Dorothea Buck obituary; Nazi Victim and Voice for Mentally Ill

Born: April 5th, 1917
Died: October 9th, 2019

In March 1936, a week before Hitler’s troops reoccupied the Rhineland, violating the treaty that a defeated Germany had signed to end the first World War, Dorothea Buck, the 19-year-old daughter of a German pastor, was so traumatised by the prospect of another brutal European war that she had to be hospitalised.

She was ruled schizophrenic and sterilised under the Nazi-era “hereditary health law” protocols, which had been imposed to prevent so-called genetic impurities from being transmitted to future generations of Caucasians, whom the Germans considered Aryan.

For nine months she was confined to an asylum, which disciplined her by dousing her with cold water and subjected her to medical abuses camouflaged as curatives. A surgical scar resulting from her sterilisation was falsely attributed to an appendectomy.

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When she was released, she was barred from marrying and denied a career as a kindergarten teacher. During a subsequent hospitalisation, in the middle of the second World War, she learned that she had been spared the fate of tens of thousands of others deemed mentally deficient by the Nazi authorities: euthanasia.

Even after the war, when she had become a sculptor and art teacher, she suffered from poor treatment during two more hospitalisations. Finally, after her last psychotic episode, in 1959, she transformed herself from a full-time sculptor into a crusader for more humane psychiatric therapies – writing about the subject, giving lectures, holding seminars and helping to start organisations to protect the mentally ill.

She died on October 9th in Hamburg, Germany, at 102. Her death was announced by the Psychiatric Clinic of the Charité, the joint medical school of the Free University of Berlin and the Humboldt University of Berlin. Charité is one of the largest university hospitals in Europe.

Medical crimes

Dorothea Sophie Buck-Zerchin was born on April 5th, 1917, in Naumburg, near Leipzig, in eastern Germany. She was raised in Oldenburg, near Bremen in the north, and then in a parsonage on Wangerooge, an island in the North Sea, where her father, Hermann, was a pastor. Her mother was Anna (Lahusen) Buck.

By concealing both her psychiatric history and her forced sterilisation, Dorothea was able to enrol in 1942 in a private art school in Frankfurt, where she learned pottery. She worked as a sculptor and taught art from 1969 to 1982 before being overcome by the lingering revelations of mass murder of mental patients by the Nazis, and by what she found to be continuing mishandling of the mentally ill in modern-day Germany.

“These hidden medical crimes and the unchanged degrading and inhuman German asylums disturbed me deeply, although I could have used my concentration for my artistic work,” she wrote on her website. “As a sculptor, I lived on public commissions in Hamburg, which could only be gained through competition. When, in 1965, my last bronze objects were placed, I stopped this work. As long as there was no elementary humanity, art seemed less important.”

She wrote a play about the Nazi-era murders of the mentally ill and the disabled, published essays opposing medical research on patients who lack the cognitive ability to grant consent and gave lectures to promote more humane psychiatry.

Highest honour

In 1992 she helped found an organisation of present and former psychiatric patients – “in their own terms, survivors”, Andreas Heinz, medical director of the psychiatry and psychotherapy department of the Charité, said in an email. Buck was the group’s honorary chairwoman at her death.

As long as we talk to each other, we don’t kill each other, Buck famously said. She argued that people with psychosis should be able to discuss their problems and not be treated as soulless objects of study.

And in 2011, with a small inheritance, she established the Dorothea Buck Foundation to support patients who help others recover.

She was awarded the Great Cross of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany, the nation’s highest honour for service to the community, in 2008 and honoured by the Hamburg senate in 2017.

When Buck turned 100 two years ago, her younger sister, Anne Fischer, sought to describe what had made Buck so important to the cause of the mentally ill.

“It’s the truthfulness of her insight, her critical wakefulness, her fighting power and her creativity,” she said, adding: “She gives a voice to the discriminated.” – New York Times