Reconfiguring the Marginality of Disability in Nazi Euthanasia: A Study of Countermemory Narratives of Yuko Tsushima's Karino Jidai and Ann Clare LeZotte's T4: a Novel in Verse

The historical and political significance underlying the narratives of the disabled victims has remained largely unacknowledged since the marginal position occupied by the victims within the mainstream popular understanding of the Holocaust has been undermined. Moreover, the act of legitimizing the survivor testimonies has resulted in the de facto marginalization of their memories within the discourse of Holocaust and Memory Studies. The study attempts to interrogate the post war memory cultures of the Nazi euthanasia in Ann Clare LeZotte’s T4: a Novel in Verse and Yuko Tsushima’s Karino Jidai. It examines the historical uncanny and the unheimlich felt in the memory cultures of Nazi euthanasia. It also studies the various memory cultures of disabled victims, drawing on Kaja Silverman’s concept of heteropathic recollection and Hannah Arendt’s notion of compassion in order to resist the appropriation of their memories. It incorporates the methodology of narrative prosthesis and aesthetic nervousness as a means of reading the narratives of disability and underscore the conflicts and crises of representation of disability. The diverse representational strategies of reading the disabled bodies emphasizes the role of body in literature as a liminal point in the representational process.