Disability in Late State Socialism. History of Everyday Life in East European Societies
Abstract
Typically, socialist societies were characterized by both a shorthanded labor force and a fundamental importance of work for the social status of their members. At the same time, the political leadership and the ideologists of the Eastern bloc emphasized that discrimination based on deviations of physical or mental capacities did not exist in socialism. The existence of people with disabilities not conforming to the system’s labor demands, thus, generated specific challenges for socialist societies and often led to a discrepancy between integrative aims on the one hand and at least partly discriminatory realities on the other hand. The proposed session explores how people with disabilities experienced these paradoxes in their everyday lives across various late socialist societies. The perspective of everyday history amends and corrects previous research that predominately focused on sociopolitical and institutional developments and expert discourses while conceiving people with disabilities mostly as objects of the actions and decisions of non-disabled people. Contrarily, the session’s analysis of everyday actions and experiences allows to conceptualize people with disabilities as acting subjects of their own history that were able to reject political, institutional and academic or ideological directives, expectations and suggestions, or integrate them into their everyday lives or even creatively adapt them while simultaneously trying to alter the overarching frameworks of their living conditions. Additionally, the session addresses a region previously neglected by disability history research and offers a comparative and nuanced perspective by focusing on different national cases studies.
Die DDR begriff die gesellschaftliche Rehabilitation von Menschen mit körperlichen Beeinträchtigungen als staatliche Aufgabe. Während deren Integration in die Arbeitswelt vergleichsweise gut erforscht ist, sind zu den Bereichen Wohnen und Mobilität noch viele Fragen offen. Welche Maßnahmen ergriff der Staat, um körperlich eingeschränkte Menschen in diesen Bereichen zu fördern? Welche Rolle spielten hierbei Kreisärzte und Stadtarchitekten? Welche Ergebnisse wurden in der Praxis erzielt? Und welche Initiativen entwickelten die Betroffenen? Am Beispiel ausgewählter Städte sollen diese Fragen in den Fokus genommen werden.
Trotz anfänglicher Skepsis des Staatssozialismus gegenüber der Familie blieb diese Institution auch in der DDR „Keimzelle der Gesellschaft“. Ebenso hielt sich weitgehend das traditionelle Leitbild der female care-givers trotz der umfassenden Integration von Frauen in den Arbeitsprozess. Auch für Menschen mit Behinderungen war die Familie ein zentraler Lebensort. Wie gestalteten sich für ihre Familien Alltag, Reaktionen auf behinderungsspezifische Herausforderungen und Rollen- und Aufgabenverteilung vor dem Hintergrund der DDR-Arbeitsgesellschaft, der „sozialistisch-humanistischen“ Fürsorgeansprüche des Staates und der (diesen oft nicht genügenden) sozialstaatlichen Rehabilitationsmaßnahmen?
In the early 1950s, following sustained lobbying by deaf activists, the Soviet government brought in new legislation to improve the lives of deaf people. This included the creation of spaces for deaf people within the wider community, both literal (deaf factories, living spaces and clubs) and metaphorical (the recognition of the particular visual culture of deaf people). This paper traces the formation of these spaces, which both enabled deaf people to participate fully in Soviet life and marked them out as culturally different to the hearing Soviet community. It thus explores the tension between inclusion and exclusion that defined the lives of disabled people under late Soviet socialism.