The Question of Unworthy Life

Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century

Dagmar Herzog

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Hardback

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English

Princeton University Press
08 October 2024

History; Genocide & ethnic cleansing; The Holocaust; History of medicine

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 sterilisations 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 victimisation of the disabled and developed alternative approaches to cognitive impairment based on ideals of equality, mutuality, and human possibility.

By: Dagmar Herzog
Imprint: Princeton University Press
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 235mm, Width: 156mm,
ISBN: 9780691261706
ISBN 10: 0691261709
Pages: 312
Publication Date: 08 October 2024
Audience: College/higher education , Professional and scholarly , General/trade , Primary , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

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).

Reviews for The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century

""Innovative. . . . The Question of Unworthy Life attempts to restore dignity to people with disabilities who have been treated inhumanely — precisely because their humanity has gone unrecognized.""---Brian Hillman, Jewish Book Council