202 RüdigerKunow
political denouncement of our culture's privileging of normative
feminineappearance"(Avrahami50),Lorde'scancermemoirisintended
also as a large-scale socio-cultural critique of the socio-cultural
complicity between a spectral normality she is nudged to produce and
the overall uncaring behavior of the medical establishment and U.S.
society at large. And so, her text returns again and again to what
Canguilhem called the polemical nature of norms. She registers the
multiple, often minute tendencies at work in patients, medical experts,
and the general culture to "tame" a newly non-normative bodily reality
by laying onto (in a very direct of the word 'layering on' as a surface
gesture) a spectral normality. The spectral normality conjured up and
insisted upon in the contextof cancer is in Lorde's view part and parcel
ofalarger,equallyspectralnormalitywhichdemandsthatracializedand
gendered (also, even though Lorde does not explicitly mention them,
class-based)differencesbeacceptedasnormal(Nielsen117).
For Lorde, the new normal of her post-mastectomy body is
essentiallyapoliticalcondition.Howthespectralnormalityprovidedby
prostheses can be made subservient to sinister political agendas can be
furtherillustratedbywayofahistoricalexample:DuringWorldWarII,
Germany'sleadingandhighlyprominentphysician,ProfessorFerdinand
Sauerbruch (1875-1951), had devised new and better prostheses for
peoplewhosearms orlegshadbeenamputated.And here,myintention
is not to incriminate those for whom Sauerbruch's prostheses made it
possible to return to their everyday lives as best as circumstances
permitted. At the same time, however, there are broader political
implications which recruited Sauerbruch's patients into the overall war
situation and which need to be addressed here. Sauerbruch's new
prosthesis clearly were a blessing for hundreds if not thousands of
soldiers wounded in the course of Nazi Germany's war effort. But they
wereablessingalsoforNazipropagandawhichdidnotmissoutonthe
opportunities which presented themselves here. Sauerbruch was
awarded the Kriegsverdienstkreuz(the Medal of Merit for the war
effort) by theFuehrer, and the new prostheses featured prominently in
newsreels and newspaper articles, suggesting how even disabled
veterans could return "back to normal"—which in some (albeit rare)
casesalsomeantthattheycouldagainfightincombat.
The spectral normality made possible by Sauerbruch's prostheses
also formed an important element in the last Nazi propaganda movie