Teenager sterilised by the Nazis became an advocate for mental health patients
Across from Dorothea Buck’s hospital bed was a Christian message, a quote from the Gospel of Matthew written in large letters on the light green wall: ‘‘Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest.’’
Buck, a pastor’s daughter in Hitler’s Germany, had been institutionalised at the Bethel psychiatric centre, where she was diagnosed with schizophrenia after a psychotic episode in 1936. But in lieu of rest or gentle care, the 19-year-old faced treatment that she later likened to torture, presided over by doctors and nurses who rarely said a word.
There were 23-hour baths inside a canvascovered tub, where her neck was held rigidly in place; unwanted injections of paraldehyde, a sedative; and long stretches inside a cocoon of cold, wet sheets, wrapped so tightly she was unable to move. She soon noticed that other female patients bore fresh scars along their lower abdomens, which doctors explained as the result of appendectomies.
Only after Buck was forced to undergo the procedure herself did she learn the truth from another patient. She had been sterilised under the Law for the Prevention of Offspring With Hereditary Diseases, a 1933 statute designed to help purify the Aryan race.
‘‘I was distraught,’’ Buck said decades later, ‘‘because people who had had forced sterilisations were not allowed to attend secondary schools or schools providing higher education, and were not allowed to marry a non-sterilised partner. I had to abandon my chosen profession as a kindergarten teacher.’’
Buck was one of an estimated 300,000 to 400,000 victims of forced sterilisation under Nazi rule and, by the time of her death aged 102, one of its last survivors. The programme targeted patients diagnosed with ‘‘feeblemindedness,’’ schizophrenia and epilepsy, among other conditions, and foreshadowed a wave of killings, in which more than 200,000 people with mental and physical disabilities were systematically murdered.
While struggling to find work and make sense of a trauma that she described as ‘‘the most inhuman experience of my life’’, Buck turned to ceramics and sculpture, crafting larger-than-life pieces that included a bronze depiction of a mother and child. She later traded art for activism, championing more humane therapeutic practices in Germany and co-founding support groups for victims of psychiatric abuses.
Buck was institutionalised four more times after being released from Bethel. She was sometimes treated with electroshock therapy and, after her last psychotic episode, in 1959, was injected with ‘‘high dosages of antipsychotic drugs’’, which she called a ‘‘total dictatorship’’ that kept her from thinking and feeling.
Her turn toward mental health advocacy came in the early 1960s, spurred partly by the trial of Holocaust organiser Adolf Eichmann and a broader reckoning with the crimes of the Nazi era. She wrote a play on the murder of people with disabilities, co-founded survivor groups and, above all, emphasised the importance of conversations between patients and physicians.
‘‘I experienced the psychiatric system as being so inhuman because nobody spoke with us,’’ she said in a 2007 lecture at a conference organised by the World Psychiatric Association. ‘‘A person cannot be more devalued than to be considered unworthy or incapable of conversation.’’
Communication was also a theme she had pursued in her art, notably in a small sculpture of a mother and child that she gave in 2008 to the Charite hospital in Berlin.
The sculpture ‘‘expresses the relationship between two people’’, she wrote in a letter marking its donation, ‘‘which is still missing in today’s psychiatry due to the still inadequate conversations’’. As she often told interviewers, ‘‘As long as we talk to each other, we don’t kill each other.’’
Dorothea Sophie Buck-Zerchin was born in Naumburg, central Germany. After World War II, she supported herself for more than a decade as an art teacher, before shifting her focus to advocacy. Initially, she was wary her advocacy work would negatively impact her artistic career. Her 1990 autobiography, On the Trail of the Morning Star: Psychosis as Self-Discovery, was published under the name Sophie Zerchin.
In recent years, she was still writing letters to politicians and campaigning on behalf of patients, including those who do not have the ability to consent to medical research. ‘‘As long as I’m still in good shape and can do something,’’ she told the German newspaper Die Welt, days before her 100th birthday, ‘‘I will continue this.’’ –
‘‘I experienced the psychiatric system as being so inhuman because nobody spoke with us.’’