Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (17 page)

Of course, the nature of the coming “new man” and the broader social setting were defined rather differently by eugenicists across the political spectrum. Social Democrats focused on the condition of the urban working class, and the city more generally. For many conservatives, on the other hand, the vision of a mechanized industrial world where human beings were reduced to functional components in a labour process was the problem not the answer to the crisis of modern society. Le Corbusier is dreams of “the contemporary city with three million inhabitants”—“la Ville radieuse” (1935)—left them cold. They identified social health not with the city but with the countryside, not with industry and the machine but with the soil and manual labour. For many eugenicists, cities had paradoxical effects upon human fertility: they made the middle classes sterile while at the same time inducing the lower classes to breed with appalling speed. In fact, prompted by eugenic concerns, a deep-rooted ambivalence could be
encountered across Europe about the social and biological consequences of urbanization.

Before 1914 Europe’s surplus population had been siphoned off across the Atlantic, or settled in far-flung colonies. But after 1918, America closed its doors and transatlantic emigration on the scale of the past became impossible. The imperial powers tried to encourage people to become farmers in Tanganyika, Libya or the East Indies, but few had found this idea attractive in the past, and fewer still were tempted in the 1920s. Peasants looking for work, or refugees from persecution, flocked into the cities, and the number of Europe’s conurbations with more than one million inhabitants doubled between the wars. This flight to the cities was on a limited scale compared with what would take place after 1950, yet in the depressed and anxious conditions of the 1920s and 1930s it provoked deep unease.

Alarmed at the growth of the “Great Cities,” the Secretary of the German Society for Housing Reform saw them threatening “the roots of our whole existence … biologically through the enormous decline in birth-rates … politically through the negation of the bases of a healthy democracy … militarily through the obvious and particularly great vulnerability of big cities in wartime, and morally through the enormous obstacles that the contemporary big city places in the way of the necessary moral regeneration of our nation.” Sir Arthur Keith—an eminent British anthropologist and President of the British Association for the Advancement of Science—contrasted the life led by modern city-dwellers with that of their “tribal ancestors” and became uneasy about “the effects of modern civilization on the minds and bodies of those who are subjected to it for many generations.” The biologist Konrad Lorenz, whose writings after 1938 betrayed a sympathy for National Socialism, argued similarly that the “domestication” of human beings by modern life was leading to racial deterioration and was thus opposed to true evolution. Whereas ancient village life was supposed to have bred a sense of community and encouraged child-rearing, the modern city offered pleasures and temptations which threatened family solidarity and fed individual selfishness and alienation: its bitter fruits were youthful “asocials” and “psychopaths” as well as sexual hedonism shaped by the easy availability of casual partners and birth control. Cinema—that post-war
apparition—was seen as a poisonous influence, condemned by Church leaders, criticized by conservative politicians and studied by social scientists.
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Providing public housing with allotments and private gardens, or shifting the focus of building from city centres to suburban homesteads and new pseudo-villages was one way of trying to cope. In Poland, Scandinavia and Germany, the authorities built as though for urban farmers. In the UK, private builders responded to similar desires among their buyers by offering mock-Tudor and other “pre-urban” styles.
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But as the political outlook in Europe darkened, this public love affair with an idealized countryside intensified. Across the continent, the modernist idiom of the 1920s—internationalist, mechanized—gave way in the arts to a more nationalist concern with the organic and with a life close to nature. Rationalism was replaced by an emphasis on the instinctual, individualism by the tribal and communal life, the brain by the body. Weimar’s New Realism was succeeded by Hitler’s Aryan landscapes of fields and farmers, just as in France the cosmopolitan art scene of Paris was challenged by the avowedly Gallic paysages of Dunoyer de Segonzac and Ozenfant. Fascist Italy had started out worshipping the machine, Futurism and the destruction of the past; by the 1930s it had embraced classicism, history and the land.

Yet once again, in practice, the state found it difficult imposing its wishes upon its recalcitrant population. Mussolini tried to prevent country-dwellers settling in towns without work, deporting new unemployed arrivals back to the provinces. This did not work very well. Others tried to make the rural life more attractive by giving loans to new farmers and building new housing estates in country areas. In Eire, the government subsidized remote Gaelic-speaking communities. In Britain—where urbanization had begun earlier than almost anywhere else—access to the countryside was made easier for city-dwellers. It was natural that a prominent eugenicist like Lord Horder, royal physician and President of the Eugenics Society, should have combined an interest in mental health and family planning with a concern for physical fitness, the Boy Scouts and the National Park movement.

But in fact nothing stemmed the movement citywards. Cities
remained magnets of employment and cultural freedom. Moreover, the state itself had only a limited interest in following up its own rhetoric: in an era when national power depended upon industrial progress, the country life could never present a convincing alternative to the city. “It is necessary to correct many legends concerning urbanization and populous cities,” wrote an Italian journalist in 1925. “The idyllic country, the creator of vigorous loins and the nursery of the long-lived, is a work of poets; in any case, it cannot be in accord with the development of industry.” For nation-states determined to fight for their place in the world, cities might look dangerous to national health and power, but they were indispensable nonetheless.
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QUANTITY AND QUALITY

Bodies were on display between the wars as never before, parading in what a previous generation would have regarded as underwear or scandalous near-nudity. Footballers’ shorts crept up to around the knee, while the members of the human pyramids photographed by Rodchenko in Russia even went without vests. Open-air public swimming pools were available for recreation and pleasure; new stadia were built—in Wembley, Vienna, Berlin—for grander sporting and political events. Massed together in ranks and rows, these bodies projected collective unity and political might. In 1931, 100,000 socialists marched round Vienna’s Ring before watching a show in the new stadium in the Prater in which 4,000 performers enacted the overthrow of capitalism. This was a vast spectacle—with banner parades and mass callisthenics, choruses, chants and oath ceremonies. It represented a deliberate projection of the military might of the workers’ movement, inspired in many ways by the Bolshevik Proletkult festivals of the early 1920s. In turn, it looks to us very like the Nuremberg Party rallies of the Nazi Party. Even placid Britain—in a much less charged political atmosphere—offered mass pageants like the 1924 Empire Festival or the Albert Hall spectaculars laid on by the Women’s League of Health and Beauty. In most countries, keeping fit was not so much the matter of consumer choice it would become after 1950 as a national or class duty: “The body culture of the Worker is the Core of Socialist Construction,” ran the slogan on a Soviet poster.
Right-wing movements from the conservative Boy Scouts to the Romanian fascists in the Iron Guard took a similar view. The more politics was seen in terms of military struggle and national survival, the more important became the physical fitness of the collectivity.

But the state had not merely to promote the healthy body; it had also, in one way or another, to ensure it was not contaminated by the unhealthy. It had, in terms of eugenicist thought, to concern itself with the quality as well as the quantity of the nation’s human stock.

Negative eugenics—obsessed by the idea of social degeneration—was especially preoccupied by the threat posed by the mentally ill. Ever since Darwin’s cousin, Francis Galton, called for “stern compulsion” to “check the birth rate of the unfit,” eugenicists had urged state action to stop the breeding of racial inferiors. In Britain, the pre-1914 Liberal government studied the problem of the “feeble-minded”—a catch-all category which included the deaf and dumb, those “unable to earn a living” or “incapable of managing themselves or their affairs with ordinary prudence.” To Prime Minister Asquith, the young Winston Churchill privately described the high birth rate of the “mentally deficient” alongside the “restriction of the progeny among all the thrifty, energetic and superior stocks” as “a very terrible danger to the race.” In 1913 a law was passed providing for the detention of “mental defectives” in special institutions in order to prevent them having children.
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Poor young women who in one way or another threatened prevailing social norms thereby found themselves at risk of being seized on the flimsiest of pretexts—at the behest of father, husband, doctor or employer—and held for years among those with genuine mental problems. It was, for example, only after his father’s death that the Bristol working-class boy called Archie Leach—better known to the world as Cary Grant—found out that the mother he thought had abandoned him and his father was actually living in an institution where his father had placed her in order to be able to live with his mistress.

Yet holding people in asylums—the British solution—was an expensive means of preventing them having children. Sterilization—a
cheaper alternative, but one which involved actual physical violence to the body—had been widely discussed in late-nineteenth-century Germany and Scandinavia and actually introduced into several American states. The USA was at the forefront of negative eugenics around this time, and by 1921 2,233 people had been legally sterilized there, mostly in California. But several doctors in Weimar Germany were also carrying out illegal voluntary sterilizations without sanction.
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Sterilization was a precise answer to the issue which so worried eugenicists of differential birth rates between “superior” and “inferior” population groups. It targeted the fast-breeding inferiors—however defined—and thus supplemented the positive welfare measures which the state could take to encourage more “valuable” births. The financial crisis of 1929 made sterilization’s relative cheapness seem increasingly attractive, and laws providing for voluntary sterilization were passed between 1928 and 1936 in Switzerland, Denmark, Germany, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Estonia. Even in liberal Britain the debate was reopened by the 1929 Wood Report on Mental Deficiency, which found that there had been an alarming growth in mental deficiency over the previous two decades, and warned that there was a “social problem group”—whose size it estimated at no less than four million, roughly 10 per cent of the total population—which posed an acute threat to national health. Eugenicists proposed sterilization as the answer, after the Eugenics Society’s Social Problem Group Investigation Committee found that poor living conditions were caused by mental deficiency. As in our own times, the poor—labelled as “the socially inadequate”—were being blamed for their own poverty: slum-dwellers were the “chief architects of slumdom.”
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British eugenicists—reflecting the characteristic national obsession with class—ran into a wall of opposition. Church, medical and labour leaders helped block proposed sterilization legislation, and there were legal complications as well. All this reflected the rather mild sense of national crisis which existed there compared with on the Continent. But while eugenics was losing ground in Britain, it was gaining it in Germany, where the desire for national reassertion was as strong as anywhere. The National Socialist seizure of power swiftly ushered in compulsory sterilization laws which targeted first the mentally ill, then “dangerous habitual criminals,” and eventually juvenile offenders
as well. By 1937 over 200,000 people had been sterilized, compared with slightly over 3,000 in the USA, among them gypsies, the so-called Rhineland Bastards (children of liaisons between German women and black French soldiers), the “morally feeble-minded,” “disorderly wanderers,” the “workshy” and “asocials.”

To this point, Hitler’s Germany realized on a massive scale a policy of coercive social engineering which other governments—in Sweden and elsewhere—followed to a more limited extent. But Nazi ambitions ranged further still. In 1939 the regime moved from sterilization to mass murder. Under Hitler’s special authorization, between 70,000 and 93,000 inmates of asylums and clinics were gassed before the euthanasia campaign was run down after public opposition from Church leaders. After 1941, the killing of mental patients continued on a smaller scale, mostly by lethal injection, while the euthanasia experts found new employment running the death camps in Poland and operating mobile gassing units.

These measures formed part of a new approach to social policy which promoted the health of the “national community” at the same time as suppressing its internal biological enemies. On the one hand, it helped newlyweds with marriage loans (granted, naturally, on condition that the woman gave up work, and that both partners were racially sound) and offered child benefits, free vacations and day-care facilities. On the other, it rounded up beggars and assigned them to camps or compulsory labour schemes. “The construction of a lunatic asylum costs 6 million RM. How many houses at 15,000 RM each could have been built for that amount?” a maths school book asked children.
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What was striking was not merely the extremism of the regime’s philosophy, but the lengths to which the most modern state apparatus in Europe would now go to implement it.