Between 1939 and 1945, Nazi genocide claimed the lives of nearly three hundred thousand people diagnosed with psychiatric illness or cognitive deficiencies. Not until the 1980s would these murders, as well as the coercive sterilizations of some four hundred thousand others classified as “feeble-minded,” be officially acknowledged as crimes at all. The Question of Unworthy Life charts this history from its origins in prewar debates about the value of disabled lives to our continuing efforts to unlearn eugenic thinking today.
Drawing on a wealth of rare archival evidence, Dagmar Herzog sheds light on how Germany became the only modern state to implement a plan to eradicate cognitive impairment from the entire body politic. She traces how eugenics emerged from the flawed premise that intellectual deficiency was biologically hereditary, and how this crude explanatory framework diverted attention from the actual economic and clinical causes of disability. Herzog describes how the vilification of the disabled was dressed up as the latest science and reveals how Christian leaders and prominent educators were complicit in amplifying and legitimizing Nazi policies.
Exposing the driving forces behind the Third Reich’s first genocide and its persistent legacy today, The Question of Unworthy Life recovers the stories of the unsung advocates for disability rights who challenged the aggressive victimization of the disabled and developed alternative approaches to cognitive impairment based on ideals of equality, mutuality, and human possibility.
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 and Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton). Kaliswa Brewster is an actor and voice artist based in New York. Her television credits include recurring roles on Showtime’s Billions and ABC’s Time after Time and guest appearances on shows such as Law & Order and Blue Bloods. Her film credits include Paterno with Al Pacino. She is the narrator of Almost There by Farrah Rochon and Zenju Earthlyn Manuel’s The Shamanic Bones of Zen, among other audiobooks.
“A sweeping, nuanced, and chilling intellectual history of German understandings of cognitive disability across the twentieth century. Herzog analyzes the persistence of eugenic thinking among those who denied the full and equal humanity of the disabled, blamed intellectual impairment on heredity rather than accident or environment, and ranked worth according to usefulness. This is a major contribution to the history of eugenics and medicine, disability history, and ongoing debates about continuities and ruptures in German history.”—Mary Nolan, New York University
“Dagmar Herzog’s magisterial conceptual and cultural history is a major scholarly achievement. Her broad canvas illuminates how, in the 1920s, eugenics became firmly rooted in religious care communities and inscribed in the German lexicon. She extends her powerful narrative from the postwar trials to the late 1960s, when social movements began to dislodge the hegemony of this vicious concept and alter the perceptions and care of disabled people. Comprehensive and compassionate, The Question of Unworthy Life is an incomparable guide to this dark episode of German history.”—Anson Rabinbach, Princeton University
“Positively gripping. The Question of Unworthy Life presents in clear, concise, and compelling prose an extraordinarily dramatic and moving story, and one of profound human and political significance. Ambitious in scope, incisive in analysis, concise in exposition, and deeply researched, this powerful book will further cement Herzog’s stature as one of the most brilliant historians of Germany and Europe in her generation.”—Edward Ross Dickinson, University of California, Davis
