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

Abstract

This collection of 20 essays provides much useful information about eugenics and scientific racism in the lands of Central and Eastern Europe in the early twentieth century. It includes essays on racial anthropology in Austria, Yugoslavia and Greece; eugenics in Austria, Czech lands, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Estonia and Romania; opposition to eugenics in Austria; and racial nationalism and anti-Semitism in Romania and Hungary. It seems that Germany was excluded for the most part, probably since it has been covered so thoroughly already by scholars, including one of the editors, Paul Weindling. However, Germany still makes its presence felt. Austria was culturally German, and one essay by Herwig Czech examines the implementation of Nazi racial policies in Vienna after its annexation to Germany. Also, many eugenicists and racial theorists had to respond, in one way or another, to Nazi ideology and policies. The first essay by Egbert Klautke explains the racial ideologies developed by two German scientists: the anthropologist Egon von Eickstedt and the psychologist Rudolf Hippius. This essay is presumably included not because it deals with Germany, but because both Eickstedt and Hippius were involved in Nazi attempts to racially categorize peoples in Nazi-occupied Eastern Europe. I find it interesting that the editors chose to open the collection with this essay, and follow it with two essays on Austrian anthropology. This tends to cast a German shadow across the collection from the start.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 73 citations exist upstream.