His research on autism was compassionate – how could Hans Asperger have collaborated with the Nazis?

The Vienna-based ‘father of neurodiversity’ was ahead of his time in his work but was also implicated in the Third Reich’s crimes. My novel set out to explore these contradictions

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n 2015, I decided to write a novel about Dr Hans Asperger, who worked at the University Children’s Hospital in Vienna during the second world war. My interest was sparked by two nonfiction books: NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and How to Think Smarter About People Who Think Differently by Steve Silberman and In a Different Key: The Story of Autism by John Donvan and Caren Zucker.

Reading these stories told about Asperger, you would have thought they were talking about two different people. To Silberman, Asperger was a compassionate and original thinker, whereas Donvan and Zucker depict him as an enthusiastic supporter of Hitler. For a historical novelist, widely differing accounts of the same person are gold dust, and I began to dig deeper.

Asperger became famous as the result of a thesis he wrote during the second world war that contains a description of what we now categorise as autism spectrum disorder (ASD). His work was lost for decades but in 1980 it was rediscovered by British psychiatrist Dr Lorna Wing. Asperger was posthumously claimed as “the father of neurodiversity”. As I read about the work that he and his colleagues were engaged in at the Vienna children’s hospital, it was clear that their thinking was years ahead of its time and remains relevant today.