Die 1970er Jahre als Umbruchsphase der bundesdeutschen Disability History? Eine Mikrostudie zu Selbstadvokation und Anstaltskritik Jugendlicher mit Behinderung

Abstract

The article describes the 1970s as a period of change with regard to Disability History in the Federal Republic of Germany. It presents a case study of the adolescent inhabitants of a confessional institution for people with physical disabilities, who began to criticise the institution’s administration in the late 1960s. Their main critique concerned the conditions of education, the arrangement of the daily routine, and the lacking of infrastructure. Furthermore, the adolescents judged the educational methods as outdated, authoritarian and undemocratic and demanded more possibilities for participation. Their aims, approaches, and actions anticipated the upcoming new social movements, for example the so-called German cripple movement.
The authors analyse the case study as one step in a row of societal change processes, which interfered with each other in the 1970s: Firstly, structural changes concerning the media and political public opened up new ways of publicity for the aims of young people with disabilities. Secondly, people with disabilities began to organise their interests in a more horizontal, network-based way. Thirdly, the generational change played an important role in explaining altering approaches, forms of protest and especially the conflict between the institution’s administration and the adolescent critics. And finally, important conceptual renewals concerning ideas of “integration” and normalcy occurred. All in all, the 1970s saw a new way of the self-advocation of people with disabilities, which later on merged into the disability movement.