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 were known. The discussion revolved around what the facts meant. Fourth, Herzog also reflects on epistemology and history writing, and on the relationship between past and present, particularly in the Afterword, where she reminds us of the Freudian notion of Nachträglichkeit, or deferred effects, the idea that the present may be “causing” the past.
Change and continuities in the definition of people deemed to have intellectual disabilities take centre stage in the monograph, which starts in the second half of the nineteenth century, when different professional groups claimed expertise on intellectual disability. The three fields of theology, pedagogy, and medicine competed for competence on the question of “idiots”. Throughout the book, the author aims to show that: “The very notion of intellectual disability has always been a historically variable, fundamentally unstable concept” (p. 18). By the 1880s, a tripartite system had become accepted in which those people perceived as moderately disabled were allocated to the categories of “educable” or merely “trainable” and those people perceived to be most severely disabled relegated to the category of only “care-cases”.
Several topics returned in the debates revolving around the classification and valuation of people with intellectual disabilities. Among these was the question of usefulness and labour. While Germany was becoming a modern and industrial nation, the question of its citizens’ productivity grew in importance and was used to disqualify the intellectually disabled as unproductive citizens. The decades-long discussion on the position of these citizens would be infused, or perhaps a better word would be infected, by eugenics from the start of the twentieth century. A brochure that went on to play a major role in this debate was Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens [Permission to Annihilate Life Unworthy of Life], published in 1920 by Karl Binding, a lawyer, and Alfred Hoche, a psychiatrist. In the context of societal alarm regarding the perceived deteriorating cognitive health of the nation, the looming death of the German Volk, and race, Binding and Hoche pointed to the costs of caring for intellectually disabled people and did not hide their revulsion either. They suggested it would go against Christian values to refrain from assisting them in suicide and demanded “permission to annihilate life unworthy of life”. Herzog argues that this text not only paved the way for a discourse facilitating the Nazi “euthanasia’” murders, but that, throughout the 1920s, it also brought into being a new (Protestant) way of speaking, which Herzog terms “theo-biopolitics” or “theo-bioeconomics”, mixing religious or moral arguments with financial ones, while entangling theological questions of guilt and sin with biology. This kind of “theologizing eugenics” was also used by those Protestant spokesmen who did not condone murder to endorse sterilizations of the perceived “unfit”.
However, Herzog not only traces the origins of eugenics, but also explicitly unveils the counter-voices and protests against these “theo-biopolitics”, both among Protestants in the Weimar Republic and in the 1970s–1980s by what she calls “antipostfascist” cohorts: young professionals working in care who advocated the de-institutionalization and integration of children with disabilities into the regular school system. These professionals-activists protested not only against pre-fascist segregation and fascist murder, but also against the lack of care for the disabled in the first decades after the war. Later, they were joined by disability activists.
Another turning point was the expert testimony that the historian Gisela Bock gave to the Bundestag, which in 1984 debated reparations to victims of Nazi sterilizations. The question was whether they could be counted as having been persecuted on racial grounds, like the Jewish and Sinti and Roma victims. Bock argued that the Nazi attitude and treatment of the (intellectually) disabled was indeed racist, since Nazi racism had always been directed both at the outsiders of the Volk, like the Jews, and the insiders who were deemed mentally deficient: both types of racism were couched in biological terms and both were grounded in hierarchies of “worth” and “unworth”. So, Bock concluded, the victims of Nazi sterilization politics were prosecuted on racial grounds. This view would gain dominance in German historiography on Nazi racism, but Herzog points out the conspicuousness of the fact that Bock’s position was “nonobvious” to German historians at the time (p. 108).
The situation in East Germany, to which a chapter of The Question of Unworthy Life is devoted, at first glance seems to have been better. “Socialist humanism”, the formal state ideology, included the dignity and rights of the disabled, but in practice emphasized work so much that it excluded especially the severely disabled and their mothers who sought to care for them at home, and thus – in the view of GDR officials – were not fulfilling their labour capacities. Moreover, in the GDR, as in West Germany, ordinary citizens had called for doctors prosecuted for “euthanasia” to be set free. Herzog’s book impressively connects the history of knowledge with social, economic, cultural, and political history. Surprisingly, Herzog describes it as “unapologetically, an intellectual history” (p. 11), or “an experiment in writing an intellectual history of intellectual disability – but one that attends throughout to how facts were framed as well as to how emotions were continually being stirred on all sides” (p. 12). The word “unapologetic(ally)” appears throughout the book, often to describe activist or protest voices, who bravely went against the tide. Herzog herself seems to side with them, and in this respect this book is also an “unapologetic” plea to treat people with disabilities humanely, and an indictment against those German authors, but also the general public, who for so long so easily expressed disdain for the intellectually disabled, or, even worse, pretended to exercise Christian charity while advocating the unworthiness of their lives. For her, pointing to these long-standing prejudices also means according the German treatment and maltreatment of intellectual disability a history of its own, thus dovetailing with more recent historiography attempting to regard the T4 killings as a separate crime and not solely a precursor to the Holocaust of the Jews. Nevertheless, Herzog maintains, both forms of racism need to be studied as complementary (rather than sequentially).
Of course, like every inspiring monograph, the book leaves some questions unanswered. Did the German feminist movement actually include the theme of disability and intellectual disability? How did advocates of disability rights compare with the anti-psychiatry movement? And, as the author herself remarks, how does one write a history of intellectual disability without paying attention to the voices of those described as intellectually disabled? One partial suggestion is to read images “against the grain”, as Herzog does. The book includes many photographs and an extensive body of footnotes that will help future researchers from several fields. It testifies to a broader trend demonstrating that the history of disability is important for histories of medical expertise, religion, welfare, reproduction, capitalism, and labour.
