At the end of her final Adorno lecture on "Eugenic Phantasms: Disability, Power, Morality" on Friday evening, it seemed that the New York historian Dagmar Herzog was able to tell the story of a German civilization that began with racial hygiene and eugenic concepts at the beginning of the twentieth century which now, about a hundred and twenty years later, had achieved the “long-fought incarnation” of people with disabilities. An incarnation, for which the concept of inclusion, but also the prohibition written in the Basic Law to disadvantage people because of their disabilities, and the UN Disability Rights Convention.

But Dagmar Herzog's lively and gestural speech was accompanied by carefully selected images that not only illustrated what was said, but also opened up an additional dimension. In the last few minutes, they questioned the historian's encouraging result and showed a situation that was open to the future - but one that was also beyond the historian's territory. The pictures of short texts expressed the indignation and anger of people with disabilities on the occasion of the killing of four people in need of care in a residential facility in Potsdam a few weeks ago. And they underlined that those affected understand this act, presumably committed by a nursing assistant, as an expression of a continuing discriminatory view of people with disabilities: "Four people are dead, Ableism is alive",so one of the texts shown was overwritten.

"How do you recognize a crime?"

Above all, it is people from the German disability movement who deal in detail with this act, which for them does not appear to be an isolated case even today, but rather shows that they are still not taken for granted and treated as part of society.

This leads back to the second evening when Dagmar Herzog asked himself: “How do you recognize a crime?” In any case, it became clear that a look at the criminal code is not always enough. Herzog traced how difficult it was for post-war Germany to condemn the crimes of euthanasia and forced sterilization committed on a massive scale “in the name of the people” and to award compensation. The evasive strategies of the judiciary were varied. It is particularly noteworthy that in individual proceedings the courts referred to the essay by the psychiatrist Alfred Hoche and the legal scholar Karl Binding, "The release of the destruction of life unworthy of life", which was central to the social establishment of the euthanasia idea after the First World War, and the Duke gave their first lecture had dedicated.A Hamburg criminal chamber even summed up "that the destruction of the spiritually completely dead and 'empty human shells'" is not "absolute and a priori immoral".

Recognize crime as a crime

Dagmar Herzog described the circumstances of these processes as a “morally politically disorienting atmosphere”.

It was only in the seventies and eighties, she explained, that a new way of looking at disability was gradually developed: this required the activists of the new “cripple movement” and non-disabled allies who were now fighting for “the practice in the to redesign the lived presence of disabled assistance ”.

This also included, as Herzog explained in detail, a reorientation of the moral-political discussion in order to classify the murders and forced sterilizations that had not yet been dealt with. The publication of "'Euthanasia' in the Nazi State" by Ernst Klee created the conditions for this. Klee had not only worked up the facts of the extermination, but also fundamentally dealt with the fatal position of parts of the Protestant Church in the 1920s to 1950s, which, although in the name of Christianity, spoke out against the killings of Binding and Hoche and later the National Socialists who, however, broke the ground for the policy of forced sterilization and also confirmed the view of seeing disabled people as objects of disgust.

The destruction of this consensus was a prerequisite for the German Bundestag to be able to recognize the crimes against people with disabilities under National Socialism in 2011 by deciding after years of disputes, which Herzog traced, that “the recording, persecution and murder of people with disabilities and mentally ill ”was part of the National Socialist racial ideology.