Dreaming of a Eugenic Fortress: The Transylvanian Saxon Eugenic Discourse in Interwar Romania

Tudor Georgescu

Panel 5 The German Minorities

Abstract

While it appears peculiar that the Transylvanian Saxon eugenic discourse has largely evaded academic scrutiny, it embodies a highly indicative case study of the lure eugenic thought could exert on ethnic minorities battling a sense of anthropological crisis. Pursuing a eugenic movement that emerged under Dr. Heinrich Siegmund’s tutelage in the early twentieth century, tracing the process of its politicisation, radicalisation, and gradual translation into executable population policies by the mid 1930’s, this paper focuses on tracing the Saxon eugenic discourse’s conceptual and methodological evolution during the interwar period.

To that end, this paper will evaluate the diagnoses of ‘degeneration’ forwarded by Saxon eugenicists as evidence of the nation’s accelerating cultural and racial collapse, and do so in conjunction with the both social- and race hygienic measures advanced to counter it. How were these discourses informed by debates on social diseases (such as tuberculosis) and perceived social evils such as alcoholism and smoking; hereditary biology; mixed marriages; demographic concerns over dwindling birth rates in terms of ‘quantity’ and ‘quality’; and, finally, the omnipresent concerns over a continuous loss of ‘Lebensraum’ to ethnic ‘others’? How was this conceptual conglomerate translated into feasible population policies by individual eugenicists’ private initiatives, how did the fascist ‘Self-Help’s’ regenerative agenda appropriate and ground it in the early 1930s?

Biography

Tudor Georgescu is currently writing his doctoral thesis at Oxford Brookes University on the interfaces between racial anthropology, eugenics, and fascist ideology amongst German ethnic minorities in interwar Romania. He is also the Research Coordinator of ‘The RSCSE: International Working Group on the History of Bio-Medicine and Racial Sciences in Central and Southeast Europe during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’, an editor of the ‘Compass: Political Religion’, and co-convenor of the conference on ethnic minorities in interwar Romania featured here.

Related Publications

• Feldman, Matthew, Marius Turda, with Tudor Georgescu (eds.). Clerical Fascism in Interwar Europe. Abingdon: Routledge, 2008.
• Georgescu, Tudor. “In Pursuit of a Purged Eugenic Fortress: Alfred Csallner and the Transylvanian Saxon Eugenic Discourse in Interwar Romania.” Marius Turda, Sevasti Trubeta, Christian Promitzer (eds.). Controlling Populations: Eugenics and Hygiene in Southeast Europe. Budapest: Central European University Press, forthcoming.