Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ (00:02.798)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Dagmar Herzog, distinguished professor of history, social welfare, women's and gender study at City University of New York. And we're talking about her book, The Question of Unworthy Life, Eugenics and Germany's 20th Century. Dr. Herzog, wonderful to have you today.
Dagmar Herzog (00:24.688)
I'm very glad to be here. Thank you.
PJ (00:27.31)
Dr. Herzog, first off, thank you for writing this book, very important book, really excited to talk about today, also recognizing the sensitive nature of the topic. But let me start by asking why this book? Why do we need this book, this history, this argumentation about the question of unworthy life with eugenics in German?
Dagmar Herzog (00:52.432)
So there would be a lot of different ways one can answer that question. And maybe one way would be to say 300,000 human beings, fellow citizens, were murdered on grounds of disability or psychiatric illness. And another 400,000 were sterilized supposedly on the fact that they were feeble minded. And I put that in quotation marks. And above all, nobody cared until 40 years later. In other words, everybody covered up and continued to identify with the perpetrators.
for shame on the victims. So that's a story in and of itself. It's a story about a severe care crisis with mass murder of those most needful of care is the response. But, you know, and then one could also say these euthanasia, in quotes, murders were a major stepping stone on the way to the Holocaust of European jury. And so the little genocide was hooked to the big genocide in the sense that literally 120 men who got their training and practice.
in murdering people with disabilities were after the Catholic bishop, Klemens August von Galen, gave his sermon in August of 1941, decrying the killings. After a few months, so Hitler shuts down the gas chamber phase of euthanasia and sends these guys to Poland to build up the death factories of Belzec, Sobibor and Treblinka. And there they commit a full quarter of what we now call the Holocaust. So I think that counts as a big story. But honestly,
For me personally, I had a kind of naive question, I guess. I wanted to study theological ideas about disability. Like, I wanted to see how those change over time. I was really interested in, you know, 120 years ago, this idea that God is all powerful and makes everything happen. like, is when people are disabled, is that like a punishment for some sin or is it a test for how you're going to handle it or?
Then is Jesus especially present among the weak and vulnerable? Or is the more radical idea is God self-disabled, which is a liberation theology concept that's been promoted for the last few years. And I naively went into this topic and collected a gazillion sources and started reading and discovered that the Christians were awful. And that was pretty upsetting to me. I mean, I'm the daughter of a
PJ (03:07.564)
Hmm.
Dagmar Herzog (03:10.234)
Protestant theologian. suddenly it's like, not only were they awful about the disabled, they were awful pretty early on, like before the Nazis. And they even like developed this floor theory that sexual sin was the reason for so much disability. And so they participated in intensifying the stigmatization of the disabled. And that like wasn't the stories that I'd been raised with, nor is it the stories that were in the historiography. And I was like, huh?
Not only was I depressed, I was confused about why there was this mythology that Christians had been so damn courageous. Everybody points to that sermon by the Catholic bishop, and they also point to a story of a man named Fritz von Bodelschwing who managed to save by negotiating behind the scenes with the Nazis, managed luckily to save hundreds of his own people. And I was raised with those stories and I thought, huh, something's not right here. This is obviously a church mythology that's covering up something more complicated.
And then I sort of had, it took a while. I started my research in Hadamar, which is one of the gas chamber killing centers near Frankfurt in West Remedy. It continued to be used as a psychiatric clinic after the war and they have a big archive. It's an amazing Memorial Center now. And over time, as I went to also to various of these places that had been institutions of charity and care and
went into their archives and talked with people there, I developed sort of three new questions. So the book is ultimately about 150 years of how Germans dealt with people with cognitive disability. And my first question was sort of, how do you explain the enormous appeal of eugenics? This idea that feeble mindedness is biologically inherited, which it's not. So it's totally scientifically shaky, but it was apparently enormously appealing to so many people. So that was like important.
That's a question. How does a lie take hold? Yeah. Okay. So eugenics was an international movement in the early 20th century. It was powerful in the United States. It was powerful in the United Kingdom, Scandinavia, but also there were versions in Italy, Hungary, Romania. It's everywhere. And it's about wanting healthier
PJ (05:10.271)
Forgive me. Can you do mind repeating what you just said? I didn't quite catch all of it
Dagmar Herzog (05:36.144)
populations. But it, right?
PJ (05:39.758)
I wanted to just add, so you said something about the shaky science and I missed what you said right before that. what was so appealing even though the science of it was shaky, like it immediately took off?
Dagmar Herzog (05:44.42)
Yeah.
Dagmar Herzog (05:52.046)
I said that the idea that feeble mindedness or any kind of intellectual disability is biologically inherited. That's it. That was the word, biologically inherited. That's the part that's the lie. Because actually what caused disability at the time was poverty, malnutrition, lack of vitamins and protein during pregnancy. But above all, those fevers of toddlerhood that caused encephalitis and meningitis in an era before there were antibiotics.
PJ (05:56.078)
Mm.
PJ (06:00.12)
Thank you. Sorry. I just did not catch that. Yeah.
PJ (06:18.158)
Hmm.
Dagmar Herzog (06:21.134)
the vast majority of people who had cognitive disability were poor, like 85 to 90%. Of course, rich people have disabled kids sometimes too, because there's loss of oxygen in the birth process, or again, these childhood fevers before there's antibiotics. But the vast majority were from the ranks of the poor. providing charity care for people with disabilities was actually poverty management. And that's why states contributed to it. That's why churches got involved in it and so on. The point is that
Blaming the poor and saying that they're biologically passing on this defect is scientifically false, but it was enormously popular. Blaming the poor was enormously popular. And the question is why. So that was my first question. Then the second question, once the Nazis take over and turn this movement of wanting to improve the folk and make it healthy and beautiful and smart into reality, they both sterilize hundreds of thousands of people of their own.
and kill those that are most severely disabled and the hostility to the disabled that they promote in their propaganda lasts. mean, fascism poisons people's hearts and minds and it lasts for many, many years after Germany is militarily defeated. And then I had the desire to uplift the heroes, the people who 30, 40 years after the war finally modeled a revolutionary change of perspectives and showed that other kinds of care and education were possible.
and other kinds of memory politics were possible. So that was a big issue for me was wanting to recover the, I guess I would say the undehumanizers, those who were able to identify with vulnerability and change practices.
PJ (07:49.678)
Hmm.
PJ (08:05.314)
The undehumanizers. I like that. Yeah.
Dagmar Herzog (08:06.83)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, they were my heroes. They're all through. They exist in every era, but the most important ones were the ones in the 1970s and 80s who really changed the language and changed the practices to the point that they've influenced what we do today.
PJ (08:23.438)
Excuse me, you mentioned the term memory politics. Can you define that for me? Or roughly, I know that's always a dangerous thing in academia.
Dagmar Herzog (08:36.298)
Of course the Germans have a long-winded word for it because they always have compound words. So in Germany it's called Vergangenheitsbewertigung, which means mastering the past.
PJ (08:39.76)
Always.
PJ (08:48.184)
How do you spell that? I'm just kidding, sorry. I believe you can, but I think we'll be here for quite a while.
Dagmar Herzog (08:49.808)
Well, I actually can. Yeah. Yeah. So Vergangenheit means past and Beveltigung means mastery. So it's about mastering the past. It's not just coming to terms within the sense of confronting it and like recognizing with remorse how we need to be different, but actually trying to master it and like come up with mythologies and come up with excuses and rationalize what you did and say, well, other people behave badly also. That's
That's what it is. And so if you want to do a different kind of memory politics, you have to look at what happened in the 1980s. And what happened is that the very first apology for having been insufficiently courageous in protecting and protesting the murders was in 1984. And it was just one Protestant institution. And it's a pretty incredible story that the deaconesses, those are like
the Protestant nuns in quotes, right, who worked in those institutions. I mean, they commit themselves to a lifetime of singlehood and service. They're basically the ones who provided the majority of care. Also for the Catholics, it's basically religious orders that provide the bulk of the care in these institutions, which Germany was very precocious in setting up. There was many more institutions for the disabled and many more basically remedial schools for people with moderate disabilities in Germany than anywhere else.
that's really a very strong development. So what happened is that there was a movie, I have never told the story in an interview, but there was a movie quite famous with Meryl Streep about the Holocaust in 1978, 79. And it was shown on American TV for four segments. And then it was also shown on German TV.
And Meryl Streep's banging on the door of the concentration camp, get me my husband back, and so on. mean, it's like a, it was a big deal turning point because it told the story of Jewish victims of the Holocaust in a way that non-Jewish Germans could identify. And so it really transformed memory politics in Germany at the turn from the 70s to the 80s. And there was a six-minute segment in this movie, which you can still watch. You can get it online.
PJ (11:14.584)
What's the name the movie? My apologies.
Dagmar Herzog (11:16.076)
It's the Holocaust movie. Here, let me find it for you. Meryl Streep. Here we go. Hold on. Hold on. Let me see if I can find it quickly. Holocaust miniseries. The subtitle, this is what I defined as the story of the family Weiss. W-E-I-S-S. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
PJ (11:20.027)
it's called the, it's called the Holocaust movie.
I'm sorry. Apologies. I was gonna try to, I wanna watch it, right? I was like.
PJ (11:38.104)
it's called Holocaust. Okay. So you were telling me, I thought it was a movie about the Holocaust. Okay. I'm tracking. Thank you. Yes. Yes. Thank you.
Dagmar Herzog (11:42.572)
It is both. are true. OK, and so there's a six minute episode in there that actually has Hadamard, but it's like a fake Hadamard. It's not the actual place where I did my research. It's not the actual place where people were killed. They sort of did a composite of various gas chambers. They imagined it. But what they do is they have a traumatized Jewish girl who's been
sexually violated by young, oops, uh-oh, uh-oh, hold on, ready to go.
I'm back. Yeah. So basically she's raped and she's catatonic, truly traumatized. And she ends up being put into a psychiatric clinic. And that gives the story the occasion to show us a whole bunch of disabled people, with her included, being led into a gas chamber. So that fictionalized, kind of mushed up, not very accurate.
PJ (12:23.629)
All good.
Dagmar Herzog (12:50.608)
a little bit problematic because it's like, she's not really disabled. She's just traumatized. know, like it's so it gives, gives the viewers a chance of identifying with the not really, you know, so you have like people with Down syndrome who are also being, but you know, like the person you're focused on is her. And so it's a little problematic. Don't get me started. But the triggering effect of it is that it prompted all kinds of people to start to want to center.
PJ (13:02.721)
Yes.
Dagmar Herzog (13:20.014)
the murder of the disabled in the memory politics of the nation and not only talk, it was part of a wider movement of the so-called forgotten victims. So they also talked about homosexual men who'd been prosecuted during the Third Reich, some put in concentration camps and so on. It also talked about Roma, what we used to call gypsies, right? And how they'd been persecuted. There was attention to various groups that had been excluded.
So they're not really forgotten victims. They're actually aggressively repudiated victims, but it was a wider movement in the 1980s to get these other kinds of victims taken seriously as part of Germany's memory politics. And it really required activist effort on the part of journalists and scholars. And for the people that are my heroes, it really meant that getting a more accurate story about the past was inseparable from changing practice in the present.
And to go back to the story of what I think is so moving is that some deaconesses saw this film and were triggered, traumatized. They actually had lived through the Third Reich. They had been forced with their charges, who were young disabled women, to go in these closed trains to the killing centers in the second half. So there's a
Phase of euthanasia that is gas chambers that kills 70,000 people on German soil, that gets shut down because it's not great optics, because everybody sees the smoke from the crematoria and there's a lot of unrest in the population. So that gets shut down after the fungalen sermon. But in the second phase, which is decentralized, where people are murdered by poison injection or starvation, in that second phase, double the kill rate. There's 140,000 more people being killed.
Plus there is people being killed on grounds of disability just to clear beds for soldiers on the Eastern Front and going into Poland and the Soviet Union. it's like, it's a multi-dimensional killing project. But the point is that these deaconesses had gone along with the girls that they loved and that they cared for, had never been able to speak about it for 40 years. And then came to the director of their institution and said, please, can we like confront this and talk about what happened at our institution?
PJ (15:34.701)
Hmm.
Dagmar Herzog (15:44.992)
And that is what then, you know, through prayerfulness and through engagement with the historical record and going, like digging out patient records from that time, finally, the director, who had sort of pretended like nothing bad had happened at their place, suddenly had to confront pretty horrible complicity of the then time director. And they did a beautiful confession of guilt.
And we apologize to God, and we hope, we are so sorry that we did not protest enough and we did not protect enough. And that, a year later, triggers the entire Protestant Church of the Rhineland to do an even more, in my view, even more impressive apology in 1985, where they actually don't just apologize to God, they apologize to the victims and their families. So that, to me, is a huge other thing.
PJ (16:21.091)
Hmm.
PJ (16:37.964)
Hmm.
Dagmar Herzog (16:42.81)
So that's all part of memory politics.
PJ (16:46.776)
A lot of what you're talking about and the work that you're doing, and I see this, I love the air quotes, I love the consistent use of quotes in your writing.
PJ (17:00.462)
Are you familiar with the essay, Politics in the English Language by George Orwell? Yeah. So this is what I'm thinking of this idea that we'd like to use soft, often very Latin words to cover over. And so one of your consistent things is to write euthanasia and then call it euthanasia murder. So use euthanasia in quotes. so a large part of what you're...
Dagmar Herzog (17:05.05)
Yeah.
Dagmar Herzog (17:14.148)
Yeah. Yeah.
Dagmar Herzog (17:22.618)
Right. Yeah. Yeah.
PJ (17:28.51)
You have a very careful use of language and of redrawing the landscape of language as a big part of this memory politics. Is there a connection there? I think so, but can you talk a little bit about that? Am I on the right track there?
Dagmar Herzog (17:46.552)
It's nice of you to notice. Thank you. I really tried hard. mean, one of the stressful things, of course, is that you're no longer supposed to say the disabled. You're supposed to say people with disabilities. That gets a little bit long-winded, but you want to leave with people first. Even though I also find there are disability rights activists who say, but you can think of the word the disabled in two different ways. They could be disabled by their surroundings.
doesn't mean that it's intrinsic to their being, right? So that in English at least it works. And even in German you can say die Behinderung, which means that they are being inhibited by or disabled by their surroundings. I think, you know, I don't want the, not about being overly PC, but I think that the quotation marks around euthanasia, that is now standard in German scholarship. So they want to distance themselves from something that was a euphemism.
because to call it euthanasia is to put it in the same boat with assisted suicide, which is freely chosen. this was murder. So that's why I often say killing, slaughter, murder. I add the language to make it clear. But the other thing that was important to me, there was a literary critic named Raymond Williams who came up with this notion of the structure of feeling, which is really important.
to how I think about what intellectual history even is. So I don't just look at the ideological arguments that are made, pro and con, some issue, but I also look at what kinds of emotions are being mobilized. And so I was incredibly interested in the ways in which early in the 20th century, there is language of disgust.
And there's language about, my God, the expense, this outrage at the expense that the disabled cause. Of course, people with disabilities cost other people money. know, of course they do. Care costs money. Costs other people's time and energy. Accept that. But people didn't accept that, right? So that was, you know, I'm interested in moral argumentation and how hard it is to mobilize people to care.
Dagmar Herzog (19:58.242)
about those who are more vulnerable. And so I was also then really interested, for example, one of my heroes is a man named Ernst Clay, K-L-E-E, who was an independent journalist, married to a Protestant pastor woman, had studied theology himself, and he was a non-disabled disability rights activist. Like the kind of guy who takes politicians, sticks them in a wheelchair and drives them around the center of the city to realize that they should be doing curb cutting.
PJ (20:26.658)
Yeah. Yeah.
Dagmar Herzog (20:27.896)
organizing all these people in wheelchairs to shut down the city of Frankfurt of mine in 1975, like at rush hour, to make a point about accessibility of buildings and so on. And he was great, but he also then ended up saying, I don't, as a non-disabled person, don't want to be leading this movement. I need to get out of this. And then he turned to writing about the past and he wrote this amazing book, Euthanasia, in quotes.
Ortenauzier in German, which basically transformed the nation because it was discussed in hundreds of radio shows and magazines and newspapers. And his style of writing captured the grotesquery of the killings and it captured the arrogance and the pleasures of the perpetrators.
So he showed that the perpetrators were having the time of their life, that they're not like agonized or under pressure. They are loving it. They're partying while they're killing. And that was an unbelievably important move to make, that he enabled the reading public to be disgusted by the perpetrators and to be able to identify with the victims. That was a huge emotional shift. So in terms of...
My use of language, I was always attentive to how those people who were defending disabled life as charitable life, cherishable life, lovable life, what kind of language they used. That's what I wanted to bring out. How did they show that you could love people with disabilities or identify with them or fight for their rights?
PJ (22:13.486)
Yes, something that I have picked up, because I know you mentioned this in the book and that you might have mentioned it here. I'm getting the two confused. I've like meshed together what you've written, you've said today. A lot of this language still exists on the eugenic side of things. Especially in, you talk about it being carefully modulated.
Dagmar Herzog (22:31.502)
Yeah.
Dagmar Herzog (22:37.328)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (22:40.294)
And the reason I think of this is you're talking about showing that the people who killed were excited about it, were happy about it. And in popular discourse, the move is often pity. And the reason I say that is it puts a lie to that kind of, they're pitiable.
Dagmar Herzog (22:48.516)
Yeah. Yeah.
PJ (23:07.096)
kind of discourse and of course I'm not saying that that's right either but it when we talk about them agonizing over it which had been the popular picture up to that point that's something that you're like well see they really do care you know we can argue about this but they it's like no these people are monsters and this is who you're siding with so I get not saying that either of those reasonings are right but one of those is one of those can pretend to a moral high ground the other one
Dagmar Herzog (23:25.786)
Right, right, that's right.
Dagmar Herzog (23:36.324)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (23:37.09)
You're like, that's what are you doing? Why are you here?
Dagmar Herzog (23:40.112)
Right. Right. I mean, look, we're living through a moment in history right now where social Darwinism is once again on the rise. Eugenic ideas are once again on the rise. This fancy fantasy of like good genes and high IQ is once again there. I mean, our incoming president actually has expressed to his own nephew who has a beloved severely disabled child that that kid should just die.
And that's intense to me, that there's no shame around that. that sort of fantasies of strength and smartness are once again mobilizing people. I mean, honestly, I find it pathetic. But I mean, really, like it's bullying. Pick on somebody your own size. I mean, it's really pathetic to have to trample on the weak. But of course, having studied
PJ (24:21.964)
And if you
Dagmar Herzog (24:36.25)
what fascism is in Germany, that's a lot of what it was about.
PJ (24:41.038)
Well, and so when you look at the the basic psychology of bullies, I'm not an expert in that but it I love you you mentioned Yeah, right. Well, you do mention that That inflated sense of self-superiority. That's like you have to find something to bolster that up Something I wanted to share and because I want people to understand how even well-meaning people can feed into this I
Dagmar Herzog (24:48.656)
Yeah, but we all know what they are.
Dagmar Herzog (24:56.677)
Yeah.
PJ (25:10.19)
took a graduate class and it was on like metaphysics of the soul or something. was at was at a trendy evangelical divinity school. So I was doing philosophy of religion and anyways and well so very old philosophical idea and this is part of what made me think of Joel Reynolds as you were you were talking here that what makes human people
Dagmar Herzog (25:24.388)
Yeah. Good. I'm glad it's being taught.
PJ (25:40.426)
What makes human people human? makes humans human is that they are rational. And my teacher is teaching this. And I said, is that really what makes people human? And he was connecting to the image of God, so on and so forth. And so we go back and forth. I ask him couple questions in class. Everyone else is kind of rolling their eyes because they just, you know, they want to know what's on the test. And or, you know, whatever they're supposed to whatever they're supposed to know for whatever.
Dagmar Herzog (25:45.616)
you
Dagmar Herzog (26:08.004)
Wait, like there goes PJ again asking all those complicated moral questions. I don't want to have to think about that.
PJ (26:10.502)
And I, I, yeah. Well, so I, and I'm like, well, but would that mean if you have this view of, what makes someone human, wouldn't that mean that someone who is mentally disabled, who is meant a person of mental disability, wouldn't that mean that they're less human? And he just, it had never occurred to him. Like I could tell, like he literally, like his whole face just went.
Dagmar Herzog (26:36.495)
Hmm
PJ (26:40.398)
so sad and he's like, I don't wanna talk about that. And we just moved on. I want you to know, one of the sweetest teachers I had, I loved him very much. He had just never considered it and he didn't see the ramifications of what he was teaching. so he wasn't even, it's an oblique thing, but it's just by excluding from your argumentation, this kind of a, you know,
the whole population, you're just not thinking about them. It's like, it's the intellectual equivalent of, everybody can walk, so we're going to build curbs without ramps. And all of a you're like, wait, we just left out a good chunk of the population. And I could tell, like, he did not know how to handle it. But it was so, and he was not looking to marginalize anybody. It was just something he had been taught and he continued without consideration.
Dagmar Herzog (27:37.144)
Right. That's really interesting because one of the things that's happened to me over the years on both sides of the Atlantic is that I'm, you people say, what do you work on? I say, intellectual disability. And people look up tight. So it's like, you know, they don't want to, but you know what? Like it's so striking to me. So I've had encounters with, you know, senior professors, people who think they're smart, you know? And then.
PJ (27:49.871)
yeah, they don't want to talk about it.
You
Dagmar Herzog (28:06.352)
I'll see them again at some other occasion and they'll come up to me and they'll go, I have a family member who's disabled. this is, I kid you not, this has happened to both South Atlantic. So, know, men who are older than me and, you know, carry themselves with a sense of authority are coming to me privately because they clearly are like working something out. And then inevitably when the story comes out more,
PJ (28:26.222)
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
Dagmar Herzog (28:36.802)
it becomes clear that it's a source of enormous shame. And that's just horrifying to me. So it's not just an unthinking exclusion, there is also the ongoing shame. And that's why one of my tasks in this book was to highlight those individuals who were refusing the shame, who were insisting on absolute equality, also with the most severely disabled person, reciprocity of relationship with those people, and a sense of possibility.
equality, mutuality, possibility, the sense that everybody can be developed. It's up to us to be in interaction with them in such a way. So actually, it's the Jewish philosopher of education, Martin Buber, that is really inspirational for some of my radicals in West Germany. And then in communist East Germany, unsurprisingly, where the churches are repressed, it's actually Christian doctors, Christian pediatricians who are the most amazing who come up with the notion of developmental care. I mean, I'm really
wanting to pay tribute to those individuals who developed, whether it's a theological or a humanistic response, but who centered the sense of deep equality, like really did not feel superior to the vulnerable. I wanted to show that that was possible and to document what they did.
PJ (29:58.176)
Forgive me one more time you said it twice, but what are the three things kind of the part of the platform?
Dagmar Herzog (30:03.66)
equality, mutuality or reciprocity, either one you could say. I mean, being in relationship. And the third thing is possibility and possibility. that's something that they the Western radicals got from Martin Buber, this idea that it's the responsibility of the teacher to bring out the possibility within the student. mean, I feel like that's a moral obligation for all teachers. We're not just
PJ (30:13.88)
Possibility. Thank you.
Dagmar Herzog (30:33.284)
We're not just dumping information into other people, what's on the test, you know, but I think our task is to actually nurture the possibility within them. I believe that anyway. the thing that those that Jurgen and Uta Trogas, who are the most remarkable human beings in the Eastern Communist East, who took over
PJ (30:45.442)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I'm game. Yeah, that sounds great.
Dagmar Herzog (31:03.176)
a place like tucked in the corner of Far East Germany near the Czech and Polish borders in the seventies. significant, some of the people who were survivors of the disability murders were still totally traumatized and living there. And they took over this place and they transformed it and they encouraged the staff to see possibility in every single one of the residents there. And they developed a concept called developmental care.
In other words, what had happened 100 years earlier in the 1870s and 1880s is that the charity institutions, all motivated by Christianity, had hierarchized human value. So they had, these are the educable, these are the trainable that we can at least have peeling potatoes or mopping floors. And then here are the care cases. The German word is Pflegefelle.
the people that you diaper and you feed, but you don't engage them therapeutically. And the crucial thing in 100 years later in the 1970s is to actually engage with the so-called care cases and say they can be developed. There is possibility. We can be in relationship with them. We can honor their preferences. That was a huge thing to have a completely different concept of what matters in life.
PJ (32:23.554)
Hmm. And forgive me, I think I understood, but if you could make explicit, when these senior professors on both sides of the Atlantic came to you, what were they ashamed about?
Dagmar Herzog (32:32.24)
I'm
PJ (32:38.37)
Were they ashamed that they had this family member?
Dagmar Herzog (32:41.538)
I think they were inhibited because they sensed the shame. And in some cases, it was a sibling who had a disabled child and they sensed the siblings pain and shame around it and didn't know how to interact differently with it. Like couldn't speak with them, like could talk with me about it, but not with their own siblings. So, I mean, I, you know, I mean, disability is.
PJ (33:04.28)
Mm-hmm.
Dagmar Herzog (33:09.548)
a life changer in the sense of you have disability in the family. This is true if you have parents who have dementia. Suddenly you're like totally changing how you interact with the people around you. takes a lot of time. You have to spend time with people. It changes how you organize your priorities. And if you have somebody who gets chronically ill, you're doing a different kind of thing. And I think that because of the ways in which a social Darwinist
survival of the fittest, the smartest are gonna win, the most beautiful whatever, because that's a thing that's out there. People have a hard time accepting vulnerability and weakness, but it's part of life. I think it's our moral obligation to come to terms with that. But I think that the injury to pride and to one's self-understanding is a phenomenon.
So I'm more like interested in this sort of uptight reaction to me. And then I realize next time they see me that I'm actually safe. That they can actually talk about their confusion about it.
PJ (34:15.202)
Yeah.
PJ (34:28.43)
There's a real...
struggle as a human being, it's very hard to admit that you're wrong. It's very hard to struggle with something that you've been blindly complicit to. Right? That's just like under and so that's a very, and I think not to give people an out, but to see a path forward to change, we have to recognize that people are going to have to take a journey. Like it's not going to be a light bulb switch, right? Like it's not like, right? Is that kind of what we're talking about here?
Dagmar Herzog (34:57.818)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. mean, nobody likes to be told you're not being very nice. You should be nicer. People react badly to that. But, you know, I mean, you have to make.
PJ (35:05.838)
You
Yeah, mean, you're, you're studying. Forgive me, I shouldn't laugh. just like, I, to go up to somebody and say, what do you study? I'm like, I study the euthanasia murders. And then as they're talking for them to recognize, they have the same attitudes as the people who did this. It's like, wait, wait, no, no, no, I'm not, I'm not one of those, but they're like,
Dagmar Herzog (35:27.408)
you
Dagmar Herzog (35:38.192)
Great. Yeah.
PJ (35:38.702)
Like the truth really hurts there where you're like, I have them having the same attitudes. That's really hard to handle. It's not, you're not just connecting them to, you're a bad person. It's like, you act like, it happens so often online that people say, never say this, like you were, you are acting, you are thinking like a Nazi. that's, whoa, no one's going to get excited about that.
Dagmar Herzog (35:41.328)
Right. That's right. Yeah.
Dagmar Herzog (36:03.3)
Yeah, it's hard. But I think it's also people think, Nazi's bad, Jewish victims, you know, amazing for having survived if they did otherwise honor their memory. If not, it's like that took. Do you realize that took a lot of decades also to get people to understand? I mean, that was not it was not cool to be a victim after the war. You know, it took a long time before people understood that.
PJ (36:13.964)
Yeah.
PJ (36:22.883)
Yeah.
PJ (36:28.066)
Hmm.
Dagmar Herzog (36:32.516)
being crushed by what happened to you is actually a normal human reaction. I mean, there was a lot of hostility to people who survived. I mean, in Germany, they were like, I don't want to give you your property back. I like having this house, you know? We should have called more of you. I mean, it takes a long time for people to acknowledge. So I would say it's not like Holocaust consciousness was there right away. On the contrary, didn't even call it the Holocaust. was like there were many, many crimes that the Nazis had engaged in.
But a lot of Germans were like, who were you Americans and Brits and Russians to tell us, know, the Soviets to tell us you also committed war crimes. Just, you know, this is Victor's justice. We don't want to hear about it. So I think it took a long time before, especially the Americans incentivized the idea of acknowledging complicity in such a way that, you know, Germans did a lot to
come to terms with their past. It's been an impressive learning curve, but it is also an ongoing struggle. Because sometimes people are like, I'm really tired of hearing about it. well, I mean, it's just, you know, people don't like other people being self-righteous. So then the question is how to stimulate people with models of courage and creativity in a way that doesn't make them feel defensive.
PJ (37:41.41)
Yeah. Sorry, go ahead.
Dagmar Herzog (38:02.138)
but make them feel inspired. I mean, that's what I tried to do then in my final chapters. You I've been told my book is too optimistic because I'm uplifting the people who show that you can be different. But I'm like pretty determined to do that.
PJ (38:20.872)
I think that there's an undercurrent here too, because you mentioned, and I don't remember his name, but the gentleman who showed that the people who were doing the killing were partying. There's that side of it. you're dealing, Vance Clay, you're dealing with monsters. But on the other hand, I've always appreciated Hannah Arendt's approach. At the same time you have monsters, you have the people, the banality of evil, who made that possible just by kind of, maybe disagree with that. I think it works hand in glove.
Dagmar Herzog (38:29.22)
Yeah, that's Aaron's clay. Yeah. Yeah.
Dagmar Herzog (38:47.715)
Ahem.
PJ (38:50.21)
I think both of them happened, but I would love to hear what you think.
Dagmar Herzog (38:52.738)
No, my point and Ernst Clay's point would be they are banal. They are monstrous in their ordinariness. I mean, the joke I make is that they're banal at the bar, not at the desk. I mean, they're not desk perpetrators. They are at the bar drinking after having killed all day, bragging about how to smoke from the human bodies that just falling is such good fertilizer for the fields all around. Right. I mean,
PJ (39:00.195)
Mmm.
Dagmar Herzog (39:22.008)
Yeah. Okay. So that's for a task and it's important so that you, that you PJ, we already go, my God, they're monsters, but actually they're ordinary. They're flirting with their secretaries who are typing the false condolence letters and they're having a great time. They're going swimming, they're going horseback riding. And then comes the next truckload of people that they kill. I mean, that's ordinary. Okay. So that's not a contradiction with Hannah are in spinality evil at all. It's just like,
PJ (39:23.726)
Yeah.
Dagmar Herzog (39:49.292)
It's not a death perpetrator thing. It's a having a good time. But you know, I like partying too. You know, like this is, totally ordinary. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But it's important. It's important to, for me, thank you for giving me the opportunity to clarify.
PJ (39:51.79)
Yeah. Yeah.
PJ (39:57.784)
Yeah. Yeah. I didn't, I wasn't anyway thinking that they're contradictory. had a different. Yes.
Yeah, no, no, that makes perfect sense. can see why. Yeah, because of course, yeah, anyways, that's a much longer discussion, but very, very helpful. But I want to make sure that I do ask, because this story you present, and there are several different strands you bring about, but the way that all of this became really popular is this really, it's seemingly complex, but when you trace it down to each individual element, it makes so much sense.
and the way that it all fuses together.
the all the elements that combine to make eugenics possible that make it popular. So for instance, the distinction between popular science and careful science. And I make that say like I won't say academic because, you know, there were there were academics who were pro eugenics, right? Like, yeah, but jumping. Yeah. So instead of like jumping to conclusions, you know, making careful science and being like, you know, maybe it's not all hereditary. There's some good
Dagmar Herzog (40:57.968)
Totally. totally.
PJ (41:07.714)
Let's wait and let's talk about this. It's like, man. if we, just want this. I mean, I see if I can, how many of these I can remember, but you have the ability to make inflated superiority, the ability to save resources, the tying it to national pride, the tying it to, hey, we should be able to have extramarital affairs so that we have a better, brighter, more beautiful seed.
Dagmar Herzog (41:23.81)
Mm-hmm.
Dagmar Herzog (41:32.303)
Hmm?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
PJ (41:37.979)
And the way that all twisted together I was like I was listening to I'm reading this
And I obviously not convinced, but you look at it, you look at it at the time, you can, it's so easy to see why it's popular. You're like, well, I'm a good German. And, and if I'm a good German, I don't have to worry about taking care of my disabled family member. I can sleep outside my marriage and I can, you know, I for the good of the fatherland, right. And it's like, it's so potent.
Dagmar Herzog (41:50.052)
Bye!
Dagmar Herzog (41:54.852)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
Dagmar Herzog (42:10.693)
Right.
Dagmar Herzog (42:14.98)
Yeah?
PJ (42:15.246)
So can you talk a little bit more about that? I'm sure you can give more detail about that. like that really, was like, you like one reason you're like, okay, when you layer all five reasons together, you're like, that makes sense why people were immediately like, let's, the science is good enough, right? Like I am a man of science, you some guy who's, you know, read one book that year, but anyways.
Dagmar Herzog (42:30.416)
Right, right.
Dagmar Herzog (42:37.134)
mean, thank you for getting it. I'm so grateful. You know, I'm so happy that apparently it made sense. mean, basically they made eugenics seem hot, you know? Like that's what it, that's totally how it worked.
PJ (42:47.278)
I wasn't prepared for that, but yes, that's definitely, yeah.
Dagmar Herzog (42:50.896)
But I mean, that's how it worked psychologically, right? I mean, that's so let me just be clear. There are many very serious German historians who insist that we need to say that eugenics was not pseudoscience. It was really science. This was internationally respected science of its era. OK. And that's very important. But I was especially interested in the fact that
PJ (43:04.27)
Mm-hmm.
PJ (43:13.26)
Yes. Yeah, it was. Yeah.
Dagmar Herzog (43:19.512)
senior medical doctors and scientists knew that cognitive disability was not hereditarily transmitted. They knew it just looked that way because poverty replicates across the generations. The poor have poor, have poor have poor, you know, like that's what happens. And they knew that it was environmental causes, but they were so intent.
on developing a seemingly scientific rationale that they presented as real science. They had this idea of recessive traits. So somebody might look healthy, but you don't know. Maybe you or your wife has like a little bit of vulnerability inside you that is explaining why you have this kid who's not doing so well. You know that there was loss of oxygen during the birth process that caused cerebral palsy, but they're saying, hmm, there must've been a vulnerability in you somewhere.
So what they do is they are looking for empirical scientific evidence. And so they start to look at family charts, clan charts. So if you had an aunt who was an alcoholic or an uncle who was a little schizophrenic, a little nutty, or this, you know, or that, there was like, if there was any sort of vulnerability anywhere in your family tree, like another sibling that had special needs and had to go to remedial school, then that proves it.
It must be hereditary. And so they kind of came up with a research project and got federal funding for it. You know, this was like these guys are career guys. They are death perpetrators. are like, we are going to say, hmm, is it inherited or is it not? Let me study these children and take their blood and measure their skulls and do encephalograms on them.
and then we'll kill them and then we'll slice their brains and then we'll see, was it hereditary, was it not? So they're creating a realness to it. And when they're making decisions about sterilization, they're you know, like there's a law passed to say that they're gonna sterilize and the very first grounds on which they say that you should do it is quote, inborn feeble mindedness. Notice they don't say hereditary, they say inborn. So that could have happened in the birth process.
Dagmar Herzog (45:38.904)
as and not been them. They do that deliberately to give the widest possible scope. But really what they want to do is get rid of ugliness and stupidity in the population. This is all a huge project of the fantasy of being the master race, which they are not. The master race had yet to be produced. As Gisela Bach, the feminist historian that's one of my heroines says, you know, it's like this fantasy of wanting to be the would be dominant group wants to prove that it's perfect.
So I'm really interested in this notion that the Nazi racism had two complementary components. There was racial hatred against the supposed outsiders Jews, which is also nonsense because of course Jews were German also, but they create them as outsiders to the quote race. And there is this racial fear about imperfection within their own group. The non-Jewish Germans were not so amazing.
they were imperfect human beings, but that's the thing. So the racial fear and the racial hatred were the two sides of the same coin. And so, you know, in retrospect, what I'm most struck by is the amount of energy that went into creating science that made it look like it made sense. And of course, because there's also eugenics going on and they're constantly in international conversation, they're going to conferences in England and the United States and they're borrowing from each other and
In the United States, there was a guy who said maybe 10 % of the American populace should be sterilized. They never got there, right? There are many fewer sterilizations in the US. But in Germany, there were fantasies of sterilizing 20 or 30 % of the population. That's a third of your fellow human beings that you're looking at and are thinking are subpar. That is like a narcissistic wound, an injury to your pride.
PJ (47:23.502)
Dagmar Herzog (47:32.58)
that they are wanting them to put a lot of violence into enacting. So I think it's important to stress that it was considered internationally good science at the time, but I'm also really, really interested in documenting the guys who knew it was nonsense and then come up with ways around that by either doing the clan charts or by having little excuses here and there, say we're gonna study it, we just know more about it, that's why we have to do this research. I mean, they basically people rationalize.
I mean, the scientists used the Nazis. Everybody says, the Nazis used the scientists. No, the scientists used the Nazis. It was a huge opportunity. They had human beings to do studies on. It's gross.
PJ (48:03.884)
So there's
PJ (48:15.284)
One. Yeah. Yeah. One thing I appreciate you mentioning that the sterilizations happened in America as well. That's something I feel like should be talking about memory politics. That's something that's not brought up enough in America, I think. But and that you you list these out in the introduction to your book and how all like it's very clear how all these work together, that there is a packing order for human worth. Like that's a big part of it, right? This master race fantasy. You've you've
Dagmar Herzog (48:26.266)
Yeah, yeah, right, that's right.
PJ (48:44.994)
we've dwelt at length on intellectual disabilities are hereditary versus accidental or environmental, which means that we can get rid of you. Yeah. Which like we can't like, we, are the problem. It's so much easier to get like, it's so much easier to get rid of a person unfortunately than is to get rid of the. Yeah.
Dagmar Herzog (48:49.274)
They're not, they're not. Yeah, right.
Dagmar Herzog (49:00.25)
Well, actually, can I just say, they claim that disability care costs so much money, but it also costs a lot of money to set up a murder apparatus. I mean, you know, it's like a lot of ruthlessness and a lot of elaborateness went into setting up sterilization courts and setting up the murder machinery. Like it wasn't, you know, a small investment. it's something like they're claiming it's about saving money, but really it's a psychological move, a power move.
PJ (49:30.146)
And that's, that your third reason is the inflated sense of superiority, which is like, and the more that you've even talked today, the more I understand this idea of fantasy, this idea of, I might not be perfect, but I make the cut, right? Like everyone who's talking like this thinks they make it right. Like nobody's talking like this and doesn't think they make it. And so it's like, I belong with, mean, it, it sounds so infantile when you say it like this and
Dagmar Herzog (49:47.472)
Yeah. Yeah.
PJ (49:58.976)
In some ways there is like a, yeah, anyways, that's a whole other thing. but the last reason you give, and I want to, if we could end on this today, I want to be respectful of your time. You talk about how they talked about inferior people, right? So we've gone back and forth between their language and like talking about people with disabilities. they're dangerous, disgusting, and or pitiable. And that.
Dagmar Herzog (50:16.112)
Hmm?
PJ (50:27.97)
component of it. One, mean, people have inflated senses of superiority. I mean, whether we're outside of this discussion or not. what I would like to kind of talk about the end here is how do we talk to somebody who thinks that a person with disability is dangerous? That one I don't hear as often, but I definitely I hear things like disgusting. I hear things like pitiable. I hear pitiable a lot. And so how
And you've given some great examples of you yourself doing this and you've talked about other journalists doing this shutting down Berlin with Wheelchairs that sort of thing but But yeah Frankfurt, yes, sorry apologies. yes shutting down Frankfurt But how do you what if someone's in a conversation what are some good talking points or what like is there a
Dagmar Herzog (51:07.536)
Yeah, Frankfurt. It's okay. Yeah.
PJ (51:27.904)
a good book to read besides your excellent work, obviously. What would you recommend to somebody? Read this book, read this other book, or try this way you found this effective to help people kind of realize the skewed nature of their perspective on this.
Dagmar Herzog (51:46.864)
Well, as opposed to reading a book, would say go work at a homeless shelter or a soup kitchen or go spend some time in a classroom with children with disabilities. mean, go do something. Put yourself into relationship with people who are vulnerable would be my recommendation and let that transform you. So that's, think, but that was just my response to what is there to read besides my book. I think that
PJ (51:50.988)
Mmm. Mmm.
PJ (52:00.248)
Yeah, yeah.
PJ (52:06.798)
Mm-hmm.
Mm.
Dagmar Herzog (52:18.86)
One thing that we need to accept that vulnerability is a part of human life. Weakness is part of human life, right? I mean, we're born vulnerable and we often end life vulnerable, you know, but there's all kinds of vulnerability all through. one of the people, man named Garek Foyzer, who's one of the boogerist special education teachers is one of my heroes.
He basically says it's emotionally deforming for the non-disabled not to have contact with the disabled. Like we are damaged in our moral and emotional development by not being in constant contact with vulnerability. Like that is totally compelling to me. He's one of the major advocates for inclusive education. So to have kindergartens just start with kids with disability, kids with cerebral palsy and Down syndrome and autism all mixed in with the other kids.
PJ (52:53.411)
Mmm.
Dagmar Herzog (53:14.984)
And you have to do pedagogy differently because you have to include everybody. But I have gone to visit schools now in person. Like I know people would tell me, it doesn't work. And I wanted to see examples where it does work. And what I'm really interested in is the places where it works best, is places that are committed to anti-racism and to understanding that vulnerability is about poverty. So they have like a social justice basis from the get go. So they have like.
PJ (53:18.808)
Mm-hmm.
Dagmar Herzog (53:41.998)
refugee children and children from Roma families. And then you have a little blonde girl with Down syndrome in there. It's no big deal, right? It's like they're already locating the kids where they're at, taking their questions seriously, treating them with respect, and they're encouraging solidarity from the get-go. So I've seen seven-year-olds in like little classroom parliaments, all caring for each other, all sticking up for each other, all taking an interest in each other's point of view. And it's like, it works.
And they're learning, you know? I mean, it's kind of amazing. And you see that happening, you feel like you're, it's like a little piece of heaven on earth. You feel this is how life should be. What kind of life do we want? Do we want more stuff or do we want more care? So, you know, to me, it's, mean, there's religious arguments. You can say we're all God's children, but
PJ (54:12.558)
Hmm.
Dagmar Herzog (54:34.2)
you know, or that it's a privilege to serve, that in service we are doing God's work. You know, that's always an argument, but I think that the humanistic arguments are just as important. What kind of world do we want?
PJ (54:45.966)
Thank you. I appreciate also including the religious arguments. mean, you know, having multiple reasons at our disposal is useful. So, one, you've already given a great recommendation, which is go serve somewhere. For the person listening at home, what would you tell them to think about or do this week?
Maybe it is just to go serve. What is the best way to find to get connected in that way? there a website or something like that?
Dagmar Herzog (55:22.832)
I mean, in every town in this great nation, there are people who are providing that care and they need help. Because everywhere, I just got an email yesterday about early intervention in New York City. And it's obviously people who are speech therapists who are working with the most vulnerable kids who, if you catch them early and do proper therapeutic interaction, maybe they'll be able to, you know, be whatever. And for whatever reason, their funding's getting cut.
PJ (55:42.862)
Mm-hmm.
Dagmar Herzog (55:50.318)
I don't know what's going on. I don't know if the mayor did that or whatever, but they're like mobilizing to protest the cutting of funding. mean, welfare is a huge part of human wellbeing and you can either do it by charity or you can do it by government funding or you need to do a combination, but everybody can find a place to help.
PJ (56:12.878)
Dr. Herzog, has been an absolute pleasure having you on today. You are a joy to talk to. Thank you.
Dagmar Herzog (56:18.682)
Thank you for understanding and asking all these good questions. I really, really appreciate it. It means a lot to me.