Dagmar Herzog. The Question of Unworthy Life. Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century. Princeton University Press, Princeton (NJ) 2024. 312 pp. Ill. $35.00/£30.00. (E-book: $35.00/£30.00.)
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: Dagmar Herzog's latest book ties in with her previous work, especially with Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (2018).In the latter, Herzog, distinguished professor at CUNY Graduate Centre and a specialist in modern European history, particularly German history and the history of sexuality and psychoanalysis, explored the connections between abortion and disability in the rhetoric of anti-abortion and feminist activists in the 1960s and 1970s.Herzog pointed out how, across Western Europe, anti-abortion activists referred to the Nazis' mass murder of the disabled to outlaw abortion, but also how advocates of the liberalization of abortion laws mentioned disability as something that could be avoided by legalized abortion.In Unlearning Eugenics, Herzog thus already emphasized the strong and ongoing influence of eugenics as well as, more generally, how the past may haunt present-day reproductive politics.Herzog's latest book returns to eugenics and disability, but now exclusively zooms in on prewar and postwar German views on intellectual disability.Her monograph is impressive, analytical, compassionate, and sometimes utterly baffling.The author explicitly aims to convey her own, and consequently her readers' bafflement, at the ways in which people with intellectual disabilities were regarded as "unworthy life" as early as two decades before the Nazis' mass murder (the T4 killings, or involuntary "euthanasia"), but also, and perhaps more shockingly, decades after the Second World War.Herzog traces the genealogy of the term "unworthy life" and its embedding in eugenics.One of her most important arguments is that it took until the 1980s-1990s before the human rights of disabled people were acknowledged in Germany, and before the Nazi "euthanasia" murders, as well as the 400,000 coerced sterilizations, were recognized as a crime.In the first decades after the war, many Germans continued to think about the intellectually disabled in eugenic and dismissive terms.As Herzog states: "the disabled were not 'forgotten' victims, but rather aggressively repudiated ones" (p.4).The book focuses on "battles over knowledge and meaning" (p.11) on several levels.First, regarding discussions among experts about the "hierarchy" of intellectual disabilities.Second, relating to debates on the value of lives of persons with intellectual disabilities, or rather those labelled as cognitively deficient.Third, these battles over knowledge and meaning also refer to how Germans dealt with the memory of the Nazi "euthanasia" killings, their acknowledgement, and the discussion about reparations for victims of the Nazi sterilization policy.As Herzog points out, the facts of these murders
Author: Willemijn Ruberg
Institution: Utrecht University
Language: English
Topic: Medical History and Research
Subfield: History
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Reduced inequalities
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4410874208