In conversation with … Petra Fuchs

Abstract

Petra Fuchs was born in 1958 in Herten (North Rhine–Westphalia). Since early childhood, she has had a physical disability as a result of polio and uses a wheelchair. After completing teacher training in German, history, and education at Bielefeld University, she moved to Berlin, where in the mid-1980s she co-founded the theatre group Die erste Hilfe with friends; the group performed original productions on disability in several cities. In 1989, together with Rita Brucker (1960–2011), she founded the Fuchs–Brucker film production company and produced provocative Super 8 feature films that critically explored the lived realities of disabled people, especially disabled women, and received international attention.

To secure her livelihood, she began working in 1987 at a residential care facility in Hamburg for girls and boys with disabilities, where she reconstructed the biography of the institution’s founder, Hilde Wulff (1898–1972). She continued this historical work in a doctoral dissertation at the Technical University of Berlin, completed in 1999 and later published in two monographs. From 2000 to 2013, she worked as a research associate at the Institute for the History of Medicine at Freie Universität Berlin/Charité on DFG-funded projects on patient history and Nazi medical crimes. This was followed by leadership and teaching positions, including at the Alice Salomon University of Applied Sciences Berlin and the University of Applied Sciences Zittau/Görlitz. Since May 2022, she has been retired and has served as a co-editor of the Journal of Disability Studies / ZDS Journal of Disability Studies.