Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900-1940

Central Europe Confronts German Racial Hygiene: Friedrich Hertz, Hugo Iltis and Ignaz Zollschan as Critics of Racial Hygiene

Central Europe Confronts German Racial Hygiene: Friedrich Hertz, Hugo Iltis and Ignaz Zollschan as Critics of Racial Hygiene Paul J. Weindling The new national states of interwar Europe were fertile seedbeds for the growth of eugenics as science, ideology and medical practice. Sandwiched between the two pariah states of Germany and the Soviet Union, Central European eugenics was astonishingly diverse. In part, there were influences from abroad. The Rockefeller Foundation sought to promote hygiene and welfare in the European successor states; social medicine in Weimar Germany had fertility control as a core interest; and there were socialist endeavors to produce a “new man.” Undoubtedly , there were heterogeneous streams in each country, which meant that population and health policies took on distinctive national forms. The strength of an articulate opposition to German race theory and the Nazification of racial hygiene merits comparison with the fragile political context of interwar Central and Southeast Europe. In this chapter I shall show how radical critiques emerged from within the Central European crucible, and how it moved from an initial concern with anti-Semitism, and the racial mythology of Houston Stewart Chamberlain (1855–1927) and Arthur de Gobineau (1816–1882), to targeting Nordic racial anthropology and the eugenics of the German ultra-Right. Three figures took the lead in mounting critiques of the scientific pretensions of racial theory: the social scientist Friedrich Otto Hertz (1878–1964); the biologist and geneticist Hugo Iltis (1882–1952); and the radiologist Ignaz Zollschan (1877–1948). Zollschan was also a committed Zionist, while Hertz was nominally a Roman Catholic, although his father was of Jewish descent. Iltis was also nominally Catholic with a father of Jewish descent. Hertz and Iltis were both socialists and secular in outlook. All shared a common background in the Habsburg Monarchy, where, in Hertz’s words, “no race could seri- ously oppress another.” Before 1914, their spur was the Aryan antiSemitic ideology of Houston Stewart Chamberlain. All three thinkers engaged with eugenics during the 1920s: Hertz did so as a social scientist ; Zollschan as a Lamarckian anthropologist; while Iltis did so from a firmly Mendelian position, rooted in biological concerns. By 1930, they rose to the challenge of refuting Nazi racial theories.1 While it is clear that German racial hygienists, notably Alfred Ploetz (1860–1940) and Fritz Lenz (1887–1976), were Nordic racial idealists, both were cautious in articulating anti-Semitic sentiments until the patriotic fervor of the First World War brought about an intensification of ideas associated with Lebensraum and German racial health.2 The Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene (The Society for Racial Hygiene), founded in 1905, was broadly Grossdeutsch in orientation, and had Central European pretensions. Unification of the scattered German people meant looking beyond the limited frontiers of the German Reich established in 1871. Ploetz intended the Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene to extend beyond the boundaries of Germany, to include members from Austria and Switzerland, as well as to cement links with Hungary . The Society also brought together Swiss nationals like Ernst Rüdin (1874–1952), alongside Austrians like the Munich professor of hygiene, Max von Gruber (1853–1927), and the Lamarckian Ignaz Kaup (1870–1944), a follower of the Austrian anti-Semite, Georg von Schönerer (1842–1921). The Society was proclaimed the Internationale Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene (International Society for Racial Hygiene) in 1907, and only in March 1910 was a national German umbrella organization instituted . During the First World War, racial hygienists rallied to schemes for expanding racial hegemony over Central Europe. Fritz Lenz contributed to Julius F. Lehmann’s bellicose journal Osteuropäische Zukunft (East European Future) during 1916–1917, recommending the racial value of population settlement in the East.3 On 23 September 1918 a meeting was planned in Budapest on racial hygiene and population policy, with notable figures in science, medicine and politics from Germany, Austria and Hungary invited to attend.4 264 “Blood and Homeland” Friedrich Hertz In 1902, Hertz published his first critique of “modern racial theories” in the Sozialistische Monatshefte (Socialist Monthly).5 This pre-dated the founding of eugenics societies in Europe, and was a critique of the rising interest in Aryan racial theory on both the political Right and Left, the latter exemplified by the revisionist socialist Ludwig Woltmann (1871–1907). Hertz attacked the writings of the anthropologist Otto Ammon (1842–1916), as well as Houston Stewart Chamberlain’s idea of racial breeding. He also refuted the theory...