Eachversion of the Europeanwelfare state developed out of particular historical contexts. The modern Austrian welfare state was developed in “Red Vienna” as a response to the perceived dysgenic emergency of World War I and strong doubts about the Lebensfähigkeit (viability, “ability for life”) of the young nation itself. Eugenic thought was central to the Vienna Welfare Ministry's mission, activity, and appeal to both a local and international audience. The welfare system implemented in Vienna in the interwar years worked to sustain and amplify the city's viability by creating hygienic conditions that Dr. Julius Tandler, its founder, believed would positively alter the very constitutions of its citizens and make possible a “coming generation” of healthy children.
In presenting such an argument, this study participates in two ongoing historiographical conversations. The first concerns the creation of the welfare state in Europe. Questions of reproduction underline any state family policy, and, as a result, the history of sexuality is implicated in the history of welfare. Doctors play a central and well-documented role in this literature.Footnote 1 Yet, because welfare is a key tenet of social democracy as it is practiced in Europe today, few historians have explored the role of eugenics in the development of current welfare programs.Footnote 2 Clearly, however, state practices throughout the industrialized world bear the mark of eugenic reform: mandatory premarital blood tests, prenatal screenings and health support, state subsidies for families that provide for childcare, housing, and food. This essay offers a provocative case study of the Viennese municipal welfare system whose goals were tied to the eugenic beliefs of Julius Tandler, who created and directed the program under the First Republic.
The second purpose of this work is to answer important questions about the attraction of eugenics to progressive groups in Central Europe at this time. Before the legislation of the racial state in National Socialist-controlled Germany in 1933, it was quite common for feminists, homosexual activists, Socialists, progressive doctors, and assimilated Jews to support eugenic policies as part of their larger vision of social and sexual reform. A growing literature explores the uneasy connection of these groups in Central Europe to eugenics, a practice that would eventually be turned against many of them.Footnote 3 Only sustained historical contextualization of eugenic thought, both theoretical and practical, can explain these earlier political links. The case of Julius Tandler provides a useful prism though which to reexamine the intellectual and material conditions that led interwar health-care professionals to eugenics. Tandler's achievements and eugenic commitments are largely unknown to English-speaking audiences. I seek to extract him from the excellent existing biographies and party histories that have documented his contributions to Socialist Vienna and to use his unusual career to examine the interwar relationship between welfare and eugenics.Footnote 4
Tandler was one of the few prewar Jewish professors holding department chair positions at Vienna University's Medical School. He was a professor of anatomy, a founding member of the Austrian Society for Population Politics, and the editor of a scientific journal dedicated to research into improving the human constitution. Tandler had served on various health committees in the fledgling Austrian Republic before ascending to his new title as Directing City Councillor for Welfare and Social Administration of the City of Vienna (amtsführenden Stadtrat für Wohlfahrtswesen und soziale Verwaltung der Stadt Wien). Tandler's unofficial title was no less impressive; within a few years, he was popularly known as “the medical Pope of Social Democracy.”Footnote 5 Tandler's Jewishness made him an unpopular choice for either Minister of Welfare and Social Administration or “medical Pope” among Austria's Catholic population in general and the Christian Social political party in particular. The job ahead of him—first, to overcome the depopulation and disease that directly followed World War I and, second, to speak as a Jew to a Catholic, openly anti-Semitic culture about sexual hygiene and reproductive responsibility—was a difficult one. Historians should take seriously the coexistence of Tandler's status as a Jew, a socialist, and a eugenicist. This perspective allows a more nuanced evaluation of the multiple political uses of eugenics, a scientific framework that still bears the stigma of incorporation into National Socialist policy.
In the last twenty years, historians have successfully debunked the myth that eugenics was always inherently a science of Fascism. Important work has traced the theoretical affinities between interwar Socialism and eugenics.Footnote 6 Paul Weindling, in his work on Weimar Germany, has established a wide cast of characters who were Socialist, eugenicist, and even occasionally Jewish. He rightfully positions the roots of the Rassenhygiene (racial hygiene) movement in quests for social justice, rather than in contexts of anti-Semitism.Footnote 7 My work points directly to the events that caused one local experiment in municipal Socialism to embrace eugenics. In a period of almost continual political and economic crisis, Julius Tandler's mandate was to heal a war-broken population and to engender neue Menschen—literally, a new people—whose healthy, orderly lives would help rebuild the nation. To achieve this, Socialist Vienna justified radical changes and eugenic policy in the name of recovery from World War I and the Nachkriegszeit, the years of material hardship that directly followed it. Socialists framed this as a moment of eugenic emergency that opened possibilities of radical state intervention into private life and individual sexual behavior. In the original German, Tandler used four words to describe these interventions and his program for public health: Rassenhygiene, Bevölkerungspolitik (population politics), Eugenik, and Konditionshygiene (hygienic conditions). Because these terms were always talking about the fitness of a population, for the purposes of this article, I will use the term “eugenics” to describe their common intentions.
Welfare and Eugenics
Most Western welfare systems incorporated both positive and negative eugenic policies in their early attempts to improve the quality and quantity of their populations. “Eugenics,” the English term taken from the Greek for “well-born,” was coined by Francis Galton in 1883. Eugenic theory before World War I combined Darwinian, Mendelian, and Neo-Lamarckian ideas about the transmission of desired human traits. Eugenics and social Darwinism were popularized in Germany and Austria by Alfred Ploetz, whose 1895 book The Efficiency of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak coined the term Rassenhygiene. This term was used interchangeably with eugenics in both German-speaking and Scandinavian countries.Footnote 8
Ploetz's initial work on Rassenhygiene argued for a Nordic race that purged itself of weak members, rather than protecting them through universal social welfare policy. He suggested that reproduction be planned to maximize positive qualities in offspring, that sickly children be mercifully destroyed, and that the most inferior males of society be sent to the front line during wartime.Footnote 9 Reproductive hygiene, in his eyes, was essential to prevent welfare from undoing the rigors of natural selection. Ploetz described human beings as deposits of “positive” and “negative” biological materials. These poles were, in turn, used by a wide range of eugenic thinkers, in Germany and elsewhere, to describe eugenic policy itself. Positive eugenic actions were designed to increase the quality and/or quantity of a given population through the provision of medicine, welfare, housing, and education. Negative eugenic actions sought to affect the population by limiting the gene pool through isolation, sterilization, or destruction. Eugenic societies were founded in Germany (1905), England (1907), the United States (1910), France (1912), and many other countries before World War I. The First International Eugenics Congress was held in London in 1912. Social reformers of all political persuasions attended such congresses throughout the interwar period as proud participants in an international, scientific project of human improvement.Footnote 10 Negative eugenic policies, such as forced sterilization, were largely dropped in the West after World War II (Sweden famously persisted for longer). Thereafter, eugenic policies as a whole were associated with the “barbarous utopia” attempted by National Socialism.Footnote 11
Yet well before National Socialism expanded eugenic practices in Germany, Socialism across Europe had used eugenics to educate and emancipate the people. In many cases, this discourse also demanded social reform through the welfare state. In prewar England, Socialists, Fabians, and eugenicists had called for “race regeneration” in response to census reports that suggested falling maternity rates among the upper classes. Karl Pearson, speaking at the Galton Laboratory in early 1914, described eugenicists as patriotically inspired and scientifically informed social reformers.Footnote 12 This language was repeated in Scandinavia, where many of the founding supporters of eugenics were Social Democrats. All of the Scandinavian countries developed sterilization laws in the 1930s from within democratic political systems. In national debate and academic institutions, these laws were framed as rational responses to a perceived rise in social degeneration and a responsible way of balancing limited budgets with expanded health and welfare benefits.Footnote 13 Poland's eugenic proponents were inspired by the Scandinavian model. Seeking to replace “free-market chaos” with rational state economic planning, they envisioned expanding health benefits for citizens.Footnote 14 Interwar Romania undertook a massive education program to “modernize” the peasantry and created a public health system to serve eugenic goals.Footnote 15 Likewise, in Hungary, the National Institute for the Protection of Mothers and Infants (1917) was founded to combine medical care with hereditary research as part of a general campaign to increase the birthrate of healthy children.Footnote 16
In France, Socialist eugenicists forged common goals with politically conservative (often Catholic) Natalists through the state program of puericulture, the science of infant health and childrearing.Footnote 17 Puericulture was part of a wide range of biologically inspired reform movements in France designed to reverse the perceived degeneration and depopulation crises of the fin de siècle, all of which were incorporated into the political system of solidarism. Solidarism, the French bridge from laissez-faire liberalism to the welfare state, has often been compared to the state socialism enacted under Bismarck. Imperial German experiments in social insurance acts passed in the 1880s were designed to lessen the appeal of the Socialist party. Their benefits were initially limited, but they established an important legal base of protection that was expanded throughout the Second Reich.Footnote 18
In both the French and the German cases, these limited prewar welfare systems were radicalized after the armistice. In France, a health and welfare ministry was created for the first time in 1920. That same year, the Natalist movement was able to pass the law of 1920 banning birth control advertisement and devices, using the rhetoric of war loss and patriotism to do so.Footnote 19 Weimar Germany enacted vigorous series of local welfare assistance and educational policies, beginning in 1920 with the Law of the Severely Disabled (designed to serve injured veterans of the war), the Youth Welfare Law of 1922, and the National Welfare Decree of 1924.Footnote 20 Budgetary shortfalls and the effects of hyperinflation sapped the progressive Weimar welfare system, which struggled to replace charity with centralized state aid.
Like France and Germany, the new state of Austria also expanded its national welfare legislation in the postwar period. In his brief tenure as Undersecretary for Public Health in Austria from 1918–1919, Julius Tandler passed a law establishing publicly funded hospitals on a national level.Footnote 21 However, the changing relationship between Vienna and the nation in the immediate postwar years (particularly Vienna's increasing role as a Socialist vanguard of an imagined future) meant that Tandler's most far-reaching, “racially hygienic” reforms would be achieved on the municipal level.
Viennese Specificity
Julius Tandler's explicit goal as Welfare Minister for Vienna was the regeneration of the postwar population. His welfare system was designed to produce healthy children first and foremost, very much in the tradition of French puericulture. To this end, he funded eugenic premarital counseling, birth control, VD testing, maternity benefits regardless of the mother's marital status, and layette gifts for every child born in Vienna. Once born, the child could draw on a municipal system of school doctors, nurses, and dentists, social workers, kindergartens, after-school programs, summer fresh-air camps in the countryside, and adolescent job placement advice.
That Tandler was an acclaimed medical academic committed to eugenic research and programming is not unusual.Footnote 22 His background was very much in keeping with the ranks of professionals in Central Europe who looked to the state to fund and legitimate their eugenic vision of the (often new) nation.Footnote 23 Furthermore, the interpretation of World War I as a dysgenic emergency was widespread throughout the international eugenic community.Footnote 24 Although some eugenic thinkers before 1914 had hypothesized warfare to have a salutary culling effect on populations, the widespread, mechanized destruction of trench warfare ended that discourse within European and North American eugenic circles. The dysgenic effects of World War I were decried even before the armistice of 1918: the best and brightest young men had died on the battlefields, hence unnaturally shrinking the “positive” gene pool; returning soldiers infected home front populations with unprecedented levels of VD; the surviving inhabitants of Central Europe were without adequate supplies of food and heating fuel for years. Vienna's political and biological contexts informed each other throughout the war and its aftermath. The Austria created by the Treaty of Saint-Germain in 1919 was barred from union with Germany and hence rejected by many within Austrian politics as Lebensunfähig—not viable, “unfit for life.” As the political viability of the First Republic was debated in newspapers and cafes across the city, the physical viability of the local population was also questioned. Spanish influenza visited the city in the fall and winter of 1918, veterans returned injured and diseased, and malnourished women and children struck with rickets stood in line for food. The city was understood by contemporaries as “crippled” in every sense of the word.
Although the eugenic rhetoric used by Vienna's Social Democrats about the dangers of World War I to a healthy national population was in keeping with a pan-European discussion, three unusual components stick out. First, the city was under siege politically throughout the First Republic. The Christian Social Party had dominated city hall during the late imperial period. Vienna's wartime city council was suspended until 1916 and even afterwards did not enjoy regular meetings.Footnote 25 Until 1918, the city was run largely by its Christian Socialist mayor, Richard Weiskirchner. When the former Austro-Hungarian Empire broke apart, Vienna was left as the capital of a rump state that no native political party supported. The city collapsed in a general revolt during the summer of 1918 in a series of strikes and food crises. In November 1918, the new republic was declared; and in February 1919, the Social Democratic Party (SDAP) and the Christian Social Party (CSP) set up a fragile coalition government for the nation. Street actions related to food and housing shortages persisted in Vienna into 1920.Footnote 26
The political coalition between Socialists and Catholics broke late that year, after which point the state was split: roughly, the Social Democrats held the majority on Vienna's City Council and the Christian Socials, working in concert with local parishes, controlled the provinces. The new Republic of Austria was further destabilized by a population imbalance as its capital, Vienna, swelled in the aftermath of war to house one-third of the small country's total population. Throughout the First Republic, armed militias representing Socialists, Catholics, Communists, and monarchists clashed in street skirmishes. This violence culminated in the civil war of 1934, whose last battles were fought in Vienna's municipal housing complexes. In the wake of defeat, the Social Democratic Party was outlawed; and Austria was ruled by changing alliances of authoritarian leaders and the Christian Social Party until the Anschluss with Nazi Germany in 1938.
The second important peculiarity of Viennese eugenics reflects this coexistence of Socialism and Catholicism in interwar Austria. The political landscape of the First Republic encouraged the Austrian SDAP to display a different commitment to eugenics than did its Scandinavian or German equivalents. German Socialists in the interwar era proposed largely negative eugenic measures (such as sterilization and abortion on eugenic grounds) to the Reichstag, in part because positive eugenics had already been appropriated as an issue by competing political parties. Hence, because the Weimar parliament housed multiple parties that supported eugenics, the German SPD could only distinguish itself by recommending more radical eugenic interventions into the population.Footnote 27 Austria's polarized political landscape pitted the Rassenhygienik reforms of Vienna's Social Democratic city hall against the authority of the Catholic Church and the Christian Socials. As a result, Austrian interwar Socialists rejected any state-mandated negative eugenic measures in favor of education and individual choice. Unlike their German counterparts, the Austrian Socialists remained committed to positive eugenic interventions in the newly created welfare state.
The SDAP's decision not to press for sterilization or abortion laws may have been a pragmatic nod to the cultural concerns of Vienna's Catholic population; it was also in keeping with the ideological principals of Austro-Marxism, a distinctive form of Socialism that emerged in the waning years of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. This philosophy dominated the Austrian Social Democratic Party since its founding in 1888 by Victor Adler, a physician.Footnote 28 Austro-Marxism was a variety of reform Socialism that called for gradual, electoral change, rather than violent revolution. Many of its proponents worked to create a flexible approach to the nationalist conflict that plagued late imperial attempts to achieve political consensus. Indeed, Austro-Marxism as a whole takes a flexible approach to Marx, combining more traditional Marxist tenets with contributions from other philosophical schools to best suit the realities in Central Europe at the fin de siècle.Footnote 29 Violent revolution, and the Communist minority in Austria that called for it, was to be replaced with education reform, the rights of the individual, social welfare, and municipal housing. Tandler was a popular educator and speaker who promoted these values throughout the interwar period.Footnote 30 Reflecting the theoretical position of his party, Tandler sought to reconcile eugenic necessity with a democratic social structure. Rather than remake the Volk through mandates and legal limits, he oversaw voluntary programs that emphasized cultural change through education.
The Catholic Social Party strongly resisted any state intervention into marriage and the family. Indeed, the party blocked any parliamentary attempt to legalize divorce or initiate civil marriages; and throughout the First Republic, marriage remained a confessional act.Footnote 31 Furthermore, their party platform and its rhetoric were explicitly anti-Semitic. Vienna had enjoyed a strong history of sexological and medical expertise dating from the late imperial period, and many of these researchers happened to have been assimilated Jews. Hence, in interwar Vienna. a conservative Catholic party used anti-Semitic rhetoric to agitate against eugenic state programs that it claimed to be tainted by “Jewish Science.”Footnote 32
Finally, because Red Vienna stood apart as a something of a state within a state during the First Republic, the city's municipal government wielded unusual power. The city of Vienna's legal status was expanded in 1920, leading to its recognition as a federal province with the right to control its own taxation. Using steeply graduated income taxes and a number of “luxury taxes,” the city was able to fund innovative social programs.Footnote 33 This “laboratory for democracy” made it possible for individual leaders within the city ministries and councils to effect far-reaching changes within a relatively short period of time.Footnote 34
As one of these administrators, Tandler's story embodies precisely the ability of individual leaders to create new realities. For this reason, the confluence of modern welfare development and eugenics in Austria can best be made visible through the story of Dr. Julius Tandler. Tandler's unique and contemporaneous positions as welfare minister, social hygiene innovator, and editor of a eugenic medical journal provided him unprecedented access to both eugenic research and the opportunities to test it on Viennese society. His status as a tenured member of the Medical School faculty gave him and his writings uncontestable legitimacy as an expert in public health. As with so many initiatives of the First Republic, the Viennese Socialists believed that the success of reforms initiated in Vienna, including its experimental health and welfare system, would eventually win over the rest of the country through example. Tandler was working in a controlled local context of SDAP strength, while at the same time intentionally creating a model that could be adopted for the entire nation.
The Mission of Social Welfare
The eugenic framework of Social Democratic welfare reform was part of a general transformation of Vienna's health-care system, begun during World War I. The late imperial system of poor-relief clinics and private doctors was replaced, beginning in 1920, with a web of municipal welfare offices, clinics, and services. The backbone of this process was the Hospital Establishment Law, passed in October 1920, just before the Republic's fragile coalition collapsed, which made the state financially responsible for hospitals.Footnote 35 This money, raised by taxes in individual provinces and municipalities, was what gave the city of Vienna financial control over its welfare system. The chief backer of this new law, which remains in place to this day, was Julius Tandler. Tandler turned Ploetzian eugenics on its head by insisting that social welfare programs and publicly funded health care, far from diluting the process of “survival of the fittest,” actually accelerated constitutional improvements within the Volk. Rather than undoing the rigors of selection, as Ploetz worried welfare might, Tandler assured his audiences that a health-care system for Vienna would result in a stronger, healthier population.
Tandler's welfare system was an early embodiment the Virchowian theory of “social medicine” that had developed in Europe in the nineteenth century and expanded dramatically during and after World War I. Such social medicine sought to treat the symptoms of illness before disease spread within the social body. As social democracy responded to population loss and material want in the years following the war, it increasingly called on doctors to serve by helping to restructure society. The SDAP in Vienna imagined the medical profession transitioning away from earlier models of “house doctor for those with means to pay,” or even the doctor who devoted his life to serving the poor, toward the doctor as health official, who “in the service of all cares for the highest good of the Volk, namely, its health.”Footnote 36 The Welfare Ministry identified its primary directives along these lines. Society became a living organism to be cared for:
The goal of welfare is nothing less than our attempt to provide economically for the thousand-fold emergencies that can befall an individual or a family, and to transform the old practice of poor-relief into a modern one of social services that can encompass every appearance of sickness in the societal organism in order to fight systematically against disease itself.Footnote 37
Such welfare goals demanded professionals who could expand their practices from a struggle against the illnesses of individual patients into a fight against the diseases that threatened society as a whole.
Tandler himself spoke of health officials as transcending specialization and transforming society into an organic whole: “The health official is no longer a doctor who serves himself, and no longer a medical institution, but rather a properly organized part of a larger whole.”Footnote 38 His definition continued: “Perhaps in no other city as Vienna are the relationships [between social and medical improvements] so clearly recognized and consequently so thoroughly worked through. Here, the health official is a limb in the rich organic construction of the organism that is our city's Welfare Services.”Footnote 39 Medical knowledge was to be employed through public servants rather than private healers. The unusually integrated context of social and medical change in interwar Vienna made possible the organic imagery that Tandler employed. Tandler's interwar vision of public health, achieved through the efforts of a medical civil service, linked Vienna to the international movement that created the modern health official. Within ten years of peacetime activity, health officials in Vienna could recommend more than fifty professional journals from all over Europe devoted to expanding and perfecting social hygiene and welfare, twelve published in Vienna alone.Footnote 40
By 1921, Tandler was able to outline guiding principles for the Viennese welfare program.Footnote 41 He believed that the community was responsible to help all who needed help and that this care would be most rationally achieved through preventative assistance. Tandler joined moral messages about universal care and family units with an economic logic: the city could best reach its citizens as family members. In addition, Tandler posited that constructing a welfare care system would prevent the need for charity, so long as this system were organized into a closed organism, a totality where no-one falls through the cracks.Footnote 42 Tandler rejected older ideas of private “relief” funds to aid the deserving poor and replaced them with the right of all citizens to care and the duty of society to provide that care. In order to fulfill the responsibilities Tandler created for the city of Vienna effectively, his welfare office sought to rationalize more fully the social management of bodies.
Tandler and Eugenic Science
Two intellectual trends seem to have led Tandler to embrace eugenics.Footnote 43 The first was his professional interest in reframing biological knowledge between anatomy and medicine. To do so, Tandler founded a new scientific journal in 1913, Journal for Applied Anatomy and Constitutional Studies, which he edited for the next twenty years. In it, he sought to replace the pre-Darwinian model of diatheses, the study of susceptibility to disease, with a hereditarian-influenced study of the human constitution, or the ability of the body to withstand disease. In an introduction to the first edition of the journal, Tandler described mastering the human anatomy as a fast-approaching last frontier of knowledge and sought to prepare the scientific community for new challenges. Applied anatomy, he posited, should no longer limit its inquires to dead human beings, he wrote, but rather take as its object of study humanity in general by seeking a synthesis between anatomical and clinical experiments.Footnote 44 Part of the answer lay in the study of the human constitution, which he described as sitting on the cusp of new ideas and methods. How could anatomy, long the precedent or basis for clinical work, turn around and learn from the clinics themselves? How might the “research into the constitutional qualities of the human body, insofar as they manifest themselves in the appearance of the individual,” serve the knowledge of applied anatomy?Footnote 45 These questions guided Tandler throughout his professional career and drew him into eugenic circles.Footnote 46
The single article Tandler authored in Applied Anatomy and Constitutional Studies was a reprint of a speech he gave to the German Society for Racial Hygiene in March 1913. Entitled “Constitution and Racial Hygiene,” it provided a middle road between the Darwinian and Neo-Lamarckian models of hereditary transmission that divided eugenic theory at the time. Lamarckian models of reproduction argued that the environment and acquired characteristics of each generation could have immediate effects on the genetic makeup of its offspring. Degeneration worked as cause and symptom of the same illnesses in this school of thought; the human embryo adapted to the environment of the womb, modifying to survive the poisons and behaviors of its mother. As the practices and environments of human beings changed, Neo-Lamarckians argued, so would humans themselves. Urbanization and industrialization hence threatened to produce ever-weaker and more degenerate cohorts. Darwinian theory, on the other hand, posited that generational evolutionary change happened at a glacial rate. Sexual selection in each generation favored the strongest and hence most capable of reproduction, slowly modifying each species according to the traits selected and amplified by thousands of generations. The Vienna Medical School during Tandler's tenure there beginning in 1905 (particularly the physiology department) was animated by Darwin's work. Yet Viennese sexual science in the prewar years drew liberally from both Darwinian and Neo-Lamarckian thought. The latter survived at the University of Vienna well into the interwar period, most famously in the hereditary experiments of Paul Kammerer.Footnote 47 His research strongly suggested a Neo-Lamarckian process of change that many found persuasive throughout the period.
Tandler balanced these two theories of transmission by separating the constitution of an individual from his or her condition. Human constitutions, he argued, were fixed in the individual by the chromosomes he or she bore at birth. These chromosomes determined the inborn individual qualities of each of us, including our disposition to disorders and diseases. As such, constitutions and the chromosomes that determined them were inalterable after birth. Scientifically, of course, they could not yet be studied as genes in 1913—this was knowledge still locked in the interior of the body. Yet Tandler mentioned a variety of ways to approach the constitution from the exterior, as it were: anatomical studies, clinical trials, anthropology, comparative ethnology, and even art history are mentioned in his article. Most of these seem to be thought experiments; the only practical avenue he expanded in his paper was that of anatomy.
Through clinical work, Tandler wrote, doctors could begin deducing the interior constitution through exterior signs gathered in their interactions with patients.Footnote 48 Furthermore, Tandler revealed that he had “undertaken a precise analysis of the influence of the inner-secretion elements (hormones) of the sexual glands upon the human exterior” and had concluded that these gonads determined body development, skeletal structure, and muscle tone, all of which were important expressions of the constitution.Footnote 49 Critically, the functioning of these hormonal emissions could be altered by the conditions in which an individual lived, such as shelter, climate, nourishment, physical activity, and illness. This research led Tandler to two eugenic conclusions. First, he suggested that human racial groups were merely the result of combinations of constitutional characteristics and were certainly not separate species.Footnote 50 Some races bore constitutions more susceptible to certain diseases; others might, in time, be shown to bear resistances and even immunities to disease. Second, Tandler wrote that protecting the chromosomes and hormonal emissions of reproductive pairs from conditional dangers (alcohol, environmental poisons) could potentially prevent constitutional anomalies from appearing in their offspring.
“Constitution and Racial Hygiene” was Tandler's first formulation of the relationship between environmental conditions and human constitution, a principle that would guide him in his postwar position as Welfare Minister. The inborn constitution of an individual may have been inalterable, but the hormonal emissions that were critical to determining his or her constitution could be protected from damaging conditions. This finding had wide applications: “If, as we have shown, the condition of parents can effect the constitution of the children, then hygienic conditions will certainly communicate constitutional health, as well… . The attempt to improve the average constitution of an individual of a certain race, and thus the constitution of that race, leads to Rassenhygiene.”Footnote 51 To this end, Tandler claimed that eradicating constitutional anomalies not only made economic sense, but also protected the population.Footnote 52 Yet the process of “weeding out” was only described as a natural by-product of certain diseases and unhealthy conditions that altered the fertility of individuals; Tandler made no mention of artificial sterilization in the piece. Rather, he concluded: “Hygienic conditions are and remain the most powerful factor in improving the individual constitutions of the next generation, and with them, the constitution of the race.”Footnote 53
Tandler's article explicitly sought to define constitution, condition, and race and the interrelationship of these terms to a eugenic, prewar audience. His exploration of population protection, so close to his discussion of race as a biological expression of bodily health, is disquieting to modern audiences. Yet his conclusions were limited to positive measures—the improvement of the conditions in which reproductive humans lived. This would remain the case throughout Tandler's career. Although he edited Applied Anatomy and Constitutional Studies until 1933, he never again carried out new research. As he took on increasing municipal responsibilities during the interwar period, his academic output focused instead on producing a widely acclaimed, multivolume anatomy textbook.
If Tandler's medical research interests drew him to eugenics as a scientist, this movement was perhaps facilitated by economic theories he embraced as a Socialist. In his scientific and associational papers throughout his career, Tandler adopted important terms from Rudolf Goldscheid, a Viennese sociologist and economist whose work was often cited by the SDAP.Footnote 54 Goldscheid popularized a rhetorical framework for talking about social justice that compared quantitative and qualitative Bevölkerungspolitik (“population politics”). Tandler relied on these categories of “qualitative” and “quantitative” to describe the work of the Vienna Welfare Office and its eugenic goal of quality over quantity. His interwar publications also regularly referred to the population of a given city or state as its “organic capital,” a term coined by Goldscheid in his 1911 study The Woman Question and the Economics of Humanity: Laying the Ground for a Social Biology. Although Tandler's commitment to eugenics flowed from his medical research, it was framed and expressed in the economic language of Goldscheid, whose theories of Menschenökonomie (“economy of humanity”) shaped Tandler's vision of how a city might plan for the healthy production of citizens. Finally, Goldscheid was also the prewar leader of Vienna's Monist Society, which promoted Ernst Haeckel's interpretations of Darwinian evolutionary theory and brought them to popular audiences.Footnote 55 These included a vision of the natural world as a source of beauty and order for humanity and the promotion of “soft” forms of positive eugenic interventions into the society of humankind.
The Appeal of Eugenics to Local and International Audience
The welfare state must necessarily fund and publicly regulate private life, including sexual behavior. To do so, welfare systems develop special forms of persuasion and authorization in order to make arguments about and changes to the private sphere in the name of public good. Ultimately, welfare policies regulate more than money or health care: they also seek to regulate people's behaviors. To do so, welfare programs can use emotional appeals to the populations they seek to control. In interwar Vienna, eugenic appeals to personal responsibility were a part of this emotional regime. Based in science, eugenic discourse had the added benefit of having wrested authority over bodies, marriages, and reproduction away from the Catholic Church. Historians should be wary of setting up a false dichotomy between eugenics and Catholicism, as there was support for “soft” eugenics within Catholic circles even after the publication of Casti connubii (“On Christian Marriage”) in 1930.Footnote 56 Education and marriage counseling in particular were singled out as appropriate eugenic interventions. Nevertheless, Vienna's Socialist-controlled welfare office perceived eugenic arguments as especially effective against traditional Catholic attitudes toward marriage and reproduction.
Rhetorically, the language and arguments Tandler used to explain his welfare system was similar to that of the German eugenicists Alfred Grotjahn and Wilhelm Schallmayer. Peter Weingart has shown that in the immediate postwar period, both theorists were concerned about the qualitative characteristics of populations, and they argued that the state would need to lead the way in creating a “generative ethic” of responsibility within populations.Footnote 57 Yet clearly eugenics was more than just a rhetorical strategy for Tandler—it was the framework and the justification for his democratic welfare city-state. As a doctor and anatomist, he diagnosed Vienna's social body and developed municipal policies designed to heal it. The reproductive capacities of the Viennese social body were deemed especially important to Tandler, who developed new means of securing and promoting sexual hygiene through the Welfare Office.
Tandler explained these eugenic innovations to local and international audiences in his pivotal essay, “Marriage and Population Politics,” (1924) and a number of other publications. The eugenic commitment that emerges from Tandler's published lectures and speeches stresses individual responsibility and education over state-sponsored mandates. Rather than lobby for measures such as forced sterilization, Tandler wrote again and again about the need to privilege the “coming generation” within the state welfare budget. By altering the conditions in which this generation would be raised, Tandler hoped to eventually alter its very constitution. In each of his public and professional appeals, Tandler sought to reconcile eugenics with democratic social change.
“Marriage and Population Politics” was a widely distributed synthesis of Tandler's arguments for state interest in and support of eugenic sexual hygiene. It was presented first as a lecture in 1923 designed to mark the first anniversary of the Marriage Advice Clinic, a eugenic testing center founded by Tandler and run by his colleague Dr. Karl Kautsky, Jr. The lecture then appeared as a multipart article in the prestigious Viennese Medical Journal in early 1924; later that year, it was reprinted in book format by Moritz Perles Press, which specialized in professional and popular medical texts. In this essay, Tandler immediately situated his discussion of marriage and reproduction within the welfare of the state. Using the terminology of the Viennese sociologist Rudolf Goldscheid, he explained: “States are not only economic and political creations, but also entities organically contingent upon their human communities, and by organic contingency we mean the dependence of states upon the condition of their organic capital.”Footnote 58 The people of a state, its “organic capital,” must be healthy in order to ensure a strong state. Although these people made choices as individuals, Tandler was concerned with the ways in which their choices affected the national community and asked that these choices be informed by responsibility.
Tandler began his construction of responsibility with the sense of duty parents feel toward their children. Through state organization, this private obligation could be coordinated into responsibility for the entire next generation. State welfare and eugenic policy, Tandler said, “transform[ed] familial responsibility into population politics, [and elevated] the breeding instinct into a generative ethic.”Footnote 59 The goal of civilization, Tandler explained, was “not to inhibit the instinct to breed, but rather to enlarge upon it, to make it responsible, and even to rationalize it.”Footnote 60 Having established his analogy between the family and the state, Tandler then turned to the question of quantity versus quality in population. Again, this theme was well known to Viennese social thinkers and SDAP ideologues, having been popularized by prewar economic theorists.
In Tandler's hands, the comparison between quantity- and quality-oriented population politics was made more provocatively than ever before. He introduced quantitative population as a tool of imperialism, currently employed by the bourgeoisie to keep a plentiful pool of workers to run their factories and soldiers to fight their greed-inspired wars.Footnote 61 Population politics based on the quality of offspring, on the contrary, supported and enlarged the sense of responsibility within the family. Tandler presented two levels in which qualitative population politics works: that which is concerned with the present generation (humanitarian) and that which focuses on the coming generation (productive). The logic of eugenics entered Tandler's essay with this categorization of qualitative population politics. Clearly, Vienna's welfare system under Tandler favored population planning according to quality. Yet even within the realm of quality population politics, he warned, we find inequality, specifically, between the welfare of the present generation and that of the next generation.
Productive population politics, as they appear in Tandler's argument, were those concerned with the reproductive strength of the Volk: providing for the health of mothers and children. Productive population politics cared for the body of the reproductive adult, housed the family in a clean and safe environment, and above all valued the welfare of children and of the as-of-yet-unborn.Footnote 62 As such, productive work was profoundly gendered and reinforced a heteronormativity celebrated in the interwar period. Women were consistently targeted by Tandler's office as the most direct route to achieving family health. Their roles as mothers to the coming generation were modified and augmented by maternity benefits and municipal childcare centers. In “Marriage and Population Politics,” Tandler spent pages outlining the Viennese welfare services devoted to “productive” ends. His pride in these services is palpable. However, he reported that only 42 percent of the total welfare budget for Vienna went toward “productive” services.Footnote 63 The majority of funds were used toward “humanitarian” ends: caring for war invalids, the terminally ill, or the insane. Accounting totals from the Vienna Welfare Office for the years 1925–1929 show that Tandler never overcame this spending trend: care for adults remained more expensive than children's services despite yearly decreases in the former and budget increases for the latter.Footnote 64 Tandler assessed this dilemma:
It is our duty to be humane and just, and thus to also care for the old and the criminal, for the weak and the mad. The greater part of this duty is unproductive; is purely humanitarian. From the standpoint of population politics, the welfare budget of a state is balanced when its productive spending outweighs its humanitarian spending.Footnote 65
Vienna's welfare spending, then, according to Tandler's categories, was faulty: the city was spending too much on the present population at the expense of the coming generation.
The most important aspect of Tandler's essay “Marriage and Population Politics” was not about marriage (of which he says very little), but rather about what it meant to base a welfare and health system on population quality over quantity. “Marriage and Population Politics” is overwhelmingly concerned with the right to live and cure. Although he admits that some of his fellow welfare specialists have suggested terminating the lives of the criminally insane or terminally ill, his article closes by pointing toward less brutal solutions. Healthy marriage and proper reproduction, in the end, appear in his argument to constitute more rational means of reducing the “humanitarian” drain on the welfare state. He advocated giving the state the right to control marriage, only in order to control reproduction. He reminded his reader that religion had long held the power to veto marriage and reproduction among certain segments of society and suggested the welfare state would wield this authority in a more rational manner. He defined state control of marriage as one of proper reproduction: “Society's input [into prospective marriages] is not simply concerned with those who want to enter into it, but rather is concerned with what the product of this marriage will be.”Footnote 66
Tandler's pleas must be heard in their local context. Because civil marriage did not exist in Austria until the Anschluss of 1938, marriage remained a religious affair determined by the confession of the participants: for the vast majority of the population, the Catholic Church.Footnote 67 State control over marriage, Tandler maintained, would promote healthier reproduction and eventually reduce the “humanitarian” costs borne by the Welfare Office. Evaluating potential marriage partners through the eugenic questionnaires of the Municipal Marriage Advice Center, rather than through a priest, offered Tandler a first step toward reducing costs at the Welfare Office.
Tandler continued to publish on the themes of a eugenic “ethics of procreation” throughout his tenure at the Welfare Office, using the same categories of “productive,” “unproductive,” “and “humanitarian” to talk about budgets and populations. At the International Congress for Hospital Systems in 1929, Tandler delivered a speech that posed difficult questions about the ability of society to care for the chronically ill, particularly in times of economic distress.Footnote 68 He warned:
Whatever welfare we undertake must be economically well-grounded; it should express the rational population politics of the Welfare Office and not be a manifestation of exaggerated charity or weak-kneed humanitarian officiousness. … For many years, I have characterized as productive all welfare expenditures that go towards the reproduction and repair of humanity, and as unproductive all those expenditures that do not serve this goal.Footnote 69
Tandler listed again the unproductive drains on the welfare budget: madhouses, old-age homes, care for the mentally or physically crippled, and care for those who could not be healed. However, in contrast to his message in 1924, by 1929 Tandler was able to report that Vienna's welfare budget was far more weighted toward “productive” spending; he claimed that his office had reached a balance of 62 percent productive and 38 percent unproductive expenditures.Footnote 70 Furthermore, the remainder of Tandler's speech is devoted to proud enumerations of Vienna's many asylums, as well as long descriptions of the progressive pavilion-system of residential care offered in them.
This section overwhelms and undoes the economic warnings that opened the lecture; Tandler frames these “unproductive” sites as hallmarks of Vienna's success in providing care for all. The city's ability to provide both outpatient and in-house care to the widest variety of needy citizens appears in this argument as a testament to its closed system, in which a web of connected services and offices could cushion the blows of fate.Footnote 71 It was precisely in these centers for the terminally mad or ill, he claimed, where caregivers witnessed “the silencing of eugenic considerations; here pure humanitarianism reigns, the love of creation,” where hope was never entirely forsaken.Footnote 72 Ultimately, Tandler seems to have been aware of the limits of eugenic arguments within welfare planning and the places in which his “ethics of procreation” would be threatened by purely rational, economic considerations. Tandler was willing to categorize and instrumentalize individuals according to their bodily abilities and constitutions, but he was unwilling to limit the city's responsibility to care for such groups.
Perhaps the strongest example of eugenic categorization that Tandler engaged in was that of “inferiority” [Minderwertigkeiten]. For many contemporary eugenicists, this category contained individuals who bore inheritable diseases, as well as those who did not fit the current standard of physical or mental fitness.Footnote 73 Tandler also included some classes of criminals in this category. Some of his most provocative eugenic beliefs were outlined in his 1929 lecture, “Dangers of Inferiority” to the Austrian Association for Volk Regeneration and Inheritance. This lecture, delivered to an audience sympathetic to eugenic projects, was expanded and printed for publication through the Welfare Office press later that year. It represents a curious synthesis of science and social reform; as an anatomist interested in the human constitution, Tandler warned of the missing scientific research for eugenics even as he championed the future possibilities of certain eugenic interventions. He considered a wide range of practices that would allow the state to limit the reproductive capacities of “inferior” citizens: premarital testing, sterilization, even abortion on eugenic grounds.Footnote 74
Indeed, throughout the article, Tandler approached controversial subjects, discussed their applications in other nations, and then rhetorically retreated. The population in Vienna needed to be educated about eugenic responsibility to future generations, rather than be legislated into it. He explained: “Without a psychological receptivity in place among the population, the proclamation of social laws—and especially those of a eugenic nature—can not only lead to the legislation's failure, but also do injury to the cause that lays behind the law.”Footnote 75 Hence, Tandler emphasized that he did not support any legislation that was contrary to the people's sense of “rights and duties.”Footnote 76 In this sense, Tandler's speech was a part of his project: an attempt to create wider support for eugenic policies. Although he supported a number of negative eugenic practices in theory, his speech ultimately stressed moderate change for Vienna through education and public health.
In Dangers of Inferiority, the expanded offprint of his speech, Tandler repeated his demand for qualitative (rather than quantitative) population politics and placed its practice squarely within eugenics.Footnote 77 He also repeated the message of the municipal Marriage Advice Clinic: that marriage and reproduction, far from being mere personal choice, were to be influenced by the state.Footnote 78 He defended the eugenic goal of racial regeneration against those who saw it as utopian, but he also identified the barrier to this goal: that the end goal of eugenic breeding was unknown. Breeding plants and animals was a process untroubled by psychological or ethical implications, he explained, but, “In humans, the end goal of breeding is difficult to fix, and certainly not something that can be scientifically substantiated.”Footnote 79 It was impossible to “select out” and breed for positive characteristics, for the science of inheritability was still too little understood for this.Footnote 80
What was clear to Tandler, and what he stressed to his audience, were the high levels of impaired children born to certain kinds of parents, and that the municipality assumed the burden of caring for these children. It was in this context that Tandler imagined the future sterilization of “master criminals, sexual offenders, the mentally retarded, [and] epileptics, who are beginning to endanger human society with the products of their bodies,” to be a dictate of emergency.Footnote 81 Even here, however, Tandler bowed to the preferences of citizens and caregivers, suggesting that parents or guardians of the state be allowed to choose sterilization for their loved ones and conceding that legally required sterilization would need to be postponed until more doctors supported it.Footnote 82
Finally, Tandler used his essay to return to the relationship between the human constitution and the conditions in which humanity lived and thrived—the relationship he had first worked out for his 1913 article “Constitution and Racial Hygiene.” Neo-Lamarckian theories of transmission persisted in Tandler's late formulations, as well: in the admitted absence of experimental documentation, he wrote in Dangers of Inferiority that he was convinced that inner hormonal secretions were changed by events such as pregnancy, climatic change, and hunger, and that these effects “manifest themselves in the organs and sometimes the characteristics” of individuals.Footnote 83 This suggested to him that, “the acquired characteristics of parents—their conditional qualities—will be inherited by their children, and thus will become constitutional.Footnote 84 Because the living conditions of the parents influenced the possibilities of chromosomal combination, or constitution, of the next generation, he claimed, it was incumbent on society to practice what Tandler called “a hygiene of condition” [Konditionshygiene].Footnote 85 His local audience in 1929 surely could guess what this neologism referred to: better maternity care, healthy living and learning environments for children and families, and medically informed marriage contracts. Indeed, these were the municipal programs Tandler had developed and cited throughout the article.
The Konditionshygiene that Tandler promoted in 1929 was ultimately one of positive eugenics. Far from excluding “inferior” individuals from the collective, it demanded care for all. Doctors who complained that welfare and public health services protected the weak might be correct in terms of population management, he admitted, but they were wrong in their methods. “The practice of medicine has as its highest objective the preservation of life, regardless of whether the aforesaid carrier [Träger] is inferior or not,” he wrote.Footnote 86 Yet, even as he demanded welfare for all and rejected negative eugenics measures, Tandler used ambiguous language. He rejected the term “life unworthy of living,” for example, not as a category, but rather on the basis of its utility:
Right now, Konditionshygiene indiscriminately embraces all people, including, as in any human action that must be governed by humanitarianism and compassion, those [who bear] deficiencies. Konditionshygiene does not seek to define worthy or unworthy lives. Destroying those unworthy of life for the sake of the worthy is hardly a meaningful question, because it passes over a problem.Footnote 87
Tandler's problem, of course, was self-imposed; he sought to create a welfare system that provided for all of Vienna's “organic capital” (including the “deficient”) while encouraging the creation of stronger, healthier citizens of the future.Footnote 88 It is likely that Tandler chose the aggressive terms and explanations used in Dangers of Inferiority in light of his heredity-minded audience. Did some of them believe, along with Ploetz, that welfare was a dysgenic state intervention? Tandler stressed throughout his speech that many of the Welfare Office's practices were coeval with eugenic goals.Footnote 89 But he bristled at the suggestion that the welfare system of Vienna had been created merely as a means to achieve eugenic ends. Although it might serve these ends well, he insisted that welfare “had been built for the purpose of humanitarianism” as “collective security for assistance where individualistic approaches had failed.”Footnote 90 Tandler hence demanded praise for Vienna's welfare system on two terms. It was both a humane, Socialist response to the uncertain living conditions the citizens of the First Republic faced, as well as a system that, through its attention to those living conditions, sought to create a stronger coming generation.
Conclusions
Tandler's work at the helm of Vienna's Welfare Office brought him international fame. He promoted Vienna's system of care for all in numerous publications (many published by the city itself) and spoke at conferences in Europe and the United States during the 1920s. These activities increasingly became advisory in the 1930s: he supplied Latvia with physicians to create a health insurance program in Riga, reported to the League of Nations on the role of doctors as public health servants rather than as private contractors, and he traveled to Greece and China to organize national health programs at these nations' request.Footnote 91 Tandler was still in China during the Austrian civil war of February 1934. The new clerico-Fascist regime, the Fatherland Front, outlawed competing political parties and began building a self-styled corporate state. As a prominent Social Democrat, Tandler was briefly arrested upon his return to the city. When released, he spent another year lecturing and advising in several Chinese cities. His final welfare project lay in Russia, where he taught, reorganized the medical curriculum, and planned a new child welfare system from 1935 until his death a year later.Footnote 92
For a lifelong scientist and social reformer, such an end was perhaps fitting. Tandler's biographer, however, claims that anti-Semitism was one of the reasons for Tandler's frequent trips away from Vienna toward the end of his tenure in the municipal government.Footnote 93 Christian Social politicians and papers routinely attacked Tandler's municipal interventions into marriage and reproduction; they also attacked his role as a medical lecturer at the University of Vienna. Concomitant with his service to the city, Tandler remained the head of the Institute of Anatomy at the university. After the Munich Putsch in 1923, Tandler's anatomy lectures were interrupted by anti-Semitic student protesters, who had to be locked out of the dissection rooms in 1923, 1925, and again in 1927. Tandler complained to the Dean in 1927 that “nothing in my teaching contract mentions allowing myself to be beaten up,” but he was attacked again in 1929 and saw his institute sacked in 1931.Footnote 94 Two waves of violence at the institute in the spring of 1933 led to a number of student injuries and wide coverage in the press. Afterwards, a police security post guarded the institute until Tandler was forced to retire from his position as Chair of Anatomy in 1934. His profound productivity was finally insufficient, in the face of political anti-Semitism, to justify his service to either medicine or the municipality.
The eugenic tradition in which Tandler participated had its roots in prewar Monist, feminist, and sex-reform ideology. Like the interwar French tradition of puericulture, it stressed the health of mothers and children above all else. “Social radical eugenics” and “Rassenhygiene” are two terms that scholars have recently applied to this form of eugenics.Footnote 95 I am not sure that either captures the distinctive nature of Socialist eugenics in interwar Austria. Taking its cue from the Monist tradition, this eugenics assumed that the work of nature, including the individual's satisfaction of “natural” urges, was positive. Sex was released from Christian dogma, yet still constrained by the strictures of heterosexual love, health, and responsibility. Creating, nurturing, and improving life on earth were the highest goals of humanity. Improving life meant, above all, the improvement of life's conditions. As historian Reinhard Mocek has explained, “this mode of eugenics assumed a change in living conditions, or social milieu, to be the key to human betterment.”Footnote 96
In Socialist-run Vienna, this change in living conditions was achieved through public housing, expanded sport and hygiene opportunities, medical subsidies, and, as I have outlined in this essay, extensive sexual, maternal, and family health programs. The class struggle was reinterpreted by the SDAP as a struggle for national health, achievable through a eugenics that required material improvements in the lives of the Viennese working class. A clean bed, healthy sexual partner, and hygienic body were the objects of eugenic reform in Vienna. However, as “Marriage and Population Politics” illustrates, the language of eugenics could be expanded to imagine a reduction of social services to unproductive members of society or even the voluntary sterilization of the reproductively unfit. Although Tandler's Welfare Ministry did not employ these measures, they were well within the limits of the thinkable in interwar Vienna. They were also explicitly singled out for condemnation in Pope Pius XI's pivotal 1930 papal encyclical Casti connubii. It is a measure of the radicalism of Tandler's vision that this same encyclical also forbade equal rights between husband and wife, state control over marriage, birth control use or distribution, and any legislation of eugenic principles: all measures promoted by the welfare state in interwar Vienna.
Although many eugenicists assumed a hierarchy of racial worthiness that appealed to conservative or nationalist political parties, it is important to stress that people of all political persuasions embraced or interpreted the concepts of eugenics and Rassenhygiene. The interventionist social medicine practiced in Vienna in the interwar period should be included within the umbrella of eugenic policies. For Socialists, state planners, and welfare advocates, eugenics was a means of making talk about sex scientific. In the early Republican years, scientific sexual discourse was a powerful tool for those who sought to undermine the authority of the Catholic Church and its representatives in Viennese government, the Christian Social Party. Eugenic thought helped a variety of people, Julius Tandler included, make arguments about reproductive health that were not dependent on Christian concepts of marriage, fidelity, and chastity. Most importantly, eugenics provided a framework in which to understand the demographic destruction of World War I and its consequences for the city of Vienna—and by extension greater Austria. It took seriously the questions of Lebensfähigkeit that dogged the new nation and answered them in the language of scientific planning and possibility.
