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

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

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