Worthy and Unworthy Lives

Distinguished historians Dagmar Herzog, author of The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century, and Sophia Rosenfeld, author of The Age of Choice: A History of Freedom in Modern Life, offer complementary perspectives on profound and long-term shifts in values characterized by conflicts over individual freedoms and human interdependence. 

What makes life worth living? Which lives are worthy of being cherished? Who gets to make those determinations?  This session brings together two historians who have reflected deeply on these universal questions. Whether they study concepts whose meanings are taken for granted and seem self-evident—like choice or disability—or look at topics that are hotly contested - like democracy and truth or sex and fascism—both are attuned to the very real consequences of battles over meanings and moralities. Herzog’s The Question of Unworthy Life reconstructs the long pre- and post-histories of the Third Reich’s first genocide—the “euthanasia” murder program—in its intricate entanglement with the Holocaust of European Jewry, but it also recovers remarkable advocates who, in every age, developed imaginative ways of encountering people with impairments based in ideals of equality, reciprocity, and human possibility. Rosenfeld’s The Age of Choice asks how we came to equate freedom with choosing off menus of options reflecting personal preferences—and how this development has changed the way we live, from shopping, believing, and pairing off to voting and exercising bodily autonomy.  Both authors are interested in the values that animate the past and continue to haunt the present.  

Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. She is author of seven books, including Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History, and Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe.

Sophia Rosenfeld is Walter H. Annenberg Professor of History and chair of the History Department at the University of Pennsylvania. Her latest book, The Age of Choice, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice. She is also the author of A Revolution in Language; Common Sense: A Political History, and Democracy and Truth: A Short History

“[Herzog’s] book opens new vistas on the past and present of disabilities. . .. Pairing first-rate scholarship with a deep moral sensibility, it restores emotion – and, when possible, voice – to those previously deemed unworthy of life.”

—Corinna Treitel, Times Literary Supplement

“Perceptive and nimble. . .. Rosenfeld has a knack for zooming in on seemingly ordinary objects, interpreting them in unexpected ways, and using them to reframe our picture of the modern world. . .. In The Age of Choice, she assembles an eclectic mix of everyday objects like menus alongside social practices like ballroom dancing, political debates about issues like voting rights, and high philosophy, reading those varied texts to piece together the story of the ideology of choice.”

—Andrew Lanham, New Republic