About The Question of Unworthy Life. Talk description coming soon.
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.
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 and Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton).
Moderated by SOF Fellow Zavier Nunn
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