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The Prosthetic Man: The Wounded or Disabled Veteran In a satirical article in Die Aktion in 1920 looking at what he called the ‘prosthetic economy [Prothesenwirtschaft]’, Raoul Hausmann mimicked the celebratory rhetoric heard more and more often extolling the great potential of prosthetic technologies for the regeneration of the country. ‘The prosthetic-person

[Prothetiker] is therefore a better human being, raised thanks to the world war to, so to speak, a higher class’. One such technology, the Brandenburg artificial arm, is ‘the greatest wonder of technology and a great mercy’, impervious to scalding heat or even to being shot, and able to work a 25-hour day without becoming tired. Prostheses ensure higher taxes for the Fatherland, and prosthetic men require less food: ‘thank goodness there are still upstanding lads – and we can remember this for the new big war – when in principle we will have just two types of soldiers: those who will be shot dead right away, and the second type, those who are presented with prostheses. With these people we will manage Germany’s rebuilding – that’s why every reasonable person demands a prosthetic economy instead of a council dictatorship’.

Writing as the hopes for a council republic were fading, Hausmann ironically presents the prosthetic state as the capitalist response to communist social transformation. Hausmann’s satire is telling precisely because the language he uses and the themes he takes up were not uncommon at the time. Medical and popular discourses of prosthetics put forward techno-utopian visions of bodily regeneration and transformation. More concretely, Hausmann’s satire shows the extent to which ideas of rehabilitation were read through an economic lens; the value of prostheses could only be measured in terms of labour, extensions of Taylorist and Fordist strategies of efficiency integrating workers with the machine. Hausmann’s own art developed this satirical perspective through the production of cyborg bodies whose various mechanical components extend the body’s potentials in mysterious ways.

Hausmann was deeply attuned to the ways in which capitalist practices reengineered bodies and subjectivities. As his references to war suggest, however, he had a more concrete phenomenon in mind, namely the huge number of war veterans who had been wounded or disabled. Even as many of them were being shunted to the streets or confined in institutions, programmes were being implemented to integrate them back into the workforce and, crucially, to lessen state obligations towards them. Unlike the decontextualised presentation of bodily injury we saw in Dix’s Two Victims or his many canvases showing disabled veterans begging on the streets, Hausmann’s satire is carefully attuned to the concrete politics at play, suggesting that the politics of disability can only be understood in relation to a broader project for the production of labouring and fighting bodies.

More broadly, however, in the culture of the period the figure of the ‘war cripple’ or ‘war wounded’ (The term ‘war cripple’ (Kriegskrüppel) was commonly used, sometimes by the artists I will discuss here. As we shall see the term was sometimes rejected for its stigmatising implications. Other common terms included ‘war invalid’ (Kriegsinvalider) or ‘war wounded’ (Kriegsbeschädigter or Kriegsversehrter). Here I will vary my use of the English equivalents to fit the context - although, as with the term ‘sex worker’, I will use more contemporary terminology in my discussion as well). One of the underlying themes in this section will be to highlight the implications of different ways of conceptualising serious injury, impairment, and disability. joined that of the prostitute as one of the most complex and overdetermined symbols of the Weimar period, the two together providing a gendered pair embedded deeply in practices of social hygiene and eugenics. At one level, the constant recurrence of images of wounded and disabled veterans simply reflected the massive bodily impact of the War. While exact numbers are difficult to come by, Robert Whalen estimates that 4.3 million German soldiers were wounded during the War. In 1920 the government officially recognised over 1.5 million as officially disabled, making them eligible for a pension. That number was reduced later in 1920 by giving those with a disability defined as ten percent or less a lump-sum payment, and again in 1923 for those with less than a 25 percent disability. The percentages reflect the state’s attempts to manage social welfare programmes by categorising disability; the numbers were tied directly to work, with the percentage reflecting the presumed reduction in ability to labour. Both in terms of state expenditures and labour, the question of disability thus loomed large in Weimar economic and political thinking, with the state trying to manage these issues through the twinned projects of welfare and prosthetics. Disabled veterans and their dependents, along with other disabled people, often challenged these state practices, however, meaning that the politics of disability remained a major field of contestation throughout the Weimar period. It was in this context that artistic representations of war-related injuries and disabilities emerged, a perspective that, in many cases, was shaped by artists’ own experiences in the War.

Disabled veterans occupied a distinct and conflicted position in relation to broader discourses of disability. Not only were almost all of them men, as soldiers they had, according to the rhetoric of war, performed a peculiarly masculine bodily sacrifice. As politicians frequently proclaimed, they were owed the ‘thanks of the Fatherland’. At the same time, though, social hygienic discourses had long read people with disabilities through narratives of degeneration and the health of the Volkskörper. Thus, disabled veterans were caught up in two potentially contradictory modes of understanding, what we might call the heroic and the social hygienic narratives. These competing discourses had directly material implications, particularly in contestations over pensions or other benefits. Disabled veterans drew on the heroic narrative not only for their own identity formation, but also to argue for state support. Indeed, soldiers had access to state support that was denied other disabled people, as there was a network of state and district welfare bureaus (Fürsorgestellen) dealing with disabled veterans and war survivors that was separate from other welfare and disability programmes. As Dix’s configuration of the wounded veteran in Two Victims suggests, however, and as I will argue here, wounded and disabled veterans were never entirely able to escape from the pull of narratives of social hygiene, demonstrating in the process the centrality of a politics of disability to the embodied logic of capitalist modernity more generally, and Weimar society in particular.

Throughout the Weimar period support for disabled veterans and their dependents made up a significant proportion of state spending. While the number of disabled veterans receiving pensions had declined to 720,000 by 1924, that year also saw 365,000 widows, 962,000 half orphans, 65,000 full orphans, and 194,000 dependent parents receiving public support through the military pension system, with the broader war-related pension and welfare programmes taking up fully one-third of government funds between 1920 and 1932. Other social groups – such as Sozialrentner, who lived on funds from disability, old-age, or accident insurance, and the Kleinrentner, who had seen their income from savings and investments wiped out by inflation – likewise staked a claim to state support as victims of war. These social programmes were deeply shaped by the broader social welfare system in Germany on which... the SPD in particular sought to ground its place in Weimar politics.

Social welfare had a long history in Germany, implemented originally by Bismarck as part of his attempts to undercut the growing influence of the left. As Andreas Killen puts it: ‘Germany’s social legislation was conceived as the cornerstone of a policy aimed at taming the revolutionary impulses of the working classes, which it sought to redirect into what [Thomas] Mann called a revolution of the body’. This revolution of the body was the point at which social welfare and social hygiene intersected. Prior to the First World War, welfare had been run primarily by confessional organisations, with poverty configured through a paternalistic model that differentiated deserving from undeserving poor. The pre-War SPD resisted these stigmatising social welfare perspectives and argued for universal state programmes. The war years saw welfare programmes move somewhat in this direction. As we saw in the second chapter, existing social programmes expanded and changed as the state and military attempted to sustain the war effort. Young-Sun Hong argues that: ‘World War I precipitated a contradiction in the conditions of social reproduction in Germany because the social programs undertaken to mobilize the home front and the increasingly industrialized war effort tended to undermine those relations of political authority and social deference which the war was being fought to preserve’. It was in this sense that, as we saw, the state was increasingly delegitimised during the War.

During the War, war-related disability had already been presented as a distinct social welfare issue. In early 1915 the prominent orthopaedic surgeon Konrad Biesalksi argued in the Reichstag that state resources should be redirected to support disabled veterans on the grounds that, ‘firm like the phalanx of our fighters on all the borders, inside the country stands this social dam’. Biesalski’s comments reflect the militarised logic of total war... with the defence of both internal and external boundaries crucial to its prosecution. This logic translated into the language of treatment as well, with work the measure of success. Like the deserving poor who could be helped up by welfare, ‘it was the will to work that would propel the disabled veteran back into the self-esteem of social productivity’. Medical treatment itself was frequently configured as a battle of wills between doctor and patient. Some veterans’ organisations strategically took up this view as well, arguing that the ‘will to work’ of disabled soldiers was more powerful than in the population at large. Underlying all of these claims was the implication that some disabled people displayed an inadequate will; as with the ‘work-shy’ unemployed, this was the point at which discourses of degeneration took hold.

In the aftermath of the War, under the influence of the SPD, the logic of welfare shifted to an extent. The SPD’s desired universal, secular social welfare system was never realised, with the Weimar system remaining a hybrid of confessional and state-run programmes, and the punitive and stigmatising model of poverty also retaining much of its strength. But the SPD did work to reform and expand the social welfare system, seeking to shift away from the paternalistic Bismarckian model even while still conceiving of social welfare in terms of the containment of the radical left. In relation to disability, the most tangible result of these reforms was the passage of the Law of the Severely Disabled (Schwerbeschädigtengesetz) in 1920, which was sponsored by the SPD but garnered cross-party support. The law was notable in that it covered not only disabled veterans, but also other disabled people (in particular those disabled in accidents). Veterans with a disability categorised as 40 percent and over qualified for state support, but non-veterans only at 50 percent. The categorisation of disability in this way gave doctors and bureaucrats broad discretion in determining qualification; this became evident in the late 1920s and early 1930s when doctors began to loosen their criteria, leading to a large jump in the number of those covered by the law. It mandated that employers of over 25 people hire at least one disabled person, the numbers increasing with the size of the enterprise. The impact of the law was significant, ensuring relatively high employment rates for disabled people. It was a remarkable piece of legislation in this respect, but it also demonstrates the centrality of labour to social welfare initiatives and the politics of disability.

The law intersected with the desire to reassert a gendered division of labour that, as we saw in previous chapters, was a primary concern across the political spectrum in the aftermath of the War. Those covered by the Law of the Severely Disabled were primarily men, and it was implemented at precisely the time that women’s labour force participation was being discouraged by demobilisation policies. The law was thus geared not only towards rehabilitation in terms of disability, but also the reconstitution of masculinity. For the USPD – who argued for increased pensions rather than the imposition of workforce quotas in the initial debates over the law in 1918 – it was precisely the gendered order that was at stake. Thus, the USPD’s Karl Ryssel suggested that inadequate pensions would force the wives of disabled men to work, undermining families and undercutting men’s wages. In this context, not only were women more likely than men to lose their jobs to disabled veterans, but disabled women were almost entirely absent from the debate.

The extensive rehabilitation industry that sprang up early in the War likewise took the male working body as its object. The development of this industry cemented the professional claim of the medical establishment, supplemented in the case of prosthetics by engineers, to treatment of the disabled body. As Mia Fineman puts it, in the aftermath of defeat, the ‘rehabilitation industry briskly stepped in . . . to replace the amputated will to victory with a prosthetic will to work’. It is this tendency that was satirised so effectively by Hausmann. Prosthetic technologies were developed as part of a reconceptualisation of the body that drew heavily on Taylorist principles of rationalised production, as well as the specifically European field of psychotechnics. For many in the industry, the development of prosthetic technologies was celebrated as a new frontier for German technological achievement, an integration of medicine and engineering that, as Fineman suggests, could redeem the failure of the War. The focus of production shifted from aesthetic prostheses (that is, prostheses designed to mimic the appearance of the limbs they replaced) to functional prostheses designed to perform specific tasks; the former were still produced, but were intended for leisure time or for workers who did not require use of those limbs at work. The capitalist division of work and leisure was thus reflected in prosthetic design itself.

As Peter Sloterdijk argues, this homo prostheticus had affinities to the armoured soldier-male of the radical right’s imagination, both in terms of the emphasis on technology and the premium placed on will. However, his argument tends to ignore the extent to which disability was also enmeshed in the more mundane bourgeois and managerial practices of labour, social hygiene, and social welfare. Or, to put it another way, radical right ideologies were not discontinuous with those practices. Sloterdijk’s approach entails a rejection of the instrumental rationality on which rehabilitation was based, but we need to be careful in drawing out the implications of this critique. As Carol Poore argues, while rehabilitation and welfare provisions reflected a technocratic and potentially repressive approach, in many ways they also proved enabling for disabled people. Germany provided more extensive pensions and care for disabled veterans than other countries, and rehabilitation, she argues, enjoyed significant success. In a social context in which labour was ideologically and materially central to everyday life, such provisions were crucial in sustaining quality of life, a point that disability rights activists themselves stressed. Some, including the prominent activist Otto Perl, argued for the importance of orthopaedics and medicine in improving conditions for people with physical disabilities, although he was sceptical of the impact of the 1920 legislative changes, and argued that the high point in this respect had been reached before the War.

An interesting expression of the narrative of progress surrounding prostheses was the way in which they were covered in the media. They were often fetishised as markers of technological progress, celebrated through articles and photographs in popular science magazines like Die Umschau. As with Taylorist time-motion studies more generally, photography and film were deployed in the service of rehabilitation, enabling the representation and analysis of movement in the service of this progress. The doctor Waldemar Schweisheimer tied this directly to strengthening the will of disabled veterans: ‘[n]othing encourages the war wounded [Kriegsbeschädigten] more quickly and strongly, nothing gives them more hope and therefore makes them more driven and skillful, as when they can see their hard-working exercises presented to them, either in person or, when that isn’t possible, in the excellent substitute of film’.

Schweisheimer’s confident claim notwithstanding, it is clear that not all disabled veterans shared this positive view of rehabilitation, with many rejecting the reductionism of its individualising and rationalising approach. In response, many turned to collective action. As mentioned in the second chapter, wounded and disabled veterans played a prominent role in the wartime protests. Their demonstrations escalated after the War. A host of organisations speaking for disabled veterans and other ‘war victims’ sprang up, divided primarily along political lines. There were seven such major organisations with a total membership of nearly 1.4 million in 1921. The SPD-oriented Reichsbund, founded in 1917, was the largest, while the KPD-oriented International Organisation of Victims of War and Labour, which formed out of a split from the Reichsbund, encompassed over 130,000 members by 1921. Crucially, as the name suggests, the communist organisation broadened the scope of those covered to include work-related disability. The Weimar political landscape was profoundly shaped by the agitation of these different groups.

The formation of these groups helped to ensure that disability became a prominent public issue in the aftermath of the War, and also led to an increase in the participation of disabled people who were not veterans. At the same time, the new organisations drew on the work of disabled activists who had long been agitating for social change. Organisations of blind and deaf Germans had formed before the War, and after the War they sought alliances with veterans. In the case of blindness, this mobilisation won the expansion of social welfare coverage beyond those blinded in the War. The Selbsthilfebund der Körperbehinderten (Self-Help League of the Physically Disabled [SBK]), also named the Otto Perl-Bund after its founder, formed after the War to support all physically disabled people. Perl’s own history of disability, published in 1926, was notable for its critical analysis of changing institutional practices around disability, rejecting especially the persistent reading of disability in relation to labour. He argued that Luther’s contention that ‘[w]hoever doesn’t work also shouldn’t eat’, had profoundly shaped the modern conception of disability, inscribing it in discourses of ‘worthiness’ that were profoundly troubling.

Many male disability-rights activists hoped to undermine the depiction of disabled people as unwilling or incapable of work by mobilising military and masculinist discourses of heroism. Disabled veterans, the Reichsbund newspaper stressed, were not just heroes of the War, but ‘heroes of everyday life’ for the way in which they had to fight through poverty, suffering, and the impact of their disabilities. Disabled non-veterans drew on these themes as well. Carl von Kugelgen, who had lost an arm in civilian life, rejected the stigmatising term ‘cripple’ [Krüppel], especially for its association with begging, and the conception of people with disabilities as being of lesser worth. ‘Having once lost my arm’, he argued, ‘I would not – out of my conscious, free will – have it any other way, for what appeared to be a loss which would make me weaker has actually made me richer and stronger, has made me into what I am. I want my destiny, I love my destiny, I am my destiny’. The title of his book, written during the War, rendered this revaluation of disability experience through a military metaphor of male overcoming: Not Cripple – Victor!

The SBK thus argued for the deinstitutionalisation of disability and the provision of support for work and independent living. This point was made in Marie Gruhl’s presentation on behalf of the SBK at the 38th conference on welfare in March 1924. Arguing that self-help groups were the third pillar of social welfare alongside state and private agencies, Gruhl argued that the place of disabled people was ‘not in the infirmary, they belong in free living and work communities’. Significantly, though, Gruhl (like the SBK more generally) focused on physical disability; she stressed that she ‘is not speaking of the mentally ill’. Mobilising this distinction between forms of disability was part of the SBK’s strategic positioning by which it sought to expand access to programmes and benefits for physical disabilities to all disabled people, not only veterans. By hierarchising forms of disability, however, this approach ran the risk of reinforcing some dimensions of discourses of degeneration and social hygiene.

...discourses of degeneration were founded on a close connection between bodies and psyches, rendering the distinctions Gruhl and the SBK sought to maintain extremely unstable. Interestingly, artists and writers tended to reverse the stigmatising of types of disability, with physical disability often presented through the lens of the grotesque, and cognitive difference (madness) valorised as potentially emancipatory and creative. In such artistic productions, the prosthetic body itself tended to serve as an ambivalent symbol for the fragmented state of modern life. In this sense, the cultural politics of disability was closely linked with ideas of fragmentation and totality outlined in the last chapter. As with the prostitute body, representations of disabled bodies tended to abstract them from the lived experiences and material concerns outlined above, reading them instead through fetishised or stigmatised tropes of bodily difference. Notable as well is the fact that, despite the prominence of the various social movements that I have touched on here, most artists tended to efface the social constitution of disability.

One of the most famous works using disability as a symbol for modern life was Leonard Frank’s book Der Mensch ist Gut (Man is Good), written during the later years of the War. Frank’s own career followed the familiar trajectory from Expressionism to neue Sachlichkeit. He was associated with the Activist movement around Kurt Hiller whose work was rejected by many left critics and artists for its espousal of vague humanist and artist-led notions of transformation. For his defenders, Frank’s work ‘had the effect of the unyielding sobriety (Nüchternheit) of photography’ associated with reportage. Man is Good was made up of a series of loosely connected stories written in an Expressionist vein, with the culminating part of the book focusing on ‘the war cripple’. This latter story begins in an operating theatre behind the front, amputated body parts strewn about, with both the doctor and patients trying desperately to sustain a sense of coherence in the midst of this bloody fragmentation. Through this bodily violence they find a shared humanity that transcends the antagonisms of war, a theme familiar from Toller’s Transformation. The mad, the blind, the cripples of all sides in the War are now linked, thinks one soldier: ‘[t]hey wounded us, we wounded them. And fundamentally we are all comrades’.

The scene shifts to a troop train full of wounded soldiers returning to the home front. Frank details the injuries, including a car full of ‘mad’ veterans, a man with severe facial injuries, and a man who has lost all of his limbs. Upon arrival in a city the men disembark and, in a typically Expressionist conclusion, lead a parade through the town, the man with no limbs seated on a kind of throne leading the way in this vaguely carnivaleque procession. The parade thus serves as an integrative and redemptive spectacle. Only Jesus had a bigger impact than the wounded veterans, the narrator says. Their presence overwhelms the residents, who all gradually emerge out of their homes and workplaces, shutting the city down. This event gives rise to a new human, and a new humanity.

Frank’s account participates in a number of very ambivalent conceptions of disability. The Expressionist evocation of a social transformation mediated by the intervention of these wounded and disabled veterans is powerful in that it foregrounds the immense bodily impact of war and configures the wounded and disabled body as a source of social regeneration. In one sense the novel’s excessively visible rendering of the bodies of disabled veterans can be read as an implicit critique of the institutional practice of keeping veterans with severe facial or other highly visible injuries confined in secretive military hospitals away from the public view. However, as Elizabeth Hamilton argues: ‘[d]epicting disability as a product of damage, Frank upholds the notion that disability is derived from able bodiedness and is not to be considered an experience in its own right. When able bodiedness is validated in this manner, it is impossible to speak of disability as anything but a problem or a flaw whose solution lies in its prevention or cure’. In this sense Frank’s work deploys disability as what David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have called a ‘narrative prosthesis’. They argue that disability is anything but hidden in literature: ‘disabled peoples’ social invisibility has occurred in the wake of their perpetual circulation throughout print history’. In this context, ‘disability has been used throughout history as a crutch upon which literary narratives lean for their representational power, disruptive potentiality, and analytical insight. Bodies show up in stories as dynamic entities that resist or refuse the cultural scripts assigned to them’.

The trope of disability is thus paradoxical, undermining but ultimately guaranteeing normative forms of bodily and narrative coherence. The problem, evident to a significant degree in Frank’s story and much of the cultural production of the period, is that disabled bodies tend to appear not in relation to historical and material contexts of disability experience, but as figures enabling other narrative ends, in this case a quasi-Expressionist transformation. As with prostitute bodies, disabled bodies here work very much as a crutch supporting artistic renderings of transgression and transformation. For critics like Heinz Kindermann, writing in 1933, this represented an inadmissible utopianism for which the ‘radical sobriety [Radikalen Sachlichkeit]’ of writers like Brecht offered a necessary antidote.

The constant return in this period to representations of non-normative bodies foregrounded the very difficult problem of the grotesque which... was central to avant-garde aesthetics. This problem of the grotesque was itself part of the experience of disability and impairment. As Robert Whalen argues in his history of the bodily impact of the First World War in Germany, veterans’ experiences were shaped by the grotesque. ‘Touched by grotesque death, they discovered to their horror that they had become grotesque’. This was most notably the case for veterans with severe facial injuries who, as indicated earlier, were generally segregated from other patients and the public. A rather horrifying instance of the instrumentalisation of wounded veterans came at the Versailles conference after the War. When the German delegation came to the Hall of Mirrors at the palace to sign the final document they were met by five French veterans, all with severe facial injuries, who had been brought from their isolated hospitals for the occasion. Clemenceau tearfully shook each of their hands, a piece of political theatre in which the disabled veterans were reduced to props in a spectacle designed to further humiliate the Germans. By appropriating this experience as a narrative prosthesis, though, Frank largely loses a sense of this materiality of the grotesque. Rather, as with so many of the prostitute bodies we saw previously, the grotesque body becomes merely a vehicle for the production of a utopian, and often masculine, wholeness.

Ernst Friedrich’s pacifist polemic War Against War! is a sharp political work that highlights the problem of representation evident here. War Against War!, a photo-book produced as part of the anti-war events of 1924, confronts the reader with page after page of photographs of the bodily impact of war, with facial trauma especially prominent. ‘At last’, he has an imagined reader say, ‘at last the mask has been torn away from this “field of honour,” from this lie of an “heroic death,” and from all the other beautiful phrases, from all this international swindle the mask has at last, yea, at last, been torn away!!’ The ‘true’ face of war is revealed.

Even today, War Against War! remains a powerful and challenging indictment of war, its visceral impact driven by the images of destroyed bodies. Aesthetically, Friedrich’s deployment of the grotesque body was rooted firmly in a critical documentary practice similar to that of Dix, but deployed now true and faithful to nature, has been photographically recorded for all time’. Notably, many of the photographs came from the growing medical and rehabilitation literature. Friedrich radically repurposed these images, wrenching them out of their medical context and using them to challenge the interlinked discourses of militarism and pathology. It was especially his use of these images that sparked massive protest from the right, who denounced his book as a sacrilege against veterans, the military, and the nation. Unlike Dix’s appropriations of these images, Friedrich’s work was arguably more complex in the sense that, in his documentary insistence on the materiality of those bodies, he went beyond a merely instrumental aestheticisation, challenging instead the production of the grotesque body in war itself.

In all of the examples I have touched on here it is clear that the grotesque body, as Mary Russo argues, cannot be understood outside of its gendered implications. The degree to which such bodies served as a vehicle for the expression of a crisis of masculine identity was especially evident in Dix’s work. As I have argued, his Two Victims suggests an asymmetrical relationship between the figures of the prostitute and the war wounded that revolves around anxieties over a damaged masculinity. Friedrich makes a similar connection in depicting a group of sex workers in front of a brothel behind the front, although in War Against War! we don’t find the same antagonistic relationship set up with soldiers. Dix, however, returned obsessively to the theme of the grotesque as a crisis of masculinity. One of his most famous works, Prague Street (1920), depicts a disabled veteran begging on Dresden’s elegant main commercial street. His three prosthetic limbs and his distorted posture link discourses of disability directly with avant-garde concerns with the fragmented modern body. In one sense the work offers a simple message, presenting ‘the viewer with a contrast between the plight of the war cripple and the callousness of the public’. This humanist pity is by no means the dominant frame, however. What is striking in Prague Street is not the contrast between disabled bodies and the implied able-bodied public of the humanist narrative, but rather the fact that none of the bodies in the image are in fact rendered as whole. The man in the foreground has no legs, while the other people on the street are represented solely as body fragments: an arm and a hand on the left, and the leg and buttocks of a woman on the right. The dog and cat are likewise only parts, while the one ‘whole’ figure, the child at the shop window, is presented with her legs askew.

One of the key dimensions of Prague Street is the association of this bodily fragmentation with commerce and commodities. The beggar eking out a living from the coins thrown by shoppers contrasts sharply with the opulent displays of commodities in the stores. The shop windows also display dismembered bodies, this time of female mannequins. They are distanced from the beggar by their gender and their association with luxury and consumption, but they also reinforce the notion of bodily fragmentation. Where the gendered distinction is cemented is through the voluptuous woman moving out of the frame. Her buttocks loom over the man, the bright colours of her dress and her fleshy body contrasting strongly with the emaciated figure beneath. Her tall boots enhance her sexualisation, with the suggestion being that she is a sex worker. Once again we find the pairing of the disabled veteran and the prostitute, with the image again reading masculinity in terms of the grotesque body threatened by an excessive femininity.

The implications for a politics of disability are especially clear in Dix’s 1920 War Cripples (Kriegskrüppel) which was exhibited in the first International Dada Fair in Berlin. Dix’s work had alternate titles, notably 45% Fit for Employment (45% Erwerbsfähig) – which threw an ironic light on state categorisations of disability for welfare claims – and subtitles, including ‘a selfportrait’ and ‘four of these still don’t add up to a whole person’. War Cripples uses similar devices to Prague Street, again juxtaposing the broken men with the various fragments of bodies behind them: a boot, an arm, a head. Wearing their uniforms and medals proudly, the men march down the street in a parody of a military parade. Various common injuries and disabilities are represented here. The first man displays Dix’s fascination with facial injuries, while the second’s shaking outline suggests shell shock, a physical manifestation of the psychological impact of war that, as I will discuss later, gained great prominence in the First World War. What the image suggests, however, is the absurdity of the bodies. They embody a parodic militarism (and indeed the image can be read as a commentary on the participation of some disabled veterans in nationalist and militarist organisations), and their grotesque bodies take on an almost comic air. This grotesqueness is reappropriated for Dada; the montaged face of the last figure implies a direct link between Dadaist aesthetics and facial injuries.

...Dix’s critique of militarism here is at best oblique. As Dora Apel argues, Dix separates militarism from masculinity, his work stressing the ‘desperate fight by the individual soldier-male against death and disfigurement’, a potentially anti-war theme, but offering a regenerated masculinity marked by struggle and overcoming as his response. In this sense the violence enacted on the bodies of the soldiers, like the graphic violence against women in many of his works, was in the service of a nostalgic recuperation of a coherent and whole male body and subjectivity.

This nostalgic desire was expressed explicitly in Dix’s Self-Portrait with My Son Jan from 1930. As Maria Tatar argues, the painting serves as a powerful counterpoint to the rest of Dix’s work, an anchor guaranteeing in the last instance the viability of the stable male artist-subject. Dix’s interest in classical painting is evident here, the dramatically different aesthetics of the work underpinning the presentation of the recuperated male subject. ‘In an act of artistic triumph, Dix erases the link between sexuality and creation, negates human mortality, and recreates himself as the artist who stands as the source of life and immortality. Here, the sensual woman who threatens to overwhelm and crush the creative artist is effaced to make room for the autogenous artist who has appropriated the procreative powers of women and gone them one better by producing a work of transcendent spiritual purity’. Not only does the erasure of women here enable the work of the autogenous male artist... but, when the classically whole bodies here are read in the context of the fragmented bodies of the rest of his work, it also produces a powerful reconstitution of normative male bodies untouched by disability or the grotesque.

Dix’s insistent association of disability with injured masculinity blocked anycritical engagement with the politics of disability in the period, and especially with its implication in practices of labour. His approach represents an extreme version of the perspective that animated the work of much of the avant-garde, but there were alternative perspectives. Sella Hasse’s 1919 Blind War-Cripple at the Machine (Blinder Kriegskrüppel an der Maschine), for example, is a woodcut of a worker operating a machine with a flesh and a prosthetic arm, his seeing-eye dog at his side. Although bodily exceptionalism is clearly the theme of the work, it is presented in a matter-of-fact rather than grotesque fashion, although tinged with a melancholia reminiscent of Hasse’s teacher, Kathe Kollwitz. Yet this is not simply the normalised or integrated worker that, as we saw earlier, was promoted by the rehabilitation industry. Hasse’s worker may be ‘rehabilitated’, but the dark, enclosed factory and the worker’s own expression suggests not a heroic overcoming, but an extension of conditions of alienated labour. Magnus Zeller’s 1919 Demonstrators (Demonstranten), alternately entitled Demonstration of the War Wounded (Demonstration der Kriegsbeschädigten), likewise eschews the grotesque depictions of Frank and Dix. Crutches and canes are in evidence, but it is the men’s haunted eyes and drawn faces rather than their disabilities that suggest the damaging impact of war. Like Hasse, Zeller, who had participated as a delegate in the Berlin Workers’ and Soldiers’ Council, foregrounds the social rather than the bodily conditions of the veterans. It is the protest itself that holds out the promise of transformation, not a dream of bodily wholeness.

Heinrich Hoerle’s work offers an even more striking contrast with that of Dix. Part of a loosely organised group of artists in Cologne calling themselves the ‘group of progressive artists’, Hoerle produced a series of works throughout the Weimar period that took up themes of disability. His 1923 The European, for instance, presented this generic figure as a stylised man stepping purposely forward on his prosthetic leg, a prosthetic arm swinging ahead of him. As this image suggests, Hoerle saw the disabled body as the archetypical modern body but, unlike with Dix, he invested his portrayals with a much more complex set of implications. Indeed, the ‘group of progressive artists’ in Cologne – which included Franz Wilhelm Seiwert and Gerd Arntz along with Hoerle – rejected the neue Sachlichkeit in general as well as the Verist stream of which Dix was the key figure. Hoerle had significant connections with Dada, but looked more to older forms of craft production for artistic inspiration, an aesthetic orientation that he and his colleagues combined with a commitment to a council communism. They sought, as Arntz put it, to produce an art combining the ‘politically revolutionary’ with the ‘formally revolutionary’.

Hoerle shared the Dadaist conception of the contemporary body as irrevocably fragmented and alienated, but his figures tended to be more formal and geometrical than the ragged and proliferating bodies of Dada. Prostheses were especially prominent in Hoerle’s work. Already in 1918–19 he produced a Cripple Portfolio that deployed disabled bodies as markers of difference, but over time his work shifted, the prosthetic body becoming indistinguishable from other contemporary bodies, especially labouring bodies. Hoerle frequently depicted workers with hybrid bodies, but the prosthesis in his work was neither simply a symbol of technological modernism nor a marker of lack; rather, it marked the body as productive in a more complex sense. Hoerle’s workers embodied neither heroic proletarianism nor absolute subjugation to the machine. He thus arguably captured the ambivalence of capitalist labour as both productive and repressive, enabling and disabling, but did not read bodily difference itself as the locus of that disability.

Hoerle’s 1930 Monument to the Unknown Prosthesis (Denkmal der unbekannten Prothesen) is the most famous example of this tendency in his work. Rather than the unknown soldier, it is the prosthetic that emerges as the hero of war. The work thus satirises the technological nationalism of the rehabilitation industry. But the two foregrounded figures in the painting are not themselves the source of satire. They are doubled, the black interior head of the man on the left evoking the severe facial injuries that Dix and Friedrich used to very different effect, while the impossible prosthetic head of the man on the right gestures perhaps to the psychological impacts of war. Both interior heads are inscribed in a ‘whole’ head, the interplay between the two elements of each head destabilising not only normative ideas of embodiment, but also the relationship between inside and outside. Like x-ray images that show the ‘true’ bodily structure beneath the skin, the interior, non-normative heads of the two men appear here as an inner truth of contemporary subjectivity....

Hoerle’s work thus destabilises the nostalgic desire for the whole body. Prostheses mark the body as modern, but not as grotesque or as lacking. Hoerle’s gender politics is interesting, if ambivalent, in this respect. In Two Cripples and Woman (Zwei Krüppel und Frau, 1931) the two male ‘cripples’ are similar to those in Monument, but in this case paired with a woman’s figure represented as whole, her voluptuous curves contrasting with the linear bodies of the disabled men. The moment of nostalgic wholeness is thus gendered feminine, while the modern, the age of the prosthesis, is masculine. Earlier, however, in his series Women from 1919–21, Hoerle produced what was a very rare depiction of disabled women. In part his series evoked the mannequins that, as we saw with Dix, were a familiar medium through which the modern female body was represented, but this was not the case in Figure with Corset (Figur im Korsett, c. 1921). Here an armless and hairless woman is depicted marching resolutely, one leg clad in a fashionable high-heeled boot, the other a prosthesis.

This last work is exceptional in shifting the representational terms of disability, both in terms of the sheer fact of this being a female figure, and in depicting her as one of the prosthetic figures who embody modern subjectivity. More generally in the period, from debates over welfare programmes to the plethora of images produced, it was male disability that was the focus. In this sense, then, the work of Dix, Frank, and others simply reflected the broader discursive context. The almost complete absence of disabled women from public discourse was in part due to the sheer number of disabled men in the aftermath of the War, but also reflected the profoundly masculine conceptions of labour that structured Weimar politics.

These themes were evident in Ernst Toller’s play Hinkemann, which was staged initially in 1923, then rewritten and mounted again in 1924 to great scandal. In this play Toller treated disability not as a figure for a universal crisis of modern subjectivity, but rather as a concrete instance of a crisis of masculinity. Unlike with Dix’s work, though, it is not the degenerative influence of the feminine that drives this crisis, nor does Toller present us with a nostalgic masculine wholeness as resolution. The play instead reads this crisis more concretely in terms of militarist ideologies, but also through the lens of class, a perspective different from his Transformation. Yet the play continued to reflect Toller’s ambivalence about the communist left and his sympathy for Expressionist ideas of social transformation. As with his earlier work, the body emerges as the site of social contestation, with the limitations of the left read in terms of the inadequacy of their politics of embodiment. Thus, as with Transformation, in Hinkemann Toller is deeply attuned to the embodied dimensions of a radical politics.

The play revolves around the character Eugene Hinkemann (‘hinken’ in German means to limp, as well as to be inappropriate), a war veteran who in outward appearance is large, strong, and masculine, but who has returned castrated, one of those Hirschfeld called the ‘eunuchs of war’. Hinkemann’s relationships with his wife, Margaret, and with his working-class and leftist milieu are profoundly shaped by his injuries. Margaret has an affair with Paul Grosshahn, a virile and masculine worker, to whom she reveals Hinkemann’s secret. Grosshahn responds to this news by claiming that it would be a sin for her to stay with Hinkemann, he ‘who isn’t a man – a sin against nature’. Hinkemann’s castration thus marks the bodily site of the crisis of masculine subjectivity.

This crisis is bound up with Hinkemann’s inability to find work. He eventually finds a job in a circus freak show – but ironically as a strong man who drinks the blood of rats and mice. The conflict between his hidden unmanning and his public performance of an extraordinary vampiric masculinity highlights the disjunctures of gendered identity formation. His work in the carnival, a central venue for the display of the grotesque, enables him to perform a masculinity that, according to essentialist notions of genital masculinity, should be inaccessible to him; this awareness only augments his humiliation. For Toller, this embodied crisis is both aesthetic and political, a point he makes explicit in the brief appearance of the tattooed woman Monachia who ‘wears the greatest works of art of the old masters in front and the most modern, expressionist, futurist, dadaist confections behind’. Her name is a feminine variant of Monachium, the Latin name for Munich, her body thus displaying the aesthetic duality that, at the time of the revolutionary upheavals in which Toller played such a central role, split the city. Monachia’s literal embodiment of this ‘high’ art in the context of the circus, a most crass form of mass culture, performs a carnivalesque reversal that takes the female body as its ground. The old masters are of course on the front of her body, the side of the classical nude, while the avant-garde occupies the rear, their artistic experiments associated – as it was so often in the avant-garde’s own practices – with the lower bodily strata.

Margaret herself is torn by the situation, returning to Hinkemann after seeing him while on a visit to the circus with Grosshahn. But she is ultimately unable to reconcile herself to Hinkemann’s condition, later committing suicide. Hinkemann too reaches the point of contemplating suicide, although the play leaves his fate open. Before we reach this point in the narrative, however, Toller outlines the political implications of Hinkemann’s disability. Hinkemann sits in a pub debating politics with a group familiar from the concluding scenes of Transformation: a scientific socialist, a Christian, and a utopian-socialist or anarchist. From the scientific socialist – with his belief in the inevitability of revolution – Hinkemann demands to know what would happen in the new state to those who are wounded or mad. They will be humanely cared for, the socialist responds. Hinkemann suggests that there are more complex injuries, hinting at his own. The socialist responds:

There are no such people. People with healthy bodies have healthy souls. Common sense will tell you that. And people who are not right in their heads belong in an asylum.

Hinkemann rejects this socialist eugenics and presses the issue. He asks about eunuchs, giving the example of his ‘friend’ who, he says, was injured in such a way. The scientific socialist has no answer. At this point Grosshahn comes in and starts to reveal Hinkemann’s secret; Hinkemann pre-empts him, confessing his condition and addressing his interlocutors:

Fools! You don’t know what it feels like – torture. What a change there’d have to be before you could build a better world . . . Words are all very fine for people in good health. But you don’t see the places you can’t reach. There are people you can’t make happy with all your states and society and family and community. Our sufferings begin where your cures end.

The people in the bar are moved by his speech, but Hinkemann leaves and begins to descend into madness, hallucinatory sequences interspersed with snatches of ‘reality’. He is visited by visions of the denizens of the post-War city, wounded soldiers and prostitutes prominent among them. Hinkemann, who has bought a phallic statue of Priapus, a fetish object connecting individual masculinity with social power, laments the inevitability of fate. The original version had Hinkemann preparing a noose for himself; the 1924 version, rewritten after left critics found the original too pessimistic, leaves him in this liminal state.

Hinkemann thus refuses the Expressionist narrative of overcoming so central to Transformation, but also rejects the alternative of a left social hygiene experiences of disabled veterans more broadly, who felt increasingly abandoned in the post-War years. In part this was due to a cultural tendency to repress the experience of the War, a point made in the play by the circus boss who tells Hinkemann

that the war’s a back number now. Peepshow ‘the horrors of war’ won’t earn sixpence. Nowadays Progress is the world. Hundred percent profit in it. War held no interest to the commercial entertainment industry.

At the same time, the ‘progress’ promised by the scientific socialist, on the other hand, offered little more hope than this sanitised capitalist vision. Toller’s anti- capitalism thus linked a critique of progress with a deep suspicion of the masculinist ableism of the left. In its original version, the play was framed more explicitly as a critique of nationalism as well, the 1923 title being The German Hinkemann. Toller himself wanted to promote a more universalist meaning, dropping the ‘German’. The right certainly continued to read it as an affront to the nation, however, mobilising against the play and disrupting its performances.

What is notable in the play is that Toller does not dwell on the metaphorical dimensions of Hinkemann’s genital injuries, but has Hinkemann stressing their materiality. In this sense Toller was drawing on broader debates amongst doctors, psychiatrists, and other researchers on the ‘eunuchs of war’. As Sabine Kienitz argues, genital injuries proved challenging to biological conceptions of gender, with both cultural and scientific responses seeking to reinscribe normative models of genital masculinity. Toller drew on these anxieties to provoke a critical confrontation between the militarised masculinity of the nation, the proletarian masculinity of the scientific socialist, and the complex politics of the grotesque body. His challenge, however, gave rise to its own problems. Toller’s account relied on stereotypes of working-class gender roles evident in Margaret’s passive femininity and Grosshahn’s crudely misogynist masculinity. As Richard McCormick argues of Hinkemann: ‘[a]ggressive proletarian masculinity and passive proletarian femininity are critiqued from the standpoint of a castrated hero who embodies the virtues of a somewhat androgynous and enlightened (male) intelligentsia’ For all his attention to the material body, Toller’s vanguard figure is thus again marked by an Expressionist desire for the transcendence of that body and its base sexual instincts.

The desire for a reconstituted masculinity returns us to the rehabilitative politics of the period that sought to overcome the sense of bodily lack or loss so evident in Hinkemann. Where Hinkemann came up against the limits posed by the stigmatising and marginalising constitution of disability as a social phenomenon, rehabilitation offered the promise of an individualised transcendence of the body. Thus, in rehabilitation practices, ‘the maimed body of the disabled veteran was bolstered by an incipient quasi-scientific identity politics centering on the concept of the Krüppelseele (cripple soul)’. The concept of the Krüppelseele did in some ways represent a new understanding of disability, incorporating a sense of bodily difference not wholly subsumed to the logic of degeneration. This perspective was articulated by the prominent orthopaedic surgeon Konrad Biesalski: ‘[j]ust as the amputation stump is not just a severed piece of arm or leg, but rather a new organ with its own biological laws, the cripple is not merely the distorted image of a healthy person; rather, through the interaction of the remaining powers a new, differently constituted yet self-contained unity of body and soul arises – a special biological person, whose own laws and capabilities must be studied before attempting to interfere with them’. Or, as Biesalski argued in a rather utopian speech to the Reichstag in January 1915 on the medical and rehabilitative possibilities now available to deal with war injuries and disabilities, ‘there really is no condition of disability [Krüppeltum] any more’. For the psychiatrist David Katz, writing in 1921, the prosthetic should thus not be experienced as a foreign element, but rather as part of an integrated body, which he argued involved ‘giving the prosthesis a soul’.

Seemingly progressive, this conception of disability was profoundly ambivalent, in particular by effacing any sense of the material implications of different forms of disabled embodiment. Biesalski’s understanding of disability rooted it firmly in the technocratic and rationalising logic of the prosthetic and rehabilitation industry touched on earlier, an approach committed to the therapeutic value of work. He worked hard to promote this conception of disability, lobbying the state but also engaging in popular education, including the production of an educational film entitled Krüppelnot und Krüppelhilfe. The technocratic and state-oriented nature of this approach was evident in Biesalski’s stated goal of creating ‘taxpayers rather than charity recipients!’ He looked towards a future where the ‘numerous war cripples should merge into the masses of the people as if nothing had happened to them’. Unburdening the state of responsibility for care lurked behind these arguments, a budgetary imperative also underlying the diagnosis of Rentenpsychose (pension psychosis) that... proposed that reliance on state support was itself the source of disability.

Hinkemann implicitly challenges the rationalising impulse of the rehabilitation industry. Here the Expressionist desire for transcendence becomes more concrete, grounded on the one hand in the intractable materiality of bodily difference, and on the other in a rejection of a purely instrumental conception of bodies. Toller demands a revolutionary transformation of a social order that produces both bodily violence and the subsequent stigmatisation of its effects. This is a challenge he poses both to capitalist society as a whole, and to the left. What he proposes is an alternative understanding of the body that stands in opposition to ideas of degeneration. In tracing out a radical Krüppelseele, Toller suggests that disabling social practices are simultaneously psychological and bodily, signalling the need for a dramatic reconceptualisation of subjectivity as part of a radical political project. The impasse at the play’s end remained insufficiently ‘optimistic’ to some of its socialist critics, but it was precisely here that Toller’s challenge to the left was posed. This psychological dimension... was central to the complex debates over aesthetic and political radicalism that shaped the culture of the period.

- Robert Heynen, Degeneration and Revolution: Radical Cultural Politics and the Body in Weimar Germany. Historical Materialism series. Leiden: Brill, 2005. pp. 292-322 Art is, from top to bottom: 1) page from Ernst Friedrich, Krieg dem Kriege; 2) Photo from Illustrierten Jahrbuch des Berliner Tageblattes, 1915; 3) Otto Dix, Prague Street; 4) Heinrich Hoerle, Monument to the Unknown Prosthesis (Denkmal der unbekannten Prothesen); 5) Otto Dix, War Cripples (Kriegskrüppel) or 45% Fit for Employment (45% Erwerbsfähig), 1920; 6) Photo of two war wounded from Deutsche Kriegsversehrte im 20. Jahrhundert website

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