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Marius Turda and Paul J. Weindling, eds., Blood and Homeland: Eugenics and Racial Nationalism in Central and Southeast Europe, 1900-1940 (Budapest: Central European University Press, 2007), 476 pp., $25.95 (pb), ISBN 978-963-7326-81-3.
The title of this volume, taken from the Romanian "Sânge si glie" (blood and soil), points to its major purpose to analyze the history of eugenics or race hygiene in the countries of Central and Southeastern Europe (CSEE), the racist or radical or ultranationalist visions of the nation as an ethnically homogeneous state, and the relationship between the two. To do so with respect to CSEE is a task, which has been neglected until quite recently, even though during the period covered here, the international community of eugenicists, including many outright racists and anti-Semites, highly appreciated the cooperation with their colleagues from CSEE. (For instance the International Congress of Population Science, held in 1935 in Berlin, assembled that community and included among its non-German participants over 30% from CSEE.) In fact, from its emergence in the 1990s, the international or comparative historiography on eugenics and "race science" had focused mostly on Britain and the United States, Switzerland and Germany, and the Nordic countries. Moreover, the national historiographies of the CSEE countries, especially prior to 1989, had completely ignored the subject (with the exception of Austria, where research followed the emergence of such studies on Nazi Germany in the 1980s). The volume opens with a study of Nazi-German "race psychology" as being at "the core of scientific racism" and as applied for example to people in the Eastern borderlands of Germany (Egbert...