Discourses of Human Disqualification: The Story of Gerhard Herbert Kretschmar on Screen and Stage

Abstract

The article centres on a contemporary short film and two plays that were inspired by the story of Gerhard Herbert Kretschmar, the first known victim of the Nazi programme of the extermination of people with disabilities; these are: Robert De Feo and Vito Palumbo’s Child K (2014), Kristofer Blindheim Grønskag’s Kinder K (2012), and Weronika Murek’s Feinweinblein (2015). I examine verbal and visual discourses of human disqualification that these works reveal and challenge or reinforce. Following Tobin Siebers, I define disqualification as “a symbolic process” that excludes individuals from being considered rightful human beings, thereby exposing them to “unequal treatment, bodily harm, and death” (Siebers, 2013, p. 23). As regards visual discourses of human disqualification, the article argues that even though each play or film employs a different representational strategy, which can respectively be called: monsterization, sublimation, and normalization, they all render the “severely” disabled body of Gerhard Herbert Kretschmar invisible. In other words, they hide the “unsightly” from view, hence denying full representation to those body-minds that fall significantly outside the “norm” and perpetuating their aesthetic disqualification.