Disability and the Worship of Work

December 16, 2025

Essays

Protestant disability care institution Alsterdorfer Anstalten in Hamburg in the 1930s

Dagmar Herzog’s The Question of Unworthy Life challenges the believe that a life needs to be useful to be meaningful. What can history teach us about the predicaments faced by disabled Americans today? See https://somatosphere.net/disability-and-the-worship-of-work/

At the Protestant disability care institution Alsterdorfer Anstalten in Hamburg in the 1930s, NS swastikas were integrated into care festivities. 513 residents were eventually deported to killing facilities, at least 469 of them at the initiative of the care institution. (c) Archiv der Evangelischen Stiftung Alsterdorf.

Danilyn Rutherford