Eugenics and Nation in Early 20th Century Hungary

M. Turda

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137293534
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

In 1900 Hungary was a regional power in Europe with imperial pretensions; by 1919 it was crippled by profound territorial, social and national transformations. This book chronicles the development of eugenic thinking in early twentieth-century Hungary, examining how eugenics was an integral part of this dynamic historical transformation.

1

A New Dawn

In the first decade of the twentieth century, the debate over the nature and content of eugenics intensified. Interpretations differed from country to country, depending on eugenicists’ cultural, social and political backgrounds. In Hungary, the ambition of the first generation of eugenicists was, first and foremost, to construct a social science which could be used as an instrument to facilitate social reform. This does not imply that the biological and medical dimensions of eugenics were ignored. On the contrary, next to sociology and anthropology, biology and medicine were seen as two essential disciplines underpinning eugenic claims for social re-engineering and national protection. This convergence – between social and medical dimensions of eugenics – deserves to be highlighted, both historically and theoretically.

In Hungary, the interpretation of eugenics as a social theory was most successfully popularized by the progressive journal Huszadik Század (Twentieth Century). It featured a wide range of intellectual arguments and controversies, centred on culture and society, right up to the publication of its last issue in 1919. No less a celebrity than the English philosopher and sociologist Herbert Spencer blessed Huszadik Század’s first issue with his encouragement. “I rejoice”, he wrote to the editors, “to learn that you propose to establish a periodical having for its special purpose the diffusion of rational ideas – that is to say, scientific ideas, – concerning social affairs”.¹ But Hungarian intellectuals associated with the journal had hoped for more than just a constructive and creative intellectual disposition. As Oszkár Jászi confessed to Bódog Somló in 1907, “We intend to not simply create well-written monographs but to stir up the intellectual life of this dark, backward country.”² And they did.

Huszadik Század promoted an intellectual programme based on a mixture of positivism, socialism and Darwinism.³ From its beginning in 1900, the journal attracted a large number of Hungarian social and natural scientists, including the historian Gusztáv Gratz, the economist Pál Szende, the sociologist Oszkár Jászi, the legal scholar Bódog Somló and two of Hungary’s most promising philosophers, Gyula Pikler and Ervin Szabó. Many of these intellectuals also pursued political careers and played important public roles over the following years, fully justifying the journal’s editorial credo that politics and science should be part of the same cognitive effort to both grasp social reality and advance scientific progress.

Huszadik Század’s intricate history, and the cultural and political movements it generated, have been the subject of much debate in Hungarian historiography.⁴ Less so, however, the eugenic texts published in this journal. Among the eugenicists who contributed to Huszadik Század are, for example, physicians József Madzsar and René Berkovits, the biologist Lajos Dienes, the natural scientist Zsigmond Fülöp, the geographer and politician Pál Teleki and the diplomat Géza Hoffmann. These authors participated in shaping Hungary’s “complete Weltanschauung”⁵ – the reconfiguration of intellectual traditions that Oszkár Jászi, one of the journal’s editors-in-chief, identified, in 1899, as the rationale behind launching the new publication.

Equally important, in this journal more than any other, eugenics was conceptualized as an integral component of the Darwinian revolution and the newly institutionalized social sciences. In 1901, Huszadik Század mobilized a number of Hungarian scientists and intellectuals who, in turn, constituted the Society of Social Sciences (Társadalomtudományi Társaság), with the sociologist Ágost Pulszky as its first president.⁶ At the time institutionalized sociology was in its infancy across Europe. The Sociological Society of London was only formed in 1903, followed by the Sociological Society (Soziologische Gesellschaft) of Vienna and the German Society for Sociology (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie) established in 1907 and 1909, respectively.⁷

To grasp the complex conditions that contributed to the development of eugenics in Europe, one must also recapture the emergence of sociology as the “science of society”.⁸ Not surprisingly – as Philip Abrams and R. J. Halliday have argued – the origins of sociology in Britain can be found in Émile Durkheim and Ferdinand Tönnies’s methodologies to much the same extent as in Francis Galton’s unified conception of statistics and biology.⁹ In France, too, as Terry N. Clark has noted, “much of anthropology, segments of statistics and political science, and sizable elements of history, economics and geography emerged from identical sources”.¹⁰ Paul Weindling has identified a similar confluence of interests between eugenics and social sciences in Germany, where “advocates of social hygiene and demographic studies oriented to the European problem of a declining birth rate conflicted with those concerned primarily to establish sociology as an academic discipline”.¹¹ As it was understood at the beginning of the twentieth century, eugenics – like sociology – was concerned with the rational regulation and management of both the individual and society.

However, it was not just the popularization of ideas of social and biological improvement but the fashioning of the entire edifice of the modern state and society that Hungarian eugenicists demanded. As simultaneous products of both Hungary’s own particular conditions and its participation in larger intellectual European currents, eugenics and sociology engaged in public debates over how modern Hungarian society ought to be organized, and on which cultural and biological values it should be based. Intellectual and political change was thus recast by means of social and biological diagnoses. Yet the imposition of biological precepts, simultaneously both specific and idealistic, on modern society did not go unchallenged. As soon became clear, eugenicists in Hungary – embedded as they were initially in a dialogue between disciplines that wanted to assert their conceptual distinctiveness – would find it problematic to claim their own intellectual identity. Asserting this identity would ultimately become coterminous with the eugenic vision of a modern Hungarian state.

Crossing Boundaries

The question of whether biology can have a recognized social and moral role in society had preoccupied sociologists and eugenicists alike since the late nineteenth century. “Does a real biological science of the evolution of human societies exist?”, pondered the English biometrician and eugenicist Karl Pearson in his 1909 study, The Groundwork of Eugenics.¹² Why this question should concern the eugenicist has everything to do with the fact that some of the most powerful critiques of eugenics have been found in the works of sociologists strenuously denying the significance of race as a factor in social improvement. Based on this conceptual framework, eugenics would not only study the biological basis for social evolution, but would investigate the ethics and morality of human improvement as well. What implications, then, does such a claim have for the reading of eugenic texts in Hungary?

Locating the intellectual genealogy of Hungarian eugenics within a broader European intellectual tradition – one in which various academic definitions of natural and social sciences competed for pre-eminence – contributes to an understanding of eugenics as a symbiosis of social and medical discourses geared towards both individual and collective improvement. It is thus worthwhile to reflect upon the specific lines of reasoning within which demands for population management were voiced by the eugenicists. For example, the first issue of the Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie ( Journal of Racial and Social Biology), the prestigious German periodical edited by Alfred Ploetz, was published in the same year as Galton’s much-quoted 1904 article on the definition and aims of eugenics. With the founding of the Society for Racial Hygiene (Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene) in Berlin the following year, it seemed that German eugenicists had finally put their differences aside and transformed their irregular networks into a formalized constituency. The new journal’s aims were both managerial and conceptual, as Ploetz not only wanted to unite German eugenicists, but to also provide them with a correspondingly attractive theoretical platform. Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene), Ploetz’s own idiom for eugenics, was exclusively concerned with the hereditary qualities of the race. As such its aims were twofold: to encourage the reproduction of those individuals deemed hereditarily “superior” on the one hand, and on the other to decrease – if elimination was not possible – the number of those considered racially undesirable. The protection of existing hereditary racial qualities was given impetus by Ploetz’s eugenic vision of a new racial community to be built on scientific rationality, biological solidarity and control over reproduction. Racial hygiene, as Ploetz conceived it, was ultimately a vast experiment in biological and social engineering.¹³

The Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie was immediately recognized as providing a much-needed forum for the growing German-speaking eugenic community.¹⁴ Questions of scientific complexity aside, Ploetz enlisted a number of disciplines – including the social and economic sciences more generally – along with history and psychology, in order to complement racial hygiene’s provocative demand for scientific recognition. Central to this tendency was his explicit insistence on the primacy of biology (nature), as the necessary alternative to culture (nurture), that would set in motion the nation’s social and political progress. It was a daring objective, and one with which those encountering and reading Ploetz’s journal readily engaged.¹⁵

One of the first critical commentaries to confront the conceptual mosaic into which Ploetz fused social biology, racial hygiene and anthropology came from Hungary and was published in Huszadik Század. This testifies to the Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie’s immediate impact outside Germany. But it also makes visible Huszadik Század’s unmistakable pride in presenting the Hungarian public with the latest cultural and scientific debates in Europe. Indeed, the journal’s publication of articles on eugenics are best read in this light. Eugenics, ultimately, represented one of the strategies both editors and contributors employed towards achieving two of the journal’s main goals: asserting scientific knowledge and charting “Hungary’s anatomy and physiology”.¹⁶

The latter goal, in particular, was to prove especially influential in generating wide-ranging eugenic narratives of social and biological improvement. It is also notable that the person offering this assessment of the new German journal was none other than Count Pál Teleki. Born to one of the most esteemed aristocratic Transylvanian-Hungarian families in 1879, Teleki was a comparatively multifaceted, if controversial, individual, who, among other things, served twice as Hungary’s prime minister (1920–21 and 1939–41). Prior to the First World War, Teleki was less interested in politics – though he was a member of Parliament, being elected three times between 1905 and 1911 – and more preoccupied with science in general, and geography in particular.¹⁷ Considering Teleki’s central role in the institutionalization of eugenics in Hungary a decade later, his 1904 review of the first issue of the Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie already displays a remarkable familiarity with contemporary debates on racial and social sciences.¹⁸

From the outset, Teleki expressly indicated his commitment to the social and political significance of eugenics. The ostensible purpose of the new “discipline” was understood to be intellectually indebted to both social and biological sciences. This was not merely an incidental comment: Teleki believed that cross-disciplinary collaboration was essential in avoiding “the vortex of prejudicial development and dogmatism”.¹⁹ This intellectual pluralism was matched, however, by biological determinism, for Teleki believed that “all the basic laws of human existence are biological”. Within this all-encompassing social and racial biology, eugenics emerged as the guardian profession for individuals and communities alike. Its ultimate goal, Teleki noted, was to “explain the past, present, and future of state and society”.²⁰

These postulates were accompanied by a strong belief in the regulatory mandate of biology over other social and cultural factors. Yet Teleki was not a racialist in the narrow sense of the term; that is, he did not believe in ideas of racial superiority. His views on the relationship between eugenics and racial essentialism were more nuanced, expressed especially in the next part of the review, where Teleki engaged with Ploetz’s definition of race. Embracing Ploetz’s preference for the importance of race – namely “the group of morphologically similar individuals who share common ancestry and are capable of producing similar offspring” – over the individual, Teleki was, however, less inclined to accept the former’s view that racial biology should become a distinct branch of medical science, divided into “anatomy, physiology, pathology, and therapeutics”. Teleki believed that analogies between racial hygiene and general biology were “conceptually confusing”. This objection to Ploetz’s methodology was, in fact, an indication that Teleki was not comfortable with analogies between biological and social organisms. He thought the practical application of eugenic precepts premature. “The aspirations of racial hygiene”, he noted further, “although they can certainly be expected to bring large benefits in time, do not possess significant practical value and will remain sterile until racial biology has developed into a systematic science”.²¹

A closer inspection of this argument reveals, however, a broad acceptance of eugenics on Teleki’s part. He agreed with Ploetz that the community’s racial welfare was closely connected to that of the individual. Societies, both authors agreed, did not exist outside nature, and were essentially constituted as much by biological as by social factors. Ploetz simply took the argument further than Teleki, berating modern societies’ harmful features for the quality of the race. Substantive eugenic engineering was required. Consequently, Ploetz proposed to protect the race from damaging social conditions through “excluding unfit and defective individuals from procreation”, that is, by controlling social selection to p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Acknowledgements
• Prologue
• Introduction
• 1 A New Dawn
• 2 Debating Eugenics
• 3 At a Crossroads
• 4 Towards National Eugenics
• 5 Health Anxieties and War
• 6 Eugenics Triumphant
• 7 The Fall of the Race
• Conclusions
• Epilogue
• Biographical Information
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index