Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945

Typhus, Turks, and Roma: Hygiene and Ethnic Difference in Bulgaria, 1912–1944

88 Christian Promitzer The conclusion of this assessment was rather dry: “The central sanitary administration calls special attention to the delousing of the populations of Turks and Roma of these districts as careful investigations have shown that these groups are the cause for typhus.”2 It would be problematic to simply interpret such warnings within the narrow framework of medicine. In the 1920s Bulgaria was haunted by various warnings together with both real and perceived threats. This wary state of Bulgarian public and state institutions had its roots in the unfavorable outcome of World War I. The defeat had frustrated aspirations for a Greater Bulgaria: the peace treaty with its reparation payments and postwar inflation had shaken the state’s already weak economy and ultimately, resulted in political instability as witnessed in, for example, the coup d’état that toppled the government of the left-wing Bulgarian Agrarian Union in 1923; an unsuccessful Communist uprising in the same year; or a severe assault on the elite of the country in 1925, also organized by the Communists, contributing to a feeling of uncertainty among the middle classes and to an introspective mood among Bulgarian intellectuals.3 The possible danger of typhus emanating from the Turks and Roma—two ethnic groups who were already subject to suspicion because of their perceived failure to integrate into the Bulgarian nation-state—only aggravated an already tense situation. These two ethnic groups were connected with the despised Ottoman past, (the so-called “Turkish Yoke”), which Bulgarian intellectuals held responsible for the Orientalization of their country, and its state of relative backwardness , which became particularly apparent during the interwar period.4 The ascription of particular diseases to certain ethnic groups seems to be the resumption of an old tune that had already made the Jews responsible for the Black Death in 1348–49 and which, in the nineteenth century, was recreated by the representatives of classical epidemiology. As Peter Baldwin has pointed out in his work on prevention politics in the modern era: “Each nation had its favorite epidemiological whipping boy: Poles and Galicians for the Germans, Russians for the Swedes, Irish for the English, Spanish for 2 Arhiv na Glavnata direktsiyata na narodnoto zdrave 1 (1932): 75. 3 See Maria Todorova, “The Course and Discourses of Bulgarian Nationalism,” in Peter Sugar, ed., Eastern European Nationalism in the Twentieth Century (Washington: American University Press, 1995), 85–88. 4 Mary Neuburger, The Orient Within. Muslim Minorities and the Negotiation of Nationhood in Modern Bulgaria (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004). 89 Typhus, Turks and Roma the French, Catholics for Protestants, while (to paraphrase Tom Lehrer) everybody feared the Orient.”5 It is evident that in the nineteenth century the importance of this phenomenon has to be considered within the context of nation-building. Ethnic groups and nations are created by ascription and self-ascription of certain cultural features—and by stressing possible differences with respect to other groups. With respect to the latter, one can assume that if medical language is used to expose a certain group as the focus of diseases, two possible directions can be taken: either their threat derives from an alleged lack of hygiene, which is still interpreted as expression of certain essentialized cultural features, or they pose a threat to the majority population because of their imagined biological difference. In his seminal work on typhus in Eastern Europe, Paul Weindling has shown how German medicine assumed the existence of a correlation between typhus and Jews and how the biologization of this connection played a part in planning the Holocaust.6 But where is the line between the “explicit racist belief in biological differences” on the one hand, and the “essentialization of cultural features”—which proceeds from a Leitkultur, from a “leading culture”, and according to Etienne Balibar can be described as “racism without races”7 —on the other? Is this line detectable on the basis of the possible ideological uses of hygiene and health? One can assume that a “softer,” assimilative option—standing for overcoming cultural differences under the sign of a Leitkultur—expresses itself in the intention to teach a certain group to adopt the hygienic norms of the majority population and abandon its own traditional customs and forms of folk hygiene, ensuring, within a preexisting hierarchy of powers and values, both the health of the minority group and of the majority. The alternative, that is, the hygienic containment of...