Triumph of the Stump: German Stories of Amputations and Prosthetics Marking Victories in the Midst of Physical Loss

German literature is replete with woe and warfare and all-too frequent tragic endings. One unlikely literary motif reveals an unsuspected wealth of victorious, even uplifting tales from the depths of painful physical loss: amputations and prosthetics. A recent growth in literature concerning this topic has emerged in both the sociological field of Disability Studies (Grayson and Scheurer) as well as within literary studies (Engelstein’s Anxious Anatomy and Ingwersen’s “Prothesen und Cyborgs”). German literature offers countless examples of amputated or prosthetically enhanced figures within this unusual but illustrative motif. This paper focuses on three wellknown stories involving amputations and prosthetics: Adalbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte (1814), the Brothers Grimm fairy tale “Sechse kommen durch die ganze Welt” (1819) and Thomas Bernhard’s “Viktor Halbnarr. Ein Wintermärchen nicht für Kinder” (1966). The grotesque nature of the conspicuous injuries and their various prosthetic adaptations are leveraged through literature to elevate fragmented, incomplete human beings and even national identities by highlighting the indefatigable nature of the human spirit.