Rassenhygiene

Summary

The German term for eugenics, a discourse in which physicians’ participation was predominant, coined as a name by Alfred Ploetz; in Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, Franz Oppenheimer embraced it on the view that positive transformations of peoples and races could be achieved within a generation through social causes (Zionism and Cosmopolitanism: Franz Oppenheimer and the Dream of a Jewish Future in Germany and Palestine, PDF p.25, p.54).

Rassenhygiene arose, with Sozialhygiene, from the popularity of social medicine at the end of the nineteenth century (PDF p.54).
Oppenheimer preferred the positive approach of English eugenics — Francis Galton’s aim of increasing offspring from people with supposedly superior genetics — over the negative approach of reducing offspring from people with supposedly inferior genetics (PDF p.55).
Both Alfred Ploetz and Wilhelm Schallmayer linked Rassenhygiene with socialism, regarding capitalism and class privilege as detrimental to sexual selection (PDF p.56).
Its advocates sought to increase birth rates among the educated classes while reducing them among the uneducated through (voluntary) marriage prohibitions, blaming neo-Malthusianism for falling educated birth rates; Oppenheimer rejected its sexual intervention programmes, including sterilization even if voluntary (PDF p.61, p.65). Schallmayer sought to distinguish it from social anthropology and to have its goal determine an overarching “national biology” (PDF p.57-58).

tags
aliases	eugenics (Germany)