Eugenics by Philippa Levine

Author:Philippa Levine [Levine, Philippa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780199385928
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2016-09-19T00:00:00+00:00

Race hygiene and the idea of the nation

The term race hygiene (Rassenhygiene), used mostly in Europe in the early twentieth century, was synonymous with eugenics. The German biologist Alfred Ploetz coined it to describe his vision of a medically centered eugenics aimed at preventing degenerative hereditary factors from weakening nations. Race could mean many things and was often used rather vaguely and grandiosely. It could connote superficial physical differences among people in diverse locations, but it often simply meant the human race. In the early twentieth century, it was also frequently used in place of the word “nation.” Maintaining the purity or strength of the race was hailed as a national duty, a vital means to keep the nation safe from threat. The geneticist and eugenicist Fritz Lenz claimed that the “central mission of all politics is race hygiene.”

In Britain, such ideas found expression in a call to “national efficiency.” A 1904 government committee found that military recruits among the poor were physically unfit. In a nation with a huge empire, an inadequate military was cause for alarm, opening the door for eugenics as a solution to a problem of national importance. In eastern and southeastern Europe, the political upheavals of World War I and its aftermath meant that many people in newly formed nations found themselves cast suddenly as ethnic minorities experiencing discrimination. For example, in Latvia, created as an independent nation in 1918, eugenicists aimed to reduce the “inferior” non-Latvian population to strengthen the “purity” of the race. Under Nazi occupation in the 1940s, an active regimen of euthanasia boosted this mission. When Ploetz and his colleagues established the first formal eugenics organization, the Society for Race Hygiene, in Berlin in 1905, their stated goal was to protect and improve the nation. Within a few years there were moves to restrict membership to the “white races,” and more radical members lobbied to limit it exclusively to those of Nordic stock; the winning compromise in 1909 was the exclusion of those not considered white. The category was slippery: Jews and Slavs were initially admitted to membership, though by the 1930s they would be pushed out of this and other eugenic organizations in the region.

All these ways to understand race framed the nation not just in cultural or social terms, but biologically. Nations in this racial and eugenic reading had identifiable physical characteristics amenable to biological and biomedical solutions to strengthen their borders and boundaries. And in defining the nation biologically, it was easy to justify not only racial but gender discrimination, given the central role of reproduction in both eugenics and in nation-building.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.