Can’t sleep.
I went and saw Kill Bill Vol. 2 (which was really good, btw), and ate a big old overpriced hot dog at the theater. And drank some Coke.
That hot dog is still with me. It’s like a ninja saboteur (to extend this Kill Bill thing way too far) whose job is to be attractive enough to eat, but malicious enough to keep me from getting to sleep.
That and the fact that when I was laying on the couch wrapped up in a sleeping bag, trying to tun off my mind by watching TV, the only thing on that wasn’t an infomercial was a documentary on PBS about the Kindertransport. The Kindertransport was refugee children escaping Nazi Germany in 1938, to England. So lots of harrowing tales of Jewish kids being sent off by their parents into an uncertain future, against the backdrop of the fact that most of those parents would be killed within the next few years. And the idea that they weren’t welcome in the US. In fact, a boatload of 300 or so refugee children was turned away from New York harbor.
And that combines with the fact that I’ve been reading a book called ‘They Thought They Were Free‘ by Milton Sanford Mayer, which was written by an American Jew who traveled through Germany during the occupation, interviewing average Germans, trying to figure out how all this could have happened. I’m reading it because a friend of mine wanted to form a book group for discussing it, and I thought that might be interesting.
So last week, one of the other members of the book group mentioned a book she read, called ‘Songs of the Gorilla Nation: My Journey Through Autism,’ by Dawn Prince-Hughes, about a woman with Asperger’s Syndrome. I mentioned that I had Asperger’s Syndrome, and there was a little bit of discussion about it, and then it was time to go.
But on the way home, there was something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. There was some connection I couldn’t remember, and then it hit me: Hans Asperger was Austrian, and he published his work in 1943. (What we now know as Asperger’s Syndrome comes about largely as a revival of his work in the late ’70s and early ’80s. Asperger believed autism was purely psychological, as did Kanner, and there’s a whole ‘refrigerator mother’ loop to this diagnostic story, but that’s not my point here.)
So I was poking around some on the internet to try and get this all straight in my head. Was Asperger a Nazi? I couldn’t find evidence of it. I also thought that perhaps his vision of autism was meant to counteract Kanner’s more defeatist one, in terms of finding a way to give scientific validity to the lives of autistics, and perhaps keeping some of them out of the concentration camps. This was something I’d read on a support group web site somewhere, and it could conceivably be true, but there’s not much evidence to support it.
However, there’s this: Useless Eaters: Disability as Genocidal Marker in Nazi Germany. It’s long, it’s academic, and it’s a real downer.
And all this is running through my head.
)
