These days, the topic of intellectual disability seems frequently to function as a conversation stopper, and yet studying its history can teach us much we need to know about the potently seductive appeal of fascisms past and present. The Question of Unworthy Life resituates the hundredthousandfold Nazi coercive “eugenic” sterilizations and “euthanasia” murders of people with cognitive impairments and psychiatric diagnoses in a longer-durée history of lethal malice toward the vulnerable that was erotically charged already since the 1890s and inseparable from the promise of libidinal pleasures that facilitated the Nazi ascent to political power. On the basis of a wealth of rare archival evidence, Dagmar Herzog revisits this grim history, exploring also the ambivalent enmeshment of those constituencies principally responsible for provision of supports, but recovers as well singularly courageous counter-voices and – taking the story into the 2020s – chronicles the uneven, protracted battles to establish a new image of the human and novel practices of education and care.

Speaker

Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her many books include Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (Wisconsin), Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (Cambridge), Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge), and Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton).