Asperger studied medicine at the University of Vienna and like contemporaries such as Eichmann and Heydrich he was in his mid-twenties when Hitler came to power. He did not join the Nazi Party, which proved crucial in clearing his reputation after the war, but he joined the Fatherland Front and supported the new Austrofascist regime in the mid-1930s. The Vienna medical school removed three-quarters of its personnel, most of them Jews, and as they escaped into exile, Asperger rose through the ranks.
Vienna had been a centre of research into what Leo Kanner later called autism. But what interests Sheffer, in particular, is how earlier debates about eugenics and autism changed dramatically as the Nazi regime took over psychiatry and medicine. They produced a mix of moralising judgments and biological assumptions about the “unfit”. Above all, they were preoccupied with the idea of a Volksgemeinschaft, a unified, homogenous national community, and the crucial distinction became between those children who fitted in and those who did not or could not. This is why autism became so important. Nazi psychiatrists like Asperger became interested in anti-social children, those who did not have social feeling. Asperger wrote about one boy, Harro, that he resisted the “important social habits of daily life”. In some cases, such children could be teachable, they could learn to become sociable. But many could not. And as the Nazi regime moved towards euthanasia this became a death sentence for them.
Sheffer follows Asperger’s career from 1930s Vienna to the war years and beyond. She looks at how his ideas changed to fit in with Nazi psychiatry and shows how he became involved in a group of leading Nazi psychiatrists whom he met at conferences and worked with in Vienna. There are, however, worrying gaps in her account. The period 1925-31 passes unnoticed. There is little about his war service in Croatia, 1944-45. There are troubling questions. Why didn’t Asperger join the Nazi Party? How did he reconcile his Catholicism with the Nazi euthanasia programme? How original were the debates about autism in interwar Vienna compared to contemporary debates in Britain, France and the US? Sheffer has done a considerable amount of research and yet much of her language is speculative (“It may well have been”, “It appears that”, “Whether or not he intended it”). This can feel slippery and uncertain. There is also too much guilt by association. Many of Asperger’s colleagues did terrible things. Did he? How does Asperger compare with them? Sometimes we run out of evidence. There is a chapter on Asperger’s patients but Sheffer only writes about four main case histories. How representative are they?
There is one particularly unsettling question. Sheffer is keen to put Asperger’s ideas about autism in the context of changing Nazi ideas. But I keep thinking about that boy in the ice-cream shop 35 years ago, and Asperger’s accounts describe him very well. Too often, Sheffer is a voice for the prosecution. But her book doesn’t help us understand why his ideas seemed so relevant in late-20th-century Britain and America, half a century after the war. If his writings on autism were a response to Nazi ideas, why did they speak to parents and psychiatrists in liberal societies decades later? Sheffer is very good at looking at Asperger in context, but perhaps she loses sight of his originality along the way.
Vienna had been a centre of research into what Leo Kanner later called autism. But what interests Sheffer, in particular, is how earlier debates about eugenics and autism changed dramatically as the Nazi regime took over psychiatry and medicine. They produced a mix of moralising judgments and biological assumptions about the “unfit”. Above all, they were preoccupied with the idea of a Volksgemeinschaft, a unified, homogenous national community, and the crucial distinction became between those children who fitted in and those who did not or could not. This is why autism became so important. Nazi psychiatrists like Asperger became interested in anti-social children, those who did not have social feeling. Asperger wrote about one boy, Harro, that he resisted the “important social habits of daily life”. In some cases, such children could be teachable, they could learn to become sociable. But many could not. And as the Nazi regime moved towards euthanasia this became a death sentence for them.
Sheffer follows Asperger’s career from 1930s Vienna to the war years and beyond. She looks at how his ideas changed to fit in with Nazi psychiatry and shows how he became involved in a group of leading Nazi psychiatrists whom he met at conferences and worked with in Vienna. There are, however, worrying gaps in her account. The period 1925-31 passes unnoticed. There is little about his war service in Croatia, 1944-45. There are troubling questions. Why didn’t Asperger join the Nazi Party? How did he reconcile his Catholicism with the Nazi euthanasia programme? How original were the debates about autism in interwar Vienna compared to contemporary debates in Britain, France and the US? Sheffer has done a considerable amount of research and yet much of her language is speculative (“It may well have been”, “It appears that”, “Whether or not he intended it”). This can feel slippery and uncertain. There is also too much guilt by association. Many of Asperger’s colleagues did terrible things. Did he? How does Asperger compare with them? Sometimes we run out of evidence. There is a chapter on Asperger’s patients but Sheffer only writes about four main case histories. How representative are they?
There is one particularly unsettling question. Sheffer is keen to put Asperger’s ideas about autism in the context of changing Nazi ideas. But I keep thinking about that boy in the ice-cream shop 35 years ago, and Asperger’s accounts describe him very well. Too often, Sheffer is a voice for the prosecution. But her book doesn’t help us understand why his ideas seemed so relevant in late-20th-century Britain and America, half a century after the war. If his writings on autism were a response to Nazi ideas, why did they speak to parents and psychiatrists in liberal societies decades later? Sheffer is very good at looking at Asperger in context, but perhaps she loses sight of his originality along the way.
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