The field of biopolitics encompasses issues from health and hygiene, birth rates, fertility and sexuality, life expectancy and demography to eugenics and racial regimes. This book is the first to provide a comprehensive view on these issues for Central and Eastern Europe in the twentieth century.
The cataclysms of imperial collapse, World War(s) and the Holocaust but also the rise of state socialism after 1945 provided extraordinary and distinct conditions for the governing of life and death. The volume collects the latest research and empirical studies from the region to showcase the diversity of biopolitical regimes in their regional and global context – from hunger relief for Hungarian children after the First World War to abortion legislation in communist Poland. It underlines the similarities as well, demonstrating how biopolitical strategies in this area often revolved around the notion of an endangered nation; and how ideological schemes and post-imperial experiences in Eastern Europe further complicate a 'western' understanding of democratic participatory and authoritarian repressive biopolitics.
The new geographical focus invites scholars and students of social and human sciences to reconsider established perspectives on the history of population management and the history of Europe.
Introduction 1. Is Biopower Something to Be Afraid Of?: Biopolitics as a Research Category in Historiography Section I: Issues of Reproduction 2. Regenerating the Nation: Eugenics and Racial Hygiene in Early Twentieth-Century Austria 3. ‘Each Jewish Child Is Precious’: Survivor Community in Poland and Its Biopolitical Discourses 4. ‘Marital Intercourse Means Togetherness and Parenthood’: The Biopolitics of Catholic Marriage Preparation in Poland during the 1970s 5. Whose Children?: Pronatalist Incentives and Social Categorization in Socialist Romania 6. State and Parenthood: Family Planning Policy in Socialist Yugoslavia (1945–1991) 7. Blind Faith or Divine Providence? Global Catholicism and the Population Bomb Section II: Beyond Procreation: Health, Nutrition and Hygiene 8. Feeding Hungry Bodies: Children’s Nutrition as Biopolitics after the Great War 9. Disinfection Trains: Fighting Lice on Polish Railways, 1918–1920 10. The Intricacies of Communist Biopolitics: Control of Disease and Epidemics in the Polish Countryside after 1945 11. State Socialist Biopolitics: Four Stages of Human Development in Post-War Czechoslovakia 12. Imperial Biopolitics: Famine in Russia and the Soviet Union, 1891–1947 13. Fearing the Nation, Fearing for the Nation and Fearing Other Nations: Compulsory Vaccination in Twentieth-Century Germany
Barbara Klich-Kluczewska is an Associate Professor at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow and a cultural historian of twentieth-century Poland. Her fields of research include history of family, history of sexuality and gender, biopolitics and history of experts’ knowledge. Joachim von Puttkamer is Director of the Imre Kertész Kolleg Jena at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. His research focusses on nationalism and statehood in modern Central and Eastern Europe. Immo Rebitschek is an Assistant Professor at the Department for Eastern European History at the Friedrich Schiller University Jena. He has published widely on the history of the Soviet procuracy in Stalinist Russia and is currently focussing his research on the history of famines in the late Russian empire.
