The Pleasure and Pain of Passing as (Dis)abled: Rudi Dutschke’s Exile in the United Kingdom (1968–1971) and the Ableism of the West German Student Movement

Questions of (dis)ability have played a marginal role in the scholarly literature on contemporary German history and culture and the movements associated with the West German “1968.”¹ But this is changing. The emerging field of disability history has emphasized the critical importance of disability as a category of historical analysis and a tool for emancipatory change. In this context, disability is understood as socially constructed and susceptible to change. In her excellent account of disability policy in Germany, Elsbeth Bösl highlights that “disability was ultimate otherness and was primarily understood as a functional deficit in relation to someone’s productivity and ability to work.”² While consciously rejecting the aims and aspirations associated with the conventional “petty bourgeois” lifestyle, student activists in the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) and West Berlin had high expectations for themselves when it came to their intellectual productivity and commitment to a global revolution. As...