Margins
Unlearning Eugenics book cover
Unlearning Eugenics
Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe
2018
First Published
4.04
Average Rating
176
Number of Pages

Since the defeat of the Nazi Third Reich and the end of its horrific eugenics policies, battles over the politics of life, sex, and death have continued and evolved. Dagmar Herzog documents how reproductive rights and disability rights, both latecomers to the postwar human rights canon, came to be seen as competing―with unexpected consequences. Bringing together the latest findings in Holocaust studies, the history of religion, and the history of sexuality in postwar―and now also postcommunist―Europe, Unlearning Eugenics shows how central the controversies over sexuality, reproduction, and disability have been to broader processes of secularization and religious renewal. Herzog also restores to the historical record a revelatory array of from Catholic and Protestant theologians who defended abortion rights in the 1960s–70s to historians in the 1980s–90s who uncovered the long-suppressed connections between the mass murder of the disabled and the Holocaust of European Jewry; from feminists involved in the militant "cripple movement" of the 1980s to lawyers working for right-wing NGOs in the 2000s; and from a handful of pioneers in the 1940s–60s committed to living in intentional community with individuals with cognitive disability to present-day disability self-advocates.

Avg Rating
4.04
Number of Ratings
25
5 STARS
36%
4 STARS
44%
3 STARS
12%
2 STARS
4%
1 STARS
4%
goodreads

Author

Dagmar Herzog
Dagmar Herzog
Author · 8 books
Dagmar Herzog (born 1961) is Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She has published extensively on the histories of sexuality and gender, psychoanalysis, theology and religion, Jewish-Christian relations and Holocaust memory, and she has edited anthologies on sexuality in the Third Reich, sexuality in twentieth-century Austria, and the Holocaust.
548 Market St PMB 65688, San Francisco California 94104-5401 USA
© 2025 Paratext Inc. All rights reserved