I Was an Asperger. Now I’m Supposed Not to Be.

Some terms become, over time, more than mere diagnoses. They become explanations for one’s own life. For many people, „Asperger“ was exactly such a term.

It stood not only for a medical category, but for a specific, recognizable pattern of life: social friction since childhood, constant misunderstandings, the feeling of being highly capable and yet permanently overwhelmed by ordinary life – a life that often looked normal from the outside while feeling entirely different on the inside.

Especially for adults diagnosed late, and particularly for many women who had spent decades being overlooked or misclassified, this word often arrived as a belated explanation. Not in the sense of: I identify with Hans Asperger. It was in a much simpler one: Now I finally understand why so much was always so difficult.

That is the decisive point. The term was not a moral statement and not an honor bestowed upon a historical physician. It was a tool of self-description. It helped bring order to something that had previously often been experienced only as personal failure.

Today, that word is gradually disappearing. Since the DSM-5, Asperger syndrome has largely been absorbed into the broader diagnosis of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Officially, the term now is autism spectrum disorder.

Medically, this may be reasonable. Diagnostically, it is broader and more systematic. Existentially, for many people, it is far less precise.

„Autism spectrum disorder“ covers very different life realities. Precisely because of that, many feel the precision of the old term has been lost. „Asperger“ referred to a concrete experience: late recognition, masking, high intellectual functioning combined with severe everyday difficulties, invisible exhaustion, and constant social friction.

That experience does not disappear simply because the label disappears.

That is why the abolition of the term is not merely an administrative change. Over time, a diagnostic category becomes part of a biography. When one says, „We no longer use this term,“ one also changes the language through which people have understood themselves.

This creates a simple question:

If I am no longer an Asperger – what exactly am I then?

And in the end, who owns such a term: the doctor whose name is attached to it, or the people who recognized their own life story inside that word?

A Diagnosis Is Also a Biography

Diagnostic terms appear neutral on paper, as if they could simply be replaced whenever necessary. In reality, it is rarely that simple. A diagnosis does not merely describe a condition – it often reshapes one’s life story in retrospect.

Someone who only at thirty, forty, or even later understands why social relationships were always more exhausting than for others, why adaptation constantly consumed energy, or why they had spent their entire life feeling like a person assembled incorrectly, does not experience such a diagnosis as bureaucratic classification. It feels more like a delayed translation of one’s own life.

„Asperger“ therefore did not simply mean autism in a general sense, but a specific constellation: late diagnosis, high adaptive performance, social masking, and the experience of permanently failing at the invisible rules of everyday life despite outward functionality.

There was also something medicine can hardly measure, but biography cannot ignore: the feeling of always standing slightly beside social reality. Not excluded, but never entirely and naturally belonging. Not „ill enough“ to receive help, but different enough to constantly doubt oneself.

Many people reorganized their identity around precisely this experience. This is especially true for women diagnosed late, who were often treated for years for depression, anxiety disorders, or personality disorders without anyone recognizing the underlying structure. For them, „Asperger“ was often the first term that actually fit.

That is why the disappearance of the word is not harmless linguistic modernization. It is an intervention into lived biographies. Whoever says that this term is outdated or morally unacceptable is also saying: the language through which you finally understood yourself must now be replaced again.

It is hardly surprising that many respond to this not with agreement, but with resistance. Not because they are attached to a name, but because they do not want to be told once again that their own self-description has suddenly become wrong.

The Historical Accusation

Why is the term „Asperger“ disappearing not only diagnostically, but morally as well? Because Hans Asperger is increasingly seen today not merely as a pediatrician, but as part of the National Socialist system.

The central accusation is not simply that he lived in his time, but that he was embedded in structures that decided over the lives of so-called „unworthy“ children. At the center of this stands Spiegelgrund, the infamous Viennese children’s clinic where hundreds of children were murdered as part of the Nazi „euthanasia“ program.

Particularly disturbing is the question of whether Asperger referred children there – knowing what was happening. Added to this are his connections to institutions such as Gugging, as well as professional links to figures such as Erwin Jekelius, Heinrich Gross, and Franz Hamburger, all of whom define the institutional environment in which he worked.

The debate was reignited above all by the historian Herwig Czech, especially through his 2018 paper, which presents Asperger’s role far more critically than the older, almost hagiographic portrayals had done. Edith Sheffer’s book Asperger's Children also contributed significantly to the radical transformation of Asperger’s public image.

With that, the long-maintained image of the quiet humanist physician who had somehow remained outside the system began to collapse. Today, Hans Asperger appears far more clearly as part of the medical and institutional structures of National Socialism—structures that selected, excluded, and decided over life itself.

He was not a morally untouched observer. He worked within that system, adapted to it, benefited professionally from it, and made decisions with existential consequences for children.

That must be stated plainly.

The question, then, is no longer whether his biography is problematic. It is.

The real question begins only afterward: Is this historical guilt enough to destroy the term itself—even when that term, for millions of people, has long meant something entirely different from the man whose name it bears?

But What Is Actually Proven?

This is precisely where the debate often becomes intellectually sloppy. There is a significant difference between legitimate historical criticism and moral simplification.

That Hans Asperger was entangled in the system of National Socialism is now difficult to seriously deny. The question is no longer whether there was problematic proximity, but how that proximity should be understood.

Complicity is not the same as ideological conviction. Adaptation is not automatically fanaticism. Moral failure is not identical to the figure of the fully committed perpetrator, as he often appears in later simplified accounts.

The popular formula is usually simple: Asperger was a convinced Nazi. It is rhetorically satisfying, morally clean—and historically much harder to sustain.

Even the critical scholarship describes something more complex: a physician who adapted, made compromises, understood the logic of career survival, and made decisions that, from today’s perspective, are deeply troubling. That is serious enough. But it is not the same as the image of an ideologically fanatical destroyer.

Herwig Czech, in particular, argues more carefully than many later summaries suggest. His work demonstrates institutional involvement, problematic referrals, and moral responsibility—but not the simple figure of a demonic true believer. [Herwig Czech, „Hans Asperger, National Socialism, and ‘race hygiene’ in Nazi-era Vienna,“ Molecular Autism 9 (2018): 29.]

Edith Sheffer’s book Asperger's Children was also criticized for portraying Asperger’s ideological certainty more strongly than the available sources securely support. [See Walter Heijder, A Response to the Book Asperger’s Children, University of Gothenburg.]

This distinction is not academic hair-splitting. It determines whether we are trying to understand history or merely manage it morally.

Whoever turns historical ambiguity into pure symbolic figures afterward—heroes or monsters—replaces analysis with moral ritual.

Hans Asperger does not need rehabilitation. But history must not be rewritten into a ritual of purity either.

The real question is not: Was he good or evil? It is: What exactly did he do? What did he know? What room for action did he have? And what actually follows from that?

Only after that can one seriously ask whether the term itself must disappear along with the man.

Does Abolishing the Name Solve Anything?

This is where the real center of the debate lies. Even if one fully acknowledges the historical burden of the name, the question remains: what is actually gained by abolishing it?

Because removing the word does not change the reality it described.

It does not erase the differences within the autistic spectrum, nor the radically different forms of life gathered under it. The experience of the late-diagnosed adult does not disappear. Neither does the social invisibility of many highly masking women. Problems in professional life remain. So does the constant friction of everyday existence.

What disappears first is only the language.

That is precisely what makes me skeptical. Language is not secondary. Once people lose a precise term for an experience, they often lose the ability to make that experience socially visible.

The new umbrella term, „autism spectrum disorder,“ may be medically broader, but socially it is often less precise. It levels differences that remain very real in daily life.

Many people who understood themselves for years as Asperger therefore experience this shift not as liberation, but as the loss of a usable self-description. They are suddenly expected to dissolve into a category that may be technically correct, but describes their concrete way of living far less precisely.

Who benefits from that? Rarely the people concerned themselves. The differences remain, as do the practical problems and the constant social misunderstandings.

What often grows instead is simply a feeling of symbolic moral order: the burdened name has been removed, and with it the impression is created that a historical problem has been addressed.

But moral purification is not the same as real clarification.

It is easier to abolish a word than to seriously endure the tensions within the spectrum: the conflict between profound disability and high-functioning invisibility, between care dependency and social collapse despite outward competence, between radically different life realities forced under the same roof.

The abolition of the term solves none of these problems. It merely shifts them into language.

That is why, for many people, the process feels less like progress and more like institutional self-soothing: the system feels morally cleaner, while those affected are often left with less clarity.

My Distrust of Moral Purification

Perhaps I react so strongly to this debate because I come from a part of Europe where language was never merely language. If you grow up in a political system where terms are controlled, renamed, and morally loaded, you develop a deep distrust of the idea that social honesty begins with the correct terminology.

I learned early that linguistic correctness and moral truth are not the same thing. Often, the opposite was true. The cleaner the official formulations became, the greater the distance from reality. Words were not used to make things clearer—they were used to make it controllable.

That is why I react skeptically when I hear that a term must disappear because its continued use is considered morally problematic. My first impulse is not agreement, but a question: is something actually being understood here—or merely being linguistically purified?

Renaming is almost always easier than understanding.

It is easier to remove a burdened name from the vocabulary than to endure historical ambiguity. It is easier to send a morally clean signal than to confront the fact that people, institutions, and entire eras are rarely clean.

That is precisely why the Asperger debate makes me suspicious. Not because the historical criticism is wrong, but because its social processing often follows a familiar ritual: a name becomes problematic, so it is removed, and with that comes the comforting feeling that the moral problem itself has been addressed.

I know that logic too well.

My Position

I do not defend Hans Asperger as a hero. His biography is burdened, his role within the National Socialist system was real, and any attempt to recast him afterward as a morally untouched figure would be historically false.

That is not the point.

Nor do I defend a name out of sentimental habit. Words are not sacred, and diagnostic categories are not immutable.

What I care about is the right of people to preserve a term that helped them understand their own lives.

Many people did not describe themselves as Asperger because they wanted to identify with the doctor, but because that word finally named a structure that had shaped their lives for decades. It was a term for experience, not for reverence.

To now tell these people that the continued use of this word is morally questionable strikes me as a premature reflex. It treats self-description as if it were a political declaration and confuses historical sensitivity with linguistic discipline.

Those who continue to speak of „Asperger“ are usually not defending a historical physician, but the accuracy of their own biography. A medical term has long since become a personal and cultural one.

I also reject the tendency to reduce history to moral clarity. The past rarely consists of clean categories of good and evil. Whoever turns it into symbolic rituals of purity no longer understands it, but merely uses it.

My position is therefore simple: one can view Hans Asperger critically as a historical figure and still refuse to place the term „Asperger,“ as a biographical self-description, under moral suspicion.

One can acknowledge his historical guilt and still keep the word.

Who Is Afraid of Hans Asperger?

Perhaps the real question is wrongly framed. Perhaps the issue is not who is afraid of Hans Asperger as a historical person. Most people arguing about his name today never knew him as a physician, only as a term.

The real unease begins elsewhere: in the difficulty of enduring ambiguity.

It is easier to work with clear moral figures. An innocent humanist can be defended; a convinced perpetrator can be condemned. What is harder are people who are neither one nor the other—figures who acted within a criminal system, adapted to it, benefited from it, and became guilty without fitting neatly into simple categories.

Hans Asperger belongs precisely in that uncomfortable zone.

It becomes even more difficult when such a person becomes the namesake of an experience that is entirely real for those who live it. Then two levels collide: historical guilt and biographical truth.

A morally compromised man can still have given a real human condition its name. That is not a contradiction. It is simply uncomfortable.

Those who want to abolish the term are often trying to eliminate that discomfort. But that does not work. Because with the name, the experience does not disappear. The people remain. The life patterns remain, as do the differences within the spectrum.

That is why I do not believe that those who continue to use the word „Asperger“ are the true defenders of a problematic past. More often, they are simply people who refuse to have their own biography retrospectively rewritten into a morally cleaner form.

Perhaps they are not the ones who are afraid.

Perhaps it is those who cannot bear that history is untidy—that guilt and knowledge can exist side by side, that a burdened name can still describe something real, and that removing the name does not remove that reality.

Who is afraid of Hans Asperger?

Perhaps, above all, those who believe that moral clarity begins by crossing out the right word. Reality is rarely that tidy.