Population policy, eugenics and welfare have moved from the margins to mainstream issues in modern German history. The issues of births, welfare, sexually transmitted diseases and contraception became highly charged political issues around 1900, and thenceforth this mindset has exerted considerable force on family policy and welfare in successive eras. There is also a darker side as regards eugenics and sterilisation, culminating in Nazi racial policies. Nowhere is this more true than in Berlin, a city that has itself undergone immense upheavals in terms of population and politics. Timm’s book is mainly pitched at the level of ideology, the public discourse on sexually transmitted diseases, and – to a lesser extent – the provision of contraception. Berlin provides a context and setting for the impact of the fear of a declining population. The city is seen as a hotbed of progressive culture from the culturally and politically vibrant Berlin of the 1920s until the divided city of the 1960s.
The medical discourse long focused on a ‘sterile Berlin’, as a city unable to replenish its population stocks, and as a city of inward migration. Timm’s concern is less at the level of population and patients, and more at a higher political and administrative level. On the whole we have a rather top–down analysis using central state archives, rather than one based on the reconstruction of the sexual advice centres and sexually transmitted disease clinics as regards their clientele, and the involved lay and professional groups. The analysis is pitched at the level of the city as a whole, rather than one based on the distinctive political and social identities of a district by district anatomy of the metropolis. The translation of Adolf Gottstein from medical officer in Charlottenburg to Prussian Ministerial Director might have been considered among other local/ federal state interactions. Timm is more at ease with policy rather than actual reproductive and sexual behaviour.
The analysis of Nazi Berlin provides the author with greater scope. Those sterilised were assisted in finding other sterilised partners, although groups subject to persecution such as Jews and Roma might have found their place in the analytical framework. The study divides into population and family policy, and the control of sexually transmitted diseases with some details on contraception in Nazi Germany. The book comes into its own with the immensely useful sections on post-World War II Germany. One is that of the status of the sterilisation law of 1933. The effects of the impact of the Berlin Wall on sexually transmitted diseases is fascinating in indicating that the political repression of the German Democratic Republic facilitated effective disease control. Overall, this is a study that gains in strength as it unfolds. There is an index but no bibliography.
