Happy Ever Afters - disability awareness in children's storybooks - based on the book Happy Ever Afters.
DICSEY Example - a book for fluent mature readers
Dreaming in Black and White by Reinhardt Jung. Translated by Anthea Bell
2000 Mammoth ISBN 0-7497-4157-0
A modern disabled child tells about his dreams in which he becomes Hannes Keller, a disabled child in the Nazi Third Reich, as the persecution began of any who were considered undesirable in the 'healthy, pure Aryan master race'. They included his friend, his teacher and himself.
Rienhardt Jung draws on recently revealed evidence to provide a background to this brief but compelling story, and offers an explanation of the history in a short appendix. Up to 200,000 disabled people who lived in mental hospitals and other institutions were judged to have 'lives not worth living'. They were exterminated in an operation which became the model for the Holocaust of Jews in Europe.
'Dreaming in Black and White' is fiction, but the social attitudes which permitted the murders of disabled people at that time still echo today in some debates concerning the equality of disabled people, respect of differences and issues around the use of genetic science.
This DICSEY analysis is offered as a mark of respect for all the disabled people who died at the inception of the Holocaust.
'Dreaming in Black and White' can be used to highlight all the elements of the DICSEY code but most obvious are Image and Society, in particular its laws and the attitudes that produce and sustain them. These are more than adequately explored in the text by author Reinhardt Jung.
Return to DICSEY examples page
© K. Saunders 2001