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A
This episode is brought to you by Avid tv. Where do savvy minds go to find masterful documentaries and hard to find films from across the globe? Try a free month long trial at Ovid and go beyond the mainstream. Indiewire says Ovid is unafraid to program films that matter. And the New York Times calls Ovid a terrific streamer for independent film fans. A boutique hand curated streaming service. Yet now with over 2,400 titles, Ovid is the home to films by auteurs from Chantal Akerman to Chris Marker to Wang Bing and has the richest collection of probing, avant garde and provocative films anywhere. Ovid offers many things except conformity. Try Ovid today and get your first month free. Use promo code N B N O V I D. That's Ovid TV promo code nbnovid. Hello everybody, this is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
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B
Hey everyone. You're listening to New Books in Critical Theory, a channel that's part of the New Books Network. I'm your host, Lisa Schmidt Herzog, and I'm very grateful to get the chance to interview Professor Dagmar Herzog today about her latest book, whose title is the New Fascist Body, by the way, also with a fascinating after work by Alberto Toscano. Hi, Dagma.
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C
Hi. I'm glad to see you.
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B
Me too. But before we begin Let me briefly introduce Dagma's work. She is a distinguished professor of history at the CUNY Graduate center in New York. Her research spans a wide range of topics, including historical European fascism and its sexual morals, the history of psychoanalysis, eugenics, disability justice, and Holocaust memory. She's the author of several outstanding books. Among the more recent ones are Cold War Psychoanalysis in the Age of catastrophes from 2016, unlearning eugenics. Yes, Sexual Sexuality, Reproduction and Disability in Post Nazi Europe from 2018, and the question of unworthy eugenics and Germany's 20th century from 2024. But today we are going to talk about the most recent essay, the New Fascist Body. So thank you so much, Dagmar, for being with us today. And let's jump into the conversation. I would say.
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C
Okay, thank you.
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B
I listed a few of your publications, and I think in this most recent book, you're really connecting the dots between the topics you've been working on all along. But to begin, could you maybe tell us what first drew you to explore these connections between fascism, sexuality, and the biopolitics of classifications such as race and disability, which is really what this recent book is about.
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C
Right. So it wasn't easy. And it started as an assignment, the origins of this little bookie, this essay book, lie in a paper I was asked to give back in January of 2025 in Rome at a conference on fascism, which brought together scholars from both sides of the Atlantic. And my assignment was to speak on, quote, unquote, the New Fascist Body. So that was the title that was given to me. And the expectation was that I would speak on Nazi sexual politics based on my earlier book, Sex Heptive Fascism, and then on all the subsequent historical work by other scholars. And I just assumed that there would be the second panel on fascist eugenics because I had actually discussed it with the organization, but that is covered that this other panel on eugenics wasn't going to happen. But then I realized, oh, no, it's going to fall to me. I'm going to have to figure out how to tell history, sexuality and history, disability together. Gulp. And they sometimes feel like they happened on different planets, but they didn't. It's the same planet, even the same country, Germany. And then I realized, oh, my God, of course, in Germany, the two topics are totally intertwined, not just in the Third Reich, but already in the very earliest document, which is the founding document of German eugenics, Alfred Pletz's the Prowess of Our Race in German, Die Tuktiguit Unswer wasse It was published 1895 and I kept thinking about this whole problem of having to talk these two things together. And I had a second scary revelation, which is that basically sex and disability are also weirdly conjoined in the present day extreme right party alternative, the AfD, just doing scarily. Well, the AfD uses what I've come to call, I'm guessing we'll talk about it, sexy racism to communicate its outrageous, cruel, anti migrant, anti Muslim messaging. And there's really disturbing echoes here with Nazi softcore, anti Jewish imagery. And the AfD is obsessively preoccupied with purveying nasty messages about people with disabilities over and over and trying unfortunately ever more successfully to foment opposition to the inclusion of children with disabilities in mainstream schools. So to re segregate them and thereby I would argue, to re invisibilize disability. And the party is constantly engaging in intensified stigmatization of disability. So then I took the occasion of that Rome paper to think about the long and complex entanglement in German history of titillating racist messaging, sexually titillating with anti disability nastiness. And then for that latter topic, I could draw on the book I published in 2024, the question of Unworthy Life, which explores the history of eugenics and above all explores attitudes towards people with disabilities, especially cognitive disabilities in Germany over 150 years, from the 1870s to the 2000s. But if you're asking what first drew me to this whole naughty mess of intensities, the answer lies further back. All of it has its roots in years of teaching history of the Holocaust. Because with that you can't avoid thinking about the quote unquote euthanasia murders the Nazis did, because those murders were concretely interconnected by both the perpetrators and the victims with the Holocaust of European jury and years of teaching history sexuality there you can't escape the issue of eugenics and its stunning popularity, really across the entire audio on spectrum. And then, yeah, on top of those two themes, there's my long standing preoccupation, which I keep returning to for both the US and for Europe, with what draws human beings to the political right.
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B
Yeah, and you, you do suggest the possible answer in the book, Right. One of the central arguments is that historical and contemporary fascism and fascisms in the plural, that it is not only about the question of why people vote against their own interests, as you say, but you emphasize how it is rather a kind of pleasure that gets promoted through violence. Could you explain what you mean by that and how fascism speaks to something that is maybe less about rational interests of people, but rather about affects and libidinal investments.
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C
Yeah, so of course the terrifying present makes me think about that a lot. But I mean, the traditional checklist for how do you recognize a fascism for the 1920s, 30s and 40s includes of course, extreme nationalism and Turkish racism, terroristic violence against political opponents and unwanted minorities and knowledge control through propaganda and censorship. And all of that's correct, but none of it captures the permission giving aspect of all fascist movements, past and present. That uplifting sense of feeling superior, of belonging to the powerful in group, what I would call a narcissism boost, that exciting sense that you are valuable, that all right wing movements provide their followers. And so I would say that's an important part of the pleasure that fascisms provide for the, you know, wannabe superior group. But in addition, literally, the Nazis have for a very long time been misunderstood as sexually repressive and conservative. I still get that to this day. And I'm always surprised it just isn't true. Yes, there was a contradictory cacophony of messaging around sex. So there's pro sex, pro chastity, and a lot of muddled mixed messages. And all of those messages were conveyed through vicious anti Semitism. But the main through line was one of sexual incitement, not just for baby making, also for pleasure. Nazism wasn't nearly as restrictive as was long believed, at least for non disabled, heterosexual, quote unquote Aryans. But then that's the majority of the population. The Nazis put themselves in the place of the Jewish sex rights activists they drove into exile. And they styled themselves as the new pleasure givers, all the while persecuting men accused of homosexuality as well as Jewish gentile couples, and all the while constantly denigrating supposedly dirty Jewish sex. So it's like, come have our good clean Nazi heterosex instead. I mean, that's the memo to the racially and ideologically approved masses. But either way, whether you're being told that Jewish sex is bad and wrong or that Nazi sex is pure and good, you get to enjoy looking at softcore imagery.
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B
Yeah. And you describe where we see the manifestation of such pleasure and softcore imagery, as you call it, particularly today, because, yeah, you're drawing your examples mainly from Germany and the United States. So could you describe that a little bit where we really see that today?
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C
Yeah, the AfD has already gone through at least three stages, as far as I can tell, in its particular versions of sexy racism, if not even four by now. I mean, Just recently they started a new youth organization called Genova Undeutschland. And the merchandise for that is has pretty horrific imagery as well. So maybe there's a fourth dance, but at least the first three we can say for sure. The first one was full of gentle fun, I would say. 2017, the campaign posters with attractive women in skimpy bathing suits walking to the beach. And the tagline was burkas question mark referring to modest Muslim dress. We prefer bikinis and our land, our rules. So the picture pandered to the pleasures of looking and of feeling superior. You could enjoy the cute tushes on the women and you can enjoy the sense that non Muslim European cultures were good for women's liberation. But then two years later, 2019, the tone had really changed and the new move was fear mongering with brown or black men, or Arab or Mediterranean coded men presented as a sexual danger to white women. But the images were of naked white or light skinned women and they were fully visible in public space. So again, there's the pleasure of looking and of feeling superior. Like I said, it's soft horror and it's out in public. And it's very similar to the Nazi newspaper Der Sturmer with its pictures of naked women being attacked or abused by Jewish men or by snakes with Jewish names. And then the third stage is this horrible 2024 remigration hit video, which you can still see online. It's a party dance song with AI generated images. And here the message is simply brutal. Here, brown and black men are not dangerous at all. Hundreds of them are being led into airplanes flown by quote, unquote, Aryan looking pilots, while flight attendants in that distinctive AFD turquoise blue are gyrating around and celebrating the mass deportations of bottles of champagne. I mean, this is schadenfreude. It's a triumphalist pose or a dominance pose. It's about pleasure and exuding power over vulnerable others. I mean, that's very different from the fear mongering. Right? And it's a lot like, if you want a US comparison, Kristi Noem, the Homeland Security Secretary, standing with her perfectly styled long hair and tight fashion clothing and shiny boots in front of caged shirtless men in the sea cot prison in El Salvador.
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B
Right, so those are some of the ways that you note the striking visual echoes across time between the paradoxical Nazi sex politics and the mix of cruelty and sexiness in the AfD's political imagery. I would like to talk a bit about how the sex politics in the third Reich fit together with Nazi anti disability policies. Maybe as a first step you can talk about the ambivalent relationship that the church, and particularly the Protestant church had to the Nazis sexual politics.
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C
The leaders in both the Protestant and the Catholic churches had high high hopes that the Nazis would restore traditional conservative sexual values. I mean arguably Germany in the early 20th century had the most sex liberal culture in the world. And millions of gentiles, millions of non Jews were eagerly seeking the information that the mainly they're not exclusively Jewish sex advice writers were providing. So already in late Weimar, conservative Christians are constantly fretting that their control over their flocks is eroding. And the Nazis acquired glowing, enthusiastic support from both churches by portraying themselves at first as the restorers of conservative tradition. But within two to three years, I mean I'm talking 1935, 36 already they dismayed the churches by impudently advertising themselves as the new transgressive pleasure givers. So I think to make sense of it, it helps to understand the relationship. Nazis, Christians, Jews as a kind of triangular force field. The Nazis demonized whatever smacked of Jewish sacks, while also ridiculing all that was associated with the inherited Christian value system as somehow laughably uptight, all the while simultaneously borrowing, I mean like appropriating and repurposing Christian moral vocabulary of guilt and sin, but adapting it to issues of race and cult. So Christians were totally thrown off guard. They had had such high hopes and then it was all turning out not the way they wanted. So they tried to challenge Nazi incitements to sex outside of marriage, but they ended up reinforcing Nazi anti Semitism and continuing to give the anti Jewish hostility the seal of moral approval. And meanwhile, the relations between Christians and Nazis was a one way love affair, sort of unrequited by the Nazi leadership which used the churches, but also had contempt for them.
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B
So against this backdrop, like of the concern about sexual morals and racial stock, can you now elaborate a bit on Christian ideas about the disabled? Because in the book you say that there was a theobio political construct that made some religious caregivers particularly receptive to eugenic reasoning. So what exactly do we mean by that?
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C
Yeah, it took me a while to figure out what the term was. And it's not so much that they were receptive to it, it just they were receptive to eugenics. And then in order to justify that to themselves, they developed what I now come to call athea biopolitics. But thanks for asking because it's actually really important to me and I struggled a lot to make sense of it. And it also requires going backward in time a bit to before the Nazis came to power. So there's two stages that are significant. One is the 1890s, when eugenics is just getting started. And then the 1920s, the Weimar years. And even before the 1890s, even earlier into the 1870s or so, it helps to know that it was Christians and actually especially Protestants. The Catholics come a little later. The Protestants were the ones who established residential institutions for people with disabilities. They mean they had separate ones for physical, for psychiatric, and also for cognitive impairments. And the Catholics come a bit later, more in the wake of the Kultur Kampf, when they're driven out of educating Catholic school children who are neurotypical. Then they go, oh, okay, we're gonna do disability. So they come along. But pretty soon both Catholic and Protestants are hierarchizing those with intellectual disabilities in their care. So the institution directors, when they meet with each other and the staff were super frustrated that quote unquote idiocy, it was called at the time, is incurable. So they obsessed about at least making their residents somehow quote, useful. I mean, the German words they use all the time are either nutslich or brah. And for them that meant capacity to work. That was the obsessive thing focused on. And so in their frustration that mental disability is incurable, they created this hierarchy and distinguished between those they deemed educable, those who were only quote, trainable, who could do simple tasks. And then there's the, quote, lowest tier, the so called care cases. In German, that's Fliegerfelle. Those are the ones who are unable to work and above all require the care of others. And you know, in some institutions that could be 30 or more percent. So it's a lot the people who require care. And the tragedy is that already by the 1890s, expressing death wishes against those with the most significant impairments was becoming socially acceptable. And so the key text, and I mentioned it already, is this book by. It's a big book by Alfred Plutz called the Prowess of our race from 1895. And Plutz is basically expressing the dream of a disability free nation. The idea is to go back to the habits of the ancient Spartans. Everybody's talking about the Spartans at this moment, who supposedly killed is actually, it's actually unclear if this is true, but it's certainly a very consequential myth. They supposedly killed their deformed or weak newborns. And purportedly this was the reason that the Spartans were So strong and lovely. So they kept on killing off their weak members and that that's how they became strong. So the recommendation was that if only Germans would also regularly kill off their defective newborns, they too would become a folk that was strong and beautiful and notably strong, smart. So Pletz was also really interested in doing intelligence testing. So this was Pletz's racial hygienic utopia. He calls it that himself. But his comments from 1895 were part of a far wider cultural chatter across the disciplines at that time, in which also killing the long term institutionalized separate matter from newborns. Right, those who are long term institutionalized was also starting to be floated as possibly a good idea. So unsurprisingly, the Christians who run the disability institutions are very, very much on the defensive already by the turn into the 20th century. And then 20 years later, a big dramatic shift takes place right in the wake of the defeat of Germany, World War I. That's a huge turning point because it was experienced especially by the elite professional elites as a, quote, national humiliation Nationale Anitribum in 1920. A little book is published by Carl Binding and Alfred Hocha, that's a lawyer and a psychiatrist. And they together for the first time have a concrete proposal. So there's been these death wishes circulating, but that's not the same thing as having a concrete suggestion for how a three person team will comb through the residential institutions and choose who's going to be killed. They're getting very explicit about how they're going to do it and they basically make an argument that economic and an argument that's emotional. So because the disabled adult supposedly, I emphasize supposedly so expensive and supposedly so disgusting. Binningen Hoche claimed that the disabled have no, quote, affection value affects jun sviat. So people with dementia, for example, were loved for a long time and therefore you can still treat them well in old age. But they, because they used to be productive and you used to love them. But those who were disabled from the start supposedly can't be loved, right? So they are considered, quote, ballast existences or life unworthy of life. So they are the coiners of that phrase that we now unfortunately all have to use. That's how you corrupt the language, right? You put that term into circulation. Anyway, so their proposal will become the template for the Nazi euthanasia murders. There's no dispute about that. But nobody had really looked at for a long time was in the interim how the Christians responded to this provocation during the Weimar years. And the first thing that happens is that the Christian care institution directors are totally flummoxed. So the Catholics don't say that much. There's one great guy, Fonsa Bavata, who I just think is amazing, is very eloquent in his harsh response to this obnoxious idea. But the Protestants, they have a lot to say. They keep publishing books and essays trying to explain that killing is morally wrong, but they have trouble explaining why it's wrong. So because the murder idea is out there and the chatter about the disabled is apparently so disinhibiting, and because they are themselves evidently ambivalent about the people in their care, they end up stumbling when they try to explain why not kill? So they actually end up exacerbating the stigmatization of the disabled when they come up with a compromise solution. Murder? No, that's bad and wrong. But sterilization, yes. So, you know, we don't want to exterminate them, but we do want to, quote, prevent them them being disabled. Right. So it's euthanasia, no, Eugenics, yes. And then the real subplot is that, I mean, it took me a while to figure this out and I had to read these horrible texts from the twenties over and over. But they have a fantasy or an ambition that if they can learn to absorb this newfangled, supposedly so scientific, secular, eugenic langu, then they can repurpose it to scare people into sexual restraint. So for them it's really about sex and it's about their own defensiveness that they have these people in their care and that doubleness, it causes them to develop this absurd theory that the purportedly rising numbers of intellectually disabled people are the result of, quote, sexual sin. So they want to use eugenics to try to restore conservative sexual mores, which they are distressed to find during Weimar, and no longer appeal much to anybody. So they literally confirmed that they too think that the disabled are disgusting, but they should be kept alive, because that, you know, the look of what you see then would provide a lesson in chastity for the non disabled. And they come up with religious arguments for why sterilization would be good. So that's what I mean by developing a theobiopolitics. They end up merging theology and eugenics. And then when the Nazis come to power and the coercive sterilization law goes into effect in 1934, though initially the Protestants had claimed they were against coercion, suddenly they're jumping on the bandwagon and they immediately begin enthusiastically sterilized. So the Protestant hospitals volunteered to do the sterilizations. I mean, ultimately the Catholics permit the sterilizations also, but they've registered their complaint. The Protestants are really like, yeah, we're going to do it. And I think we've, I mean, there's many good books by now, but we, we've yet to really let ourselves feel or really understand what a devastating program, this massive course of sterilization camp was. I mean, this campaign of 400,000 fellow citizens. And it's precisely this deep Christian complicity, the Protestant enthusiasm in that campaign, that becomes one of the main reasons it takes a full 40 years after the war for Nazi crimes against people with disabilities even to count as crimes. Right. Because the state in the post war period looks to the churches for orientation about what's morally wrong or morally right. And they're like, yeah, yeah, it was the right thing to do. So that entanglement of the Christians, their refusal to acknowledge their own involvement in the crime is why it doesn't get recognized as a crime.
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B
Yeah, yeah. I would like to ask again about that effective dimension, effective dimension of eugenics you mentioned. So you write that fascism produced not only a sexy racism, like basically the term that you're coining here, but also what you call a sexy eugenics. In other words, a violent pleasure that showed itself in the degradation of anyone excluded from the idea of a homogenous fork. So be it Jewish and racialized people, be it mentally ill and disabled people, or be it basically anyone marked for annihilation. So in the book, you pose a striking question. You write, what could possibly be the relationship between the titillating sexiness of racism and the nastiness towards children with learning challenges? End quote. Could you talk a bit about this? Like, how do you see that connection?
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C
Yeah, I mean, for me, the most helpful way to think about it is in terms of one of my book's heroes, which is the courageous psychiatrist Gerhard Schmidt, if I can just call everyone's attention to his work. He wrote a book already right after World War II, 1947. The manuscript was done, but it was actively suppressed by his physician colleagues and it could not appear in print until 1965, almost 20 years later. It's called Selection in the Asylum Seeone der Heilanstadt. And I really think it's one of the most brilliant books about the disability murders. And in the book, Schmidt has this insight that Hitler's racial insanity, as he puts it, takes two complementary forms, racial hatred and racial fear. And racial hatred is against Jews. And racial fear is about the imperfection within the would be dominant group. So I guess maybe we could think of it as a kind of Aryan self hatred. You hear a lot these days about Jewish self hatred, but maybe this could be Aryan self hatred. In other words, it's the other side of the coin, the complement to the Nazis antisemitism. And it's pursued with a similar obsessiveness. And the great historian Giselle Bloch, who alas just passed away in November, said in a related manner when she noted that Nazi racism had always come in two complimentary forms. I mean, her task was to explain to the German West German government why the persecution of the disabled, Canada's racism also. And she, after studying and writing her habilitation on the sterilization, said look, there's two forms. And the term she came up with was anthropological racism and hygienic racism. So the anthropological is against Jews, but also Roma, but also blacks. And the hygienic racism is against the perceived efficiencies within the would be master race. And then she has to me just one of my favorite quotes ever when she testifies to the Bundestag in the late 1890s 1980s about the so called forgotten victims. Of course they're just the repudiated victims, right? She says, quote, the promised race, the master folk, was not a given. It was not the real existing German folk. Rather, the master race had yet to be produced. So I just think about that all the time, that the master race was a fantasy. And so the takeaway is that the would be dominant group. But that's true in the present as well. No matter what country you look at, it's never naturally dominant. It's a fantasy, but one that's then pursued with brutality.
- [29:18]
B
Yeah, and you're actually pointing out in the book that this fantasy of dominance is really articulated through a very obscene obsession with intelligence within eugenic and fascist logics and especially in Germany. And part of this was that to build a so called master race, it would get normalized to wish death on disabled people and actually turn this also into public policy. But I wonder how did that obsession with intelligence develop in the first place?
- [29:57]
C
Yeah, thank you. I love it that you call it an obscene obsession. I really want to communicate that. I think people naturalize that as oh, of course everyone's concerned about being smart and it's not true. It's a. Also in the present we have a renewed Social Darwinism emerging and this new smartness talk. And it's very disturbing. But to answer your question, okay, so as I already sort of indicated in the late 19th century, the charity directors, the directors of these residential institutions are having trouble accepting that a significant portion of their residential population require daily care rather than being able to do, quote, unquote, reproductive work. So even though the earliest experiments in residential care already in the 1840s, 50s, 60s, those very early or small experiments, those directors had learned how to give therapeutic attention and actually developed really excellent therapeutic approaches. And I mentioned this a little bit in my prior book, Question of Unready Life, but by the time you get to the 18, 70s, 80s, 90s, all of that's forgotten. And even the idea of simply giving loving attention was repudiated. So they're actually talking about the Protestant deaconesses, the women who do a lot of the care work. And they talk about needing to rotate them because it's so spiritually deadening to provide this care. And so they're just really frustrated that they can't get these people to be useful. Right? So that's a big dynamic in terms of the preactive patient with intelligence. But the other big trend is that although the remedial teachers at the remedial schools and the doctors and pastors and priests, they all actually know full well that the reason there's cognitive disability is because of poverty. They all know it's malnutrition of the mother during pregnancy, lack of vitamins and protein, plus the diseases of childhood. So the fevers in the toddler years that cause encephalitis or meningitis, that's the era before antibiotics. That's what causes the vast majority, the poverty and the diseases cause the cognitive impairments. And even though they know that and they say that, and I can document that by the early 20th century, they're starting to reverse causation and insist that the poor are at fault for their own misfortune. So, yes, of course, you know, also wealthy people have disabled children absolutely, in every era, but 85 to 90%, and everybody says this at the time, come from the ranks of the very poor. And so this is a moment. I mean, this is about capitalism, right? This is the moment of major demographic transition. People are moving by the tens of thousands to the big cities, some of which are quadrupling in size, and people are living in squalor, and it's easier to blame the poor. And there are already hundreds of remedial schools that are being established across Germany. And so Germany has public education pretty early. I mean, Germany is really precocious then also in providing remedial education for the children who can't make it in these typical classrooms, which often have up to 60 pupils in a room. So then they have smaller classes and they're starting to do remedial instruction. But again, and I've now read all these teachers reports about what that was like, the teachers are often impatient with the quote, unquote, slower kids. So that was an upsetting thing for me to learn, was that the remedial teachers are as contemptuous of their charges as the pastors and priests are of their residents. Okay. And then although eugenics. Yes, yes, an international movement. And Also in the U.S. for example, the lie is being promoted that cognitive impairment is heritable from generation to generation. It's not biologically heritable, it just looks that way because poverty replicates. The big difference with Germany is that Germany lost World War I. That's huge. The defeat in World War I is experienced as humiliating and they are looking for anyone to blame. And it's a. In fact, it's the psychiatrist Emile Kraepeline, who already in 1919, even before Beningenhoff's book comes out, suggests that he can no longer be proud of being a German. Not because the military generals failed on the battlefield, but because supposedly there are so many human beings who are useless and weak and Germany just cannot, he says, carry that burden. So he lends his authority, which is considerable, to that slander. And I just want to be clear. We're not actually talking about huge numbers. So in the 1910s, so right before World War I starts, 34,000 people with disabilities are living in institutions and another 25,000 children are attending the 270 remedial schools. That's a lot of remedial schools. Germany really is precocious. Right. But that's a whopping total of 60,000 people in a nation of 60 million. So we're talking about 0.1%. It's nothing but the perception that also the fellow Germans who are outside of the remedial schools or residential institutions, all these working class Germans are somehow unworthy, inferior, and that their numbers are growing. That is an obsessive chatter going on all through the 20s. And so by the end of the 20s, you can track over time what kind of percentages people are talking about. By the end of the 20s, the beginning of the 30s, and it was still before Hitler, the speculative estimates about the numbers of Germans that should ideally be sterilized have rocketed upwards. So in 1914, when World War I starts, it's like 1 to 2%. And then gradually it's 10, 20, maybe even 30% by 1931. I mean, that's nearly a third of fellow citizens that are suddenly being deemed so subpar they should not have children. And that's what I mean by Aryan self hatred. It's all so ludicrous and horrific. And then the whole idea becomes to sterilize the moderately disabled and kill the most significantly disabled. And in Mein Kampf, Hitler actually makes it quite explicit that he believes that only those who are healthy may have children and that the state must take practical steps to sterilize. How does he put it so, something that's in any way visibly ill and hereditarily burdened. Even as he fantasizes with his classic grandiosity, that it would be a mere 600 years to preventing the potential to procreate on the part of these degenerated and diseased people. That would be this enormous opportunity for healing. How does he put it? Like an exudung, I guess you could say a recovery that today seems hardly fathomable. And then a few years later, already in 1929 at a party rally in Nuremberg, he actually invokes the Spartans like everybody else does, and ventured the opinion that if. I can't believe he said this, if Germany had a million children every year and eliminated 700,000 to 800,000 of the weakest, the end result might even be an increase in strength. It's killing off 70, 80% of the kids. And like I said, it's a Catholic Ansava Walter as a professor in Munich, who pointed out brilliantly that there was actually zero relationship between the really not so great cost of disability care and the shaky financial situation of the nation as a whole. And he has this great quote, as bad off as we may be, I'm sure we can still carry one useless person for every 15,000. I mean, this is something I think about all the time now, as everyone is saying in the United States and in Germany, oh, we can't afford disability care, oh, we need to cut welfare. This is where this nonsense happens. It's not as though you can just turn that money over to all the supposedly healthy people. And he points out that setting up the murder machinery would itself be an expense. But obviously for Hitler it's not just a matter of money. It's really about the extirpation of imperfection. So the Protestants, and I'm the daughter of a Protestant theologian, so I think I took this harder, this discovery of this evidence that I might have otherwise, the Protestants in their double eagerness to use the super modern eugenic quote, unquote scientific arguments and their to instrumentalize eugenic sexual restraint. They never have the foresight to challenge the eugenicist math, these calculations that somehow there'd be so much more money available for welfare, support for the quote, unquote, healthy working class that they just kill off the most impaired. So they do try. The Protestants do try to argue that really Germans are spending too much on alcohol and tobacco and in some versions, on marmalade. Basically, they don't challenge the idea that there would be a redistribution of income. So they're really having trouble responding.
- [38:33]
B
In his afterword, Alberto Toscano makes an interesting point, actually. So he says that struggles for equal rights in the US that is, for African Americans, for women, for immigrants, these struggles were often tied up with proving that they were African Americans, women, immigrants were, quote, unquote, normal, that is not disabled, not hysterical, not psychotic. So how do you see this obsession with intelligence changing over time, and how is it actually still shaping political debates today?
- [39:15]
C
I guess there's a few points, two or three points that need to be made. One is that disability is really unlike all the other others othernesses, right? And that's in part, it's unlike race and gender and sexual orientation and ethnicity and so on. And that's in part due to disability's universal potential. It really can happen to anyone and simultaneously to the way it's associated with the very most profound vulnerability and dependency, and that's often experienced as especially threatening or despicable. But secondly, historically, for centuries, there have been ramifications particular to cognitive impairment or psychiatric illness. So in other words, either intellectual or emotional vulnerability, both because those phenomena destabilize the idealized notion of the autonomous subject, and most enduringly, because of the challenge that those impairments raise through the expectation of being able to contribute labor to one's community. I mean, so much of this entire discussion has to do with work, capacity to work and poverty and contribution and so on. It's about not being a burden. And then there's the very understandable fear for those other otherwise minoritized groups, blacks, immigrants, women, et cetera. Right. The other ones are treated somehow contemptuously, that they don't want to be seen as unequal or not being valued. Right. They're desperately trying to get themselves into the category of valuable rather than burden. But what's happening today, and this is also a point that Alberto Toscano highlights really eloquently, I think it's a really important insight on his part, is that strong bodies capable of physical labor are not needed nearly as much as they used to be in the fascisms of the 1920s, 30s and 40s. So masses of human beings now just seem simply disposable. It's a totally different thing. Our bodies aren't really needed for labor anymore and we're actually. That's one of the things that's happening is a stronger focus on quote, unquote intelligence. So we're all being treated as disposable, even in the US now. I mean, the whole frightening way in which consumer safety protection regulations on industry are being dismantled, the systems for preventing disease, for preventing hunger, all of that's being dismantled. Sometimes it really, really feels as though the rulers are hastening the apocalypse. And I guess the third and key point here is that this new fetishization of intelligence in the present is above all a strategic deployment of the new right wing libertarian elite which deems themselves especially genius, especially gifted, because they're seeking supposed hierarchies in nature to justify the ever widening inequalities they're creating in society and their own massive thievery from the public purse.
- [42:00]
B
And you mentioned already this reversal of causation with regards to the causes of cognitive deficit. And you point out in the book that the Nazis actually argue both in biologistic terms and in more social science constructivist ways. So they adapted their logics and reasoning whenever necessary. But still, one of eugenics core claims was that cognitive deficit was definitely hereditary. And you ask why there was so much insistence on this, and you also suggest an answer that it was tied to the narcissistic wound of Germany's defeat in World War I, a kind of second step in the back myth, as.
- [42:55]
C
You say in English.
- [42:57]
B
Could you unpack that connection a little bit?
- [43:01]
C
Yeah. Again, this is something that took me a while to try to figure out, but I really come to think about the talk of a supposed overabundance of disabled people as something a nation can no longer sustain either economically or biologically, as really a second stab in the back myth and just as screwed up and just as consequential as the first one. I mean, the first and most famous stab in the back myth, the one you can read up on Wikipedia, is the myth that Germany lost the war because Jews and social democrats on the home front betrayed the nation. I mean, it's bullshit, but it's bullshit with enormous consequences. And then the second one would be this idea that there are just so many unworthy Germans and we can't carry that burden. And as it happens, the psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin is a major voice in initiating that argument. Already in 1919, it's one of the first things that he says when the war is over. He doesn't explicitly mention killing. He's just kind of vague and elusive. But he basically is saying that the charitable, philanthropic support for the weak everywhere, this helping the infirm and degenerate, as he puts it, weighs down the shoulders of the able bodied. And he has this idea that of course will be taken up also by Hitler, this idea that there's a competition between nations. And he literally says, because we're in competition against other nations, we're not alone in the world. We're exposed to fierce competition. We cannot afford. There's that phrase to provide unlimited care for the weak. That's the argument. And that's why it scares me so much when now even Christian Democrats and not just AFD people make that kind of argument. So a year later, after Kibelin does this, comes the very concrete proposal for how to kill the most severely disabled from Binding and Hocha. But Kraepelin is actually a really influential figure in this entire discussion because he's no friend of either the psychiatrically ill or the intellectually disabled. I mean, psychiatrists had run away from quote, unquote idiocy and said, no, no, no, our only thing is insanity. And then suddenly it becomes financially lucrative around the turn of the century to actually be a doctor in one of the institutions. And so it becomes a career move and therefore they all run sudd disability care that they weren't in before. But Creepeline is most pernicious because he is one of the most important promoters of the concept, this newly invented category of existence called psychopathological inferiority. I mean, we could all get this diagnosis. It's somewhere in the blurry boundary between normal and abnormal, between mental illness, mental disability and normalcy. And it just means anybody he doesn't like, basically. And again, it's applied above all to the poor and the notion of, quote, moral feeble mindedness, which, you know, is for boys who do petty thievery or girls who sleep around. I mean, it basically, again is a war against the poor and these two categories. And he's so famous for having, you know, created the categorization system that now is the basis for the DSM also. But. And he's praised for his clever categorizations, but it's very striking to me that around psychopathology and which is that vague, elastic, subjective thing that he can just impose on other people and moral people mindedness, he Never knows where to put it. He's always moving his little shell games around because it's obviously an invented category and it. The most interesting scholar on him, I think, or one of the most interesting is Eric Engstrom, who's pointed out that Kraepelin is kind of a Lamarckian, which maybe you could. A generous reading today would say it's epigenetic, it's paying attention to the ways in which environment and biology are interaction. But he understood, of course, he's not stupid. He understood that poverty is unhealthy for human beings and he certainly campaigned against alcohol and sexually transmitted diseases. But he also participates in this insistence that cognitive deficit is hereditary. So he actually says things like In a textbook, 1909, this is even before World War I, the number of idiots, epileptics, psychopaths, criminals, prostitutes and tramps who descend from alcoholic. There we have alcoholic encephalitic, STD parents and who transfer their inferiority to their offspring is incalculable. So he's merging attention to knowledge of awareness of poverty and disease and alcohol to the notion that it's transferable genetically. So yeah, I mean, even if it's with the Lamarckian twist, you know, he's basically reinforcing this idea that inferiority is hereditary.
- [47:38]
B
Something that always baffles me about the logic of eugenics is actually its metaphysics and how it's really, really contradictory. The Nazis argued that there was one pure homogenous folk, and also that that folk needed to be rescued from contamination with others. But at the same time they also admitted this pure folk didn't really exist yet. Right. And that it had to be created by policies of so called racial hygiene and euthanasia. So on the one hand, racial purity was presented as a natural fact, but on the other hand, then also non racialized and non disabled Germans didn't live up to the standards the Nazi regime imagined, also in terms of intelligence. So can you talk about that paradox? How did Nazism claim purity already existed while also acknowledging that it didn't? And how do you see echoes of this in today's politics?
- [48:46]
C
So I think you're making, I mean, we were saying it's a puzzle for you, but I think you're making a really profound point about how fascisms function precisely via those contradictions. I mean, they're offering ordinary average people an opportunity to feel extra special. It's a flattering reassurance that they really are superior, better than others, and I guess maybe a second dimension. They're also offering the Ideal of ever greater perfection to aspire to and then thirdly also a justification for cruelty to those who don't match up. So it's kind of a three per. And my point is that it's exactly via contradictions that ideologies do their emotional work on us. I mean that's also one of my points about Nazi sexual politics. The seeming contradiction, accusing Jews of undermining proper sexual mores while simultaneously railing against church induced unmanly prudish dishonesty, to quote Hitler, proved really functional for the regime and for the AfD. If you're asking about the President also, all the contradictoriness is totally deliberate. I mean it reaches different constituencies, it's totally entertaining, it keeps the opponents guessing and off balance and it allows for really wild over the top taboo transgressing and then for an easy retreat and the claim that something over the top was just a joke.
- [50:08]
B
Going back maybe one more time to the connection between eugenics and this historical narcissistic wound. Because in your book you show very well, I think how the idea of a master race on a societal level, how it was also reflected on the individual level in the sense that a particular idea of subjectivity was cultivated. Right. So the master race, not the master race, the master subject as being fully capable, fully autonomous, fully self sufficient, showing no signs of weakness or inferiority whatsoever. And you ask a question that really caught my attention. So you're writing why should those who perceive themselves to be non disabled, and I would also add non racialized for instance, so why should those even care? What do various fascisms, anti disability provocations have to do with all of us? End quote. Could you talk about that a bit?
- [51:20]
C
Why should we care about other human beings is always an important question we need to ask you. Faith. I mean, I guess there are at least two ways I could answer the question. One has to do with what I would say the ideological trick being played on all of us. And the other has to do with the very earnest point about human psychology and profound moral issues. So the first point would be to call attention to the ideological game that's being played on all of us via denigrating. Talk about disability for the U.S. i would say the joke is on us if we don't see through this new hyped up social Darwinism, this brazen re hierarchization of human value. All this talk about the supposed smartness and genius of the AI tech bros that is really just an excuse for moving massive amounts of money away from the already suffering poor and into the coffers of the already ultra rich. And one of the reasons it's so effective, unfortunately, is that too many liberals and leftists still think they are the intelligent ones and then it's the dumb ones who vote for the right. The quote unquote deplorables. Right, but that's just so short sighted. They're missing all the ways in which smartness talk, talk about intelligence is really about theft and about how all of us are being treated as disposable. And with regard to Germany, I was dismayed recently to find that the Christian Democrats are not only parroting AFD messages about race. So Chancellor Friedrich Meatz has been on that kick for a while, replete with references to the supposed danger that men of color pose to white womanhood. But now this is just really recently. I mean, since my book is out, they are crossing what had previously been a red line and now claiming that the disabled are an economic burden. Kind of incredible that they're doing that. They are really overtly generating resentment against the disabled. And it's just uncanny how much it sounds like the 1920s. Here we are in the 2000s. So what used to be the center right, the CDU, the Christian Democrats, is increasingly right libertarian. And in that paper develt that is one of their mouthpieces, there was an opinion piece of Christina Schroeder. She's Christian Democrat and a former family minister. She's a big deal. Was early December 2025, she's claiming that Germany, quote, can no longer afford to provide all the supports for people with disabilities, whether physical or psychiatric or cognitive, that the UN Convention on the Rights of Person with Disability actually mandates. So aside from this obvious intensification of stigma of disability that she's engaging in shamelessly and actually one self advocate disability rights group has already called her out on this, but it's not like other politicians are shunning her. And this also comes on the heels of the Christian Democrat Henrik Strake stating again on De Vilt's television site that maybe old people should no longer be using expensive medicines again as a cost saving measure. It seems as though vulnerability and dependency are being denigrated. And Shea Schroeder and he too are doing their bit to prepare an emotional political climate for justifying welfare cuts and using the purported expense of disability care for arguing that Germany can't afford to have a functioning welfare state. So I would say that's the ideological point. And then, you know, there's my Ernest girl argument. I mean, I think a lot about processes of identification, not identity, which is a far too limiting way to think about human beings, but rather about the precious capacity to identify across boundaries. Jews with Muslims, Muslims with Jews, whites with blacks, straights and queers, et cetera, et cetera. Citizen trans. One of the things I learned when researching the prior book, the question of unworthy life, was just how unbelievably difficult it was for the courageous individuals that I refer to as the undehumanizers to get their fellow citizens to be able to identify with people with cognitive impairments. They just seemed so abjected. It was so important to try to get the non impaired, to see the impaired as fully equal and to be in reciprocal mutual relationship with them, and to unlearn the eugenic thinking, to see through how threadbare and ludicrous it was and to repudiate it. So the way I handle it in that prior book is that I quote Theodore Adorno in his famous essay Education After Auschwitz, and he was talking about the Holocaust. But I would contend that his point holds more broadly. Um, let me see if I've got it. A quote is the inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people. End of quote. So I would say it's a civilizational achievement to learn to treat people with disabilities as fully our equals, fully deserving of whatever supports they need, that we all need. The planet is boiling and burning. Millions and millions of people are on the move, in flight from poverty and wars and climate catastrophe. And we really do urgently need to accept that vulnerability and interdependence are part of human life, a much bigger part we'd like to admit. And so that's why I think we really need to learn from the radical and dehumanizers.
- [56:36]
B
And I find it very interesting how you draw on Georg Foizer, for instance. He's a professor emeritus of disability pedagogy. And his ideas actually resonate very, very much with some contemporary disability movements and with their ethical, political argument that being able bodied or able minded is actually always only temporary, and that it's not our human default mode, so to say. So when we reject such ideologies of superiority, of being able bodied and being able minded as a default mode, these ideologies of self sufficiency, when we reject these, we create very different ethics and politics. Right? So how do you hope your book will be received? And what impact do you hope it could have? In addressing these challenges while facing the global rise of fascism.
- [57:47]
C
I mean, first of all, Georg Foizer is amazing. It's one of the greatest gifts of my life that I had the privilege of having encountered him. I looked for a long time to find remarkable disability rights advocates, and he just blew me away. He's incorruptible. He's just so steadfast in his radical humanism and his clarity. I mean, honestly, he orients me every single day. So, for example, as we struggle in the US to figure out how to retain our decency and our capacity to show up with courage and providing care for students or neighbors or immigrants or anyone and everyone, increasing numbers of people who's vulnerable now to the cruelties of this horribly capricious current regime. And as it happens, and the reason I include him in the book, is that Pfeizer had the most eloquent critical analysis of this really peculiar German resistance against inclusion of children. I mean, other nations don't have this right, and even the United States was much more embracing of disability until Trump. So that's one of the reasons you recognize a fascism when you see what. But it's really peculiarly German, this resistance against inclusion of children with disabilities in the mainstream schools. And it's a resistance that, alas, is not confined to the AfD, but extends increasingly across much of the party political spectrum. I mean, they've really normalized this new cruelty with the exception of Die Linke. So Boyser just reframes the whole question as one about what kind of world do we want and what kind of life do we want? And I really love how he puts it, and maybe I should just read some of his points into the audio record. So he keeps noting that the obscene absurdity of the ways in which the current mainstream school system, even as Germany continues not to do as well as wished in international testing competitions, in the current system, children are being trained for mutual competition and efficient market exploitability. And this is all he reminds us, occurring in a world hurtling towards the destruction of the entire planet amidst an ideology of perpetual growth that can only be described as mystical, a world in which vast populations are already suffering and in which the survival of the human species is at stake. And in this context, he says inclusion shouldn't be thought of as some, quote, act of mercy bestowed by the majority on people with impairments or on people who, for reasons of poverty or migration or other circumstances, are marginalized and made precarious. Rather, he says, the ubiquitous rejection of inclusion violates the rights of the apparently non disabled. Also, forcing them, forcing us, quote, to live a life separated from people with disabilities and impairments is, he says, emotionally deforming. And I would even say it's intellectually deforming. And it diminishes the presumptively privileged in the development of their own personalities. So Puizier would argue that, and I've seen this, I've gone to visit a lot of successful schools where inclusion is working, that allowing children to learn in cooperation with each other and across the diversity of all cultures and abilities is what will best enable them to confront the overarching problems now facing us all. And in any event, he says, it's one of the few hopes we have left, that the life of people on this Earth might yet be structured in a more dignified way and on this planet be sustainable for at least a little while longer. Close quote. So to answer your question about how I hope I'll be received, if I can communicate that one core idea, that we are all deformed emotionally, intellectually, if we don't make ourselves open to being in relationship with vulnerability, that would be good. I mean, it's horrible living in the United States right now, living through a war on existential security and the rule of law. I mean, every day the rule of law is being violated by the powers that be. It's a war on knowledge and on the search for truth. It's a war on empathy and the capacity to identify and act in solidarity with others. And it's so important not to get numbed, not to tune it out, to keep naming what's happening as the completely unnecessary obscenity that it is, and to do our best to model that there is another way to be.
- [62:00]
B
Well, thank you, Dagma. I think this was so rich, so amazing, so enlightening. I think we really covered a lot of the book's arguments and maybe a little bit more. I'm very grateful for having had that conversation, and I think these were some beautiful last words, actually.
- [62:25]
C
Thank you so very much for your serious questions.