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143 Julius Tandler’s eugenic beliefs remain a series of enigmas; historical treatments of his reforms run the gamut. Some see him as a socialist hero, friend and savior to the working class, a physician of the people who worked tirelessly to improve the lives of working-class children. Others condemn him as a eugenicist , wielding political power to “reform” and remove what he saw as damaging and “inferior” people. Doris Byer states, “The decisive problem remained: who determined the border between the ‘natural’ and ‘social’ environment? The question of the boundary is the question of power.” Her treatment, however , acknowledges only natural selection as the perceived basis of evolutionary change, and she combines perceptions of hereditary progress with views of evolution that are linked solely to genetic predeterminism. This was certainly the case for many eugenicists; but, as Kammerer’s productive eugenics shows, not for all. For Kammerer and Tandler, the border between the social and natural was entirely fuzzy, and quite different messages could be taken from the power of biology, depending on how that line was drawn. This is not to deny that Tandler and others wielded great power over people’s lives, power they sometimes applied impersonally and with the potential to manipulate. Rather, it presents a more historically nuanced view of the motives and the biology behind that power.1 Gerhard Baader and Monika Löscher present Tandler from a more measured middle ground. Baader acknowledges both the Janus-faced character of Tandler’s language, which sometimes linked his ideas to negative eugenics, and the foundation of his reforms in the environmental stance of his science. Tandler often referred to race hygiene and to selection; but unlike much German race hygiene, he also relied heavily on the inheritance of acquired characteristics . Baader presents Tandler’s reliance on use inheritance as a key 7 Tandler’s Eugenic Enigmas 144 PART II REFORM EUGENICS difference between postwar Austrian and postwar German eugenics. But he interprets that difference using the distinction between negative and positive eugenics. In Baader’s view, Tandler was a positive eugenicist whose reforms promoted the greater breeding of the fit. A more contextualized view of Tandler instead acknowledges the extent to which he was, or was not, employing a version of Kammerer’s productive eugenics. Tandler, too, believed in the productive power of development. He had even anticipated Kammerer in framing that power via the interstitial cells and somatic induction. But by the late 1920s, acceptance of the inheritance of acquired characteristics was in decline, and the political situation surrounding that decline was dangerously complex. Löscher’s work emphasizes the wide range of views represented by Austrian eugenicists, including the powerful Catholic Church. She places Tandler with the socialists and notes his reluctance to use force and his emphasis on voluntary means of control. But she also stresses the ambiguities in Tandler’s language and the potential for abuse implied in his social engineering. She captures those ambiguities succinctly: “One can always refute Tandler with Tandler.”2 I agree; Tandler’s language confuses our interpretation of his goals. But I also argue that few accounts of Tandler fully explore the impact of debates about the inheritance of acquired characteristics and their relationship to the ethics of responsibility in his thinking. Some authors seem to assume that because he recognized the dangers of “poor breeding,” Tandler must therefore have sought to increase negative selection to weed out the unfit or improve positive selection to promote the fit. But at least in the early postwar years, selection of any kind was not Tandler’s preferred method. Recognizing the dangers of unregulated selection did not entail the use of selection to reverse the trend. As discussed in the last chapter, though he considered them, Tandler usually rejected them, preferring his condition hygiene. In what follows, I link Tandler’s science with features of his reform philosophy to interpret these ambiguities and situate his view of nature and nurture in the context of the political tensions and eugenic debates occurring among the scientists in interwar Austria. The theories of sociologist Rudolf Goldscheid, on whom both Kammerer and Tandler relied, provide an important key. Tandler drew on Goldscheid’s Darwinian sociology and Kammerer’s extension of endocrinology to promote somatic induction. He regularly referred to the former, but almost never to the latter, despite numerous similarities between his and Kammerer ’s views. Examining the enigmatic relationship between Tandler’s task and Kammerer’s productive eugenics reveals the political...

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