The Question of an Unworthy Life – Eugenics and Germany's Twentieth Century

This landmark study traces the dark history of eugenic thought in Germany from the late 19th century, focusing especially on the Nazi genocide between 1939 and 1945 of nearly 300,000 people diagnosed with psychiatric illness or cognitive deficiencies, in addition to a further 400,000 coercively sterilised. The author traces how ‘eugenics emerged from the flawed premise that intellectual deficiency was biologically hereditary,’ leading to a corresponding neglect of economic and clinical causes of disability. It turns out that this genocide was the precursor to implementation of the ‘final solution.’ It took a long time for this to be properly acknowledged and for a corresponding change of attitude to emerge, with a universal extension of human dignity on the basis of individual self-determination and full social integration. Two further salient points are Raymond Williams’s insistence on meanings and values as they are actively lived and felt, and Theodore Adorno highlighting the inability to identify with others as the most important psychological condition for the occurrence of such genocide. Moreover, as we have seen with recent scapegoating, our predisposition for cruelty is displaceable and interchangeable by dehumanising the other. A profoundly significant historical contribution.