Max Blecher: Dizabilitate, maladii cronice și viața de zi cu zi în sanatoriile interbelice
Rezumat
Max Blecher: Disability, Chronic Illness, and Everyday Life in Interwar Sanatoria
Abstract: The article approaches the writings of Max Blecher as early forms of “involuntary” ethnography of the everyday life of people with chronic illnesses and disabilities in interwar European sanatoria and shows how the organization of the social and material environment shapes their possibilities for autonomy beyond a strictly medical understanding of disability. The study considers the diary-novel The Illuminated Burrow, Blecher’s correspondence (especially with Pierre Minet), and the article Berck, City of the Damned. The interpretation is anchored in the pragmatist tradition of John Dewey, which conceives experience as formed in concrete situations and as having a collective dimension, and it positions itself in dialogue with the sociology of disability and disability studies. In this context, the texts are understood, in Howard S. Becker’s sense, as “stories about society,” adopting a sociological and ethnographic reading of a literary work rarely analyzed in this register. The article also mobilizes Irving K. Zola’s reflections on “ordinary life” and the distinctions between the medical model and the social model of disability. At the center of the discussion is Berck-sur-Mer, the French sanatorium town described by Blecher as an accessible space avant la lettre, where infrastructure, technical innovations (such as the gutiera brace), networks of mutual support, and cultural and educational practices allow for the continuity of an “ordinary life” for patients despite a deeply medicalized environment. As a counterpoint, the more restrictive situations in Leysin (Switzerland) and Techirghiol (Romania) highlight the diversity of ways in which patients’ lives were organized and show how the power of the medical professions, infrastructure, and local practices shaped the degree of autonomy possible. This contrast brings into relief the variations among institutional and social configurations of disability in interwar Europe, as well as the circulation—albeit limited—of certain transnational practices of fostering autonomy. The article shows how these local conditions enabled incipient forms of partial demedicalization of disability and constituted preconditions for the emergence of associative initiatives of self-organization. In this way, the study proposes a reading of Blecher as a resource for the social and political history of disability and identifies early dynamics with inclusive potential that precede by several decades the disability rights movements and the consolidation of the welfare state in Europe.
Keywords: literature as ethnography, disability experience, interwar sanatoria, Berck-sur-Mer, everyday life, demedicalization
Citation suggestion: Popescu, Cristina. “Max Blecher: Dizabilitate, maladii cronice și viața de zi cu zi în sanatoriile interbelice” Transilvania, no. 1-2 (2026): 83-93.
https://doi.org/10.51391/trva.2026.1-2.08.
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