Content deleted Content added
Leonshernoff (talk | contribs) fixed an (unintentionally?) significant typo |
Leonshernoff (talk | contribs) Aha. That typo is systematic. |
||
Line 87:
Peukert argued in his essay that the late 19th and early 20th centuries had seen tremendous scientific and technological change together with, in Germany, the growth of the welfare state, which had created widespread hopes both within the government and in society that “utopia” was at hand and soon all social problems would be solved.{{sfn|Peukert|1994|p=280-284}} Peukert wrote:<blockquote>"From the 1890s...the conviction that social reform was necessary was increasingly outflanked and overtaken by the belief that all social problems could find their rational solution through state intervention and scientific endeavor...The dream of a final solution to the social problem resonated in the plans of the 'social engineers', regardless of whatever they were active as youth welfare workers, social hygienists or city planners. Just as medicine had put paid to bacteria, so too, the union of science and social technology in public interventions would make all social problems disappear".{{sfn|Crew|1992|p=322}}</blockquote> Peukert wrote that by the beginning of the 20th century, the pattern of death had changed from being common amongst young people to being only common amongst the old, and this "banishment of death from everyday life" dramatically increased the prestige of science so that it was believed would soon solve all social problems.{{sfn|Peukert|1994|p=282}}
At the same time, owing to the great prestige of science, a scientific racist, Social Darwinist and eugenicist worldview which declared some people to be more biologically “valuable” than others was common amongst German elites.{{sfn|Peukert|1994|p=279-280}} Peukert argued that because the modern welfare state began in Germany in the 1870s, that this had encouraged an "utopian" view of social policy within Germany.{{sfn|Crew|1992|p=321}} Peukert wrote that the great success by medical practitioners in reducing mortality in the 19th century had encouraged hopes that practitioners of the new emerging social sciences like sociology, criminology and psychology would soon solve all problems and personal unhappiness would be banished forever.{{sfn|Crew|1992|p=321-322}} At the same time, Peukert argued that the "spirit of science" had aided the rise of racism.{{sfn|Crew|1992|p=322}} Peukert argued that scientific advances had reduced
Peukert wrote that as death is inevitable, scientists and those influenced by the scientists came to become obsessed with improving the health of the ''volk'' via "racial hygiene" as a bid for a sort of
Peukert argued that the very growth of the welfare state under the [[Weimar Republic]] ensured the backlash when social problems were not solved was especially severe.{{sfn|Crew|1992|p=322}} Peukert wrote: <blockquote>"Weimar installed the new principle of the social state, in which, on the one hand, the citizen could now claim public assistance in (his/her) social and personal life, while on the other, the state set up the institutional and normative framework, (defining how) a 'normal' life of the citizen of the state could progress...This process, which had already began before the turn of the century, reached its apex in the Weimar Republic and was also thrown into crisis, as the limits of social technology could achieve were reached in every direction".{{sfn|Crew|1992|p=322}}</blockquote> Peukert wrote that after the [[First World War]], the pre-war mood of optimism gave way to disillusionment as German bureaucrats found social problems to be more insolvable than at first thought, which in turn, guided by the prevailing Social Darwinist and eugenicist values led them to place increasing emphasis on saving the biologically “fit” while the biologically “unfit” were to be written off.{{sfn|Peukert|1994|p=288}} Peukert used as an example that fact that social workers had before the First World War had believed it was possible to ensure that every child in Germany was brought up in a happy home and by 1922 were instead declaring that certain young people were "biologically" prone to being "unfit", requiring a law on detention that was to remove them from society forever.{{sfn|Peukert|1994|p=288}} Peukert maintained that after 1929, when the [[Great Depression]] began, the economic limits of the welfare state to end poverty were cruelly exposed, which led German social scientists and doctors to argue that the "solution" was now to protect the "valuable" in society from the "incurable".{{sfn|Crew|1992|p=322}} Peukert wrote that rather than accept that the "spirit of science" could not solve all social problems, those who believed in the "spirit of science" started to blame the victims of poverty themselves for their plight, depicting their poverty as due to biological instead of economic factors, and began to devise measures to exclude the biologically "incurable" from society.{{sfn|Crew|1992|p=322}} Peukert described the appeal of National Socialism to scientists and social engineers as offering a simplistic "racial" explanations for social failures in modern Germany, which allowed those making social policy to disregard economic and psychological factors as a reason for why some families were "losers".{{sfn|Crew|1992|p=323}}
Line 95:
Peukert wrote that when faced with the same financial contains that their predecessors in the Imperial and Weimar periods had faced, social workers, teachers, professors and doctors in the Third Reich began to advocate plans to ensure that the genes of the "racially unfit" would not be passed on to the next generation, first via sterilization and then by killing them.{{sfn|Peukert|1994|p=289-290}} Furthermore, Peukert argued that ''völkisch'' racism was part of a male backlash against women's emancipation, and was a way of asserting control over women's bodies, which were viewed in a certain sense as public property since women had the duty of bearing the next generation that would pass on the "healthy genes".{{sfn|Crew|1992|p=323}} Peukert maintained that as the bearers of the next generation of Germans that Nazi social policies fell especially heavily upon German women.{{sfn|Crew|1992|p=323}} Peukert argued that for ''volksgenossenlinnen'' (female "national comrades"), any hint of non-conformity and the "pleasures of refusal" in not playing their designated role within the ''volksgemeinschaft'' as the bearers of the next generation of soldiers could expect harsh punishments such as sterilization, incarceration in a concentration camp or for extreme case ''vernichtung'' ("extermination").{{sfn|Crew|1992|p=323}} Peukert wrote that "after 1933 any critical public discussion and any critique of racism in the human sciences from amongst the ranks of the experts was eliminated: from then on, the protective...instances of the ''Rechstaat'' (legal state) no longer stood between the racist perpetrators and their victims; from then on, the dictatorial state put itself solely on the side of racism".{{sfn|Crew|1992|p=323-324}} Peukert argued that all of the National Socialist social policies such as natalist policies that relentlessly pressured Aryan women to have more and children were all part of the same effort to strengthen the ''volksgemeinschaft''.{{sfn|Crew|1992|p=323}} Peukert argued that despite a turn towards Social Darwinism when confronted with the failure of the welfare state to solve all social problems in the 1920s, that it was the democratic Weimar constitution that had provided a thin legal wedge that prevented the full implications of this from being worked out.{{sfn|Crew|1992|p=323-324}}
Peukert argued that in 1939 that the entire system that had been built up for scientifically identifying those of racial "non-value" served as the apparatus for genocide.{{sfn|Peukert|1994|p=290}} Peukert wrote that the all of the criterion for identifying Jews and Romany as peoples of racial "non-value" was based on the pseudo-scientific theories that had been promoted by generations of "race scientists" and that those serving in the "human sciences and social professions" worked to provide the theories for an "all-embracing racist restructuring of social policy, educational policy and health and welfare policy".{{sfn|Peukert|1994|p=290}} The culmination of these efforts was the proposed 1944 "Law for the Treatment of Community Aliens" which called for sending to the concentration camps anyone who failed to live be up to be a proper '''volksgenossen'' as a ''gemeinschaftsfremde'' (community alien).{{sfn|Peukert|1994|p=290-291}} Only the fact that Germany was fully engaged in World War II prevented Hitler from signing "Law for the Treatment of Community Aliens", which was put off until the ''Reich'' won the "final victory".{{sfn|Peukert|1994|p=291}} Peukert wrote: "Nazi racism, the professed goal which had been to secure the
Peukert wrote that the Holocaust would never had happened without the shift from the thinking of scientists from concern with the body of the individual to concern with the body of the collective ''volkskörper'', the tendency to break society into those of "value" and those of "lesser value" and with seeing the solution to social problems as eliminating the genes of those of "lesser value".{{sfn|Peukert|1994|p=291}} Peukert wrote that the fascination with pseudo-scientific racial theories and eugenics were common to all of the West, but it was the specific conditions in Germany which allowed the National Socialists to come to power 1933 that led to the "Final Solution to the Jewish Question".{{sfn|Peukert|1994|p=292}} Peukert wrote: "The 'death of God' in the nineteenth century gave science dominion over life. For each individual human being, however, the borderline experience of death rebuts this claim to dominion. Science therefore sought its salvation in the specious
He wrote that after the war that scientists who had provided the intellectual justification for the "Final Solution" were not prosecuted and a massive effort to block the memory of their actions started which largely prevented any discussion of the subject in the 1950s-1960s.{{sfn|Peukert|1994|p=294}} Peukert ended his essay stating that there were debates about "our dealings with others, notably those different from ourselves. Recent debates about foreign migrants and AIDs present a conflicting picture. On one hand, we can see the continuing survival of a discourse on segregation, untouched by any historical self-consciousness. On the other hand, however, there is a considerable body of opinion pledging for tolerance and responsibility that spring from an awareness of German history and of the genesis of the "Final Solution" from the spirit of science".{{sfn|Peukert|1994|p=294-295}}
| |||