Podcast interview with Dagmar Herzog on the 33rd Annual Lecture - Launch of new GHI podcast series

December 1, 2019

Views on remembering Nazi era euthanasia murders and abortion debates in the 1980s and 1990s

Four decades had to go by before Nazi-era euthanasia was taken seriously. Why did coming to terms with this part of our past take so long? Was there a (moral) relationship between the abortion debate and disability rights in the 1980s and 1990s? On the occasion of the German Historical Institute’s (GHI) Annual Lecture, Dagmar Herzog’s interview launches the podcast series of the GHI. The widely known professor teaches at City University of New York and has set herself a difficult task in outlining the development of the debate on the intersection of reproductive and disability rights over the decades. She explains why, in her opinion, disability and sexual rights are “late comers” in the United Nation’s catalogue of human rights. However, she takes one step further in her analysis by also applying it to the present. Listen and discover a highly complex ethical issue without black and white approaches or solutions.

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Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She writes on the histories of religion and Jewish-Christian relations, the Holocaust and its aftermath, and the histories of gender and sexuality. She held the 33rd Annual Lecture of the GHI in 2019. 

Her most recent books are Lust und Verwundbarkeit: Zur Zeitgeschichte der Sexualität in Europa und den USA (Wallstein, 2018), Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (Wisconsin, 2018), Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes (Cambridge, 2017). Her current research concerns the pre- and post-history of the mass murder of the disabled in Nazi Germany.

Interviewer was Nora Hilgert