Center for German and European Studies

The Question of Unworthy Life: Disability in Germany before and after the Holocaust

Tues., March 17, 2026
3:30 - 5:00 pm ET (US)
Hybrid Event In-Person and on Zoom
Lown 315, Brandeis University Campus

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Co-sponsored by the Department of Near Eastern and Judaic Studies at Brandeis, the Mandel Center for the Humanities, and The Tauber Institute for the Study of European Jewry.

Refreshments will be provided for in-person attendees.

About the Event

What do the Nazis' eugenic mass sterilization campaign and the hundredthousandfold "euthanasia" murders have to do with the fantasy that the Germans would become a Volk that is strong, beautiful, and smart - and why did it take so long into the postwar era for the crimes against people with disabilities to be recognized as crimes?

Historian Dagmar Herzog resituates the Nazi persecution and killing of people with cognitive impairments and psychiatric diagnoses in a much longer history of lethal malice toward the vulnerable and the promise of national greatness that facilitated the Nazi ascent to political power. On the basis of a wealth of rare archival evidence, Herzog explores also the ambivalent enmeshment of those professionals in medicine, religious charity, and pedagogy principally responsible for provision of supports. But at every step, she recovers as well courageous counter-voices and, taking the story into the 2020s, chronicles the protracted battles to establish a disability rights movement dedicated to advancing dignity and justice, a revolutionary new image of the human, and novel practices of education and care. 

About the Speakers

Dagmar Herzog has published extensively on the histories of sexuality and gender, psychoanalysis and Freud, theology and religion, disability, eugenics, Jewish-Christian relations and Holocaust memory. Her most recent books include Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe; Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes; Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany; and Sex in Crisis: The New Sexual Revolution and the Future of American Politics.

Herzog graduated summa cum laude from Duke University. She received her Ph.D. from Brown University. Before going to the Graduate Center in 2005, Herzog taught at Michigan State, was a Mellon Fellow at Harvard and a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. In 2012, she won a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship for her work in Intellectual and Cultural History.