4 - A City Regenerated: Eugenics, Race, and Welfare in Interwar Vienna

Summary

VIENNESE EUGENICS HAS YET TO FIND its position within an appropriate sociopolitical or cultural frame. Austria's eugenicists, who were concentrated in Vienna, have generally been seen through a German lens as a mere peripheral context for the German Gesellschaft für Rassenhygiene (Racial Hygiene Society), driven by its founder, Alfred Ploetz (who coined the term Rassenhygiene [racial hygiene]) in 1895, and the psychiatrist Ernst Rüdin. However, this fixation on German developments, including an emphasis on right-wing racial ideology and demands for sterilization and euthanasia, not only marginalizes the important role Vienna played in the formation of the Austrian eugenics movement during the interwar years but also ignores the significance of eugenicists from Vienna in the broader “Greater German” movement as a whole. Although an alternative view locates Austrian eugenics within a general model of “biopolitics” and permits investigation of medical and public health networks, it ignores cultural specificities and the role of crucial linkages to centers beyond Austrian borders, such as Berlin, Munich, Brno/Brünn, and Budapest — and even London and New York.

This essay argues that a more multifaceted Central European perspective reveals how Austrian racial hygiene bridged the gap between Hitler's leaving Vienna in 1913 and the increasing racialization of medicine with the Anschluss in 1938. This perspective illuminates the role of eugenics as a means of establishing coalition and consensus among those concerned with public health in Red Vienna long before it became a tool of German Nationalists. As surprising as it may seem, eugenics actually developed in a number of divergent directions, some of which formed the basis of Viennese public health and welfare developments and gained the support of individuals — including Jews, who later became victims of its misuse.