People with disabilities were the first victims of Nazi genocide; “euthanasia” literally served as template for a significant portion of the Holocaust. Yet the initial postfascist decades were marked by ongoing shaming of victims and their families. In West Germany it was neither physicians nor theologians who, after the defeat of the Third Reich, developed a new ethics in interaction with human beings with mental disabilities and a fresh conceptual framework for care. It was a tiny minority of radicals within the special ed field – repurposing Marx, Buber, Fanon, Basaglia, and Sartre, and soon joined by “cripple movement” and deinstitutionalization activists – who first developed the un-dehumanizing paradigm which now serves as the basis for the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (ratified by Germany in 2009) and which has become the (at least aspirational) international cultural standard. These "antipostfascist" stories have much to teach us today.

Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where she writes and teaches on the histories of sexuality and gender, Nazism and the Holocaust, disability activism and care work, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. She is author of seven books, including Sex after Fascism (Princeton, 2005), Sexuality in Europe (Cambridge, 2011), Cold War Freud (Cambridge, 2017), and The Question of Unworthy Life (Princeton, 2024).

Pre-Circulated Paper and Registration

The pre-circulated paper will be available one-week prior to the workshop. The paper will be available to the Princeton University community via SharePoint. All others should request a copy of the paper by emailing Shachar Gannot at [email protected].

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