In a Different Key

by John Donvan

  But Asperger did not, in either the talk or the paper, make that argument. Despite recognizing in passing that autistic traits can be seen in children of both stronger and weaker mental capacity, he had little to say about helping the latter. Rather, he focused on the boys who possessed what he called “social worth”—a term he did not apply to all children. The boys in the group he favored would later be known as the “Asperger’s type,” and decades later as “Aspies.” They were those he described as being “more lightly affected,” as well as not at all rare in the population. Virtually every account of Asperger has him describing his boys, with affection, as “Little Professors”—a reference to their intelligence and their sometimes pedantic style. (That turns out to be a myth; Asperger himself never actually used the term Little Professors.)

  Asperger made this preference explicit in his 1938 talk, where he admitted that he “thought it more rewarding to choose two [of his] not so severe and therefore more promising cases” to present. That would always be his pattern. In 1944, when discussing his “more lightly affected” children, Asperger was effusive in celebrating how far they could go, dwelling especially on those who had the potential to reach the uppermost echelons of society. To be sure, he was convinced—and said—that autistic traits were more often a detriment than a benefit for the majority of people who had them. But he was pleased to report that, for some, autism delivered special intellectual talents, and that those so endowed could “rise to high-ranking occupations.” He cited, as examples, professors and scientists and even an expert on heraldry. He also reported that some of the more able children he had treated had become assets to a country at war. During the third year of the Second World War, Asperger noted, he had received letters and reports “from many of our former children” serving on the front lines. In 1941, he wrote that these boys were “fulfill[ing] their role in the professional life, in the military, and in the party.”

  Thus, again, his boys had demonstrated their “social worth”—in terms that the Third Reich appreciated.

  That said, Asperger’s vision of special education and what it could achieve was not quite as exceptional as his supporters suggest. Contrary to popular understanding, special education had its place in Nazi Germany. The Reich allowed that disabled children who could become productive citizens should be afforded support and education to achieve that end. Even the Hitler Youth had special units for the blind and the deaf. But the Nazis drew a line where the cost of supporting a child was expected to exceed that child’s ultimate material contribution to the state. For that child the Nazis had no use; his or her life was worthless.

  Asperger did not go that far in anything he published, and the Catholic faith he professed opposed sterilization and euthanasia. But he never did advocate for the children he seems to have considered less “rewarding.” Indeed, he appeared to write off the possibility of improving outcomes for those whose autistic traits were accompanied by a “pronounced intellectual inferiority.” Rather than lay out a path to helping them, he simply noted the “tragic” fate of such individuals, or at least a sad minority of them. “In the less favorable cases,” Asperger wrote, “they roam the streets as comic originals, grotesquely unkempt, talking loudly to themselves, addressing people in the manner of the autistic.” When speaking of these “less favorable cases,” Asperger never celebrated their autistic differences. Rather, his tone was one of pity.

  —

  ERIC SCHOPLER NEVER made the detailed case presented here for a less heroic version of Asperger. Instead of evidence, he had instinct, which perhaps came from being a Jew who had lived part of his life in Germany.

  Perhaps this instinctive suspicion also explains Leo Kanner’s nearly complete silence on Asperger’s work. Also a Jew—one who, as we have seen, saved Jewish lives—Kanner may have viewed Asperger as too comfortably ensconced in Nazi Vienna, and thus preferred not to recognize him. Interestingly, on the single occasion when Kanner mentioned Asperger in print, he misspelled his name

  But instinct was not evidence. In short, there was still no smoking gun. And then there was.

  —

  IN MAY 2010, a soft-spoken Austrian academic walked into Vienna’s city hall and its ceremonial gathering place, the Wappensaal, where a symposium honoring the memory of Hans Asperger was under way. Herwig Czech was a thirty-five-year-old historian and lecturer at the University of Vienna. He had been invited to speak at the symposium by organizers from the Vienna children’s hospital where Asperger had done his most important work. A number of autism’s research luminaries were in attendance, and Lorna Wing herself was scheduled for an afternoon talk.

  Czech’s academic specialty was the role of medicine during the Third Reich. It was a hallmark of his work to unearth the discrepancies—often embarrassing—between the accounts medical professionals gave of themselves after the war and their actual conduct during it. Czech’s interest in this area was perhaps connected to his dawning awareness during his boyhood that his warm and loving grandfather had been “a convinced Nazi.” It was not something the old man ever talked about openly, but the knowledge lay heavily on Czech, given what he was learning at school about the darkness of those years.

  Which brought Czech to city hall, some thirty years after Asperger’s death. Before him, in their hands, all of the seated attendees held the day’s program, its cover featuring a black-and-white photograph of a young Dr. Asperger, wearing a white lab coat and engaged in deep conversation with a young boy—presumably one of his patients. The symposium’s title appeared above the photo: “On the Trail of Hans Asperger.” The event had been prompted by the growing international recognition of Asperger’s work. Over two days, presenters would explore the man’s career and offer assessments of the latest scientific findings regarding Asperger’s syndrome.

  The organizers had received word beforehand that Czech had stumbled across compromising details regarding their honoree. This could not have been welcome news, but in the spirit of scientific inquiry, they encouraged him to keep digging and to report whatever he might find. But once Czech was standing in front of them, there was a slight awkwardness to the situation: among the 150 or so audience members were Asperger’s daughter and some of his grandchildren. The title of Czech’s talk, printed in the program brochure, was “Dr. Hans Asperger and the Nazi Child Euthanasia Program in Vienna: Possible Connections.”

  Awkwardness gave way to surprise, and then shock, as Czech drew a portrait of Asperger that left the hero narrative in tatters, based on a trove of original documents he had excavated. There was, for example, a 1941 letter Czech had found in the archives of the Spiegelgrund—the facility where so many children had died of “pneumonia” after being poisoned with phenobarbital. Addressed to the Spiegelgrund’s administration, the letter reported on the recently conducted medical evaluation, at the University Hospital, of a little girl named Herta Schreiber. The handwriting was Asperger’s. Herta was then two years old, the youngest of nine children—of whom five still lived at home—and she had been sick all spring since contracting encephalitis. Her condition did not appear to be improving, and in June her mother had brought her to be seen by Asperger at his clinic.

  The letter contained an assessment of Herta’s condition. It was apparent that she had suffered some sort of major insult to her brain: her mental development had halted, her behavior was disintegrating, and she was having seizures. Asperger seemed unsure of his diagnosis. He noted several possibilities: severe personality disorder, seizure disorder, idiocy. Then, in plain prose, he offered a decidedly nonmedical opinion: “When at home, this child must present an unbearable burden to the mother, who has to care for five healthy children.”

  Having expressed his empathy for Herta’s mother, Asperger rendered his recommendation: “Permanent placement at the Spiegelgrund seems absolutely necessary.” The letter was signed “Hans Asperger.”

  Everyone in the audience grasped the meaning of Asperger’s letter. It was a death warrant. Indeed, C
zech confirmed that Herta was admitted to the Spiegelgrund on July 1, 1941, and killed there on September 2, 1941, one day after her third birthday. Records state that she died of pneumonia. Notes from the hospital archives quoted her mother as agreeing, through tears, that her daughter would be better off this way, rather than living in a world where she would face constant ridicule and cruelty. It was Czech’s assessment that Herta’s parents supported the Nazi agenda.

  The effect in the room was powerful. As they listened, members of the audience stole glances at the picture of Asperger and the boy on the cover of the program. Suddenly, the celebratory nature of their gathering seemed wildly off key, as Czech went on delivering, in a quiet, affectless voice, more disturbing news from the Nazi past.

  In February 1942, he reported, Asperger was the senior pediatrician representing the city of Vienna on a commission asked to review the health status of 210 Austrian children residing in a mental hospital in lower Austria. Several months earlier, the government had begun taking steps to apply mandatory education laws even to children in these hospitals, as long as they were “educable.” A panel of seven experts was charged with compiling a list of the names of those children who should, despite their mental challenges, start attending classes in either traditional academic or special-education settings. In a single day, Asperger and his colleagues went through the records of all 210 children. While 17 were found to be too young for compulsory education, and 36 too old, the panel designated 122 of them as ready for schooling.

  That left 26 boys and 9 girls. Their fate, Czech reported, was known, and he believed Asperger knew it as well. A written summary detailing the commission’s composition, purpose, and procedures clearly stated that those children judged to be not “educable” were to be “dispatched for Jekelius Action” as quickly as possible. When that was written, Erwin Jekelius, a former assistant to Asperger’s mentor Franz Hamburger, was the fiancé of Hitler’s younger sister, as well as director of the Spiegelgrund. “Jekelius Action” was a euphemism the commission’s members would have understood quite well. Asperger once said he took a “great risk” by refusing to report children to the authorities. This, clearly, was not one of those times.

  Czech also shared findings suggesting a greater affinity between Asperger and the Nazis than Asperger had admitted to. According to the file the Nazi Party kept on him, he was repeatedly judged to be an Austrian whom the Nazi authorities could trust, even more so as the years went by. Each time Asperger applied for a post or a promotion, he was cleared as someone who, though not a party member, abided by Nazi principles in the performance of his job. In one instance, a party official wrote that he “conforms to the principles of the policy of racial hygiene.”

  In the years following his talk, Czech would discover other evidence of how far Asperger went to conform. He found letters in Asperger’s handwriting that used “Heil Hitler” as their closing salutation. This was not mandatory. He also unearthed a job application filled out in Asperger’s hand in which Asperger described himself as a candidate for the Nazi Doctors Association, a group that functioned as a medical policy arm of the party and was instrumental in closing the medical practices of Jewish physicians. He also learned that Asperger had applied to be a medical consultant to the Vienna branch of the Hitler Youth, though there is no record of him having been accepted. All in all, in Czech’s view, Asperger took care during the war to safeguard his career and to burnish “his Nazi credibility.” Asperger, it would appear, did what was necessary.

  —

  CZECH SPOKE FOR only twenty minutes or so that day at the Vienna city hall. Then he stopped to take audience questions. In that pause, Dr. Arnold Pollak, the director of the clinic where Asperger had worked for much of his career, leapt to his feet, clearly agitated. Turning to the room, he asked that everyone present stand and observe a moment of silence in tribute to the many children whose long-forgotten murders Herwig Czech had returned to memory. The entire audience rose and joined in wordless tribute.

  PART VII

  DREAMS AND BOUNDARIES

  1980s–1990s

  33

  THE DREAM OF LANGUAGE

  “Communication at sentence level.” Those were the words that leapt out at Doug Biklen when the letter from Australia arrived in 1987. By then, Biklen, based at Syracuse University, was well-known in academic and activist circles as a forward thinker on the civil rights of people with disabilities. The letter writer, an Australian lawyer named Chris Borthwick, had written him to share news of a stunning breakthrough achieved by the woman he lived with. Her name was Rosemary Crossley. Biklen had met the couple a few years earlier, when the Australian government invited him to give a series of lectures on his work in the United States. Since that time, Borthwick said in his letter, Crossley had achieved something previously considered impossible: two-way, “sentence level,” English-language communication in children with autism who had never before spoken. These were children whose demeanor and verbal production—grunts, squeals, screaming, or just plain silence—suggested not only a limited capacity for language but also serious cognitive deficits.

  But Crossley had tested those limits by teaching the kids to type messages on a small computerized device. Borthwick said that Crossley was eliciting sentences after as few as three sessions.

  “Every single one,” Borthwick emphasized. “All. The lot. One hundred percent.”

  Biklen was fascinated and inspired. For twenty years, since the late 1960s, he had been at the forefront of efforts to bring recognition to people with disabilities as full members of society—and to end the prejudices that saw disability as the equivalent of deficiency. As a graduate student at Syracuse University, he began joining the legendary Burton Blatt, his mentor, in going into the back wards of New York State’s large institutions to expose the appalling warehouse conditions under which intellectually disabled people were being held. In the late 1980s, he was well-established in his own right. He was on the faculty at Syracuse as the director of its Center on Human Policy, which supported research and advocacy on disability rights, and he was the author of several well-regarded books. He was also the winner of multiple rights-related awards from organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union.

  Biklen was well-known to the local public school districts around Syracuse because of his campaign, begun in the 1970s and joined by others, to open all classrooms to all children regardless of disability. Borrowing from the argument made in the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education, which established the unconstitutionality of separate public schools for white and African American students, Biklen opposed the de facto segregation-by-disability practiced by most public schools in America—where “special education” meant usually separate classrooms and a separate curriculum. “Inclusion”—the idea that everyone should have access to the same spaces, services, and opportunities—became Biklen’s watchword.

  The inherent merit of his argument had been established by a number of legal victories won by Syracuse-area parents, who, with his encouragement and counsel, had successfully advocated for and even sued their schools to gain access to regular classrooms for children with disabilities. Their pressure also won for their kids a variety of supports to enhance their ability to participate academically and socially, which might include a sign language interpreter for a deaf child, or a second teacher to help a child with autism stay focused.

  Not every expert agreed that inclusion was always to the individual child’s benefit, and in the years to come, the efficacy of inclusion would be much debated. But Biklen was an absolutist. He argued that it was an educator’s ethical responsibility to take each student’s educability as a given, and he exhorted schools and teachers to approach each child with a “presumption of competence.”

  But a special challenge arose with bringing nonverbal children with autism into a regular classroom. Such children could only go so far, since academic progress depended so much on conversational literacy—on
the vital give-and-take with teachers, and with students. Many of the kids could not demonstrate that. As Biklen recognized, it was a difference that did not seem to have a work-around.

  That was why, as soon as he got the letter about “communication at sentence level,” Biklen knew he had to see for himself where these words were coming from.

  —

  ROSEMARY CROSSLEY WAS a celebrity in Australia. By 1984, the story of her triumph in establishing two-way communication with a teenage girl who could not talk had been made into a movie, based on a bestselling book written by Crossley herself, with the young woman as coauthor. Annie McDonald, born in 1961, had been diagnosed with cerebral palsy and was assumed to have severe brain damage. She could not walk or feed herself. In the film, as in real life, Crossley was an assistant in the institution where Annie resided full-time in the late 1970s, when she began to suspect that the girl’s intellect was, in fact, whole and vibrant. Over time, Crossley worked hard to make a connection with Annie, seeking some way to communicate using words. Ultimately, she declared that she had achieved success using a method of her own invention. She further asserted that it had vindicated her hunch that Annie was not at all mentally diminished and actually had a great deal to say. It was the cerebral palsy that kept her from speaking, by interfering with the mechanical production of speech, Crossley concluded. Then Crossley came up with a method that bypassed spoken language.

  She called it “facilitated communication.” It was also commonly known as FC. When Biklen flew to Australia in 1988 for a week’s visit, Crossley demonstrated the method herself.

  At the first session, Biklen was introduced to a twenty-four-year-old man named Louis. Louis had some speech, but it appeared to be purely echolalic, meaning that he simply repeated other people’s words, without any discernible meaning. That day, Louis started out by saying, “Excuse me. Get Mommy on the bus. Excuse me,” over and over, no matter what anyone else said to him. But as Biklen watched, Crossley sat down next to Louis, took hold of his right forearm, and, addressing him directly, apologized for the elementary nature of what they were about to do. Then she turned to the small electronic screen lying flat on the table in front of them and asked Louis to touch, with his finger, several small pictures displayed on the screen as a computerized voice called out the name of the object shown. With Crossley lightly supporting his arm, Louis reached out and, tentatively, hit the right target each time: car, circle, triangle. After a few minutes, the pictures on the screen were replaced with the words hand, eye, and fish. Crossley moved her hand up toward Louis’s wrist and took hold of the top of his sleeve—again, only lightly—as she asked him to point to specific words. Again, he made all correct choices. After that, he moved on to choosing single words from full sentences and letters from a display of the full alphabet. Crossley congratulated him warmly each time he hit a mark correctly.