Elsbeth Bösl. Politiken der Normalisierung: Zur Geschichte der Behindertenpolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland. Bielefeld: Transcript - Verlag für Kommunikation, Kultur und soziale Praxis, 2009. 406 S. EUR 29.80 (paper), ISBN 978-3-8376-1267-7.
Reviewed by Carol Poore (Brown University)
Published on H-Disability (May, 2010)
Commissioned by Iain C. Hutchison (University of Glasgow)
The Politics of Normalization
Written in the context of the new disability history, this book (a revised dissertation completed in Munich in 2008) is concerned with how disability was constituted in scientific, scholarly, and political discourses in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG/West Germany) from its founding after World War II up to the mid-1970s. It asks why and how disability was conceived of as a social problem and what solutions were proposed. The overall thrust of the argument is that policies during this period were aimed primarily at functional normalization of disabled people so that they would be able to work and be productive citizens. That is, disability was viewed mainly as a functional deficit with respect to employability and productivity, and thus as a social problem that the social welfare state should solve. In the course of the 1970s, this paradigm of normalization broadened beyond employment to include participation in all aspects of society. Concepts of rehabilitation were expanded, and technical attempts at normalization came to encompass not only efforts to correct the individual (for example, through prostheses) but also the removal of different types of barriers in society and the creation of greater accessibility in many ways. Elsbeth Bösl has made use of an enormous amount of archival sources and other material, and while some aspects of this topic have already been studied, all of these varying angles of disability politics and normalization strategies have not been brought together in this way before. This book thus breaks new ground in many important ways and gives rise to many fruitful questions and avenues for further research. (A name index would have been helpful.)
Chapter 1 sets the stage by analyzing discursive constructions of disability in this period and also points out the historical importance of viewing disability as the inability to work or be productive. In the 1950s, rehabilitation had the sole goal of recreating the ability to work: its main objects were adult men (disabled veterans and/or workers) who had worked before becoming disabled. Bösl points to the importance somewhat later of parents’ groups, disability rights groups, and the social democratic-liberal coalition in expanding this concept of rehabilitation to include other categories of disabled people and other types of social participation besides work. She notes that more in-depth study is needed to determine the interactions between the experts (doctors, rehabilitation professionals, politicians, etc.) who were constructing the dominant public discourses about disability and such groups as emerging disability rights organizations, anti-psychiatry groups, and other groups coming out of the student movement. That is, at the beginning of this period disabled people themselves had little access to the spheres that had the power to define what disability was and how the state and society were going to deal with disabled people, but over the course of the 1970s groups of disabled people began to assert the right to speak out publicly as experts about themselves. In public discourse up into the 1970s, disability was generally portrayed in negative or sentimental terms, and the book follows the trail of how some stereotypical identities were formed, e.g., “the poor but heroic disabled veteran” or “the innocent, helpless thalidomide child.” It was only in the 1970s that disabled people began to resist these ascriptions more effectively and create their own public self-images.
Chapter 2 gives an overview of changes in disability policy within the framework of the West German social welfare state and shows how the system of providing various types of disability-related government benefits was expanded. From its beginnings around 1900 until the 1970s, disability policies were social policies, not “Gleichstellungspolitik” (equality or civil rights policies), because disability was viewed as a social problem that the state should solve, above all by rehabilitating disabled men for employment. Bösl shows how the type and cause of disability, as well as the gender of the disabled person, affected status and eligibility for various programs and benefits, and she traces the gradual expansion of benefits to include more groups of disabled people. On page 189, she includes an interesting quotation from the director of an orthopedic clinic in 1959 about the difficulties in financing rehabilitation; more such examples would have enlivened the book. She notes that little was done at first for people with mental illnesses or developmental disabilities (who had been the prime targets for the Nazis’ involuntary sterilization and “euthanasia” measures), and it was only later on that they began to be included. She also points out that until the 1960s almost no attention was given to rehabilitation for disabled women and girls, but in the late 1970s and 1980s women with disabilities began to speak out publicly about their lives and needs. The chapter closes with a fascinating section on the discourse about children affected by thalidomide (called “contergan” in West Germany). Before thalidomide was banned there in September 1962, about four thousand to five thousand children affected by it were born; less than three thousand survived. Much more research remains to be done on this topic: for example, considering that children with these types of conditions would have been marked for “euthanasia” by the Nazis, it would be significant to study in more depth how they were presented in the West German press and on television. In any event, with respect to disability policy, the question of what the state was going to do to help these children led to increased interest in children with disabilities.
Focusing on employment as a core strategy of disability policy, chapter 3 outlines the methods, infrastructures, and practice of rehabilitation. It explores the employment opportunities for disabled people, both on the open market and in sheltered workshops, as well as some of the recurring problems with finding adequate and satisfying employment.
Normalization through technology is the subject of chapter 4, which deals with two main areas. The first is the development of prosthetic technology, i.e., efforts to make the “deficient” body more functional. Of course it had been necessary to provide disabled veterans with prostheses, but the thalidomide debacle led for the first time to increased efforts to develop prostheses for children. Bösl shows that the experts usually took adult prostheses as their model and often created prostheses that were difficult or impossible for children to use. Medical professionals often forced children to use these prostheses even though the children were able to do many more things without them. Furthermore, parents often wanted their children to have more aesthetic (i.e., less conspicuous) prostheses, even if these were hardly functional. These ideas about prostheses often had little to do with what the children really needed, as can be seen from the fact that many threw the prostheses away as soon as they could. One could ask here why these professionals and some parents were so obsessed with forcing children to use these prostheses. Why were there such rigid ideas about what constituted an acceptable body? Why was there such a fear of being conspicuously different? Why was the drive to “normalize” these children so strong? On a related note, Bösl mentions references in the press to parents who would “hide” their disabled children and surmises that this was more a topos than an actual practice, but this would be an important subject for more detailed future research.
The second topic in this chapter is the removal of architectural barriers, which shows the fundamental transformation in concepts of disability that has occurred since the late 1960s. Bösl points out that an extensive study could be devoted to how the disabling environment has been improved, including types of accommodations, which have tended to focus more on wheelchair accessibility than on removing barriers for people with other types of disabilities.
The book’s main conclusion is that since the end of the 1960s there has been a paradigm shift in concepts of disability and in disability policies in the FRG. It has gradually become more generally accepted that the rehabilitation approach alone did not guarantee equal opportunity and equal participation in all aspects of life. Furthermore, policies have changed from a sole focus on normalizing the disabled individual to include transforming a disabling society. Disability policy has thus come to encompass equality or civil rights policies as well as social welfare and rehabilitation policies. It is the accomplishment of this book to have shown how these developments took place.
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Citation:
Carol Poore. Review of Bösl, Elsbeth, Politiken der Normalisierung: Zur Geschichte der Behindertenpolitik in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland.
H-Disability, H-Net Reviews.
May, 2010.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=29732
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. |