Dagmar Herzog: Der neue faschistische Körper (The New Fascist Body), with an afterword by Alberto Toscano, (Wirklichkeit Books) 2025.
“In a context in which propaganda is often no longer easily distinguishable from enlightenment, documentation, and serious research,” the debate about the authenticity of images showing hunger and starvation in Gaza reached its low point in the summer of 2025: Not only did journalist Tobias Huch deny that the images circulating at the time documenting the deliberate starvation of the Palestinian civilian population by the Israeli military, he used the case of the emaciated boy Mohammed Zakarias al-Mutawaq as an opportunity to accuse Palestinians of provoking genetic diseases and having low IQs due to their sexual behavior. Unimpressed by medical assessments that clearly identify signs of starvation despite the boy’s pre-existing condition, and indifferent to countless other images showing underweight children, Huch’s X-Post aimed to degrade the Palestinian population by establishing a link between disability and sexual morality.
This very connection is at the heart of the new book by Holocaust researcher and gender studies scholar Dagmar Herzog. “Der neue faschistische Körper” (The New Fascist Body, 2025, Wirklichkeit Books) adds an important piece to the puzzle of current theories of fascism. The focus of what she calls postmodern fascism is on the “confusing connections between sexual and disability politics” (35), with the intersectional categories of gender, race, and class being supplemented by the important category of disability.
Taking the success of the AfD as a starting point, Herzog discusses in the first chapter the extent to which anti-migrant racism is made “sexy” (9) by stirring up disgust for disabled bodies. Herzog traces the “fear-driven (…) devaluation of any vulnerability” (9), which is conveyed through the eroticization of (physical) superiority, for example in AfD election campaigns, using five scenes that, not coincidentally, also play on the keyboard of the German Staatsräson (raison d’état). Among other things, Herzog shows how the devaluation of the Arab-Palestinian body and intelligence goes hand in hand with German envy of alleged Jewish intelligence, infused with anti-Semitic motives. Based on a careful reading of statements by journalists such as Ulf Poschardt and Mathias Döpfner, she elaborates on how this affective coupling of disgust and envy is used, on the one hand, to court Jewish intellect for (reputational) economic gains and, on the other hand, to affectively forestall the potential immigration of Palestinians who have lost everything through genocide.
In this sense, one could say that we are in a phase of preconditioning, which Herzog explains in the third chapter, drawing on George Mosse. Mosse had argued that the racist sensitization of Germans, who felt themselves to be a chosen people at the latest with the rise of the National Socialists, had already begun in the 1890s—along the “affective seam” (48) between the exterminatory hatred of disability and the sexual charge of “racial hygienic” procreation. Disgust and eroticism are the binding forces that work toward an ideal future, which is why Herzog speaks of “frontlash” (24) rather than backlash in relation to postmodern fascism: The attack anticipates and responds to a development such as the migration of Palestinians, which has neither begun nor is likely under the current political conditions of pacification of the “Middle East conflict.”
Emotions are excellent tools for such a preemptive attack, which is why Herzog considers their activation to be the strongest link between postmodern fascism and National Socialism. Their stimulation, and the open rejection of their repression, directly indicates that we are in a phase of fascistization and can no longer speak only of authoritarianism. For the emotional attachment to National Socialism also presupposed having penetrated the intimate sphere and revealed “the innermost secrets of desire” (41), writes Herzog in the second chapter. Even today, by focusing on the pre-political sphere, on feelings and desires, fascism is being prepared in the subjects and our “mental attitude” (47) is affectively preconditioned.
It is an important insight of Herzog’s that even historical fascism could not be reduced to a “biology-obsessed regime” (42), but was based on social constructivist theories of the mutability and malleability of desire. We have never been modern, not even in historical fascism; this is how Bruno Latour’s words could be interpreted in Herzog’s view. Even in National Socialism, there are signs of a concept of socially conditioned constructions of desire, as examined in postmodern theory. Postmodern fascism is therefore not a description of the present, but rather a kind of backward shock. Aimé Césaire coined the image of the shock triggered by the application of colonialist methods in Europe against white Europeans during National Socialism. Although transferring this image to the subject at hand is not without risks, it seems to me that the application of postmodern methods from the Nazi era is the shock of our present: The neo-fascist co-opting of the contestability of immutable truths (6), which is central to postmodern theory formation, represents a shock to postmodern theory formation as an echo of the past of National Socialism. Postmodern theory must recognize how its insights can be turned against itself.
The good news about recognizing the changeability of our desires and the contestability of truth is that, as Alberto Toscano puts it in his afterword to Herzog’s book, following Walter Benjamin, we can make ourselves completely useless to fascism by orienting our desires toward accepting vulnerability and not repressing it through fitness-asketic self-optimization.