Abstract

This essay compares the cultural and historical factors that shape Helen Keller's life and legacy in the United States and Germany. Although Keller read and wrote in German, was well-versed in German literature, and even regarded Germany as her "spiritual home," she did not make substantive inroads into German culture. Instead, she garnered grandiloquent, yet ultimately superficial recognition. Scholars in the United States, on the other hand, are increasingly appreciative of her contributions to movements promoting rights for people with disabilities, women's rights, and progressive politics. Among people in the U.S., superficial adulation has slowly begun to give way to more rigorous scholarship, allowing Helen Keller to be regarded as a thinker worthy of serious consideration. What aspects of American culture, then, allow for her multifaceted resonance at home, and what in German culture keeps her high on a pedestal, largely out of reach of the very people she admired and wanted to know? Considering Helen Keller's status as an international icon of inspiration, this study sheds light on the cultural and historical parameters that define both humans and heroes.

Keywords: Helen Keller, German culture, German naturalism

Introduction

Wherever deafness and blindness are viewed as human adversaries, Helen Keller is known as a hero. The young deaf-blind girl who learned to read and write beyond all expectations has been immortalized in story, drama, and film. The story of her inspirational triumph over disability emerged as an international sensation during her lifetime and has been retold in an almost unbroken record of new publications since her death more than 35 years ago. To be sure, Helen Keller was a remarkable human being whose life and works are worthy of the admiration that they so often inspire. Saccharine retellings of her life story, however, do not do justice to this outstanding thinker, writer, and humanitarian.

Within the United States, new biographies and creative non-fiction have appeared that fill in the complex personal details erased in more rose-colored accounts of Keller's life. Books such as Dorothy Herrmann's Helen Keller: A Life (1998) and Georgina Kleege's Letters to Helen (2001) offer critical examination of Keller's learning process and, significantly, do not end in her childhood. Herrmann and Kleege explore Helen Keller's relationships with her teacher, Anne Sullivan; with her family; her famous admirers from Alexander Graham Bell to Mark Twain; and her firm support of socialism, women's suffrage, and birth control. These biographies and many new analytical studies such as Kim E. Nielsen's The Radical Lives of Helen Keller (2004) remove Helen Keller from her pedestal and appreciate her as a human being among humans. In short, at least within the United States, Helen Keller is losing her status as a one-dimensional hero. I regard this as progress.

Although the widely traveled Keller only visited Germany once, briefly, in 1956, she read and wrote in German Braille. In school, she earned honors in the German language, read classical authors Goethe and Schiller in the original, and even spoke of Germany as her "spiritual home." Her books were translated into German as soon as they were published, and most translations have been updated more than once. Helen Keller was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Freie Universität Berlin in 1955, and virtually every major German city today hosts at least one public school bearing her name. German streets are named for her, and finally, two new German studies of her life and works have appeared within the last 5 years in the unified Federal Republic.

My discussion here addresses the degree and function of Helen Keller's hero status in Germany. My overarching finding is that in Germany, beyond some extravagant gestures and superficial adulation, only rare instances suggest that Helen Keller was recognized for the substance of her achievements. In the United States, on the other hand, in addition to extravagant gestures and superficial adulation, certain intellectual, cultural, and social trends fostered and advanced her work. This raises two questions: what aspects of American culture allowed for her multiplicity of roles, and what in German culture kept her high on a pedestal, largely out of reach of the very people she admired and wanted to know?

Literature, in my estimation, played a defining role in the differing receptions of Helen Keller and also contributed substantially to the divergent notions of disability that we see in the United States and Germany yet today. Three reasons support my claim: First, reading played a vital role in Helen Keller's own life; second, she was a natural and avid writer, and through reading, audiences have come to know her; and third, literature itself–the story, the poem, the drama–provided the tools for those around her to interpret her life. And this is certain: Helen Keller's was a life interpreted. Medical doctors, psychologists, philosophers, and teachers around the world, who never met Keller, nonetheless availed themselves of her story in order to prove or disprove their theories on the human condition. Keller herself, in contrast, preferred to know human beings first and then draw her conclusions. Her learning of five foreign languages bespeaks her deep personal commitment to knowing other human beings.

Germany, German authors and musicians, and the German language were nothing short of dear to Helen Keller's heart. Her study of the German language seems to have been a labor of love. She learned her first German words from a Bach cantata: "Wie schön leuchtet der Morgenstern!" (BWV1) or "How brightly beams the morning star" (Pieper, 2003, p. 60). She took her first German classes at New York City's Wright-Humason School for the Deaf, where the teaching philosophy stressed speech and training in lip reading. In an interesting coincidence, oralism, or the teaching of speaking to deaf people, was at that time known as the "German method." The 18th-century German educator Samuel Heinicke is often described as the father of the oral method of education, which discourages the use of sign language (Schuchman, 2002, p. 112). To be sure, the pupil Helen Keller was more interested in the content of her German courses than in the German origins of her teacher's methodology. She noted that "Miss Reamy, my German teacher, could use the manual alphabet, and after I had acquired a small vocabulary, we talked together in German whenever we had a chance, and in a few months I could understand almost everything she said. Before the end of the first year I read Wilhelm Tell with the greatest delight. Indeed, I think I made more progress in German than in any of my other studies" (Keller, 2003, p. 64).

During her first year at the Cambridge School for Young Ladies, in preparation for admission to Radcliffe College, Keller studied "English history, English literature, German, Latin, arithmetic, Latin composition and occasional themes. (...) I had had a good start in French," she writes, "and received six months' instruction in Latin, but German was the subject with which I was most familiar" (Keller, 2003, p. 69). Again, she records a particular affinity for her German teacher and for German literature:

Frau Gröte, my German teacher, and Mr. Gilman, the principal, were the only teachers in the school who learned the finger alphabet to give me instruction. No one realized more fully than dear Frau Gröte how slow and inadequate her spelling was. Nevertheless, in the goodness of her heart she labouriously spelled out her instructions to me in special lessons twice a week, to give Miss Sullivan a little rest. (...) In German I read, partly with my fingers and partly with Miss Sullivan's assistance, Schiller's 'Lied von der Glocke' and 'Taucher,' Heine's 'Harzreise,' Freytag's 'Aus dem Staat Friedrichs des Grossen,' Riehl's 'Fluch der Schönheit,' Lessings's 'Minna von Barnhelm,' and Goethe's 'Aus meinem Leben.' I took the greatest delight in these German books, especially Schiller's wonderful lyrics, the history of Frederick the Great's magnificent achievements and the account of Goethe's life. I was sorry to finish 'Die Harzreise,' so full of happy witticisms and charming descriptions of vine-clad hills, streams that sing and ripple in the sunshine, and wild regions, sacred to tradition and legend, the gray sisters of a long-vanished, imaginative age–descriptions such as can be given only by those to whom nature is 'a feeling, a love and an appetite' (Keller, 2003, pp. 69-70).

These are the remarks of a sensitive reader, one who learns about life itself and grows through literature. Indeed, the classical German works of Keller's school years upheld the human being's capacity for rational self-reflection and reasoned self-improvement toward Enlightenment. The human figures of her reading were active agents of history, capable of great invention and bearing refined aesthetic sensibilities. Her dedication to the German edition of The Story of My Life, handwritten with block letters, reflects her high esteem for the land of poets and thinkers: "In diesem (sic) Ausgabe meiner 'Lebensgeschichte' grüsse ich meine Freunde im deutschen Vaterlande. Gerne möchte ich glauben, dass mein Buch etwas Vergnügen gäbe, um die grosse geistige Freude einigermassen zu vergelten, die ich dem Lande Schillers und Goethes schuldig bin": "In this edition of my 'Life Story' I greet my friends in the German fatherland. I would dearly love to believe that my book provided some pleasure, that it might in some measure repay what I owe the country of Schiller and Goethe" (translation mine). Here she is gracious and confident that her readers dwell within the same literary inheritance that she does. Yet literature in Germany had taken vastly new turns, and no longer performed the same functions that it had for her during the years of her formal education. The values conveyed in the German literature that she had read were soon to be called into question.

Keller's birth in 1880 coincided with the beginning of naturalism, the start of modern German literary and intellectual history. The last decades of the 19th century saw the emergence of natural sciences and sociology and the rise of a worldview without metaphysics or the classical unity of mind, body, and soul. New intellectual thought reduced the human being to a powerless object of physiological and social conditions beyond the human being's control. The human being was no longer bound by morals or aesthetics, but by the laws of nature, for natural laws, and not free will, explained cause and effect. The modern European writer, now well-versed in psychology, physiology, and sociology, was to portray the natural determinants–inherited traits and social milieu– of human life. Influential European writers such as Balzac, Tolstoy, Dostojewski, Strindberg, and Zola attempted to mirror natural life in their literature. German writers such as Gerhart Hauptmann introduced dramas of detailed social observation. Others, such as Arno Holz, sought to codify naturalist principles in a highly objective theory of art, in which the artist was to observe exactly, moment by moment, the natural unfolding of life. Art was to convey life as true to reality as could possibly be.

This approach could not be less compatible with Helen Keller's outlook on life or with her facilities of perception. Helen Keller's very assessment of reality was often felt to be highly questionable. Her most severe critics accused her of outright plagiarism, though even less polemical skeptics held her knowledge to be second-hand, highly subjective, and ultimately suspect. Helen Keller was now living in the 20th century but retained the sensibilities of the 18th-century classical and enlightened German literature she loved in school: "In my college reading I have become somewhat familiar with French and German literature. The German puts strength before beauty, and truth before convention, both in life and in literature. There is a vehement, sledge-hammer vigour about everything that he does. When he speaks, it is not to impress others, but because his heart would burst if he did not find an outlet for the thoughts that burn in his soul" (p. 91). Helen Keller was well accustomed to searching for "an outlet" for "thoughts that burn" in the "soul." She believed that human beings were a copy of an ideal, spiritual reality, which for her lent credibility to literary recreations of the ideal. Literature for Keller was a source of knowledge of the world. "In a word," she wrote, "literature is my Utopia. Here I am not disenfranchised. No barrier of the senses shuts me out from the sweet, gracious discourse of my book-friends" (p. 92). She was steeped in literary tradition and drew heavily from other authors' writing, using metaphor, poetic phrasing, and imaginative description in her work. This as well contradicted the naturalists' adherence to the principles of direct observation of the material world, a desire to approximate photographic realism that–they believed–this blind and deaf woman could never achieve.

For the naturalists, Reiz, or stimulation, supplanted the Enlightenment-age notion of Geist, or human spirit, that characterized Keller's life. Many naturalist and subsequent Expressionist dramas chronicled the degradation of the rational, autonomous individual through the forces of industrialization and mechanization. Although Keller could well acknowledge the detrimental effects of the industrialized world, the natural and social environment as the primary stimulus for human action contradicted the fundamental belief in human progress that she lived and radiated. The modernist mixture of high and low culture also could not logically embrace a writer like Helen Keller, who clearly favored high culture and held a view of the civilizing influence of literature akin to that of Matthew Arnold. Contemporary German literature's doors seemed closed to Keller, as her very education, maturity, and aesthetic sensibility constituted an outright refutation of dominant literary trends.

Whereas German modernity signaled the crumbling, dismantling, and disfigurement of traditional unity, the pervasive American myth of the land as the new Eden and the American citizen as the new Adam had the potential to open up new opportunities and new audiences for Keller (Cohen, 1997, p. 7). It was only logical that she would find a place in this conceptual frontier, for she was "uncorrupted" by the things she could neither hear nor see. Her deafness and blindness rendered her somehow "pure," like the land, a blank canvas. Indeed, many of her contemporary admirers regarded her as "perfect," both in body and in countenance: she was held to be truthful, inquisitive, joyful, vibrant, and eager to please, physically lovely, with good posture, elegant movement, beautiful skin and hair, prodigious memory, and startling recall. Yet it must be noted that even these ostensibly favorable descriptions of the adult woman hardly deviate from the dehumanizing praise heaped upon the young girl. To be sure, Keller's name conjured in her lifetime and still conjures among most Americans the saintly child who emerged when the monstrous wild child learned to speak at the water pump. From its inception, this heroic episode of overcoming was indelibly etched in American lore and even today prohibits Keller from breaking out of the sentimental role into which she was cast. Kim E. Nielson discusses the unbending narrative strictures confining Keller's life story in her tellingly titled chapter, "One of the Least Free People on Earth: The Making and Unmaking of Helen Keller" (2001).

Even more positive portrayals of Keller as a rigorous, accomplished woman are stringently demarcated to set her upon a pedestal and maintain her symbolic value. As Cohen amply demonstrates, Helen Keller exemplified Victorian America through her cultivated demeanor while also embodying the American myth of the explorer on a new frontier. Her acquisition of language testified to the extraordinary reservoirs of human potential that America strove to tap. In this discursive framework, Keller's disabled body serves as the starting point of her life and the catalyst for superior achievement. German culture, in contrast, emphasizes her body's divergence from the "normal" or "healthy" body and qualifies her achievements accordingly. There, Keller's disabled body remained fixed as merely a "broken" body, a result of a damaging condition, and not a starting point for an authentic and whole life. In both countries, then, Helen Keller's function in the national consciousness bore little resemblance to the actual work she undertook in her lifetime.

Where German writers primarily chronicled the new alienated state of the individual, Helen Keller tried to reconcile alienated individuals through idealism and socialism. Her ideals met great resistance, both at home and abroad. The unity of idealism had been firmly displaced by the fragmentation of modernism, and the socialism she so favored was increasingly violent and, in turn, violently repressed. Nonetheless, Helen Keller remained unabashedly critical of the militarism and economic exploitation she saw in Wilhelmine Germany and convinced that the theories of Marx and Engels provided practical solutions to these problems. Her humanism compelled her to social action, and she took full responsibility for her beliefs. She wrote in a speech at Carnegie Hall in New York City under the auspices of the Women's Peace Party and the Labor Forum:

Some people are grieved because they imagine I am in the hands of unscrupulous persons who lead me astray and persuade me to espouse unpopular causes and make me the mouthpiece of their propaganda. Now, let it be understood once and for all that I do not want their pity; I would not change places with one of them. I know what I am talking about. My sources of information are as good and reliable as anybody else's. I have papers and magazines from England, France, Germany and Austria that I can read myself. Not all the editors I have met can do that. Quite a number of them have to take their French and German second hand (Keller, 1916).

Despite Helen Keller's preparedness to engage in substantive discussion and work with her German peers, she was simply not taken seriously by any of the leading proponents of the intellectual or political trends of the day. Keller's approach to life was furthermore not compatible with any of the popular body-centered movements, for life reform practices of nudism, vegetarianism, and outdoor recreation still equated physical health with wholesome inner qualities. The converse was equally true: Illness was held to be a sign of degeneration and a reflection of an unhealthy inner life. Modernity may have introduced widespread anxiety and nervousness, but the life reformers did not criticize these conditions as the result of inadequate social organization. Instead, they wanted to know how to perform even better within stressful modern society and remain in control of their lives. In short, life reformers sought to improve themselves as individuals within social contexts that they did not create.

Early efforts to expand society's notions of the normal and the natural were undertaken by small groups of disabled people, however. Several deaf cultural and athletic organizations, for example, testify to a growing, positive group identity and a type of class-consciousness among deaf Germans. One documentary film, Verkannte Menschen (Misjudged People, Dir. W. Ballier & A. Kell, 1932) was designed to correct the worldwide assumption that deaf people were inferior human beings. The film appeared during the emergence of international eugenics programs, some of which, it must be noted, even Helen Keller supported. The so-called "positive" approach to eugenics sought to promote desirable qualities within the population, whereas "negative" eugenics sought to eliminate undesirable qualities, in practice, by killing those people who were deemed "incurable." Misjudged People was ultimately banned for taking the "wrong" approach. It promoted, as Helen Keller did, the notion that deaf people were in fact desirable citizens and true members of the human race. The rising Nazi Party leadership did not accept this view. Germany's once progressive educational policies for deaf children ultimately gave way to the brutal, sweeping Nazi program of racial hygiene.

A fuller discussion of the Nazis' attempt to eradicate all disability by murdering or sterilizing all disabled people would take us too far a field here, yet it is important to note what an affront the well-educated and beloved Helen Keller was to Nazi logic. That she was a successful and respected disabled person was not, however, the reason why she endured extreme censorship in the early years of the Third Reich. On the 10^th of May 1933 her book Out of the Dark was burned by the Nazis because of the essay, "Why I Became a Socialist." Her German editor, Otto Schramm, pleaded with her shortly afterwards to remove favorable references to the Russian revolution from her writings. She refused from that point on to publish her works in Nazi Germany, hoping very much that there would be a way "to free the world from this Hitler business" (Pieper, 2003, p. 86, translation mine). Author Joan Dash notes, "In 1938 (...) an assistant at Vienna's Jewish Institute for the Blind wrote to Helen saying the Nazis had shut down the institute and driven the students out to beg or starve. In the face of such savagery, it seemed to Helen that the only conceivable weapon was a boycott of "the brutal empires," Germany, Italy, and Japan. Stalin's Russia was not included, for she believed that at heart Russia was a peace-loving country" (2001, pp. 204-05).

The end of the Second World War saw Germany's abrupt turn from the Third Reich to the modern social welfare state. Here one finds great, even enviable health care for people with disabilities, yet post-war German national programs also segregated disabled people in group homes and in sheltered workshops, thus removing them from mainstream society. Since 1945 disabled people in Germany have been publicly cast as the recipients of help, ever in need of cure. Although much progress has been made since the 1990s and the emergence of a true disability rights culture in Germany, change has been slow since the Naturalists (and earlier thinkers) asserted that disability is still the end station of something gone wrong. Charity has remained the public response of choice to the "problem" of disability, and Helen Keller herself is entangled in this approach. Her work with Kriegsblinde[n], or those blinded in war, drew attention to their needs without ever effecting widespread critique of the conditions that gave rise to their blindness or their ostracism after the war. Her efforts in this latter regard were ineffective, and she remained in the public consciousness the champion of overcoming personal hardship.

Although such "heroism" could not bring about systematic social change in Germany, Helen Keller did help Germany to refashion its image abroad. The Freie Universität Berlin awarded Keller an honorary doctorate in 1955, a time when West Germany had made a conscious decision to align itself with the West. This honor generously recognized Keller's 75^th birthday, yet it may also be understood as a gesture to convey to the world that the Nazi abuse of disabled people had ended for good. In his letter to her to announce her award, Dean E. Langer of the Medical Faculty at the University ascribed the "plight" of disabled people not to changeable human actions, but to fate: "Es ist uns dies ein ganz besonders herzliches Bedürfnis, nachdem Sie ein Leben lang so unendlich viel Gutes für die vom Schicksal so schwer getroffenen Menschen getan haben": "It is our especially heartfelt desire [to honor you], after you have done such unceasing good, your life long, for those people hit so hard by fate" (1955, translation mine). With characteristic graciousness, Keller responded to this award with only an oblique reference to Germany's troubling past: "I am proud that the Faculty of the Free University of Berlin should have considered me worthy of that honor. And it touches me greatly that there was room in their minds and yours for your generous gesture towards me during the period of strain and stress when your city is striving so gallantly to build up a new, and I trust, brighter future." Her off-the-record communication to the U.S. State Department upon announcement of the honorary degree hinted that she was tired of such awards. The telegram read: "TOUCHED BY COMPLIMENT BY FREE UNIVERSITY BERLIN BUT WANT NO MORE HONORS AFTER HARVARD" (1955). Keller did not travel to Germany to accept the award, but requested that Henry Parkman, a representative of the United States Consul in Berlin, attend the ceremony and accept the award on her behalf. His acceptance speech asked listeners not to regard Keller as "Godlike," yet uncritically proclaimed her heroism in the face of blindness and deafness. West German newspaper accounts of her honor ranged from thanking the "angel of the blind" to praising the "small miracle" that Keller could graduate from college.

Helen Keller did maintain friendships with Germans who did not keep her at a distance by heaping adulations upon her. Her private correspondence with Johanna Hirth, whom she visited in Bavaria in 1956, reveals their mutual admiration and respect. Hirth's letters convey her enduring embarrassment by her German home, presumably in reference to the Third Reich and the Second World War: "The papers are still full of Helen Keller's visit here. It really is a tremendous echo and a deep gratitude that you, beloved Two [Helen Keller and Polly Thompson], came to this awful Germany" (1956). Keller responded with personal warmth and with literary-philosophical reflections on humanity: "All your good wishes and good thoughts will remain not only among the brightest memories of this day but also of Polly's and my visit two weeks (sic) with you in lovely airs that seemed like trails to heavenly mysteries" (1956). Hirth had seemed to her "a real Andromache, facing the upheavals of invasion, but with unshaken courage to warn, to comfort and to direct and help the people to rebuild their shattered lives, one for whom tragedy in the robust Greek sense means strength to live down disaster and make a new beginning." Keller then drew from Goethe to encourage Hirth and her fellow Germans: "Nobly they have risen from their fearful Gethesmane (sic) to meet Goethe's challenge–'We must not hope to be mowers and to gather the ripe gold ears, Unless we have first been sowers and watered the furrows with tears.'" Thus the quintessentially American optimist showed her German friend those aspects of her own culture that could nurture a more promising future. This was Helen Keller's express desire and the essence of her success as a role model: Through her knowledge, experience, and optimism, she helped others see in themselves the source of their own brighter futures. For those who knew her, this became clear. Most others, however, focused on Helen Keller without self-reflection. For these people, Helen Keller represented impossible standards of saintly heroism. Keller would be the first to say that they had missed the point.

German public attention to Helen Keller did not end with her death in 1968. Since then, adoring accounts of the story of her childhood have graced libraries, stages, and television screens. This trend has never abated: both the 1962 (Dir. A. Penn) and 2000 (Dir. N. Tass) film versions of The Miracle Worker have been broadcast on German television within the last year.

Like so many others, Katja Behrens' biography of Keller (2001) is basically a rewriting of Helen Keller's The Story of My Life from a third-person narrator. Alles Sehen kommt von der Seele, or in English, "All Sight Comes from the Soul," begins and ends in Helen Keller's childhood, repeating the dramatic rise in tension toward the climax of young Helen's grasping the word "Water." Behrens' biography has a picture of Helen Keller as a child on the cover, in the traditional right profile pose with her obviously blind and crossed left eye out of the viewer's sight. After Annie Sullivan's death in 1936, Behrens devotes only two pages to the remaining 32 years of Helen Keller's life, recalling the common fairy tale's ending, "...and they lived happily ever after." In doing so, Behrens perpetuates the public view of Helen Keller as a little girl. Moreover, Behrens never sufficiently explains the title of her book. Strikingly, she leaves out any mention of Helen Keller's ability to speak German, to read the German classics, and neglects to note her recognition by prominent Germans of the postwar era. These are odd and unacceptable omissions for a book that purports to present this complex individual to a German readership.

Werner Pieper's book, Blind, taub und optimistisch. Leben und Lernen der Helen Keller (2003) presents a far more complex view of Helen Keller from her childhood throughout her adult life. Pieper's book contains a German translation of Helen Keller's The World I Live In, rather than the more commonly known The Story of My Life. Pieper's introduction of this more personal, phenomenological text does not repeat the narrative of The Miracle Worker, but introduces the pivotal breakthrough at the water pump with the understated formulation: "One day, Helen understood" (2003, p. 56). In at least one respect, however, Pieper's otherwise nuanced attention to Keller's life adopts the glowing adoration of lesser studies. His final photograph of Helen Keller is captioned with praise for her "strahlende Augen" or "radiant eyes." Like many before him, Pieper overlooks the historical fact that Keller had both of her original eyes surgically removed and replaced with glass eyes.

Despite Werner Pieper's admirably detailed appraisal of Helen Keller, she rarely found a foothold in Germany as a mature thinker but was repeatedly memorialized, sentimentally, as a child. To be sure, this partially arises from post-war Germany's wise skepticism regarding the cultivation of national heroes. It also reveals the specific contours of foundational ideas. We have seen that Helen Keller's life and work have no place in German myths about the nature of creation, civilization, or reality. Her heroism, therefore, is limited to the inspiration she can offer to those seeking to overcome personal adversity, exactly the sphere to which disability as a cultural identity is so often relegated in Germany. Her books are highly recommended for children, advertised on German Web sites for deaf people, with recordings promoted on sites for blind people; her (highly edited) life story is found within religious periodicals and among inspirational literature for women. Indeed, her life and works best fit into discourses of sympathy and pity, where religious or quasi-religious fortitude and perseverance are the only ways to transcend the presumed suffering of the disabled. Even today, few avenues of German culture afford a view of disability as a product of unnecessary barriers that can be removed by concrete changes in architecture, law, education and employment. Without the kind of broad reflection that she so passionately advocated, Helen Keller will remain the rather clichéd, singular victor over social and cultural obstacles. The miracle of personal triumph can only be dispatched to a pedestal until her life is examined according to the cultural and historical parameters that shape both humans and heroes.

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