I—
The Social, Professional, and Intellectual Origins of Schallmayer's Eugenics

The Social Context: Industrialization and the "Social Question"

During Schallmayer's lifetime Germany was transformed from an agricultural to an industrial society. Unlike Britain and France, where a similar transformation began earlier and extended over a longer period of time, German industrialization, to use Ralf Dahrendorf's well-known aphorism, "occurred late, quickly, and thoroughly."^[1] After a slow beginning in the 1840s, the industrial revolution took off during the period 1850–1873. Spurred by the development of the textile industry; the extension of the German railroad network; and the rapid growth of the mining, steel, and machine industries, industrial capitalism quickly penetrated all sectors of the national economy. During the second phase, the so-called Great Depression (1873–1895), industrialization proceeded somewhat more slowly and severe recessions were frequent. Nevertheless, it was in this period that industry supplanted agriculture as the dominant form of production in the

new Kaiserreich that was founded in 1871 after the defeat of France. Finally, in the third phase of German industrialization (1896–1913), huge industrial cartels appeared in heavy industry, and the chemical and electrical engineering industries grew to world stature. The rapid economic growth of this period soon brought the Reich to the position of third most important industrial power in the world, after the United States and Britain.^[2]

Hand in hand with expeditious industrialization went accelerated urbanization. Beginning around mid-century and reaching its completion before 1910, the process of urban development transformed Germany from a predominantly rural society to a nation where over half the population dwelt in towns or cities.^[3] At the time of unification just slightly more than one third of all Germans lived in towns with two thousand inhabitants or more; by 1910, 60 percent of all citizens could be found in towns of the same size. Moreover, whereas in 1871 only 4.8 percent of the population made their home in cities over a hundred thousand, in 1910, 21.3 percent of all inhabitants resided in such large urban centers.^[4] This urbanization process that was inseparable from industrialization, inevitably altered the class structure of German society.

Industrialization and urbanization not only effected profound changes in the social and economic structure of Germany but also precipitated myriad serious social tensions and problems that, owing to the country's rigidly authoritarian political foundation, often threatened to upset the very stability of the young nation. The constitutional structure of the Kaiserreich as worked out by Bismarck guaranteed that Germany's preindustrial elites—the East Elbian Prussian landed aristocracy, the military, and high-ranking members of the bureaucracy—in collaboration with the new barons of industry would be able to successfully thwart all attempts at meaningful political participation by the rest of society. Parliament and universal male suffrage notwithstanding, neither the industrial and artisanal working classes nor large segments of the nonindustrial middle class were able to gain the upper hand in German politics. Through repression,

manipulation, compensation, and indoctrination, Germany's ruling elites sought both to contain the new forces of industrial modernity and to placate those who felt uneasy in the new industrial order, without eliminating the social tensions of a political system both unable and unwilling to accept fundamental change.^[5]

Foremost among the problems afflicting the Reich as a result of this combination of political immobility and rapid social change was the rise of a radical labor movement. Born in the 1860s, the Social Democratic party (SPD) and its related trade unions had by the turn of the century won the allegiance of the majority of German industrial workers and had become the most powerful force for social change in the country. Bismarck's attempt to crush the labor movement in its infancy through the Anti-Socialist Laws (1878–1890) merely resulted in the adoption of a more radical, Marxist position before the law was finally repealed.^[6] The growing number of strikes, lockouts, and other forms of labor unrest, coupled with the increasing success of the SPD at the polls, only served to exacerbate further the fear and anxiety of many middle-class and upper-class Germans regarding the seemingly hostile, uncontrollable, and ever-increasing industrial proletariat.^[7]

In addition to the labor movement, there was a whole series of other, albeit less serious, social problems which were viewed by Germany's Bildungsbürgertum (educated middle classes) as a threat to the proper functioning of the state. One of the most important of these was the increase in various types of criminal activity. Although the common perception of a growing army of criminals out to destroy the social fabric of society was undoubtedly an exaggeration, there was indeed a marked increase in violent and nonviolent crime after 1880.^[8] It is estimated that by 1898 over 1 percent of all Germans old enough to be convicted possessed a criminal record.^[9] Particularly alarming was the rapid rise in criminal recidivism and juvenile delinquency. In Prussia alone the number of "repeat offenders" more than doubled between 1883 and 1901; during this same period the delin-

quency rate for minors increased by over one third.^[10] This growth in criminal activity not only promoted a sense of uneasiness and fear among respectable, law-abiding Germans, but also drained the nation's treasury: in 1898 approximately one hundred million marks were spent to prosecute and detain the Reich's lawbreakers.^[11]

No less anxiety-provoking for the self-righteous and orderloving Bildungsbürgertum was the increase in prostitution, alcohol consumption, and alcoholism. Though hardly a new vice, prostitution remained a relatively small-scale, inconspicuous phenomenon until the first phases of German industrialization.^[12] Despite all attempts to contain and control it, prostitution reached what many observers considered to be epidemic proportions by the end of the nineteenth century. Estimates of the total number of prostitutes in the Reich for this period vary from one hundred to two hundred thousand.^[13] Exacerbating the serious social and moral affront of prostitution were its medical consequences: widespread venereal disease.

During the industrial revolution Germany also experienced a sharp increase in the general level of alcohol consumption. Between 1850 and 1873, for example, the amount of hard liquor (measured in volume of pure alcohol) consumed per individual per year rose 44 percent; beer intake (measured in the same terms) increased a staggering 112 percent from 1850–1875.^[14] A rise in the number of reported incidents of intoxication and alcoholism, especially among working-class drinkers, accompanied the growth of beer and schnapps consumption in this period. In the 1880s there were over eight thousand arrests per year for public drunkenness in Berlin alone.^[15] Both press and pulpit discussed the mounting "alcohol problem" throughout the last decades of the nineteenth century, and concerned citizens began an open attack by creating several private, professional, and church-sponsored temperance organizations.^[16]

Although not usually viewed as a social problem in the narrow sense of the term, Germany's insane and feeble-minded also became objects of both lay and professional (medical) attention

during the Kaiserreich. Physicians and statisticians debated whether the rapid growth in the number of institutions for these "mental defectives" (as they were later called) testified to an absolute rise in the proportion of the number of insane and feeble-minded relative to the general population. Some were adamant in their belief that mental degeneration was on the rise.^[17] Others, like Schallmayer, were less certain that the sharp increase in the number of patients detained and/or eventually treated in Germany's asylums constituted substantial proof that insanity was becoming more prevalent, and preferred to use statistics documenting a substantial rise in suicides—up 20 percent between 1881 and 1897—as evidence for an increase in the "mentally degenerate."^[18] Whatever the reason for the large number of insane and retarded (an estimated 136,000 institutionalized individuals in 1901)^[19] and whatever methods were used to demonstrate the growth of their ranks, they were undoubtedly perceived as a grave social and financial liability for the new Reich.

All these problems were viewed by many observant Bildungsbürger as a threat to a well-functioning German society. In fact, less than a year after Bismarck's political unification in 1871 academic social scientists and reform-minded religious leaders began what became a quite heated and protracted debate over the so-called soziale Frage (social question)—the social and political consequences of unbridled economic liberalism and industrialization.^[20] Heavily influenced by cameralist traditions, the German historical school of economics, and philosophical idealism (Hegelianism), men like economists Adolf Wagner and Gustav Schmoller, and Lutheran minister Friedrich Naumann warned that the profits and power amassed by Germany's most recent special interest group—the industrialists—could continue to grow only at the expense of the commonweal. Manchesterism and rapid industrialization, according to these reformers, destroyed the traditional social and economic order,^[21] leaving Germany with a hostile industrial proletariat and an increasing number of asocial individuals (the subproletariat). Only the state, as guardian of the common good, was in the position to

solve the social question and reestablish the social harmony necessary to sustain a stable and prosperous Kulturstaat . As one author summarized Schmoller's perception of the problem:

If we do not succeed in at least moderating the unresolved class conflict and the exploitation of the lower classes by the upper classes, the existing culture will go the way of earlier cultures—it will crumble—just as history has demonstrated on so many occasions.^[22]

Germany's social scientists, civil servants, and middle-class intellectuals felt that the national interest compelled them to adopt some form of Sozialpolitik (social policy) to help redress the much discussed social question.

Of the numerous organizations formed to debate and propose solutions to the social question, none was more important than the Verein für Sozialpolitik (Society for Social Policy). Founded in 1872 by Wagner, Schmoller, and the economist Lujo Brentano, the Society reflected the anti-laissez faire biases of the reformminded, academic social scientists who comprised the great majority of the association. Strongly anti-Marxist while at the same time embracing Marx's organicism^[23] and social critique of capitalism, the members of the Society rejected the "peculiar utilitarian ethic of entrepreneurial individualism," and sought to prohibit "economic man" from "impos[ing] his preferences upon the rest of the nation."^[24] Although individual members embraced different economic ideals (ranging from state socialism to a modified version of economic liberalism), all viewed economic activity as subservient to larger and more important cultural and political ends. Their position demanded that social reform be undertaken from the standpoint of the whole society, not any one particular class. Indeed, as Fritz Ringer has pointed out, the very term Sozialpolitik implied a "social or communal" approach to solving the social question, not an individualistic (or class-biased) one.^[25] In reality, however, social policy was an attempt by a handful of academically trained middle-class intellectuals to integrate the industrial proletariat (and the asocial sub-

proletariat) into German society with a minimal amount of damage to the political status quo. In the last analysis Sozialpolitik was a strategy to ensure the stability of the state by preempting a social revolution.

The extent to which middle-class intellectuals outside the Society shared this preoccupation with the soziale Frage can be gleaned by the rise of a number of reform-minded voluntary organizations. For example, the Deutscher Verein gegen den Mißbrauch geistiger Getränke (German Association for the Prevention of Alcohol Abuse), one of the most important of these middle-class associations, sought a solution to the social question by attacking the "drink question." Expressing the social activism of a broad cross section of the Bildungsbürgertum, the Association preached the gospel of temperance in order to create, among other things, and orderly, industrious working class and "a more harmonious and therefore more efficient industrial society."^[26]

A preoccupation with the social question was not the only thing uniting Germany's educated middle classes. Although it would be an oversimplification to speak of a unified Bildungsbürgertum possessing a unitary political and social outlook, the social scientists, the temperance enthusiasts, and eugenicists such as Schallmayer did share a common if rather general set of assumptions about the nature of culture, society, and the state.^[27] Perhaps most significant was the Bildungsbürger's veneration of Kultur . Feeling ill at ease in an industrial society increasingly dominated by two major classes, labor and capital, the Bildungsbürger took pride in his position as standard-bearer of German culture. For the educated middle-class German, the social prestige associated with a Gymnasium and university education (where culture was absorbed and transmitted) was far more important than the material wealth that served as a basis for Germany's new economic class.^[28] Like the industrial middle class however, the Bildungsbürgertum grew more conservative as the rise of a radical working class appeared to threaten the very foundation of society. Social imperialism and social

Darwinism became increasingly appealing to educated middle-class Germans.^[29] Moreover, true to the German statist tradition—a tradition that equated the interest of society with that of the state, and placed the well-being of the latter above everything else—the Bildungsbürger mocked the special interest group mentality of Germany's political parties, and longed for a leader above the parties who was capable of solving the Reich's most pressing social problems.^[30]

As we will see, the Bildungsbürgertum's disgust with the parties, its statism, and its idealization of social harmony and stability were all reflected in Schallmayer's eugenics. Indeed, his eugenic strategy can be viewed as a new type of Sozialpolitik which mirrored both the prejudices and social concerns of his class. Like all educated middle-class Germans, Schallmayer was keenly aware of the profound social and economic changes which accompanied the industrial revolution, and was anything but oblivious to the serious social problems and tensions which plagued the Reich as a result. The increased visibility of a number of asocial, nonproductive types—an important, if not the most important component of the social question—was the problem which Schallmayer and other eugenicists set out to tackle by means of race hygiene.

Professional Commitment: The German Medical Tradition

Attempts to effectively deal with the social question were not, of course, the monopoly of any one professional or occupational group. Most, if not all, university trained Germans acknowledged the existence of a problem and recognized that their own well-being demanded its speedy solution. However, the various occupational groups comprising the Bildungsbürgertum discussed and sought to remedy the problem differently—each according to a whole series of unarticulated and perhaps unperceived guidelines dictated by the social, political, and intellectual

traditions of the particular profession in question. Schallmayer was a physician by training. As such, he not only shared the prejudices and posture of the Bildungsbürgertum as a whole but also inherited a well-defined set of assumptions about: (1) the social and political role of medical professionals in safeguarding the health of the nation, and (2) the hereditary nature of disease.

By and large late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical professionals shared the same socially conservative outlook as other educated middle-class Germans. Like other university trained individuals, they viewed themselves as part of the prestigious intellectual elite—an elite responsible, at least in their eyes, for the preeminence of German culture.^[31] The physicians' social conservatism and sense of social superiority was further reinforced by the exclusiveness of the medical profession, and by the large number of professional organizations and associations to which the vast majority of practitioners belonged. The latter proved to be especially important in promoting an image of physicians as morally and intellectually superior beings who were "born into their profession." Germany's numerous medical associations also served to socialize physicians. Most of the organizations demanded that members adhere to social and ethical codes designed to dictate and regulate their conduct and worldview. Any affronts to the medical Standesehre (professional honor) were punished by medical review boards specifically created to ensure that doctors remain worthy of their noble occupation.^[32]

Politically, physicians in Imperial Germany differed little from other Bildungsbürger. As was the case with the majority of educated middle-class Germans, medical doctors clung to a whole series of generally accepted, if not well-defined political attitudes such as nationalism, social Darwinist-inspired imperialism, and militarism.^[33] Yet like most Bildungsbürger, German doctors professed to be apolitical. True to the statist tradition of German political theory, Germany's "apolitical" doctors revered the ideal of a conflict-free society where all groups and classes worked for the interest of the whole. For most, involvement in party politics

was beneath their professional dignity. Political parties catered merely to special interests, it was believed; medicine and medical practitioners served the welfare of the entire nation!^[34]

The medical professionals' perception of themselves as custodians of national health, and hence national wealth and culture, dates at least as far back as the health reform movement during the Revolution of 1848–1849.^[35] Taking their lead from the French public hygiene movement, medical men such as Rudolf Virchow and Salomon Neumann sought to demonstrate beyond doubt the causal relationship between poverty, squalor, and disease. Since health, according to Virchow and Neumann, was directly affected by adverse social factors such as poor diet, improper sanitary conditions, and a low standard of living, physicians were compelled to go beyond the traditional medical means of safeguarding the health and well-being of the community; they must work to improve the social conditions of their fellow countrymen and women.^[36] For the reformers, such improvement implied far-reaching political and economic changes. Yet even in the short run much could be done to upgrade the health of the population by enacting a comprehensive public health program, then a radically new idea in the German states.

The public health program envisaged by the reformers and articulated in such documents as Neumann's draft for a Public Health Law^[37] reflected the aspirations of numerous politically conscious physicians and large segments of the then-liberal Bildungsbürgertum. The health reformers' dream of a comprehensive public health program, like the liberals' dream of unification, remained just that.^[38] Yet the reformers' perception of themselves as German patriots and civil servants, their belief in the efficacy of medicine as a means of solving social problems, and their demand that physicians play an active role in raising the level of health in society left a deep imprint on the minds of both contemporary and future medical professionals.^[39]

Whatever the reformers thought of their contribution to the well-being of the nation, the prestige and social status enjoyed by physicians during the first half of the century was not par-

ticularly high.^[40] Nor was the reactionary period of the 1850s and early 1860s a particularly advantageous time for physicians to further their professional aspirations. Many of the physicians' associations designed to give medical professionals control over their own affairs disappeared owing to disinterest.^[41] The two decades following German unification in 1871, however, did witness a marked change of circumstances, especially for university-based medical researchers. The rise of scientific medicine—a development made possible by the maturation of such basic sciences as microscopic anatomy, physiology, and pathology in the laboratories of the reformed German universities—bestowed upon academic physicians, and the medical profession in general, an unprecedented level of social esteem and political importance.^[42] This professional prestige was unquestionably connected to the abstract value attributed to science. Beyond that, however, it was the ideology of scientism and, more particularly, the expected social utility of German physicians that bestowed upon them both their much desired social role as custodians of the nation's health and their newly found esteem.^[43]

The high self-image and lay perception of medical professionals as Führer der Menschheit (leaders of humanity) in the 1880s—the years during which Schallmayer completed his medical education and training—stemmed not only from the worldwide reputation of German laboratory medicine but also from the eminently practical advances in bacteriology associated with the name Robert Koch. The latter advances were especially significant in boosting the prestige and sense of social importance of medical men. Indeed it would be hard to overestimate the social impact of Koch's discovery of the tuberculosis and cholera bacilli (1882 and 1883) for the treatment and prevention of "two of the most pernicious enemies of mankind."^[44] To be sure, the government as well as the public quickly recognized its value: almost immediately large sums of money were set aside for bacteriological laboratories and university chairs in the new field—no doubt a wise investment in the future health and productivity of the nation.^[45] So much faith did some individuals have in the new

science that they seriously believed it possible to find a bacterium for every disease.^[46] Medical progress appeared boundless, and physicians demigods. The euphoria over bacteriology also swept the recently founded institutes of scientific (experimental) hygiene; indeed for more than a decade the province of hygiene was virtually equated with the goals and aspirations of the new science.^[47]

The rise of bacteriology further reinforced the late nineteenth-century German physician's self-image as custodian of the health and well-being of society. This self-image was part of more than a hundred year old tradition that lasted—with disastrous consequences—into the Nazi era.^[48] But while all physicians shared this tradition and benefited from the increase in prestige that sprang from new medical discoveries, they had disparate intellectual backgrounds and chose disparate ways of fulfilling their important social and political function of safeguarding and upgrading national health. Many believed that bacteriology and related advances in serology and immunology afforded the best means of combatting disease. Others, notably the renowned social hygienist Alfred Grotjahn (1869–1931), resented the usurpation of hygiene by the narrow field of bacteriology, and chose to follow what, in the 1890s, was Virchow's nearly forgotten path of examining the social factors contributing to ill health.^[49] And finally, there were other medical professionals, among them Schallmayer and many other eugenicists who, owing to their exposure to fields of medicine that emphasized the role of heredity in the etiology of disease, argued that the surest way to improve the general level of national health was to improve the bodily constitution of all individuals in society.

While Koch's discoveries heralded a new dawn in the classification and treatment of infectious diseases, they held out relatively little promise for German neurologists and psychiatrists seeking to explain neurological and mental disorders. Just prior to and during the heyday of bacteriology (1885–1920), the new university-based medical specialties of neurology and psychiatry remained firmly under the intellectual tutelage of hereditarian-

ism. This tradition was not, of course, restricted to the two medical fields in question, but it was one which proved especially suited to "explaining" the allegedly functional diseases of the nervous system and brain. Although a strong commitment to and reliance upon hereditarian explanations of neurological and mental ailments is discernible as early as the 1860s,^[50] by the 1880s one can speak of a veritable fetishism of heredity in German neurological and psychiatric circles. Physicians had at their disposal a large body of theoretical literature and a few clinical studies attesting to the fact that severe disorders such as mental illness, feeble-mindedness, criminality, epilepsy, hysteria, as well as less serious conditions such as nervousness and exhaustion, were often inherited.^[51] Medical specialists usually chose to lump them together as manifestations of a weak or otherwise inferior hereditary constitution. By and large incapable of treating such ailments, Germany's nerve specialists and psychiatrists embraced instead two popular and related hereditarian theories to account for the wide variety of functional disorders: neurasthenia and degeneration.

The vogue of neurasthenia in both medical and literary circles on both sides of the Atlantic grew out of the writings of the American neurologist George M. Beard.^[52] According to Beard, neurasthenia was a functional disease. Although it was purely somatic, neurasthenia—or nervousness—defied all attempts at anatomical localization. Weak nerves could lead both to insanity or epilepsy, but such developments could neither be predicted with scientific accuracy nor directly correlated.^[53] In this assumption Beard and his fellow associates relied on the commonly accepted notion of the nervous diathesis as the physiological substrate of at least some nervous disorders.

Although Beard's findings on nervousness were available in Germany as early as 1871, the author failed to attract significant attention in Berlin, Zurich, or Vienna at that time. A decade elapsed before German-speaking neurologists and psychiatrists caught on; the 1881 German translation of Beard's A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (Neurasthenia) more or less marked

the beginning of the German reception of this form of hereditarianism. Once interested however, the German medical community honored Beard by publishing three separate editions of his text. The American neurologist could be proud that his theory was so favorably received in a country renowned for its science-based medicine.^[54]

Among Beard's German-speaking apostles were the Leipzig neurologist Paul Julius Möbius (1853–1907); Rudolf Arndt (1836–1900), professor of psychiatry at the University of Greifswald; Otto Binswanger (1852–1929), professor of psychiatry at Jena; and perhaps the most distinguished of all, the expert on "sexual pathology" and psychiatry, Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing (1840–1903). Despite differences in their professional concerns, all the above-mentioned men were especially preoccupied with the transmission of nervous disorders. As far as the inheritance of neurasthenia was concerned, they all focused on what Beard believed to be the single most important, if not the sole etiological factor in nervousness, the hereditary nervous disposition. Erbliche Belastung (hereditary taint)—a term frequently used by Schallmayer—became the catch-all phrase used by the German medical community to account for all pathologies of the nervous system.^[55]

The German neurologists and psychiatrists even went beyond Beard in their emphasis on the nervous constitution. "Nowhere in medicine is the importance of heredity greater than in the case of nervous disorders," it was argued. "Compared to the role played by the hereditary constitution in the origin of nervous diseases, all other factors subside into the background."^[56] For Möbius, at least one third of all mental illness was attributable to a hereditary nervous diathesis; simple nervousness was almost always inherited. Wilhelm Erb made the nervous disposition responsible for 75 to 80 percent of all reported cases of neurasthenia.^[57] And Leopold Löwenfeld (1847–1924), a Munich specialist in nervous disorders (especially hysteria), conducted a survey of two hundred cases of neurasthenia which demonstrated that 75 percent of those troubled by nervousness and/or

more serious related ailments inherited their pathological conditions.^[58] The importance of the "soverign laws of heredity" as an explanation of nervousness could hardly be overestimated.

German medical experts viewed nervousness as the starting point for a wide variety of pathological conditions; similarly, the inherited neuropathic disposition was held responsible for the development of a whole series of serious nervous and mental disorders. According to Möbius the nervous constitution was pathological in and of itself. "Tainted individuals" could expect to suffer illnesses ranging from mild forms of nervousness to the most severe cases of idiocy:

Anyone born into a tainted [erblich belasteten] family brings with him a tendency towards nervous and mental disease. This tendency manifests itself in certain peculiarities of bodily organization; its most common and simple expression is nervousness. In nervousness one can see the germ of serious pathological conditions. The latter evolves out of nervousness as soon as additional harmful stimuli induce such development.^[59]

The psychiatrist Binswanger analyzed the role of the nervous system in a very similar light. Nervous disorders were part of "one large family"—erbliche Belastung could be used to account for all of them.

Neurasthenia as a particular form of hereditarianism would have been far less significant for Schallmayer and the future course of the German eugenics movement had it not been immediately linked to the then fashionable degeneration theory. First articulated by the French alienist Bénédict Augustin Morel (1809–1873) in 1857 and later adopted by German psychiatrists, the degeneration hypothesis virtually dominated the field of German psychiatry and related branches of medicine during the last quarter of the nineteenth and early years of the twentieth century.^[60] The medical fascination with degeneration, along with neurasthenia to which it was intimately connected, was related to the lack of any therapeutic success in treating the mentally ill. The degeneration hypothesis provided an "explanation" for why

the insane were so often incurable. Degenerates, it was argued, did not respond to treatment because they were part of an inherently diseased strain of the human race.

The degeneration theory undoubtedly also served a social and political function. The concept was essentially a classificatory system—a social classificatory system. Degenerate became the generic term for Imperial Germany's nonproductive or otherwise dangerous elements: the insane, the criminal, the feeble-minded, the homosexual, and the alcoholic. Such individuals, it will be recalled, were viewed as part of Germany's much-discussed soziale Frage. They detracted, at least psychologically, from the Bildungsbürger's idea of a well-ordered, harmonious, and conflict-free society. Considering the physicians' conservative worldview, their equation of degeneracy with social deviation from the bourgeois norm should not come as a surprise: by employing the socially stigmatic and scientifically pretentious world degeneration , German doctors possessed a useful means of classifying, separating, and ultimately controlling those who offended their social, political, and cultural sensibilities.

Morel's degeneration theory first began to attract the attention of the German medical community about a decade after the publication of his major treatise on the subject. It may be briefly summarized as follows: degeneration was the result of a deviation from a type primitif which existed before the biblical Fall. After the Fall, humankind was subjected to external influences such as climate, food, and customs the effects of which, together with God's punishment for Adam and Eve's disobedience, were inherited. This inheritance led to the formation of two distinct types of human species—the normal/healthy variety and the abnormal/sickly variety, that is, the degenerates.^[61] Essentially nonhuman, degenerates allegedly possessed a combination of physical and mental traits which separated them from the healthy portion of the species. These abnormal traits were in turn transmitted from one generation to the next and with every generation became progressively worse. The result was the eventual extinction of the tainted families or groups.^[62]

German degeneration theorists modified and updated Morel's work, carefully synthesizing it with prevailing theories of neurasthenia. According to Möbius, Entartung (degeneration) represented an "unfavorable hereditary deviation from type" which almost always entailed some change in the nervous system, usually in the brain.^[63] Krafft-Ebing, perhaps the best known of the German degeneration theorists, drew an even more careful connection between neurasthenia and degeneration:

Nervousness is only the mildest expression of an inferior organization of the central nervous system tending towards degeneration in the anthropological, biological, and clinical sense of the word. This can be deduced from the unbroken transition from . . . [nervousness to degeneration], from the side by side appearance of nervousness, and the most serious kind of neurotic degeneration, idiocy, in the same generation, and from the common cause of both pathological occurrences—hereditary taint.^[64]

Having first rid Morel's degeneration theory of its religious inferences and language, Möbius and Krafft-Ebing helped popularize the concept in psychiatric circles through their influential pamphlets and treatises. By the end of the century, the term "psychic degeneration," a phrase frequently employed by Krafft-Ebing, had become part of German psychiatrist's standard medical vocabulary. Schallmayer most certainly heard the term used in university lectures and during his internship in a Munich psychiatric clinic.

Closely related to the problem of psychic degeneration was the "scientific debate" concerning the "born criminal." In Germany the heated discussion of this issue was touched off by the translation of the works of Cesare Lombroso, professor of legal medicine at the University of Turin. Lombroso, who beginning around 1890 gained a worldwide reputation through the publication of his notorious work L'uomo delinquente (1876), challenged the prevailing penal theory both in Italy and abroad with his delinquente nato (born criminal). According to the Italian professor, the born criminal represented an atavistic regression, a

reversion to a more primitive stage of human evolution, whose criminal nature was easily recognizable by particular anatomical (pathological) traits. Because the criminal's deviant behavior was inborn—the result of an alleged hereditary disposition toward dangerous antisocial conduct—all attempts at rehabilitation by means of moral persuasion were doomed to fail. The best any penal system could do was to make sure that hereditary criminals, once apprehended, were never again allowed to pose a threat to society.^[65]

No person did more to bring Lombroso's ideas to German psychiatrists, legal theorists, and judges than neurologist and psychiatrist Hans Kurella, German translator of Lombroso's most popular work. Reports and statistics indicating a substantial increase in criminal acts after 1870 convinced Kurella that Germany's penal code was simply impotent in combatting crime. The problem, according to the outspoken neurologist, was that German penal law emphasized punishment or reform of the criminal, neglecting the fact that such a strategy could have no possible effect on an individual destined by heredity to commit an asocial act. Kurella's 1893 treatise, Die Naturgeschichte des Verbrechers^[66] (The Natural History of the Criminal) was designed to lay the foundations of a new science of criminal anthropology and criminal psychiatry, an undertaking that would truly create a "science" out of Germany's legal system.

Although many German psychiatrists and criminal specialists differed with Lombroso and Kurella about the degree to which one could recognize the born criminal by any specific anatomical characteristics, few doubted that such a person was more likely to deviate physically from the "normal type" than those not destined to steal or kill.^[67] Even fewer questioned the accepted practice of lumping these tainted individuals together with the huge army of other types of mental degenerates. Indeed, the newer term angeborene Verbrechernatur (hereditary criminal nature) was just a synonym for the much older psychiatric concept of moralischer Schwachsinn (moral insanity), a form of mental

degeneration.^[68] Both terms were used to describe those "pathologically tainted individuals whose intelligence would suffice for the struggle for survival but who, because of their ethical inferiority, posed a danger both to themselves and society."^[69]

While the term degeneration was most frequently employed by neurologists and psychiatrists in their attempt to explain various forms of antisocial behavior, the concept was gradually extended to include nonmental ailments as well. An individual might have a weak or otherwise "degenerate" constitution: a hereditary condition that would render him or her more susceptible to diseases like tuberculosis, for example. According to the clinical usage of the term disposition that by 1890 had been reformulated into a new full-fledged Constitutionslehre (constitution theory), the hereditary bodily constitution of all individuals varied in its ability to defend itself against both internal and external pathogenic agents, for example, bacteria. In the case of exposure to the tubercle bacillus, those individuals possessing a robust constitution would not become ill. Others, because of their overall weak or otherwise degenerate constitutions easily fell prey to these disease-producing irritants and became sick. The pathogenic agent was not the cause of the disease; it merely touched off its development. The true "cause" was the unfortunate victim with his or her deficient bodily makeup.^[70] It was along similar lines that one practitioner defined the hereditary nature of tuberculosis as the "inheritance of certain bodily characteristics which provide the bacillus with the fertile soil needed for its continued growth."^[71]

By the turn of the century there was hardly a known disease or an observable socially deviant action that was not included in the ever-growing list of Degenerationszeichen (signs of degeneration). The so-called hereditary tendency toward alcoholism and the disposition toward suicide were both seen as a sign of Entartung.^[72] One German-speaking Hungarian physician, Moriz Kende, presented readers with an impressive catalog of diseases and phenomena that proved the reality of degeneration. It in-

cluded the alleged increase in tuberculosis, scrofula, cerebrospinal meningitis, rachitis, anemia, diabetes, lung infections, heart diseases, cavities, the inability to nurse, short-sightedness, and the atrophy of the human breast observable in the general population of civilized (industrial) nations.^[73] He also noted a rise in various forms of mental degeneracy. For Kende and other psychiatrists and neurologists, degeneration posed a serious and constant threat to the health of the community.

Degeneration and neurasthenia were perhaps the most fashionable and widely accepted forms of hereditarianism discussed in medical circles during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. As we have seen, they served important professional as well as political functions: both neurasthenia and degeneration theory enabled physicians to explain their obvious lack of success in curing mental disorders; degeneration allowed the practitioner to classify certain social parasites and social misfits as belonging to a pathological strain of the human race. This latter political function was particularly important for the subsequent development of German eugenic thought. Couched in the scientific/medical language of neurasthenia and degeneration, various types of asocial behavior came to be regarded by medical professionals as little more than bad hereditary traits. Because "degeneration" was seen as a straightforward medical problem rather than as a composite of social prejudices and fears, it seemed natural that many physicians committed to improving the welfare of the nation, offered purely medical rather than political solutions to the social question. Indeed, even some physicians not directly involved in the race hygiene movement called for marriage restrictions and sterilization of the degenerate. However, what separates Schallmayer from other physicians who advocated these and similar measures is his social Darwinist perspective and his denial that traits acquired during the life of an individual could be inherited. Schallmayer and other German eugenicists dislodged the degeneration theory from its Lamarckian origins and strictly medical usage, and placed it in a new social Darwinist context.

The Biological Component: The Popularity of Selection

Darwin's theory of evolution, especially as applied to human beings and human society, has always been recognized by historians as a key factor in the rise of the international eugenics movement. Indeed, the renowned English naturalist's theory of descent furnished the biological framework of eugenics and helped legitimize it as a political, social, and "scientific" movement—a point which eugenicists like Schallmayer never tired of emphasizing. Particularly important for understanding the intellectual origins of Schallmayer's eugenics is, however, the popularity that Darwin's theory of selection enjoyed in Germany during the four decades following its introduction. The Selektionsgedanke (principle of selection) was publicized by two of Germany's most eminent biologists, Ernst Haeckel (1834–1919) and August Weismann (1834–1914), as well as by numerous self-styled Darwinian social theorists. Significant modifications of Darwin's theory by Weismann, and changes in the social meaning of Darwinian evolution during the 1880s and 1890s seemed to suggest to some that the "civilized" (white industrialized) nations of the world, and particularly the "fittest" classes of those nations (the educated middle classes), faced the danger of being overrun by the "uncivilized" and "unfit."

But what precisely was the link between Darwin's theory and the Selektionsgedanke? The answer is Darwin's mechanism of evolution, natural selection. It was this mechanism that separated the British naturalist's theory of the transmutation of species from all previous speculation on the subject.^[74] His choice of the term natural selection to describe the means by which all species evolve is testimony to the great intellectual debt Darwin owed to English animal breeders and horticulturists. Their daily experience demonstrated that domestic breeds could be improved upon by selecting useful variations found among cultivated plants and animals and breeding them for successive generations. By employing the phrase "natural selection," Darwin

wished to suggest that nature was capable of rendering change similar to but even more far-reaching than that of the breeder.^[75] Indeed, in Darwin's view nature was constantly at work selecting those organisms of a species whose variations somehow enhanced their chances for survival and procreation relative to other members of the same species. In such a manner all living forms were said to have evolved one from another. Natural selection, Darwin assumed, ensured a kind of progress in the organic realm; remove it and all development would cease.

As is generally well known, Darwin did not attempt to deal with human or social evolution in The Origin of Species . It was not until twelve years later, in 1871, that his views on the role of natural selection for human and social development were made public in The Descent of Man . Darwin's own opinions on the subject were strongly influenced by the writings of the essayist W. R. Greg, Alfred R. Wallace, and above all by his cousin, the biometrician and eugenicist Francis Galton. During the 1860s these men published several articles in which they each asserted that civilization imposed a serious restraint upon the efficacy of natural selection for humankind. They did not reach the same conclusions from this alleged fact, however. On the whole Wallace remained optimistic about the future development of the species and its social institutions; Greg and Galton were extremely pessimistic. The latter two believed that modern society's humanitarian institutions were protecting the weak, the stupid, and the "unfit" at the expense of the strong, the talented, and the "fit." Unless some way could be found to effectively compensate for civilization's curtailment of natural selection, racial decay was inevitable.^[76]

In the fifth chapter of The Descent of Man , under the section "Natural Selection as Affecting Civilized Nations," Darwin paid intellectual homage to his three fellow countrymen. John Greene has perceptively touched upon Darwin's ambivalent attitude regarding the notion of degeneration in civilized society.^[77] Like Wallace, Darwin was convinced that our moral and intellectual nature set humans above other animals and was the positive

result of natural selection. Like Galton, however, Darwin believed that humankind's moral nature impeded the continued efficacy of natural selection, and threatened to reverse all human progress.

Although Darwin was never fully able to reconcile this dilemma, he was consoled by his belief that the degenerative effects of modern culture did not go unchecked.^[78] By and large, however, Darwin stressed Galton's line of reasoning more than Wallace's and took the theory of racial degeneration seriously:

If the various checks specified in the last two paragraphs, and perhaps others as yet unknown, do not prevent the reckless, the vicious and the otherwise inferior members of society from increasing at a quicker rate than the better class of men, the nation will retrograde, as has too often occurred in the history of the world. We must remember that progress is no invariable rule. It is very difficult to say why one civilized nation rises, becomes more powerful, and spreads more widely, than another; or why the same nation progresses more quickly at one time than at another. We can only say that it depends on an increase in the actual number of the population, on the number of men endowed with high intellectual and moral faculties, as well as on their standard of excellence.^[79]

Darwin suggested a eugenic solution to the problem of degeneration though much less vigorously than Galton:

Man scans with scrupulous care the character and pedigree of his horses, cattle, and dogs before he matches them, but when it comes to his own marriage he rarely, or never takes any care. . . . Yet he might by selection do something not only for the bodily constitution and frame of his offspring, but for their intellectual and moral qualities. Both sexes ought to refrain from marriage if they are in any marked degree inferior in body or mind; but such hopes are utopian and will never be even partially realized until the laws of inheritance are thoroughly known. Everyone does a good service who aids towards this end. When the principles of breeding and inheritance are better understood, we shall not hear ignorant members of our legislature rejecting with scorn a plan for ascertaining whether or not sanguineous marriages are injurious to men.^[80]

By lending his considerable scientific authority to the idea of selective breeding, Darwin did much to aid the cause of eugenics in Europe and the United States.

Darwin's views on the importance of natural selection for organic and social evolution, as well as his casual remarks about the desirability of human breeding, did not fall on deaf ears in Germany. In the two decades following the prompt translation of the Origin into German in 1860, numerous scientific books and articles were published that touched on the great English naturalist's evolutionary theory.^[81] Although the overall reaction of the German biological community was mixed, many notable scientists such as Matthias Schleichen, Fritz Müller, Carl Gegenbauer, Ernst Haeckel, and August Weismann quickly became active supporters of evolution by means of natural selection.^[82] But of all the above-named scientists, Weismann stands out as especially important in the history of German eugenics. Not only did his "modified" version of Darwin's theory give the selection principle an even greater role in organic and social evolution than did the author of Origin himself, but Weismann's views also provided the biological underpinning of the mature eugenic doctrine of Schallmayer and other German race hygienists.^[83]

To be sure, Weismann did not begin his career with the intention of becoming champion of the "Neo-Darwinian" direction in biology. Trained both in medicine and zoology, the Freiburg embryologist eventually came to his position regarding the "all-sufficiency" of selection through his work on heredity. His developmental studies on insects, crustacea, and most importantly, his investigation of sex cells of the Hydromedusa during metagenesis made him extremely skeptical about the possibility of any organism being able to transmit characteristics acquired during its lifetime to the next generation. Darwin, it should be noted, found it necessary to incorporate an ever-increasing amount of so-called Lamarckian elements into the later editions of his Origin .^[84] There were simply too many phenomena in organic nature which natural selection appeared unable to explain. In order to answer his many critics, Darwin introduced a

wide variety of Lamarckian elements such as climate, food, and use and disuse of parts into the speciation process.^[85] Weismann, although not the first to contest the inheritance of these Lamarckian factors, provided a viable theory and mechanism of heredity that appeared to render such factors not only superfluous but indeed impossible.

In his investigations Weismann noted that differentiation occurring in the production of all metazoa resulted in two types of cells, the reproductive and the somatic.^[86] The big question remained: how could the first differentiation be explained? When a protozoan—a simple reproductive cell—divides, the result is two reproductive cells. How could a one-celled organism have given birth to a nonreproductive cell? For Weismann, the answer was found in the germ plasm. Variations in the original reproductive cell or groups of cells—that is, differences in their molecular or chemical structure—could upon division create not just the expected reproductive cells but nonreproductive ones as well. If this variation proved to be advantageous to the organism, it would be preserved by natural selection.^[87] Assuming that part of the hereditary material of this varied reproductive cell remained unaltered, it could be passed down to future generations.

In short, what Weismann suggested in his first pamphlet on the subject, On Heredity (1883), and developed more fully in his later writings was the transmission of a hereditary substance through a "continuous and distinct tract" beginning with the very origin of life and proceeding from one generation to another. This "germ-tract," insofar as it occupied a "different sphere" from the somaplasm, was totally unaffected by what happens to the organism during its life.^[88] Certain important revisions notwithstanding, this was the basis of Weismann's famous mechanism of heredity, "the continuity of the germ-plasm"—a theory wholeheartedly embraced by Schallmayer once it became known to him.

Weismann's theory emphatically excluded the possibility of an inheritance of acquired characteristics. If all changes in phy-

logenetic development occurred through alterations in the germ-plasm uninfluenced by any bodily changes in the organism, neither the environment, the use or disuse of parts, nor indeed any other factor besides natural selection itself, could be of any significance for the evolutionary process. Moreover, Weismann maintained, there was no reason to accept an unproven hypothesis which was not even necessary for the theory of descent.^[89] Even the existence of rudimentary organs, a perplexing phenomenon facing Darwin and one which he believed was only explicable in terms of disuse, could, according to the Freiburg embryologist, be satisfactorily explained without recourse to Lamarckian factors. In an attempt to explain the existence of rudimentary organs Weismann proposed his theory of Panmixie . The theory sought to account for the degeneration of an organ by means of the "suspension of the preserving influence of natural selection."^[90] He offered the following example of birds of prey:

The sharp sight of these birds is maintained by means of the continued operation of natural selection, by which the individuals with the weakest sight are being continually exterminated. But all this would be changed at once, if a bird of prey of a certain species was compelled to live in absolute darkness. The quality of the eyes would then be immaterial, for it could make no difference to the existence of the individual, or the maintenance of the species. The sharp sight might, perhaps, be transmitted through numerous generations; but when weaker eyes arose from time to time, these would also be transmitted, for even short-sighted or imperfect eyes would bring no disadvantage to their owner. Hence, by continual crossing between individuals with the most varied degrees of perfection in this respect, the average perfection would generally decline from the point attained before the species lived in the dark.^[91]

In his magnum opus, Vorträge über Deszendenztheorie , Weismann went on to cite Panmixie, in conjunction with his principle of "Germinal Selection," as responsible for the short-sightedness and for the deterioration of the mammary glands in all classes of people, and for the weakness of muscles among

members of the upper classes in modern civilization.^[92] In his major treatise Schallmayer utilized both Weismann's example and his language to demonstrate both the possibility and the reality of racial degeneration.

In addition to the scientific reception of Darwin by eminent German biologists such as Weismann, the British naturalist's theory enjoyed an enthusiastic popular reception. As has been discussed at length in Alfred Kelly's extremely useful study, the rapid popularization of Darwin and Darwinism in Germany (indeed to the point where it became a sort of popular philosophy) was aided by, among other things, the country's strong popular science tradition.^[93] As early as the 1870s such Darwinian terms as Kampf ums Dasein (struggle for survival) had "penetrated middle-class consciousness," and by the 1890s certain segments of the German working class had also become familiar with the basic tenets of Darwinism.^[94] It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that Darwin was more popular in the land of Goethe and Kant than in his native country.

One of the best known German popularizers of Darwin, and the most significant for Schallmayer's intellectual development, was the combative and controversial Jena marine biologist, Ernst Haeckel. In his address to the annual conference of the Association of German Scientists and Physicians in 1863 at Stettin, a speech viewed by Kelly as "the public debut of German Darwinism," Haeckel went far beyond the usually cautious Darwin in discussing the broader implications of the new theory.^[95] Unlike Darwin, who, in his Origin , did not discuss human evolution for fear of criticism, Haeckel immediately included human beings as the end point of a long evolutionary chain connecting protozoan to people. Throughout his life—in his numerous popular texts and public lectures—Haeckel never tired of fleshing out the larger philosophical and social meaning of Darwinism. The Jena zoologist's rather dubious philosophical system, monism, was a direct outgrowth of his Darwinian outlook.^[96]

For Haeckel, as his international bestseller Näturliche Schöpfungsgeschichte (The History of Creation) makes clear, Darwinism

was synonymous with selection. It was, after all, Darwin's mechanism, natural selection, that revealed the "natural causes of organic development."^[97] Prior to Darwin, perceptive biologists knew that some form of species transformation had taken place but they lacked any viable means of explaining it. Moreover, selection not only was responsible for evolution but also accounted for the alleged "Law of Progress,"^[98] an idea Haeckel probably borrowed from Herbert Spencer.^[99] Indeed Haeckel, like Spencer, equated evolution with progress; but whereas the latter viewed natural selection as just one of many factors responsible for progressive development, Haeckel singled out Darwin's principle as the most important, if not the sole engine of forward-directed organic and social change.

Yet Haeckel, like Darwin, also recognized that progress could be impeded, at least temporarily, by certain counterselective institutions in modern society which seemed to eliminate the "fit" and protect the "unfit." Modern military service and, by extension, contemporary warfare, were examples of such ominous institutions. For Haeckel,

this and other forms of artificial selection practised in our civilized states sufficiently explain the sad fact that, in reality, weakness of the body and weakness of character are on the perpetual increase among civilized nations, and that, together with strong, healthy bodies, free and independent spirits are becoming more and more scarce.^[100]

Another factor working against progressive development was medicine:

The progress of modern medical science, although still little able really to cure diseases, yet possesses and practises more than it used to do the art of prolonging life during lingering, chronic diseases for many years. Such ravaging evils as consumption, scrofula, syphilis, and also many forms of mental disorders, are transmitted by sickly parents to some of their children, or even to the whole of their descendants. Now, the longer the diseased parents, with medical assistance, can drag on their sickly existence, the more numerous are the descendants who will inherit incurable evils, and the greater will

be the number of individuals, again, in the succeeding generation, thanks to that artificial medical selection who will be infected by their parents with lingering, hereditary disease.^[101]

But despite the counterselective tendencies of medicine and the military—tendencies which Schallmayer later bemoaned even more forcefully—Haeckel remained optimistic; natural selection, "the strongest lever for progress and amelioration," he maintained, will triumph over all attempts by human society to limit its action.^[102]

Insofar as Haeckel believed that struggle and selection were the major forces driving human history, he was not merely a popularizer of Darwin but was also a social Darwinist. Yet Haeckel's brand of liberal, optimistic social Darwinism was not Schallmayer's. Whereas the social Darwinism espoused by Haeckel, Spencer, and German social theorist Albert Schaeffle stressed the necessity of social progress and functioned more or less as a justification of the naturalness of a laissez-faire competitive society, a later variety did not. By the late 1880s and 1890s the necessitarian optimism that had been the hallmark of early social Darwinism began to dissipate, leaving a form that emphasized not the necessity but only the possibility of social progress. Instead of resting comfortably in the assurance that evolution would in the long run perfect humankind's physical, mental, and moral faculties, many late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social Darwinists like Schallmayer denied the inevitability of such progress in the absence of some kind of conscious control over the reproductive capabilities of the "fit" and "unfit."^[103]

There are, to be sure, several reasons for this growing pessimism regarding the inevitability of social progress and the growing demand that the state take an active role in regulating the nation's level of biological fitness, not the least of which was a general disillusionment in Germany with economic liberalism after the 1870s. Although the Great Depression period did not spell the end of economic growth, entrepreneurs did indeed find it more difficult to succeed during this time than they had in the

past. Economic uncertainty unleased widespread social dissatisfaction and a growing tendency to embrace aggressively ideological political positions, particularly with regard to the proper social distribution of the allegedly dwindling national income. More generally, the economic slowdown resulted in an all-too-exaggerated malaise on the part of the German middle-classes. Bismarck's turn toward protectionism and his support of social legislation in the 1880s in part reflected this pessimistic psychological climate.^[104]

This climate of social pessimism explains, at least partly, Weismann's appeal for social Darwinists after 1880. Along with Darwin, first-generation social Darwinists assumed that new characteristics acquired by an organism as a result of environmental change would be transmitted to future generations. This suggested, at least implicitly, that humankind's physical and mental traits could be improved by environmental changes. Weismann's theories, however, denied that such external influences could affect an individual's hereditary substance. The implication, for those predisposed to believe it for other reasons, was that the germ-plasm alone determined the fate of the individual and, by extension, that of the nation and race.^[105] Since, as had been maintained by many, natural selection was no longer effectively able to weed out the bad or "unfit" germ-plasm (owing to the numerous cultural institutions hampering its operation), some form of human selection was necessary. As one German social Darwinist and race hygienist put it:

It was Weismann's teaching regarding the separation of the germ-plasm from the soma, the hereditary stuff from the body of the individual, that first allowed us to recognize the importance of Darwin's principle of selection. Only then did we comprehend that it is impossible to improve our progeny's condition by means of physical and mental training. Apart from the direct manipulation of the nucleus, only selection can preserve and improve the race.^[106]

Indeed for social Darwinists of the second generation—those who accepted Weismann's views on heredity and the "all-su-

premacy" of selection—eugenics was often seen as both a logical and necessary strategy to avert racial degeneration. In short, Weismann's theories provided the necessary biological justification for race hygiene.^[107]

Late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century social Darwinism, the German medical tradition, and the Bildungsbürger's concern over the social question—these were the three most important influences responsible for Schallmayer's turn to eugenics. He attempted to grapple with the social problems resulting from Germany's rapid and thoroughgoing industrialization, he accepted the professional and intellectual norms fostered by the German medical community, and he embraced the "selectionist" variety of social Darwinism then fashionable among certain German biologists and self-styled social theorists. The impact of these contexts are immediately visible in Schallmayer's university education, medical training, early professional career, and first treatise.