The History of Adelheid Block

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Adelheid was born to a prominent Jewish family in late Constance. As a small child, she had what's sometimes called encephalitis and it brain damaged her quite severely. She went as a teenager into an asylum. And then in 1939, something horrible happened in Germany. The Nazis come in and all the asylums, the hospitals, the nursing homes are taken over. They sterilise people. Then they move into a phase which was called T4 after the address it was in in Tia Garten in Berlin. That was the where they headquarters were. This was basically the precursor of the Holocaust. It was the slaughtering, the systematic slaughtering of people who's

Welcome to the Wintering Sessions with Katherine May.

This week Katherine chats to writer Joanne Limburg about the ways that we can find connection in the experience of outsidership.

While writing her astonishing new book, Letters To My Weird Sisters, Joanne sought out women from the past who were marked out as ‘weird’, from Virginia Woolf, who was unable to choose the ‘right’ ballgown, to Katharina Kepler, who was put on trial for witchcraft. Drawing on her Jewish heritage, Joanne urges us all to assert the humanity of those who seem unfathomably different to us - the physically and intellectually disabled people who were considered to be ‘life unworthy of life’ in the Holocaust.

There is so much hope in Joanne’s project to own and cherish her own ‘weirdness’, and to find a kind of sisterhood there, stretching across time. Many listeners will find their community here, too.

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Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

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