On the 9th of February, the Institute of European Studies co-organized an event featuring Professor Dagmar Herzog with a presentation entitled “Theology of Disability: Germany, 1900-1945.” Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History at the City University New York Graduate Center and has published multiple books, including Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in twentieth century Germany. Her presentation was on her current project, entitled “Eugenic Phantasms” or “God’s disability”, which looks at the theology and politics of disability in the first half of twentieth century Germany.
Herzog started her presentation by focusing on the book Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten Lebens (Permission to Annihilate Life Unworthy of Life), a famous text by Karl Binding published in 1920, which proposes and justifies the murder of people with disabilities (especially individuals with severe cognitive impairments). Herzog explained how it caused huge controversies among the population and how there were important theological counter-positions proposed by Christian authors. These authors, priests, and charity institution representatives argued that this idea was morally wrong, but they didn’t entirely succeed in doing it in a convincing way.
Binding and his camp dehumanized people with disabilities completely by calling them “Ballastexistenzen” (ballast existences) and they brought up economical, and social reasons to justify the plan of sterilizing and euthanizing them. Religious persons and representatives of care institutions for the disabled emphasized on how people with disabilities awaken the love of other people, and how they bring out the best in their nondisabled caregivers. The perspective of a significant number of those people advocating for disabled people changed over the following years, so that they were in favor of the sterilization of people with disabilities in the 1930s and some of them even of their murdering.
Herzog finished her presentation by invoking the horrors brought upon disabled people in the Second World War, thousands of them being murdered by the Nazi regime, often willingly supported by the institutions that were supposed to take care of them. After the war it would take an enormous amount of activism and a lot of time until society started seeing individuals with disabilities as human beings worthy of life.
Herzog concluded by answering questions from the 50 people in the audience concerning the role of the family in the caretaking of disabled people, the perception of disability among greater society, and the historical diagnostic criteria for disabilities.