Dagmar Herzog

Class of Fall 2026

Distinguished Professor of History, The Graduate Center

City University of New York

Fascism’s Lingering: Regime Change and Moral Reckoning

At the Academy, Herzog is working on a book project entitled “Fascism’s Lingering: Regime Change and Moral Reckoning.” The project examines transcripts based on 121 focus-group interviews conducted between 1950-51 by the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt/Main. Participants—Germans who had lived through the Third Reich—were prompted to discuss their opinions on Jews, Hitler, and democracy. This material has remained largely overlooked since the 1950s, when Theodor Adorno and his team were astonished by the profound and lasting impact of Nazi ideologies on the German psyche. They were struck by how strongly participants held onto extreme claims and how, often creatively, they sought to deflect any sense of guilt for Jewish suffering.

The project takes a three-part approach: first, Herzog will analyze how participants evaded responsibility for crimes against Jews while simultaneously reinforcing their belief in a morally superior “master race”; second, she traces the influence of these findings on three Intellectuals who dedicated their careers to resisting nuclear war, antisemitism, and anti-disability prejudice, respectively; finally, she aims to recover theories developed by Institute staff as they sought to interpret the profound moral damage caused by twelve years of fascism—theories that remain strikingly relevant today.

Dagmar Herzog is Distinguished Professor of History and the Daniel Rose Faculty Scholar at the Graduate Center, City University of New York. Herzog earned her BA in political science and French literature from Duke University and her MA and PhD in European history from Brown University. She is a leading scholar of modern Europe and has published widely on Holocaust history, sexuality and gender, disability activism, psychiatry, and psychoanalysis. Her notable books include Sex after Fascism: Memory and Morality in Twentieth-Century Germany (Princeton, 2005); Cold War Freud: Psychoanalysis in the Age of Catastrophes (Cambridge, 2017); Unlearning Eugenics: Sexuality, Reproduction, and Disability in Post-Nazi Europe (Wisconsin, 2018); and The Question of Unworthy Life: Eugenics and Germany’s Twentieth Century (Princeton, 2024). Additionally, Herzog has edited or co-edited seven anthologies, including Brutality and Desire: War and Sexuality in Europe’s Twentieth Century (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009) and The Routledge Companion to Sexuality and Colonialism (2021). She has received numerous awards for her work, including, in 2023, the Sigmund Freud Cultural Prize from the German Psychoanalytic Society, the German Psychoanalytic Association, and, in 2026, the Günther Anders-Preis für kritisches Denken.