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by President Heidi R. Lewis
July 7, 2025

I’m writing this blog from Germany, y’all. I’m here teaching my three-week study abroad course, Hidden Spaces, Hidden Narratives: Intersectionality Studies in Berlin, which I’ve done every summer for the past eleven years—excepting 2020 and 2021 because of COVID-19 travel restrictions. 

“Instead of defining a person by their health condition or impairment, we consider disability to be a social construction as people are disabled by barriers. We recognise and respect that disability is defined by each individual and by their lived experiences. When we speak of inclusion and accessibility, we demand it for all people, no matter what they identify themselves as: as sensorially, physically or cognitively disabled or impaired, with learning difficulties, with mental illnesses, diverse, ‘crippled’, ‘mad’…”
—Berlinklusion

“We understand access and care as generative, messy, multilayered and intimate, and as something to strive for from the outset of any work that we take on.”
—Sickness Affinity Group

Useless eaters. Empty human shells. Unworthy of life.

These are some of the phrases National Socialists (often referred to as Nazis) used to describe people with physical and/or mental disabilities.

During the Nazi regime, disabled people were excluded from marriage loan programs that provided money to newly married couples and that forgave 25% of the loan for each child a couple had. The Law for the Prevention of Offspring with Hereditary Diseases legalized the sterilization of disabled people. Disabled people were not allowed to attend school past the elementary level and were eventually forbidden from attending school at all—unless the school was part of an institution isolated from all others. Sexual contact and marriage were prohibited between Aryans and disabled people. Through Aktion T4, one of the Nazis’ most well-known programs targeting disabled people, disabled adults were murdered in gas chambers. After the program met its quota of 70,000 victims, the euthanasia of disabled people was transferred to hospitals. By the end of the regime, hundreds of thousands of disabled people had been murdered.

Even folks who don’t know me well may have heard me admit that ableism is one of my greatest struggles where my commitments to examining, navigating, and addressing subjugation and oppression are concerned. Of course, that’s due, in large part, to me being an able bodied person who has the privilege of being and remaining ignorant and inattentive. Ableism is one axis of oppression that is far too often ignored by far too many of us.

Yet, I think about it a lot during my study abroad course, because while Word War II ended 80 years ago this year, the legacy is profound. Many buildings don’t have ramps or elevators. Crosswalk lights often shift from green to red way too fast. There are sizable gaps between a lot of streets and sidewalks.  Small text—on everything from subway station signage to museum placards—is commonplace. Elevators are often way too small. And the list, as always, goes on and on.

I was thankful, then, when Adam Schonfeld and I discussed shifting the focus of the tour on Jewish history that he’s given my students annually for the past few years to a Stolperstein tour focused on women’s resistance, LGBT persecution, and the persecution of people with disabilities.¹

In the early 1990s, artist Gunter Demnig developed the idea of the Stolperstein to commemorate individuals persecuted and murdered by Nazis between 1933-1945, including Jews; Sinti and Roma people; people stigmatized and persecuted for their political views, religious views, such as Jehovah’s Witnesses, sexuality, and/or race; people stigmatized and persecuted as “asocial,” such as homeless people or sex workers; forced laborers and deserters; and people with mental and/or physical disabilities. Stolpersteine, also referred to as stumbling stones, are 96x96x100mm brass plates cast in a concrete block that are installed in front of the homes where victims of National Socialism last lived voluntarily. As of last August, 107,000 stones have been laid in almost 1,900 municipalities across Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Finland, France, Greece, Great Britain, Ireland, Italy, Croatia, Latvia, Lithuania, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, the Republic of Moldova, Romania, Russia, Sweden, Switzerland, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Spain, the Czech Republic, Ukraine, and Hungary.

Scholars like Sabine Offe have been critical of the ways Holocaust memorials, especially museums and especially those in Germany, “are not embedded in contemporary Jewish life” and have been “established for a largely non-Jewish public, mostly lacking in knowledge and experience of Jewish history, culture, and religion.” More pointedly, and in conversation with Wolfgang Ernst, Birgit Jerke, Carol Duncan, and others, Offe writes, “It is perhaps the ultimate absurdity that the remains of the history of a people that hardly ever enjoyed a secure place, sheltered against prosecution and assault, are housed in the protected rooms of a museum—accessible only at certain times, safeguarded against trespassing and human touch.”

Many would argue Stolpersteine are different. For one, they could be considered community-based or grassroots projects, as initiators have included students, teachers, activists, and residents or owners of the houses where the victims of Nazi persecution once lived. The facilitation paperwork can be cumbersome, the process can take anywhere from 6-9 months, and the installations aren’t cost-free. Still, the work is far from impossible, especially if the installation results from collective efforts, which is the point. And while you could miss them while traveling through any given city, especially if you’re blind but also if you’re not blind but you’re just not paying attention, once you know they exist, it really is hard not to notice them. Do all or even most of us take the time to stop and look at each one carefully? Probably not. Do all or even most of us take the time to do extensive research on the people being honored? Again, probably not. Still, residents often host events to commemorate the victims and many walking tour guides—at least in Berlin—are committed to teaching audiences about many of the victims and their stories.

On that note, Adam’s tour did not disappoint.

And one story he told has been on my mind ever since last Tuesday—the story of Frida Schoenberner, whose Stolperstein is located at Hagelberger Straße 26 in Berlin-Kreuzberg, the neighborhood where I’ve lived each summer for the past eight years.

Frida Schoenberner's Stolperstein 
[Photo Credit: Kylee Lynn of the 2025 #FemGeniusesinBerlin]

Frida was born in Berlin on August 11, 1888. Notably, her father Reinhold Schoenberner, a Protestant priest and later superintendent, began supporting deaf and hard of hearing folks after working as a curate for “deaf-mutes” in 1866. In the 1880s, he also learned to teach sign language, which was often resisted even then. Due to the trauma she experienced after the deaths of her mother and sister, as well as the bombing raids on her hometown, Frida had a nervous breakdown. After being admitted into a psychiatric hospital by her family, she was eventually deported to the Meseritz-Obrawalde hospital without their knowledge. Because of the Nazis’ euthanasia policy that resulted in the mass murder of patients in care and nursing homes, Frida was killed in the hospital by a phenol poison injection on April 12, 1944.

Frida’s nephew Gerhard Schoenberner, Founding Director of the House of the Wannsee Conference memorial and education site, later visited the place where she was murdered and wrote a poem, “For Frida,” in her memory. This time, I’m gonna leave you with that:

1
From afar
I recognize her
Amidst the bustle on the platform
Breathless I run
Into her open arms
Waiting for me
We kiss and smile
And hold each other tight
I smell the familiar perfume
And stroke her hair
Cheerfully she looks at me
Through her small eyes
Again and again I see this film
Until it goes black and breaks off

2
This is where she was
This is where they took her
This is where she died
Killed by doctors
I note silently
What I see and hear:
House 9
The tablet dosage
The lethal injection
The morgue cellar, the lift
The clothes, the gold teeth
Black wrapping paper for coffins
The urnfield
The number signs
The mass grave

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