sonnenstein and finally being transferred to Auschwitz in 1941. An entire group of the T4 staff was sent to Lublin in 1942 to serve under SS and Police Leader Odilo Globocnik in the Aktion Reinhard. Christian Wirth, probably the most infamous among them, had a prominent career: originally a police officer in Stuttgart, he supervised the administrative procedures and the gassings at Grafeneck and Hartheim and later became commandant at Belzec and general inspector of the Aktion Reinhard camps (Stöckle 174; Schmuhl, “Patientenmorde” 316–28). After the completion of Aktion Reinhard in 1943, Wirth and other former T4 staff transferred along with Globocnik from Lublin to Trieste to fight partisans, coordinate the deportation of the Jews in the region, and establish a concentration camp and killing center in the Risiera di San Sabba, a former rice factory on the outskirts of the city.⁶

The connections between Grafeneck and the Holocaust extend far beyond technological and procedural similarities. In Homo Sacer, Giorgio Agamben emphasizes the fact that the Nazi euthanasia program was no mere preface to the Holocaust but rather its first chapter: it is impossible to detach the Nuremberg race laws from the laws on eugenics: both the victims of the concentration camps and those of the euthanasia killing centers constitute what Agamben terms “bare life,” that is, life that ceases to have any juridical value and thus becomes the site of the exertion of sovereign power. The politicization of eugenics, that is, the regime’s arrogation of the right to ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part One
• 1. Remembering Euthanasia: Grafeneck as Heterotopia
• 2. Bridging the Silence, Part I: The Disabled Enabler
• 3. Bridging the Silence, Part II: The Vicarious Witness
• Interlude
• 4. Lethal Trajectories: Perpetrators from Grafeneck to the Risiera
• Part Two
• 5. Black Holes and Revelations: The Risiera, the Foibe, and the Making of an “Italian Tragedy”
• 6. A Severed Branch: The Memory of Fascism on Stage and Screen
• 7.Bridging the Silence, Part III: Trieste and the Language of Belonging
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index