Episode Overview

Podcast: New Books Network – Critical Theory
Host: Lisa Schmidt Herzog
Guest: Professor Dagmar Herzog
Book Discussed: The New Fascist Body (Wirklichkeit Books, 2025)
Date: January 13, 2026

This episode features a deep discussion with Dagmar Herzog, a distinguished historian, about her new book The New Fascist Body. The conversation explores how fascist ideologies—both historical and contemporary—conjoin sexuality, racism, eugenics, and attitudes toward disability. Herzog draws connections from early 20th-century Germany to the present, examining the “biopolitics” of exclusion and the ways pleasure, violence, and notions of intelligence are weaponized politically.

Key Discussion Points & Insights

Introducing Herzog and the Project

• Background: Herzog is a renowned historian (CUNY Graduate Center) specializing in sexuality, psychoanalysis, eugenics, disability justice, and Holocaust memory. Her previous books include Cold War Freud, Unlearning Eugenics, and The Question of Unworthy Life.
• Book’s Genesis: The book originated from a 2025 conference assignment to address “the New Fascist Body,” prompting Herzog to interlink histories of sexuality and disability in fascist Germany and draw parallels to today’s far right, particularly Germany’s AfD party.
  (04:04)

“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 ... the founding document of German eugenics.” (04:04, Herzog)

Fascist Pleasure, Affects, and Violence

• Core Argument: Fascism is not only about people voting against their own rational interests but is fundamentally about affect and pleasure emerging through exclusion and violence.

“All fascist movements ... have this uplifting sense of feeling superior, of belonging to the powerful in-group—what I would call a narcissism boost ... an important part of the pleasure that fascisms provide.” (08:33, Herzog)

• Sexual Politics: Nazism is often misunderstood as sexually conservative. Herzog explains how Nazi politics were simultaneously pro-sex (for certain groups) and transgressive, providing “softcore” pleasure to the dominant group while institutionalizing exclusion and persecution against others (notably Jews, disabled people, and LGBTQ individuals).

“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 ... persecuting men accused of homosexuality as well as Jewish gentile couples, and ... denigrating supposedly dirty Jewish sex.” (09:26, Herzog)

Contemporary Echoes: Softcore Racism in the AfD

• AfD’s Evolving Propaganda: Herzog details how Germany’s far-right AfD party employs “sexy racism”—politicized, titillating images of women and sexualized xenophobia—mirroring earlier Nazi propaganda.

  • 2017: Use of sexualized images and slogans positioning “European” culture as liberating for women.
  • 2019: Shift to fear-mongering, sexualizing white women as victims of men of color.
  • 2024: Celebratory “remigration” videos showing mass deportations, merging triumphalism, cruelty, and sexualized spectacle.

“The AfD uses what I’ve come to call ... ‘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.” (04:45, Herzog)

Paradoxes of Church Complicity and Eugenic Logic

The Churches

• Initial Support: Churches, especially Protestant, initially hoped Nazis would restore sexual conservatism. Nazis instead appropriated Christian moral language for racial and sexual messaging, destabilizing church authority. (14:18–16:12)

• Christianizing Eugenics: By the 1890s and during Weimar, Protestant and later Catholic caregivers in disability institutions developed what Herzog calls a “theobiopolitics”—justifying eugenics and even sterilization via religious argument.

“They have a fantasy ... if they can learn to absorb this ... ‘scientific,’ secular, eugenic language, then they can repurpose it to scare people into sexual restraint.” (22:57, Herzog)

• Devastating Effects: Christian complicity in Nazi eugenic sterilization policies led, after WWII, to a decades-long failure to recognize anti-disabled atrocities as crimes.

Sexy Eugenics & Disgust: The Affective Logic

• Violent Pleasure: Fascist and eugenic ideologies provided followers with a perverse pleasure not only in sexualized racism but also degradation of disabled people—what Herzog calls “sexy eugenics.”
• Complementary Racisms: Drawing on the work of Gerhard Schmidt and Gisela Bock, Herzog outlines “anthropological racism” (against racialized others) and “hygienic racism” (against the disabled within the dominant group).

“Hitler’s racial insanity ... takes two complementary forms, racial hatred and racial fear ... anthropological racism and hygienic racism.” (27:36, Herzog)

• Fantasy of a Master Race: The “master race” is always constructed as an aspirational fantasy; no real population ever meets its criteria, justifying perpetual violence and purges.

Obsession with Intelligence: Roots and Continuities

• Intelligence as Fetish: The elevation of “intelligence” became an “obscene obsession” in German eugenics and persists today in right-wing discourse.
• Origins: While early caregivers recognized links between cognitive impairment and poverty, the post-WWI humiliation and desire to blame the “weak” led to the myth that cognitive deficit was hereditary—a “second stab in the back.”
• Sterilization Statistics: By 1931, up to a third of Germans were speculatively considered unfit to reproduce by this logic.

“It’s not as though you can just turn that money over to all the supposedly healthy people ... the whole idea becomes to sterilize the moderately disabled and kill the most significantly disabled.” (33:37, Herzog)

Contemporary Lessons and Dangers

• Current Fascist Rhetoric: Today’s right-wing movements, including the AfD and US libertarian elites, revive old eugenic logics to justify inequality, welfare cuts, and the marginalization of disabled people.

“This new fetishization of intelligence ... is above all a strategic deployment of the new right-wing libertarian elite, which deems themselves especially genius ... seeking supposed hierarchies in nature to justify ... their own massive thievery from the public purse.” (40:47, Herzog)

• Adaptable Logics: Nazi eugenicists oscillated between biological determinism and social constructivism, weaponizing whichever logic served exclusion and control.

The Paradox of Purity

• Contradictory Ideology: Nazism claimed racial purity as a given, even as policies acknowledged the folk needed ongoing purification—a “functional contradiction” that enables both flattery and cruelty, keeping followers invested and off-balance. (47:37–49:20)

Why It Matters: Solidarity, Empathy, and Vulnerability

• Ideological Trickery: Anti-disabled rhetoric serves an ideological purpose—masking theft and erosion of public welfare while flattering “intelligent” or “abled” citizens.
• Need for Identification: True civilization, Herzog insists, is measured by one’s capacity to “identify across boundaries,” to refuse abjection of the most vulnerable.
• Learning from Disability Rights: She highlights theorists like Georg Feuser, who argue that “able-bodiedness” and “able-mindedness” are always temporary and that genuine inclusion benefits everyone emotionally and intellectually.

“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.” (53:11, Herzog)

Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Fascist Pleasure and Narcissism:
  “That uplifting sense of feeling superior, of belonging to the powerful in-group—what I would call a narcissism boost … all right-wing movements provide their followers.” (08:33, Herzog)
• On Softcore Political Racism:
  “...the picture pandered to the pleasures of looking and of feeling superior.” (11:06, Herzog)
• On Churches' Complicity:
  “They end up merging theology and eugenics.” (22:50, Herzog)
• On Two Forms of Racism:
  “The master race was not a given ... Rather, the master race had yet to be produced.” (28:09, Herzog, quoting Gisela Bock)
• On Current Dangers:
  “Too many liberals and leftists still think they are the intelligent ones, and then it’s the dumb ones who vote for the right … but that’s just so short sighted.” (52:10, Herzog)
• On the Urgency of Solidarity:
  “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 ... civilized and innocent people.” (53:51, Herzog, quoting Adorno)

Important Timestamps

• 01:55 — Introduction to Dagmar Herzog and her work
• 03:31 — Origins of the book and key thematic links
• 08:33 — Fascism, pleasure, and violence
• 11:06 — AfD’s “sexy racism” campaign evolution
• 14:18 — Churches’ relationship to Nazi sexual politics
• 16:41 — The development of “theobiopolitics”
• 26:47 — “Sexy eugenics” and shared logics of exclusion
• 29:56 — Roots and escalation of “intelligence” obsession
• 39:15 — Disability’s unique position in politics of exclusion
• 43:00 — The “second stab in the back” myth and hereditarianism
• 47:37 — Fascist ideological contradictions about purity
• 51:19 — Why everyone should care about anti-disabled politics
• 57:47 — On disability inclusion and hopes for the book’s impact

Conclusion

Herzog’s discussion offers a powerful, multidisciplinary look at how fascist ideologies weaponize pleasure, sexuality, intelligence, and exclusion—past and present. She highlights the urgent need for solidarity, empathetic identification, and vigilance against resurgent eugenic logics in today’s politics amid a new rise of authoritarianism and social Darwinism.

For deeper engagement:

• Read Dagmar Herzog’s The New Fascist Body (Wirklichkeit Books, 2025)
• See works cited in the episode, particularly on Gerhard Schmidt, Gisela Bock, and Georg Feuser
• Reflect on current political logics that invoke disability, intelligence, or “deservingness” in social policy, and their historical roots