In a Different Key

by John Donvan

  For months, experts led by Volkmar had been looking at studies, running field trials, and debating with one another, in conference rooms, by phone, and by fax, whether Asperger’s syndrome deserved that formal recognition. As part of the working group assigned to “pervasive developmental disorders” for the 1994 update of the DSM, their conclusions would be decisive.

  Volkmar’s Yale Study Center was the leader in Asperger’s research in the United States. At one point, a research request for volunteers with the condition had given Yale a roster of more than eight hundred families and individuals across the country. At Yale and elsewhere, clinicians who found the concept useful and relevant had been diagnosing patients with Asperger’s without waiting for the DSM to sanction its usage.

  Yet there was still vigorous disagreement over the validity of the concept. It was unclear whether individuals with the diagnosis were truly different in presentation from those described as “high functioning autistic,” an already familiar and much-used concept. Beyond that, it was evident that clinics were independently tweaking the criteria, leading to widespread inconsistency in how the Asperger’s label was applied. Given this, many argued that Asperger’s was not a necessary or useful addition to the diagnostic lexicon.

  On the other hand, the World Health Organization had just endorsed Asperger’s as a stand-alone condition. Of greater relevance, Volkmar himself was among those convinced of its validity, having seen plenty of people at the Yale Child Study Center whose symptoms appeared to justify a diagnosis of Asperger’s. Volkmar, charismatic, persuasive, and thorough, would be one of the final arbiters of whether the condition would be enshrined in the DSM. So it mattered when, with only months left till the new manual was due, he decided to investigate the question of whether Hans Asperger had been a Nazi.

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  ERIC SCHOPLER, FOR ONE, was convinced of it. He was also among those who considered Asperger’s ideas superfluous to the understanding of autism, not to mention sloppily conceived. His attacks on Asperger’s work in the 1990s were noticeably personal, reflecting an antipathy not justified by mere professional disagreement. “The seeds for our current syndrome confusion were sown in the rich soil of his few publications,” he once wrote. In Schopler’s view, Asperger had never “succeeded in identifying a replicable psychiatric syndrome.”

  Schopler’s antipathy can be understood as the bitterness of a man who, as a child, had to flee Germany with the rest of his Jewish family, and who remained suspicious of any adult—German or Austrian—whose career as a medical professional had thrived during the Nazi era. He had no more to go on than that; it was guilt by association. But this did not prevent him from launching a one-man whisper campaign to the effect that Asperger had probably been a Nazi sympathizer, if not a collaborator or actual party member. More than once, Schopler dropped such innuendoes in print, in publications he oversaw, such as the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. There and elsewhere, he pointedly made reference to Asperger’s “longstanding interest in the German Youth Movement,” hinting at a connection between Asperger and the Hitler Youth. Still, perhaps because Schopler kept his allusions subtle, most people who knew of Asperger’s syndrome in the 1990s were unaware of any controversy concerning Asperger’s past.

  Volkmar, for example, did not hear about it until late in the DSM review process. But it was not Schopler who brought it to his attention. During the field trials Volkmar was running in order to test the proposed criteria for Asperger’s, two Yale colleagues he held in high esteem raised the subject. One, Donald Cohen, the longtime director of the Yale Child Study Center, had published widely on autism. The other was a young star in the field, a clinician and investigator named Ami Klin. As a psychology PhD candidate in London, Klin had caused a stir with a brilliantly designed study showing that autism affected children’s responses to the sounds of their mothers’ voices. It had been Cohen who personally recruited Klin to Yale in 1989. The two men formed a close mentor-protégé relationship based on both a fascination with autism and a powerful sense of Jewish identity. Cohen was an observant Jew and a dedicated student of the Holocaust. Klin had been born in Brazil, the son of Holocaust survivors, and had earned his undergraduate degree in history and political science at Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

  The question the two men kept turning over was whether Asperger might be implicated, in any way, in the medical atrocities ascribed to the Nazis who ruled Vienna. Both knew that the medical profession had already embarrassed itself by its failure to ask this question about several doctors and researchers who had practiced under the Third Reich. Modern textbooks still carried references to diseases named for Nazi-era scientists whose ethics were repellent, if not criminal, such as neurologists whose significant discoveries were made by dissecting the brains of children and adults murdered by the Nazis. A Dr. Franz Seitelberger of Vienna had been a member of the SS, while Professor Julius Hallervorden of Berlin was known to select live patients whose brains he planned to study after their deaths by “euthanasia.” Hallervorden infamously said, “If you are going to kill all these people, at least take the brains out so that the material gets some use.” Yet the terms “Seitelberger disease” and “Hallervorden-Spatz disease” still appeared in academic publications.

  In 1993, Asperger, dead thirteen years, never a great presence on the world stage, remained a little-known figure. Uta Frith had published a cursory review of his life and work in 1991, to accompany her translation of his big 1944 paper. In addition, a talk Asperger gave in Switzerland in 1977 had appeared in translation in the magazine of a British autism organization in 1979, but it was not widely distributed. In short, Volkmar could get little information about Asperger on his own, and had no true “Asperger expert” to turn to. It was in that context that he called Lorna Wing, the one person he knew who had met Hans Asperger, and posed the question to her: Was Hans Asperger, as a young man, a Nazi?

  Lorna Wing gasped. “Hans Asperger, a Nazi?” He could hear her indignation. She spoke of his deep Catholic faith and lifelong devotion to young people.

  “A Nazi? No,” Wing said. “No, no, no! He was a very religious man.”

  It was a short conversation, but it settled the issue.

  A few months later, the DSM-IV appeared. Ninety-four new mental disorders had been proposed for inclusion, but only two made it. One was Bipolar II Disorder. The other was Asperger’s Disorder.

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  IN 1993, WING and Volkmar knew nothing, of course, of the information about Asperger that would be unearthed in the years ahead.

  The first warning sign came in 1996. That year, Ami Klin, along with Volkmar and psychologist Sarah Sparrow, began putting together a book they planned to title Asperger Syndrome. Yet Klin still could not shake his misgivings. And, because his name would be on the cover of the book, he decided that something more than a phone call to Lorna Wing was necessary in order to establish that Asperger’s hands were clean.

  In late 1996, Klin began writing to archives and institutes in Germany and Austria, seeking any documentary or other information on the Austrian doctor. This yielded little. But then a professor in Cologne, Germany, referred him to Austrian historian Michael Hubenstorf, who taught at the Institute of the History of Medicine at Berlin’s Free University. “We would like to be able to write that he was a benevolent doctor whose primary concern was his patient’s [sic] well being,” Klin wrote Hubenstorf. “But we are not sure of that.”

  Hubenstorf responded a few weeks later with a four-page letter and a five-page catalog of Asperger’s career postings, promotions, and publications he had assembled. Klin’s concerns, he wrote, were justified. While he had found no record of formal membership in the Nazi Party, Hubenstorf informed Klin that Asperger’s “medical career was clearly set in a surrounding of German Nationalists and Nazis,” and that he was regularly promoted within that setting. He believed the doctor might have downplayed his previous connections to known Nazis such as Professor Hamburger, his onet
ime mentor, whom Hubenstorf described as “the most outspoken Nazi pediatrician of them all.”

  “It remains unclear how much of a fellow traveler he was,” Hubenstorf concluded. But his advice to Klin was to err on the side of caution. He recommended against publishing “anything before the utmost effort has been made to clear Prof. Asperger’s past.”

  In the end, Klin chose not to take Hubenstorf’s advice. Weighing everything, he recognized that no “smoking gun” had been found—no evidence that Asperger had directly participated in any Nazi medical crimes. In the meantime, Klin had received a copy of an obituary of Asperger that portrayed him as a warm, gentle doctor devoted to the care of children. Asperger’s daughter, Maria Asperger Felder, also vouched for her father’s reputation when Klin reached out to her. Herself a psychiatrist, she wrote that her father had been at odds with the Nazis’ racial determinism, that he had been an enemy of children’s suffering, and that he had never lost “his lifelong interest in and his curiosity about all living creatures.”

  This was the story of the benevolent doctor that Klin had hoped would turn out to be the truth. In 2000, Klin, Volkmar, and Sparrow published Asperger Syndrome, with a foreword by Asperger’s daughter.

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  THE “BENEVOLENT DOCTOR” version of Asperger had strong appeal, and would inform many assessments of his work. Indeed, an overwhelmingly positive narrative of Asperger as a man of moral rectitude came into focus in the new millennium, elevating him almost to the status of hero. Increasingly, he was seen as a cautious yet brave and canny saboteur of the Nazi project to exterminate intellectually disabled children. This image of him echoed Uta Frith’s assertion, in 1991, that Asperger had been an ardent defender of the “misfits” the Nazi eugenics program was designed to destroy. “Far from despising the misfits,” Frith wrote in the introduction to her translation of his 1944 paper, “he devoted himself to their cause—and this at a time when allegiance to misfits was nothing less than dangerous.”

  The hero image was amplified by Berlin psychiatrist Brita Schirmer, who in 2002 called attention to Asperger’s “humanity and his courageous commitment to the children entrusted to him in times when this was by no means obvious, or without danger.”

  In 2007, the Dublin-based psychologists Viktoria Lyons and Michael Fitzgerald wrote a letter to the Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders that celebrated Asperger as a man who “tried to protect these children from being sent to concentration camps in World War II.”

  And in 2010, the British autism historian Adam Feinstein published the results of his own reporting trip to Vienna to investigate the rumors that Asperger was sympathetic to Hitler. “The very opposite is more likely to be the case,” he concluded.

  This view of Asperger rested on a number of compelling stories. It was said that he had twice narrowly escaped arrest by the Gestapo while working at the Vienna Hospital, and that he had risked his own safety by failing to report the names of disabled children to the authorities. An entry in his diary, written during a 1934 visit to Germany, seems to shudder at the gathering Nazi storm: “An entire nation goes in a single direction, fanatically, with constricted vision.” His Catholic faith, and his membership in the Catholic youth organization known as Bund Neuland, have also been cited as evidence of his association with a progressive morality that was at odds with the Nazi agenda.

  Above all, this view rested upon Asperger’s clear statements, from early in the Nazi era, defending the right of mentally challenged children to society’s support. During the 1938 talk in which he described his autistic cases for the first time, he declared, “Not everything that falls out of line, and thus is ‘abnormal,’ has to be deemed ‘inferior.’ ” Likewise, at the conclusion of his better-known 1944 thesis, “Autistic Psychopaths,” he saluted the medical profession’s “duty to stand up for these children with the whole force of our personality.”

  Thus, the case seemed strong for Asperger as a humanitarian and liberal thinker. It was an optimistic and inspiring portrait that spoke to modern sensibilities. And it would prove to be seriously flawed.

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  ONE OF THE best-known laundry detergents in the world goes by the brand name Persil. Originally manufactured in Germany, Persil is the Tide of Europe. In Austria and Germany, after World War II, the word came to signify, with grim humor, the furious, sometimes ludicrous, efforts made by Germans and Austrians to clear their reputations. Prompted by the Allies’ “denazification” policy, an effort to purge Nazi Party members and collaborators from positions of influence, millions scurried to track down witnesses to their innocence. Especially prized was the testimony of Jews who could vouch for some moment of kindness or decency shown as the Holocaust unfolded. Often, those seeking to clear their names portrayed themselves as having been victims also, claiming that they had been threatened with arrest by the Gestapo, or stymied in their careers for standing up to Nazi policies. Others insisted that they had gone along with the Nazis as a ruse, and that they had secretly resisted the Nazi system from within. At the end of the process, those who succeeded came away with a document called a persilschein, or “Persil certificate,” confirming that they had been certified innocent, or “clean.” Even at the time, there was much cynicism about persilschein.

  Without doubt, there were at least some authentic secret resisters among the Austrians. But a good many of these claims were nothing more than whitewash jobs. Michael Hubenstorf’s letter to Ami Klin had pointed to the possibility that Asperger’s past had also been whitewashed to some degree. Indeed, a second look at the hero narrative offers reasonable grounds for skepticism. To start with, the story of Asperger’s near arrest by the Gestapo had only one source, and that was Asperger himself. As far as is known, he brought it up twice in public: in a 1962 talk and during a 1974 radio appearance. To any astute Austrian familiar with the persilschein phenomenon, this raises the suspicion that Asperger embroidered on his experience of being politically vetted by the Nazi authorities, or perhaps even concocted the story in full. This vetting was a process most public servants had to endure under a law passed after the Anschluss to weed out Jews and anyone else deemed “unreliable.” No doubt Asperger’s being a non-party member was looked into, but in the end the Nazis cleared him.

  Another flag should have been Asperger’s membership in Bund Neuland, which was, by Asperger’s own account, crucial to his development as a young man. While ardently pro-Catholic, this group also espoused an anti-modern, pan-Germanic nationalist philosophy, and its tensions with the Nazis stemmed primarily from the Reich’s anti-Church position. Otherwise, there was a fair amount of common ground between Bund Neuland and the Nazis. For example, a 1935 issue of the Neuland monthly periodical highlighted the problem of “excessive Jewish influence” in the upper reaches of society, and discussed the need for “a clean separation” between the “Jews of Vienna” and the rest of the population.

  Then there were Asperger’s own words. His 1934 diary entry about all of Germany moving “in a single direction, fanatically” has been cited—originally by his daughter, and then by others, relying on her account—as evidence that he condemned the Nazification of Germany. Read in full, however, it seems more ambiguous, with hints of awe and admiration as well as consternation: “An entire nation goes in a single direction, fanatically, with a constricted vision, certainly, but also with enthusiasm and dedication, with tremendous discipline and control, with a terrible effectiveness. Now only soldiers—soldierly thinking—ethos—Germanic paganism…” Moreover, it is the sole known excerpt of Asperger’s writing that suggests concern about where things might be headed as of 1934.

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  FOUR YEARS LATER, on October 3, 1938, there was no ambiguity in the language he used to open a historic address he gave to an assembly of his fellow physicians. The words he used sounded startlingly pro-Nazi, and came at the beginning of the talk in which he discussed his “autistic psychopaths” for the first time. This was a full seven months after the
Nazi Anschluss, when Austria was absorbed into the Third Reich, yet Asperger’s opening lines were nothing short of a valentine to the newly Nazified Austria.

  “We stand in the midst of a massive renovation of our intellectual life, which encompasses all areas of this life—not least in medicine,” he began. This new thinking, he said, was “the sustaining idea of the new Reich—that the whole is greater than the parts, and that the Volk is more important than any single individual.”

  In a handful of words, this was the defining vision of German fascism, which Asperger, in the next breath, applied to his fellow doctors. This “sustaining idea,” he urged, “should, where it involves the nation’s most precious asset—its health—bring profound changes to our entire attitude.” This applied, he said, to “the efforts being made to promote genetic health, and to prevent the passing on of diseased heredity.” It was hard not to miss the clear reference to the Nazi-driven “science” of race improvement through eugenics. “We physicians must carry out the tasks that fall to us in this area with full accountability,” Asperger declared.

  This salute to the Anschluss, to the Nazis, to the suppression of individuality, and to the task of purifying the genetic lineage of the nation should by itself have dealt a fatal blow to the idea that Asperger secretly resisted the Nazi agenda. A review of other medical talks and papers printed that year in the same weekly journal where Asperger’s appeared shows that the opening of his talk was far from typical. Defenders of Asperger sometimes argue that he had a hidden anti-Nazi agenda—that he sought to throw the Gestapo off his scent by paying lip service to the regime. Brita Schirmer described the preamble as a “deft chess move” on Asperger’s part. His defenders usually assert, as a corollary, that the full text of Asperger’s speech, together with his 1944 paper, constitute an unambiguous argument to protect and nurture all vulnerable children, no matter the level of their disability.