Dagmar Herzog: Der neue faschistische Körper

In the organizer's words:

The success of fascist movements and parties cannot be explained by fear and anger alone. The desire and pleasure of violence and aggression are just as decisive. Racism is particularly intense when it is erotically charged, for example when migration is portrayed as a sexual threat to German women. In addition to this "sexy racism", according to historian Dagmar Herzog, obsessive hostility towards the disabled is a fundamental building block of radical right-wing programs.

In her book The New Fascist Body (Wirklichkeit Books, 2025), Dagmar Herzog attempts to think together the intellectual history of these two phenomena - libidinal intensification in fascism and hostility towards bodies perceived as imperfect. For only those who study the emotional worlds and debates of past fascisms can understand and combat their current manifestations.

The author talks to sociologist Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky (Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität) about the historical connections between racism, ableism and sexualized images of violence - and explains how disturbingly present these phenomena are again today with a look at the USA and Germany.

Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She teaches and writes on sexual and gender history in modernity, National Socialism and the Holocaust, histories of disability activism and care work, psychiatry and psychoanalysis. She is the author of Sexuality in Europe (Cambridge 2011), Die Politisierung der Lust (new edition Psychosozial 2021), Cold War Freud (Suhrkamp 2023) and Eugenische Phantasmen: Eine deutsche Geschichte (Suhrkamp 2024), among others.

Paula-Irene Villa Braslavsky is Professor of General Sociology and Gender Studies at LMU Munich. She teaches and researches biopolitics - the intertwining of life/body and society -, care, sociological theory, popular culture and political sociology.

An event of the NS-Dokumentationszentrum München, Amerikahaus München and Bayerische Amerika-Akademie in the joint series Voices of Democracy.

The event will be held in German and will be translated into German sign language by the Museum Signers.

Price information:

Free admission. No registration necessary. Further information and visitor info at nsdoku.de/programm.