The Vertigo Years

by Philipp Blom

  The most significant and portentous developments of the apparently rational utopias of this period took place at the very intersection of science and philosophy. The second prophet of this new world-view was the German anatomist and writer Ernst Haeckel (1834-1919), a jellyfish specialist whose popular works on evolution and biology were among the greatest bestsellers in Wilhelminian Germany. His most successful book, Welträthsel (Riddles of the Universe, 1899), sold 400,000 copies before 1914.

  Haeckel came to prominence as a science writer around 1900, but his career was a product of the prodigiously energetic and optimistic nineteenth century. Like several scientists of his time, he immersed himself totally in his work - much to the chagrin of the second Mrs Haeckel, who felt sorely neglected by the intellectual giant. Having read The Origin of Species around the time of its publication in 1859, Haeckel, then a student without any firm professional plans, had immediately recognized the book as the most important of his life and he had dedicated his entire career to spreading its message and bolstering its scientific claims. On several extended research journeys he collected specimens and worked on those that colleagues brought back from their own expeditions. He named and described literally thousands of new species, 3,500 alone after the Challenger expedition to the Polar Circle. A gifted draughtsman, Haeckel also made beautiful illustrations of his specimens.

  Haeckel was cut from a very different cloth from Galton or his idol, Darwin. His intellectual patron saints were Goethe, a poet and a scientist, and another German, that great universal genius Alexander von Humboldt, who during the first half of the nineteenth century had put all his energies into creating a unified vision of the world, a grand synthesis reaching from cosmology to geology, botany, zoology and human history and thought. Standing in this German Romantic intellectual tradition, Haeckel was a scrupulous researcher, but the results of his studies were to be material for a deeper understanding of the world, a new ethics, based on the thought that all matter was invested with the same universal spirit.

  The art of nature: Ernst Haeckel’s successful work

  showed an aestheticized nature.

  One of Haeckel’s most successful books, found on every good middle-class bookshelf in Wilhelminian Germany, was Kunstformen der Natur (Artistic Forms in Nature, 1904), in which he described the aesthetic beauty of different creatures and natural phenomena in 200 sumptuously drawn illustrations. It is fascinating book. Not only are the plates expensively produced and lovely to look at, but they are also subtly stylized, more like Jugendstil fantasies than scientific work. These are not real plants and animals in a random world, but animated moments of grace, indicators of a higher order, a cosmic mind which Haeckel believed to have recognized in evolution itself.

  The real task of humankind, Haeckel felt, was learning to live in accordance with the rules of nature, which at the moment were being flouted everywhere by the philistines in power:

  The higher culture, which we are only beginning to construct, will always have to keep in mind the task of creating a happy, i.e. contented existence...Many barbarous customs and old habits which are thought indispensable will vanish: war, duels, forced adhesion to churches… The main interest of the state will no longer be the creation of the strongest possible military force, but the most perfect education of its youth based on the most extensive care of the arts and sciences. The perfection of technology with its inventions in physics and chemistry will satisfy the needs of all; artificial synthesis will deliver foods rich in proteins. A rational reform of marriage will create happy families.

  It is possible that Haeckel had his own, copiously unhappy family life in mind when he wrote these last lines, but to his scientifically trained eye the future was bright because the solution was so clear: Politics, he wrote, was nothing more than applied biology.

  Haeckel was often critical of his contemporary Nietzsche, whom he reproached for underestimating the power of sympathy and pity, but his own understanding of these qualities was idiosyncratic. He was a pacifist and an admirer of Bertha von Suttner, but at the same time his notions of pity took on a decidedly active tone. ‘Rationally speaking,’ he wrote in 1904, ‘the killing of a crippled newborn child...cannot be subsumed under the notion of murder, as our modern law books would have it. Instead, we must see and approve of it as a sensible measure, both for those concerned, and for all society.’

  It was this mixture of natural, almost pantheist piety, strict scientific thinking and social engineering that attracted a host of followers, many of whom seized particularly on the eugenic aspect of Haeckel’s works, on the chance of building a new, purer, better society out of the shambles that was reality. These men, a new generation, hardened the eugenic ideas and pushed them into a particular direction. Science was becoming politics, and one of Haeckel’s protégés, Wilhelm Schallmayer (1857-1919), propagated this political slant: ‘The principle of natural selection is what made evolutionary theory important,’ he wrote in 1910. ‘Only as a result of the union of the descent theory and the theory of selection did evolution become a force which, despite strong opposition, old prejudices and powerful interests, continues to pave new roads...’ If evolution reigned supreme, then an individual’s value lay only in its usefulness to the species:

  It appears as if the individual exists only to perform a function for the species and is not an end in itself; individuals no longer of worth to the maintenance of the species are blessed with an early death. As Weismann had demonstrated, the duration of life of every species is regulated to fit its needs... . Death itself is, according to Weismann, a service to the species at the expense of the individuals. This law of nature, the total subservience of the interest of the individual to that of the species, must also hold true for human development.

  Schallmayer was in no doubt that civilization was working against natural selection and was creating a ‘crushing and ever-growing burden of useless individuals’ with the inescapable result of ‘a decline in the average hereditary qualities of a people such that its overall fitness with respect to the demands necessitated by the struggle for survival is diminished’. Convinced of the urgency of his task, the writer had very little patience with those too decadent and short-sighted to perceive the inexorability of the impending catastrophe:

  If the flabby views and comfortable habits for which Neo-Malthusians [who believe populations are too large already] and feminists make propaganda become dominant among the white civilized nations, the white race will not only not expand over the earth, but will doubtlessly… sooner or later either be militarily defeated by the tough and rapidly growing portion of the yellow race and then be gradually replaced by its reproductively superior competition until it [the white race] disappears, or, if hostilities are avoided by all sides, the peaceful immigration of the fecund Asiatics...will lead to exactly the same result.

  Measures would have to be taken, measures outlined by another of Haeckel’s pupils and one of the vice presidents of the International Eugenics Convention in London, Alfred Ploetz (1860-1940). With supreme Prussian application, he wrote in his 1895 work Die Tüchtigkeit unserer Rasse und der Schutz der Schwachen (The Excellence of Our Race and the Protection of the Weak) that procreation must not be left to ‘some accident, an hour of inebriation, but regulated according to fundamental principles established by science’. If such dutiful copulation resulted in a malformed child, ‘the college of doctors...will give it a kind death with a small dose of morphine’.

  The founder and tireless propagator of the German Society for Race Hygiene, Ploetz was by no means more extreme than other writers, all of whom published successful books and articles. ‘We do not approve of any false humanity,’ wrote the avowedly racist eugenicist Theodor Fritsch. ‘Whoever seeks to preserve the degenerate and depraved, limits space for the healthy and strong, suppresses the life of the whole community, multiplies the sorrows and burdens of existence and helps rob happiness and sunshine from life. Where human power cannot triumph over sorrow, there we
honour death as a friend and redeemer.’ Fostering the strong would get nowhere without killing the weak, it was believed, and here Nietzsche was used to give ammunition to those who wanted to kill to be kind: ‘Even the most careful selection of the best can accomplish nothing, if it is not linked with a merciless elimination of the worst people...Zarathustra preaches: Do not spare your neighbour!…Therefore this means becoming hard against those who are below average and in them to overcome one’s own sympathy.

  A New Manliness?

  There is an obvious correlation between eugenic thinking and social issues which we have seen throughout the preceding chapters. Declining birth rates, especially among the middle classes, raised fears of being swamped by those further down the social scale, and called into question - illogically yet forcefully - the manliness of husbands who fathered fewer children. The relationship between men and women had been sufficiently questioned to raise the spectre of a decadent social disorder in which people no longer knew the place allotted to them by nature. Scandals like that surrounding Prince Eulenburg and the suicide of Friedrich Wilhelm Krupp, a convinced eugenicist, because of his rumoured homosexuality had created an impression of moral degeneracy among those in positions of power. In addition to this, the wave of nervous illnesses and neurasthenia, the rise of psychiatry and the free discussion of sexual pathologies had all contributed to a feeling of destabilization, of an enfeeblement of human stock. The spectre of decadence, weakness and unmanliness rose everywhere, and behind it loomed a machine-powered dystopia, in which the masses of the weak and unfit were lulled into artificial sleep by mass entertainments and industrial levelling of all distinctions, all merit and all values. Eugenics appeared to offer a solution to these fears.

  If eugenic thinking was strong in Germany and Britain, it was widely discussed in all industrialized nations. Historians have, for obvious reasons, given German eugenicism a great deal of attention, but recent research on other countries has shown that the debate there was every bit as intense, and the ideas no more moderate.

  In France, the heritage of Lamarck and his doctrine of inheritable acquired traits was still dominant around 1900. In addition to this, the widespread fear about the collapse of the French population due to low birth rates tended to dissuade scientists from neo-Malthusian positions proposing a further limiting of births among those whom they believed to be of inferior stock. While the sense of needing to build a future (industrial, political and intellectual) was palpable, and eugenics became one aspect of this feast of utopian social engineering, French writers tended to be more sceptical about the future of their nation, and hence perhaps less inclined to imagine such a future.

  Positive eugenics (in effect, selective breeding) was not high on the agenda, but when it came to weeding out the unfit, France was equal to other European nations. In a debate about the abolition of the death penalty (quickly rebutted by the higher ranks of justice and turned into a dispute between the relative merits of the guillotine and hanging), many experts published their views about punishment in general, and about social justice. The Italian criminal pathologist Cesare Lombroso worked on biometric measurements to define what he called the ‘born criminal’, a kind of person from whom nothing good could come, a class of degenerates that was best contained from birth or done away with immediately. In France, this view found enthusiastic support from the psychiatrist Emile Laurent, who argued simply and forcefully:

  If your beloved dog catches rabies you kill him despite everything this cruel act might cost you. But you also kill him to protect him from injury and to spare him unnecessary suffering. And then, all around you, nature applies the death penalty on an immense scale in its hecatombs of the weak and the vanquished, with its storms, its famine, by the claw and tooth of those flesh-eaters that are its hangmen. Kill them! says nature to society. Kill them! says the past of humanity to the present through a hundred voices in history.

  Another expert, a retired military doctor, praised the efficacy of execution because of a beneficial side-effect: ‘it takes out of circulation the mad pro-creator [of future children] and is therefore a powerful factor in the amelioration of our race […] through the avoidance of potential, vice-infected [viciées] conceptions.’

  Not only the conservative legal establishment took an interest in eugenics. Socialists of all countries had long proposed eugenic measures for creating a healthier proletariat. This somewhat surprising face of eugenic thinking was represented in France in the educationalist and activist Paul Robin (1837-1912). Robin was a born revolutionary. Son of a conservative naval officer, he had moved to Belgium and chosen to become a teacher. Living off private lessons, he became involved with socialist education and ideas, and spent a decade between Geneva, London, Paris and Belgium, always involved in political activism, through which he met and collaborated with luminaries such as Prince Kropotkin in Geneva and Karl Marx in London. Eventually, however, Robin tired of the ceaseless factional in-fighting in the International and plunged instead into practical work as director of an orphanage, where he could put his very liberal educational ideas to the test. There was no corporal punishment, boys and girls were taught together and learned a variety of trades as well as academic subjects. Astonished visitors saw all the principles of education flouted and yet had to remark on the remarkable cleanliness of both orphanage and children, and on the pupils’ cheerfulness and confidence. His reformist attitude, though, was too much for his superiors, who sacked him after fourteen years of service, in 1894.

  Towards the turn of the century, Robin turned more and more towards eugenic teaching, or neo-Malthusianism as it was known in France. He founded the Ligue de la régénération and published a journal in which he argued for eugenic measures. During his years working in popular education and as a socialist activist, he had seen his share of misery and injustice. The conclusions he drew from his experiences, though, were surprising: ‘public assistance is most often addressed to those inferior people who were born like this or became such through circumstances and will remain like this,’ he wrote in 1902.

  In the worst case they will haphazardly produce numerous children who will have no chance of triumphing over their difficulties and will tax all assistance beyond what is possible or imaginable. What is more, it allows the worst degenerates to live, particularly the weak of mind...which the former state of nature or of public assistance would have allowed to perish. All these degenerates which are now allowed to live under great sacrifice, but a life of which nobody would want even a week, and to which all of us would prefer death.

  Societies, Robin believed, could not allow themselves to be burdened with such a load. ‘The millions spent by all nations in order to help the inadequate, the scrofulous, the syphilitic and the alienated result in nothing but an amelioration hardly sufficient to make their miserable path in life,’ he thundered, ‘[and] are an impoverishment of the race. It is the organization of public decline.’

  Sweeping measures would have to be taken to prevent a slide back into barbarism, Robin wrote, particularly through a directive as to who should or should not produce children. Workers brought part of their own misery upon themselves by producing great numbers of children who would soon be their competitors in the workplace, and having fewer children was therefore in their interest, he believed, adding that for ‘the worst incurable degenerates...there is no other remedy than artificial sterilization’. Having never abandoned his secular principles, Robin also drew another consequence from this necessity of limiting births, for while procreation by the wrong people was a danger to society, the joys associated with it were unquestionably good and healthy, as he argued in 1902:

  Let us establish the principle that the nervous vibrations corresponding to sexual enjoyment [volupté sexuelle] are just as positive as other vibrations, which nobody refuses to esteem. It is just as honourable for a person to give and to receive sexual pleasure as it is to create something beautiful, useful, good, or to look with admiration at a beautiful lands
cape, a beautiful monument, a beautiful statue...to listen to beautiful music, enjoy the perfume of a rose, or a violet, or of jasmine, or to eat an apple.

  National stereotypes are always annoying and sometimes dangerous, but they can also be very diverting. Where the German Dr Ploetz proudly proclaimed that the sexual act would no longer be a haphazard occurrence due to a drunken moment (poor Mrs Ploetz!), the Frenchman Robin convinced his compatriots that one of the positive aspects of his neo-Malthusian brand of eugenicism was the emancipation of sexual desire from necessary procreation. Despite the jolly reputation of the French capital as Europe’s foremost place of pleasure, however, Robin’s robustly sensual views on sex scandalized his contemporaries and repeatedly brought him into conflict with the authorities. Emancipating sexual enjoyment from procreation and openly calling for contraception, the socialist was questioning the fundamental values of good society. Paul Robin had become a feminist: ‘A woman must be able to dispose freely of her own body and to decide for instance, when she is pregnant, whether or not to keep the child she carries. The freedom of woman is the conditio sine qua non of regeneration. Women’s liberation, freedom before the law, in morals, before public opinion is in itself...will be the veritable regenerator of humankind.’

  Robin remained a rationalist to the very end. When, in 1912, he felt that his threescore years and ten had been exhausted and he was now, aged seventy-five, himself becoming one of the infirm and the scrofulous, he swallowed a large dose of morphine. Even while dying, he attempted to make notes about the symptoms of poisoning until he was overtaken by unconsciousness.

  At Home with the Kallikaks

  While the French were gripped by national malaise and unsure of their future, the citizens of the Land of the Free had no such misgivings. In the world’s greatest place of immigration, planning populations was an obvious concern shared by, among others, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, two of the richest and most powerful men in the land. Their financial support allowed Charles Davenport (1866-1944), a leading Harvard biologist, to create, in 1904, the Eugenics Records Office at Cold Springs Harbor, New York, as a laboratory for research into heredity and natural variation.