Is Germany a nation of monsters? While this question has haunted most attempts to understand the Nazi past, Disability in Twentieth-Century Germany forces readers to address it more directly and forthrightly within a large historical context. In some places we confront the monstrosity of perpetrators both large and small of crimes against humanity. In others, because monstrosity is a synonym for disability, readers come to understand the many complex ways people with disabilities have been modernity's quintessential victims. Somewhere between these seemingly opposing notions of monstrosity lie unexpected revelations well beyond the Nazi period and even modern Germany, for at its core this is a work that invites witting and unwitting comparisons with the contemporary United States. At the same time, Poore's courageous, nuanced book moves beyond victims and blame to suggest new frameworks for contemplating the relationship among scholarship, activism, and personal experience.

While many scholars have described Nazi medicine's role in eliminating “undesirables,” this is the first synthetic work in either English or German to take up the subject from the perspective of critical disability studies. Rather than see disability purely in terms of a tragedy or deficit that befalls certain unfortunate individuals, this view explores it as the product of social, cultural, economic, and political factors while showing that it offers an analytic tool for examining a host of larger issues. This new paradigm lifts disability and disabled people from the margins where they have long been considered the preamble to the “real” story of genocide, and accords them a central place in the German past and future. By providing the tools for understanding those with physical, sensory, cognitive, and psychiatric disabilities as potentially having lives worthy of life, critical disability studies paradoxically open the door for using disability to explore aspects of German history that might initially seem to have nothing to do with disabled people.

The book occupies a difficult-to-define middle ground between introductory text and scholarly monograph, perhaps because Poore seems more comfortable with questions that address the “what” of a topic than she is with the “why.” Indeed, most chapters lack a conclusion, and it would be hard to state an overarching argument for the work as a whole. At the same time, this professor of German Studies at Brown University has done impressive interdisciplinary research that offers new insights into known figures such as Otto Dix, Bertolt Brecht, and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. We also meet men such as Rudolf Kraemer, the outspoken blind critic of the Third Reich's eugenics policies in 1933, and Franz Christoph, the activist who struck the president of the Federal Republic with his crutch during a 1981 protest against the patronizing United Nations' “Year of the Disabled.” The book is full of sophisticated, smart, original observations for thinking about how disability can, indeed should, be integrated into all histories of modern Germany.

Poore follows a loosely chronologic and thematic framework that begins with Weimar and continues up through the early twenty-first century. Though only one of the nine chapters deals explicitly with policies of the Third Reich, it looms large over the entire book, just as it does in recent German history. Given National Socialism's unrelenting campaigns to eliminate the country's “lives unworthy of life” through sterilization and its “useless eaters” through a program of euthanasia, this emphasis is understandable, even predictable. Poore's cultural history approach, however, reveals the Nazi era as a prism or vortex that absorbed different strands of German ideas and representations, transforming them into altered, yet recognizable approaches in both east and west until the recent past. Disability had been a part of the German cultural lexicon well before Hitler seized upon it as the opposite of the Aryan ideal. Whether veterans or civilians, disabled people served as a constant reminder of the Second Reich's humiliating defeat in 1918. Artists, writers, propagandists, and politicians across the spectrum all found these undesirable citizens a useful metaphor for conveying everything from the futility of war to the need for revenge. The Nazis exploited these stereotypes and misconceptions about disabled people, pushing the ideas to such extremes that they became emblematic of intolerance. And yet, even after the thorough discrediting of the Third Reich, many of these same ideas permeated the Soviet brand of socialism that gripped the German Democratic Republic in the decades before reunification. Thanks to the emergence of a disability rights movement, antidiscrimination laws, and the advent of critical disability studies, the situation has improved markedly in the past thirty years.

The book's most compelling and original parts approach the topic of disability comparatively. For example, Poore analyzes the different approaches to returning veterans after the two world wars, a complex situation with fascinating implications when read in the context of the Cold War. Elsewhere, she describes German and American representations of disabled politicians, including the intriguing revelation that the Nazi media, like their American counterparts, participated in the “gentleman's agreement” that did not exploit Roosevelt's polio as a sign of inferiority and weakness. Often Poore's comparative discussions draw attention to larger analytic frameworks such as gender relations, the philosophy behind public policy, or paradoxical effects of socialism.

Historically minded readers should resist the temptation to skip the final chapter in which Poore offers “An American Professor's Reflections on Disability in Germany and the United States.” More than a simple epilogue that brings the story up to the present, this is the book's soul, its intellectual payoff and punch line. Here is where Poore brings together the strands of eugenics, internal revelation, and activism that run through the book by weaving in her own story as a scholar with a visible disability trying to make sense of two different worlds. While some might find this personal touch irrelevant or even self-indulgent, such wariness might in fact reflect the same discomfort that Poore analyzes throughout her book, for to answer the question of whether Germany is a nation of monsters requires each reader to peer within.