Abstract
“The Great War was a eugenics nightmare”1 considering the astounding casualties. Germany lost nearly two million people, followed by Russia with an almost equal number and by France with approximately a million and a half casualties.2 A military conflict of such magnitude was certainly beyond the wildest imagination of those who, prior to 1914, glorified war as a means to revolutionise the stale condition of modernity. If the literary and artistic avant-garde depicted war as a therapeutic response to a long process of cultural malaise and degeneration, most politicians believed the time had come for a rearrangement of Europe’s political order. All groups, however, deemed the existing European system of power and political alliances as unable to cope with the new forms of nationalism, imperialism and political anarchism that arose in the early twentieth century. Take, for instance, the Italian poet and founder of the Futurist avant-garde, Filippo Marinetti who famously portrayed war as “the world’s only hygiene” in 1909.3 Modernists believed that when all cultural values had proven themselves inadequate, the rejuvenation of the national community could only result from the existing order’s total transformation. Their longing for a spiritual renewal grounded in the hope that the nation would ultimately be saved by the violent transgression of all existing boundaries, as expressed in Marinetti’s address to the Italian students: “[o]ur ultra-violet, anti-clerical, and anti-traditionalist nationalism is based on the inexhaustible vitality of Italian blood and the struggle against the ancestor-cult, which far from cementing the race, makes it anaemic and putrid.”4
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Notes
Richard A. Soloway, Demography and Degeneration. Eugenics and the Declining Birthrate in Twentieth-Century Britain (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1995), 138.
The data is from Michael Howard, The First World War. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 122. Other excellent discussions of the First World War include Niall Ferguson, The Pity of War (London: Allen Lane, 1998); Roland Stromberg, Redemption by War. The Intellectuals and 1914 (Kansas: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1982); and Ian F. W. Beckett, The Great War, 1914–18, 2nd edn. (London: Longman, 2007).
F. T. Marinetti, “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism 1909,” in Futurist Manifestos, ed. by Umbro Apollonio (London: Thames and Hudson, 1973), 22.
Filipo T. Marinetti, “Manifesto agli studenti” in Roger Griffin, ed., Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 26.
Quoted in Roger Griffin, Fascism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 190.
John Alexander Williams, “Ecstasies of the Young: Sexuality, the Youth Movement, and Moral Panic in Germany on the Eve of the First World War,” Central European History 34, 2 (2001): 163–89.
Emilio Gentile, “The Myth of National Regeneration in Italy. From Modernist Avant-Garde to Fascism,” in Mattew Affron and Mark Antliff, eds., Fascist Visions (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997), 38.
Kevin Repp, “ ‘More Corporeal, More Concrete’: Liberal Humanism, Eugenics, and German Progressives at the Last Fin de Siècle,” The Journal of Modern History 72, 3 (2000): 683.
Karl Pearson, National Life from the Standpoint of Science (London: A & C. Black, 1901).
J. A. Lindsay, “The Eugenic and Social Influence of the War,” The Eugenics Review 10, 3 (1918): 133.
J. Arthur Thomson, “Eugenics and War,” The Eugenics Review 6, 1 (1915): 4–5. [italics in the original]
J. Arthur Thomson, “Eugenics and War,” The Eugenics Review 6, 1 (1915): 13.
Ibid., 14.
J. A. Lindsay, “Eugenics and the Doctrine of the Super-Man,” The Eugenics Review 6, 3 (1915): 247–62.
Lajos Méhely, A háború biológiája (Budapest: Pallas, 1915), 24.
Ibid.
Theodore G. Chambers, “Eugenics and the War,” The Eugenics Review 6 (1914/1915): 284.
Ibid., 245.
Todd Presner, Muscular Judaism: The Jewish Body and the Politics of Regeneration (New York: Routledge, 2007), 194–5. See also Maurice Fishberg, “Eugenics in Jewish Life,” The Journal of Heredity 8, 12 (1917): 543–9.
May Sinclair, The Tree of Heaven (London: Cassell, 1917).
István Deák, Beyond Nationalism: A Social and Political History of the Habsburg Officer Corps, 1848–1918 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 195.
G. Sergi, “L’eugenica e la Guerra,” Nuova Antologia 51, 1064 (1916): 135. Quoted in Francesco Cassata, Molti, sani e forti. L’eugenica in Italia (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 2006), 55.
Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (London: Penguin Books, 2004), 160 [first edition 1871].
(Anonymous), “Eugenics and War,” The Lancet 187, 4830 (1916): 685. For similar views, see also Leonard Darwin, “Eugenics During and After the War,” The Eugenics Review 7, 2 (1915): 91–106.
See, for example, Gabriel Petit, Maurice Leudet, eds., Les Allemands et la science (Paris: Felix Alcan, 1916).
Max von Gruber, Krieg, Frieden und Biologie (Berlin: Carl Heymann, 1915), 14.
G. Poisson, “La race germanique et sa prétendue supériorité,” Revue anthropologique 26, 1 (1916): 25–43.
L. Capitan, “Les caractères d’inferiorité morbide des Austro-Allemands,” Revue anthropologiques 26, 2 (1916): 75–80. Perhaps the most disturbing feature of this profoundly pathological discourse of racial identity is Capitan’s argument that “polychesia” (excessive defecation) and “bro-midrosis” (body odor) were distinctive “ethnic” traits. Not surprisingly, then, that in 1917 the Society of Medicine in Paris published a report on the widespread encounter of these diseases in the “German race.”
Anon., “Eugenics and the War,” The Eugenics Review 6, 3 (1914): 195–203.
F. Savorgnan, La Guerra e la popolazione (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1917), 93.
Corrado Gini, “The War from the Eugenic Point of View,” in Eugenics in Race and State: Scientific Papers of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, vol. 2 (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1923), 430.
Leonard Darwin, “On the Statistical Enquiries Needed after the War in Connection with Eugenics,” Journal of the Royal Statistical Society 7, 2 (1916): 160.
Ibid., 161.
Ibid., 162.
Ibid., 195–6. Emphasis in the original.
Ibid., 170.
Géza Hoffmann, “Fajegészségtan és népesedési politika,” Természettudományi közlöny 48, 19/20 (1916): 618.
Géza von Hoffmann, Krieg und Rassenhygiene. Die bevölkerungspolitischen Aufgaben nach dem Kriege (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1916), 7.
Ibid., 10–12.
Ibid., 16.
Ibid.
Georg F. Nicolai, The Biology of War (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1919) [first edition 1917].
See J. Tandler, “Bevölkerungspolitische Probleme und Ziele,” in Der Wiederaufbau der Volkskraft nach dem Kriege (Jena: Verlag von Gustav Fischer, 1918), 95–110.
Leonard Darwin, “Quality not Quantity,” The Eugenics Review 7, 4 (1916): 320.
Ibid., 321.
István Apáthy, “A fajegészségügyi (eugenikai) szakosztály meg-alakulása,” Magyar Társadalomtudományi Szemle 7 (1914): 170.
See Marius Turda, “The Biology of War: Eugenics in Hungary, 1914–1918,” Austrian History Yearbook 40, 1 (2009): 238–64.
Ladislav Haskovec, “The Eugenics Movement in the Czechoslovak Republic,” in Eugenics in Race and State: Scientific Papers of the Second International Congress of Eugenics, vol. 2 (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1923), 440.
Lucien March, “Some Attempts towards Race Hygiene in France during the War,” The Eugenics Review 9,4 (1918): 198.
Géza von Hoffmann, “Eugenics in Germany,” The Journal of Heredity 5, 10 (1914): 435.
Ibid., 345–6.
Hermann W. Siemens, Die biologischen Grundlagen der Rassenhygiene und der Bevölkerungspolitik (Munich: J. F. Lehmann, 1917).
The programme of the Society was published in Mitteilungen der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Bevölkerungspolitik 1, 1 (1916): 1–4.
Géza von Hoffmann, “Drohende Verflachung und Einseitigkeit rassenhygienischer Bestrebungen in Deutschland,” Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie 12, 3/4 (1917): 343–5.
Von Behr-Pinnow, “Zu welchen bevölkerungspolitischen Maßnahmen muß uns der Krieg veranlassen?” Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie 11, 3 (1915): 333–43.
Seth Koven, “Remembering and Dismemberment: Crippled Children, Wounded Soldiers, and the Great War in Great Britain,” The American Historical Review 99, 4 (1994): 1169.
Neil MacMaster, Racism in Europe, 1870–2000 (Basingstoke: Palgrave — now Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 46.
H. Stöcker, “Staatlicher Gebärzwang oder Rassenhygiene,” Neue Generation 10, 3 (1914): 134–49.
János Bársony, “Eugenetik nach dem Kriege,” Archiv für Frauenkunde und Eugenetik 2, 2 (1915): 268.
Ibid., 272.
Ibid., 275.
L. M. Bossi, “Per la difesa della dona e della razza,” Laginecologia moderna 10 (1917): 128. Quoted in Cassata, Molti, sani e forti, 74. Thanks are due to Erin O’Loughlin for the translation.
Wilhelm Schallmayer, “Zur Bevölkerungspolitik gegenüber dem durch den Krieg verursachten Frauenüberschuß,” Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie 11, 6 (1915): 713–37.
See Tara Zahra, Kidnapped Souls: National Indifference and the Battle for Children in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1948 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2008); Richard Allen Soloway, Birth Control and the Population Question in England, 1877–1930 (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982); Edward Ross Dickinson, The Politics of German Child Welfare from the Empire to the Federal Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996); Richard Wall, Jay Winter, eds., The Upheaval of War: Family, Work and Welfare in Europe, 1914–1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
See Ann Taylor Allen, “Feminism and Eugenics in Germany and Britain, 1900–1940: A Comparative Perspective,” German Studies Review 23, 3 (2000): 477–505; and Nancy Wingfield and Maria Bucur, eds., Gender and War in Twentieth Century Eastern Europe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).
Kristen Stromberg Childers, Fathers, Families, and the State, 1914–1945 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003), 3.
Richard Allen Soloway, Birth Control and the Population Question in England, 1877–1930 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 173.
In 1916, a conference was organised in Berlin dealing with the problem of demography, eugenics and population policy. See Die Erhaltung und Vermehrung der deutschen Volkskraft. Verhandlungen der 8. Konferenz der Zentralstelle für Volkswohlfahrt in Berlin vom 26. bis 28. Oktober 1915 (Berlin: Heymann, 1916). In Hungary, a conference on national hygiene was organised in 1918. See Béla Fenyvessy, József Madzsar, eds., A népegészségi országos nagygyűlés munkálatai (Budapest: Eggenberger, 1918). There were, however, conferences aiming at an international consensus, such was the conference on preventive medicine organised with German, Austrian, Hungarian and Bulgarian doctors in Berlin in February 1918 and the Austro-Hungarian conference on child rearing and protection organised in 1918 in Vienna. The first German and Austro-Hungarian conference on racial hygiene and population policy, although announced for September 1918 did not take place.
See Marius Turda, “The First Debates on Eugenics in Hungary, 1910–1918,” in Turda, Weindling, eds., Blood and Homeland, 185–221.
Géza von Hoffmann, “Eugenics in the Central Empires since 1914,” Social Hygiene 7, 3 (1921): 291.
Ibid., 291–4.
István Apáthy, “A fajegészségtan köre és feladatai,” Természettudományi Közlöny 50, 691/2, part 2 (1918): 86.
Géza von Hoffmann, “Rassenhygiene in Ungarn,” Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie, 14, 1 (1918): 55–67.
See, for example, A. L. Galéot, L’avenir de la race: Le problème du peuplement en France (Paris: Nouvelle librairie nationale, 1917).
Modris Ekstein, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (London: Macmillan, 2000), 325. [first edition 1989]
Theodore Szél, “The Genetic Effects of War in Hungary,” in Scientific Papers of the Third International Congress of Eugenics (Baltimore: Williams & Wilkins, 1934), 251.
Ibid., 252.
Ibid., 254.
George L. Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 7.
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Turda, M. (2010). War: The World’s Only Hygiene, 1914–1918. In: Modernism and Eugenics. Modernism and …. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230281332_3
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