Health, Hygiene and Eugenics in Southeastern Europe to 1945

Marital Health and Eugenics in Bulgaria, 1878–1940

236 Gergana Mircheva century.4 Projects for their institutionalization could be perceived as a radical element within the system of “biopower”5 that the modern state exercized in politics and techniques for the “naturalization” of socio-historical phenomena. In a paradoxical way, the discourse of eugenics blended conservative anti-liberal attitudes with modern aspirations of social engineering.6 The imaginary transformation of the “nation” into an “organism ” together with its eugenic “transfiguration” were laid out in the utopian horizon of “the Bulgarian right-wing project” after World War I.7 Its substance was provided by the concept of “native” [rodno] as taken from the pre-modern collective value system and successfully adapted within the early modern period to be re-integrated into the cultural political framework of the interwar years. In the 1920s and 1930s the value of “native” as “national” expressed in organic images inspired critical social moods, a readiness to violate human rights and anti-liberal attitudes hardened in а teleological stance toward the mastering of a national future.8 As an expression of this will for social catharsis, eugenic projects represented a striving toward a “normalization” of the crisis. Where its symptom, “degeneration”, was defined as an “acute social disease,”9 and health as the most precious tions of the body as a central rhetorical instrument, as a “generator of figurative speech” to describe the rise of nation-building processes and the construction of modern collective identity. See Ina Peleva, Botev. Tyaloto na natsionalizma (Sofia: izdatelstvo “Kralitsa Mab,” 1998). This nationalistic dispositive, the “body of nationalism ” as Peleva called it, was adopted and further developed by the Bulgarian modernist culture at the beginning of the twentieth century. See Boyko Penchev, Tagite na kraevekovieto (Sofia: Literaturen vestnik, 1998), 107–122. 4 The chronological framework of my study encompasses the period between the establishment of the modern Bulgarian state between the end of the Russo-Turkish war in 1878 and the start of World War Two. The first, more considerable attempts to introduce eugenic concepts and practices in the public sphere took place at the beginning of the twentieth century. It was in the 1920s and 1930s, however, that the eugenic discourse in Bulgaria became more socially influential. 5 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin, 1998), 140. 6 Paul Weindling discusses the inherent cultural contradictions of the Weimar period in Germany with regard to eugenics: “Whereas conservatives idealized the remnants of the traditional social order, the artists and social critics attacked bourgeois conventions as pathological and diseased. Experts in social hygiene and eugenics attempted to reconcile these antitheses on the bases of social health.” See Paul Weindling, Health, Race, and German Politics between National Unification and Nazism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 400–401. 7 See Ivan Elenkov, Rodno i dyasno. Prinos kam istoriyata na nesbadnatiya “desen proekt” v Balgariya ot vremeto mezhdu dvete svetovni voyni (Sofia: LIK, 1998). On the interwar right-wing cultural visions see also Ivan Elenkov and Rumen Daskalov, eds., Zashto sme takiva? V tarsene na balgarskata kulturna identichnost, (Sofia: Svetlostruy , 1994). 8 Elenkov, Rodno i dyasno, 58. 9 Petar Monev, “Izrazhdane, kultura i obrazovanie,” Mediko-pedagogichesko spisanie za zdravno-sotsialni i vazpitatelni grizhi za deteto i yunoshata 5, 1 (1938): 26. 237 Marital Health and Eugenics in Bulgaria capital of the organic people-state,10 the victory of national regeneration through a bio-political restoration of the social environment to health was envisaged. Degeneration could be reversed, marking a utopian return to the primary condition of the Bulgarian race.11 As Zygmunt Bauman argued “[g]ardening and medicine supplied the archetypes of constructive stance, while normality, health, or sanitation offered the archmetaphors for human tasks and strategies in the management of human affairs.”12 The concepts of “degeneration,” “heredity” and “social danger” were misused as interrelated formulae for coping with individuals who were deemed “unfit” for the ideal type of “national organism.” In 1926, on the initiative of the Bulgarian zoologist Stefan Konsulov (1885–1954), the “Society for the Study of Racial Hygiene” [Obshtestvo za rasovo-higienichni prouchvaniya] was established in Sofia.13 This informal intellectual circle was transformed into the “Bulgarian Society for Racial Hygiene” [Balgarsko druzhestvo za rasova higiena] in 1928.14 There is almost no historical evidence on the activities of these two short-lived doctrinal societies apart from data on a small series of lectures and publications . This is to a...