October 19, 2011
Depending upon how you look at it, I have either a short story or a sequence of prose poems appearing in this fall’s issue of WITNESS. It’s called Mercy Killing Aktion, and it’s an exploration of last summer in Berlin…and about eighty summers before that.
It’s available at the nation’s few remaining bookstores, or online. This is just the text portion of my larger body of work that includes a series of multi-panel photographs, performance pieces, and various other works exploring the Aktion T4.
If you’ve ever sat at a cafe alongside the banks of the Spree in Mitte, you may have been unaware that you are steps away from the offices of the gynecologists and psychiatrists and other medical officials who helped murder hundreds of thousands of human beings during the “Mercy Killing Aktion” – the medical killings program that murdered people with physical, developmental and psychiatric disabilities and masterminded the torturous medical experiments on prisoners at the Nazi concentration camps.
I sat on the banks of the Spree, in a cafe, fully aware. And Mercy Killing Aktion is about that evening.
You can read the story here: http://witness.blackmountaininstitute.org/issues/volume-24-number-3-fall-2011/mercy-killing-action/
