Abstract
Reviewed by: Maria Sophia Quine, Norwich, UK
Although this volume avoids engaging with the many controversies around the terms ‘Eastern’ versus ‘Central’ Europe, it captures much of the essence of the complexities which lay behind them. It adheres to the nomenclature of ‘East-Central Europe’ now current in the Anglophone world and restricts its focus to the area of the newly independent successor states to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which were created in the years 1918–1920. Defined collectively by any name, the succession states of Czechoslovakia, Poland, Austria, Hungary, Yugoslavia and Romania, all covered herein, were countries which, even by the standards of a general Europe-wide crisis of democracy in the inter-war period, were characterized by a high degree of turbulence and instability. It was not so much the ethnic heterogeneity of these nation-states which conspired against them; rather, the amount of rapid social change and the extent of the political upheaval experienced as a result of the peace settlement, which re-drew the map of the entire region, caused intractable problems. The biggest loser, of course, was the much truncated, post-Trianon Hungary, reduced to being a landlocked ‘pygmy’ country, with only 28 per cent of its former pre-war territory. The biggest winner, Greater Romania, saw its irredentist dreams largely satisfied, as the nation more than doubled in size as a result of the peace treaties. However, it was just as deeply divided and fragile as the rest of the successors. Roughly 30 per cent of the Romanian population was defined as being ethnically non-Romanian in 1920, as opposed to 8 per cent in the pre-war period. Although the official policy lumped together Croats, Serbs, Montenegrins, Macedonians and Serbo-Croatian-speaking Muslims together into one ‘Serbo-Croat’ ethnic category, as defined by the 1921 census, language, religion and culture divided the ‘national’ community of the new Yugoslav titular state, where antagonism between Serbs and Croats was rife and separatism rampant, even in areas of ‘mixed’ population, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina. In this difficult and complicated context, the centrifugal forces of pan-nationalism and the external pressures from fascism in the west and communism to the east threatened to tear nations asunder. Here, Marius Turda explains, eugenics played an extremely important part in the largely unsuccessful nation-building enterprises carried out by the fledgling successor states. In common with varieties of political nationalisms in the region, East-Central European eugenics embarked upon a search for a homogeneous national community. As in eugenics everywhere and anywhere, the obsessions of East-Central European eugenicists were ‘the nation’, ‘race’, ‘the family’, ‘marriage’ and the ‘quality’ and the ‘quantity’ of the population. This volume succeeds admirably at the task outlined in the Introduction. A documentary reader with commentaries on each case study presented, it provides an invaluable new perspective on the transmission and adaptation of eugenic ideas in countries, which, until recently, have not been part of the so-called mainstream. Connections between East-Central European eugenicists and their Western European and North American counterparts are established. The real strength of the book is its illumination of the historical particularities and spectacular originality of East-Central European eugenics through the primary sources themselves. In these overwhelmingly rural nations, with high rates of mortality and morbidity, intellectual traditions focused on human improvement predated Galton. Eugenics, moreover, was bound to be different from the more familiar Western European varieties. So in Slovenia, Ana Cergol Paradiž explains, eugenics fed off local peasant and folkloric cultures, as well as literary naturalism, with the result that a colourful ‘folk eugenics’ emerged, which extolled the importance of protecting the inheritance of future progeny. Slovene eugenicists completely rejected the notion of ‘Slavs’ as inferior, as commonly expressed in Western Europe and the United States, and developed a kind of ‘anti-Western’, pro-Slavist eugenics of ‘the oppressed’, which was utterly fascinating and entirely unique in the history of eugenics. We learn from this volume that no ‘negative’ eugenic laws were introduced in any of Yugoslavia’s provinces during the interwar period, because of the opposition of largely Orthodox Christian Serbian doctors and authorities to anti-natalist measures. Czech eugenicists shared views which were similar to the Italians, as they saw German-style negative eugenics as ‘aristocratic’ and ‘undemocratic’. Jan Be˘lehrádek reveals that, though some Czech eugenicists wanted a sterilization law, proposals never became a bill; however, the historical record is sketchy here, so the details are unclear. Indications of where future research is needed are provided, helpfully, as in the case of two decrees governing sterilization which were introduced in Nazi-occupied Yugoslavia 1942 and about which little is known. The volume draws out the importance of concepts of blood purity and ‘blood as destiny’ in countries so internally divided; sometimes, these ideas were simply imported from Germany by Nazi sympathizers within German minority communities; but, often, they were home-grown versions of race hygiene and racial cleansing, with a large helping of religious belief in God and Faith as the primary pillars of eugenics and the nation. The least ‘likable’ or ‘good’ eugenics which emerges from this book is one strain of the Croatian, with its foundation in Aryanism and racism and its avowedly anti-Muslim, anti-Jewish, anti-‘Gypsy’, anti-Serbian and genocidal nature. But another type of Croatian eugenics is premised upon the proposition that bankers and capitalists (rather than the ‘usual suspects’ in eugenic scenarios – that is, the working class) comprise the parasitic and degenerate element within the nation-race. It was a delight to read in this book the only eugenic text I have ever encountered that speaks of happiness as a racial and eugenic virtue. The Polish eugenicist, Karol Stojanowski, quite pragmatically, outlined how a people’s emotional well-being was essential to any nation seeking greatness. It wasn’t all darkness and gloom in this part of Europe after all.