THIS DISMISSAL OF ONE OF THE MOST TURBULENT PERIODS in recent German history occurs near the beginning of the East German author Christa Reinig’s autobiography, Die himmlische und die irdische Geometrie (Heavenly and Earthly Geometry), and appears to obstruct the possibility of reading Reinig’s narrative as a commentary on the time between her birth in 1926 and the text’s publication in 1975. This seems a lost opportunity, for Reinig had survived the National Socialist regime and the Second World War, witnessed the deployment of Russian troops against East German protesters in 1953, and had her freedom curtailed by the partition of Berlin.

Christa Reinig is not alone in erasing aspects of her socio-historical context as part of an autobiographical narrative. Her West German contemporary, Luise Habel, also narrates a life in Herrgott, schaff die Treppen ab! (Lord, Get Rid of Staircases) which seems untouched by the wider narratives being played out in the Germany of her time. It is true that Habel displays none of Reinig’s truculent refusal to engage with her social context. Rather, Habel simply passes in silence over large-scale history. Nonetheless, the two autobiographers’ suppression of the past is striking. This essay considers the reasons for such drastic erasure of the sociohistorical context and its consequences for the autobiographer’s assertion of a subject position. It examines, too, how our understanding of history is shaped by such accounts.

The two women’s effacement of history owes much to the fact that they are disabled autobiographers. Indeed, I will argue that a disabled person’s inscription of subjectivity through autobiography may not only depend on selective erasure of historical or cultural situation, but also on diminishing the malfunctioning body that launches the narrative. However, although the two disabled women modify their representations of both self and history, such contributions to our understanding of human experience are of seminal significance. Proceeding from the embodied situation of firsthand knowledge, Habel’s and Reinig’s accounts are authentic counterparts to authorized representations of this period of social upheaval, and thus draw attention to the way that all subjects retain their integrity by reconfiguring the large-scale narratives available.

SEISMIC SHIFTS ARE happening in the world of disability theory: no longer is this the province of a select band of activists-turned-social theorists. Rather, licensed by the gathering momentum of a cultural model of disability, scholars throughout the humanities are subjecting canonical texts to re-examination through a “disability” lens. They find that literature is populated with characters who struggle with impairments; they find, too, that the academic reader has consistently understood the representation of disabled existence metaphorically: disability, it has been assumed, functions largely as a trope which supports the other thematic concerns of any text.

Libuše Moníková's exploration of wheelchair-bound existence in Pavane für eine verstorbene Infantin is no exception. Published in 1983, Pavane is Moníková's second novel. Like most of her other work, it has been read either as an act of mourning for her Czech homeland or as a protest against society's inscriptions of femininity. Until now, the wheelchair and the associated representation of disability within Pavane have been treated as metaphors for the protagonist's sense of alienation. This essay resists normative reading strategies that take disability as merely a literary resource and strip the representation of lived materiality. Instead, Pavane should be read as a vibrant, phenomenological representation of disabled existence. My claim is based on an understanding of the entire text as a transliteration of Velázquez's celebrated painting Las Meninas (1656), which features a disabled woman in the foreground. Crucially, on Moníková's insistence, the first edition of Pavane took as its frontispiece the full version of the painting. In subsequent paperback editions, a cropped version was used to which pen and ink lines had been added, thus creating a personalized version of the painting to reflect the novel's thematization of authenticity and authorship, and of space and boundaries.

Born in Prague in 1945, Libuše Moníková moved to West Germany in 1971. She taught at the universities of Kassel and Bremen while simultaneously developing a writing career, eventually settling down in Berlin as a freelance writer. Profoundly affected by the political climate of her beloved Czechoslovakia, both Moníková's academic essays and her fictional writing continued to engage with the Czech national consciousness, as well as treating her own sense of identity.