nominalist wrote:
Parts of the translation are quoted in this book:
The Complete Guide to Asperger's SyndromeI have that book, and the quote which Attwood uses to begin Chapter 1 appears in 600,000 results from Google (Attwood uses a translation by Brit Wilczek, presumably provided directly by Springer). I would very much like to read the entirety of the paper. Adam Feinstein's "A History of Autism Conversations with the Pioneers" (Wiley-Blackwell 2010) describes more of the paper. (Chapter 1, "The Two Great Pioneers",
http://books.google.ie/books?id=1-UztWdBkPkC)
Feinstein wrote:
Hans Asperger worked as the Director of the Department of Orthopaedagogy at the Children’s Clinic of the University of Vienna, under Franz Hamburger. Some critics have claimed that his thesis was consistent with the eugenic approach, as set out by Hamburger.
This appears to be a serious misconception. The Nazis annexed Austria in March 1938 and it seems clear that Hans Asperger feared they would shortly introduce the eugenics law, already in place in Germany, ordering the extermination of, among others, the mentally handicapped and “subnormal.” Indeed, his daughter claims that he personally witnessed some unpleasant incidents during his visits to Germany in the early 1930s.
A PhD student, Marc Bush, has carried out a very detailed stylistic analysis of Asperger’s papers of 1938 and 1944 and believes that Asperger deliberately couched them in “Nazi-style” vocabulary to deceive the Nazis, while protecting the children in his charge in Vienna. “That explains why the 1938 paper, or Asperger’s follow-up paper in 1944, did not become known in the United States, where you might have expected German-speaking, scientific-minded immigrants to mention them: they saw them virtually as Nazi propaganda and not worth citing. Whereas nothing could be further from the truth.”
Asperger’s colleague, Elizabeth Wurst, told me: “Asperger had a very clear standpoint against the Nazis. He tried to develop this position. Two of his colleagues . . . emigrated to the United States and when he himself visited the US, he met them and discussed the old times. If there had been any problems with Jewish people in his team, he would not have sought them out in America.”
A close reading of Asperger’s 1938 paper throws up some fascinating clues to why he wrote this article in the way he did, as well as to how his vocabulary was misinterpreted. The paper begins by appearing to praise the Third Reich and he then refers to the need to avoid “the transmission of sick genetic material”—apparently falling firmly into line with Nazi thinking on eugenics. However, as Marc Bush has so rightly pointed out, in virtually the same breath, Asperger goes on to defend and praise the children (with autistic psychopathy) in his charge. He speaks about “how much we can do to help” abnormal children.
24 Jul 2013, 3:39 am
