Whether in the inclusion debate or prenatal diagnostics, the dispute about how society should deal with people with disabilities and about the ‘right’ lessons to be learnt from the experiences of Nazi eugenics and the ‘euthanasia’ murders is not coming to rest. The lecture explores the question of how, when and by whom in the FRG in the
decades and by whom a radically new understanding of disability - especially mental disability - was developed and what headwinds the various actors had to contend with.

It was not until the 1970s and 1980s that an ‘anti-post-fascist’ generation was able to bring to life a new pedagogy for the disabled, including school integration experiments on the one hand and a de-hospitalisation movement on the other - the latter in the name of the 50,000 people with intellectual disabilities who were either housed in outdated large institutions or remained ‘misplaced’ in psychiatric wards. Historian Dagmar Herzog will talk about the secular-political and theological-philosophical arguments used by the activists - and how the cripple movement ultimately made the cause of people with intellectual disabilities its own - as part of the presentation of her new book ‘Eugenic Phantasms. A German History’ (Suhrkamp, 2024).

Dagmar Herzog is Professor of History at the Graduate Centre of the City University of New York. She has published widely on sexual and gender history in modernity, Holocaust studies and the history of religion, including Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge, 2011); Desire and vulnerability (Wallstein, 2018); The politicisation of desire (Siedler, 2005; Psychosozial 2021); Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an age of catastrophes (Cambridge, 2017; Suhrkamp, 2023).