Prof. Dagmar Herzog (CUNY) will deliver the 2026 Ursula Hirschmann Lecture, jointly organised by the Robert Schuman Centre and the EUI Department of History.
Dagmar Herzog explores the emotional workings of novel forms of fascism in Germany, highlighting recurrent themes of sexy racism and anti-disability politics in the Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) as well as their antecedents in Nazism and before — resituating Nazism in a longer history of lethal malice to the vulnerable and the promise of national greatness. In the present, disinhibiting, deliberately contradictory messaging, and the suture of exciting libidinal transgression with ableist malice, construct not a backlash but a frontlash, an anticipatory pre-emptive reaction against progressive inclusionary policies that have not even yet been widely implemented.
Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Her books include the prizewinning The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century, Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in an Age of Catastrophes, Sexuality in Europe: A Twentieth-Century History, and Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany. Her most recent book, The New Fascist Body (Wirklichkeit Books, 2025), analyses the libidinal and aspirational fantasies of contemporary far-right politics. As a 2026 Berlin Prize Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, she will pursue her new project on Adorno’s Gruppenexperiment of 1950-51, ‘Fascism’s Lingering: Regime Change and Moral Reckoning’.
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