Inaugural Joy Foundation Lecture

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In this talk, historian Dagmar Herzog discusses her project examining transcripts of 121 focus-group conversations conducted by the Institute of Social Research in Frankfurt/Main in 1950-51. 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 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 deflected any sense of guilt for Jewish suffering. Through her study, Herzog 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.