Centre for the Philosophy of Natural and Social Science
Contingency and Dissent in Science
Technical Report 08/09
The Nazi Cosmetic:
Nazi Aesthetics in Action and the Practice of Medicine in Nazi
Germany
Sophia Efstathiou
Series Editor: Damien Fennell
The support of The Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) is gratefully
acknowledged. The work was part of the programme of the AHRC Contingency and
Dissent in Science.
Published by the Contingency And Dissent in Science Project
Centre for Philosophy of Natural and Social Science
The London School of Economics and Political Science
Houghton Street
London WC2A 2AE
Copyright © Sophia Efstathiou 2009
ISSN 1750-7952 (Print)
ISSN 1750-7960 (Online)
All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the
publisher, nor be issued to the public or circulated in any form of binding or cover other
than that in which it is published.
1
The Nazi Cosmetic:
Nazi Aesthetics in Action and the Practice of Medicine in Nazi Germany
By Sophia Efstathiou
Editor's Note
In this paper Efstathiou examines the role played by aesthetic ideals in Nazi medicine. Specifically, she
investigates how ideals of beauty and health were tied to ideals of goodness and justice to serve ideological
purposes. She also investigates the role of biological holism, arguing against the thesis that such holism
necessitated a Nazi-like ideology. By presenting a historical analysis of these important aspects of Nazi
medicine, Efstathiou draws our critical attention to crucial contingencies in this important episode in the
history of medicine.
Abstract
This paper examines the conflation of vital and aesthetic norms in the practice of Nazi
medicine, and eugenic practices. It argues that biological holism, though it served as the
vehicle of Nazi ideology historically, did so contingently. The anti-totalitarian thinking of
biological holist Kurt Goldstein speaks against the irrevocable use of biological holism to
promote Nazi ideologies.
Introduction
Paradoxically, the ‘Final Solution’, as a result of its apparent historical
exceptionality could well be inaccessible to all attempts at a significant
representation and interpretation. Thus, notwithstanding all efforts at the
creation of meaning it could remain fundamentally irrelevant for the history
of humanity and the understanding of the ‘human condition’.
Saul Friedlander, “The Final Solution”, in Levi and Rothberg (2003), 54
The extermination of Jews in Nazi concentration camps has been called “unthinkable”,
“incomprehensible” and “irrational”. In the face of such “paralysis of comprehension”1
some historians have set aside this bleak episode in human history as essentially
‘inhuman’ and hence irrelevant. This paper begs to differ. This episode in the history of
1
Levi and Rothberg (2003), 71
2
science is definitely not one to neglect. It demonstrates the importance of cultural, in this
case aesthetic norms, in shaping science –medical– policy.
It is not a “rationalization” of the horrors of fascism that is offered here –that is, not a
rationalization in the ordinary sense of the term. Dan Diner convincingly criticizes
historians who assert the irrationality of Nazi extermination policies and yet keep
searching their analytical toolboxes for some rational interpretation. Diner claims that the
description of Nazism requires a “negative historical cognition” in the sense that the
cancellation of basic principles of rationality must be accepted before any attempt is
made to describe Nazi practices.2
This account heeds Diner’s admonitions. Its guiding thesis is that Nazi practices can be
understood more fully once the aesthetic –and traditionally speaking “non-rational” –
standards at the heart of Nazi ideology are appreciated. This is not to say that no
pragmatic purposes were served by Nazi policies. The function of concentration camps as
labour camps served concrete economic goals. But this rational economic function was
an accident of the creation of camps, not the reason for it. As Giorgio Agamben notes,
camps are political “spaces of exception”,3 spaces that open up when the political
exception of some civilian population becomes a stable arrangement within a society.4
The political exception of Jews, among other civilian populations, was just a means to
2
Ibid. 80
Levi and Rothberg (2003), 253
4
According to Agamben (1998), camps articulate political exception by providing the physical spaces
where the law is suspended. In this sense, San Francisco’s Angel Island Immigration and Quarantine
Stations at the turn of the century, as Nayan Shah (2001) describes them, or the detention spaces for
foreigners requesting refugee status in modern airports, as Agamben notes, are examples of camps.
3
3
end: the end itself being the vision of a Healthy [Pure and Beautiful] German Race,
where ‘health’ was understood within a particular aesthetic-ideological frame5.
Nazi aesthetics took shape in the collective actions of the Nazi party and gave shape to
multiple domains of German life. This paper focuses on the articulation of Nazi aesthetics
in the theory and practice of the life sciences in Nazi Germany. What were norms for the
good health of a race, who were the race doctors who could cure it and how would racial
health be manifested when achieved? A deeper understanding of Nazi ‘eugenics’ can be
obtained by examining the nature of the ‘eu’ [good] in it. It is argued that the life sciences
and holistic biology in particular served as “vehicles of transport” of Nazi totalitarian
ideology. An attempt is made to identify the ways in which biological concepts are
particularly well-suited proxies for aesthetic ideals. Was the use of holistic biology in
promoting Nazi ideals inevitable? The example of Kurt Goldstein who promoted a
holistic and yet anti-totalitarian vision of biology suggests otherwise. Goldstein’s
conception of human, organismic health bears explicit marks of his anti-totalitarian
thinking. I conclude with a question of Robert Proctor (1999): How could Nazi medicine
achieve genuine advances in treating cancer and actively promote healthier lifestyles and
at the same time engineer novel technologies for mass extermination? As Nikolas Rose
and Robert Proctor have suggested, the Enhancement of the German Race implied that,
both ‘positive’ eugenic measures had to be taken to strengthen the quality of the
“germplasm” and ‘negative’ eugenic measures to eliminate the procreation of ‘unfit’
individuals. The conflation of vital norms of physical health with aesthetic norms taken to
5
Capitalization is used to convey that these are particular articulations of the concepts of ‘pure’ and
‘beautiful’.
4
exemplify racial purity and used to legitimize Nazi hegemony by recruiting more than
reason to its aid seems to exemplify an attitude present if not prevalent in contemporary
biopolitics. Perhaps the unit on which health is defined is nowadays the individual as
opposed to the race. But it seems the duty to be healthy is still a respected and
enforceable one, and arguably, still managed by cultural (aesthetic) means.
1. Nazi Culture
The 1991 film of Peter Cohen, The Architecture of Doom, does an excellent job of
highlighting the ties between National Socialism and the arts. As Cohen notes, almost
half of the Nazi government were professional, or aspiring, artists. Propaganda Minister
Joseph Goebbels was a novelist and poet, Alfred Rosenberg, founder of the first Nazi
Society for Culture, was a painter and novelist and Adolph Hitler failed his entrance
exams to study architecture in Vienna. Despite this setback in Hitler’s career as an
architect, it could be argued that Hitler’s personal artistic inclinations did ultimately find
expression in the ‘staging’ of the Nazi drama.
It has been argued that culture can have a dual function within collective actions. On the
one hand, culture can be produced by social collective action and on the other hand, it can
be used to fashion collective action. Sociologist Maren Klawiter introduces the concept
of a ‘culture of action’ to describe the emergence of “systems of embodied meaning”6
from the action of social collectives: this is culture produced –as embodied, so as painted
or marching or tied up, etc bodies– within social action events. Ann Swindler, on the
6
Klawiter (1999), 106 [emphasis added].
5
other hand, points out that culture can function as a tool-kit for shaping action repertoires,
introducing the notion of a ‘culture in action’.
The political movement of National Socialism presents us with an arguably quite
distinctive culture of action. Think of what makes parodies of Hitleric actions so
recognizable: the trademarked walk, look or music. Further, as the Nazi movement was
organized according to the ‘Fuhrerprinzip’, the recognition of one Fuhrer as leading all
party members and officials, Nazi collective action and propaganda used cultural
resources in accordance to the Fuhrer’s aesthetic fixations. So one could say that National
Socialist public actions were distal outcomes of Hitler’s culture in action.
Hitler points to the first time he saw the performance of Wagner’s opera ‘Rienzi’ as the
hour when “it all began”. This opera sings the tale of Rienzi, a popular Roman leader,
who leads the Romans to re-unite and re-instate the Roman Empire but who, due to a
malicious conspiracy, suffers a tragic -but glorious- death before the wrecks of ancient
Rome. The figure of the heroic popular leader, the historical setting in antiquity, as well
as the nationalism and anti-Semitism of Wagner himself, inspired Hitler and were partly
reflected in the Nazi culture of action.
Hitler designed the party standard in 1923 to closely resemble ancient Roman standards
and borrowed the symbol of the swastika from ancient Minoan art7. Images of National
Socialist mass rallies depict precise arrangements of disciplined, masculine bodies in
synchronic motion, taking their positions around the Fuhrer. Their faces are shaved, their
7
See [A], film material.
6
hair is cut, their uniforms are clean; only the bent cross of the swastika set against a red
background hints at their impassioned purpose. These episodes of collective action
feature the Hitler as director and leading actor. The ‘body’ of the ‘new’ German Volk,
clean, disciplined and masculine orients itself in attention to its ‘guiding principle’ –the
Fuhrer.
The monumental scale of these actions, the emblazoning of ancient symbols on young
bodies, and the centering of it all around the Fuhrer publicly produced and performed the
culture of National Socialism: the nostalgia for the ancient and pure, the reverence for
the masculine and monumental and the vision of a united German Volk marching towards
the realization of its higher Purpose. And yet, it might be argued that these actions say
more than their intended propaganda message. The ‘Body’ of the German Volk is staged
and inherently un-natural instead of Whole. The uniformity in the motions and the looks
of the Nazis are mere artifacts of scale. The individual thoughts of these men and the
private rumblings of their organs cannot be negated by their lock step. The insincerity
that comes with the pre-production of demonstrations of this scale mocks the oneness of
their presumed Purpose. Admittedly, the notion of a ‘culture of action’ seems to be a
dynamic one, varying according to the sensibilities of the action’s audience: we may
think differently of these episodes than their contemporary audiences. Still, one must
remember that these public demonstrations took place in a specific point in space and
time. It is in reference to their specific historical moment that they should be interpreted.
7
The aesthetic standards of Nazi culture were ‘performed’ in more ways than one. First of
all, art itself was made to conform to Nazi standards of beauty. Museum collections were
actively ‘purged’ of avant-garde pieces, which, supposedly, bore the marks of a ‘cultural
Bolshevism’ instigated by the Jews. Cohen’s film features footage from public
exhibitions of ‘decadent’ art, which took place in major German cities. Echoing
Agamben’s discussion of political camps8 one could say that these exhibitions functioned
as cultural camps; that is, as spaces of cultural exception wherein ‘unfit’ art was
crammed, hung over doors and next to windows and left as the designated fodder for
public disgust.
In juxtaposition to degenerate modern art, the annual Great German Art Exhibit (Grosse
Deutsche Kunstausstellung), which started in 1937, presented the art pieces that captured
the aesthetic of Nazism. The great museum halls holding pieces from the Bismarck era,
alpine landscapes and images of strong German bodies at work constituted Nazi culture
in action. Sculpture was to become the state art form. Using the preferred art medium of
the ancient Greeks and Romans, Nazi sculptors like Thorak and Brecker carved rock into
muscular male bodies, erecting the vision of the new German man.
Hitler’s inaugural speech for the Great German Art Exhibit of 1939 testifies to the
importance of Beauty for the fascist program. In celebration of the acquisition of the
ancient Greek statue of the Discus Thrower by Menon, Hitler urges his audience:
Let us perceive how splendid Man’s physical beauty once was and how
we may only speak of progress when we have not only achieved such
beauty, but even surpassed it. May we find here a measure of the tasks
8
Agamben (1998).
8
which confront us in our time! May we strive as one for beauty and
elevation such that both our race and our art will withstand the
judgment of the millennia.
Presented in [A] -emphasis added.
Hitler’s words are stunning to modern ears! Could the achievement of physical beauty be
this politician’s idea of progress? Is the beautification of the German race and German art
the way to make history? Surely, the achievement of “physical beauty” cannot be a
political end…
It is crucial to realize that the standards of beauty that Nazi culture produced and imposed
were taken to capture the real essence of racial health. Socially emergent aesthetic
standards were assumed to actually reflect vital, biological essences. As Hitler exclaimed
“Our first principle of beauty is health!”9 Nazi propaganda consistently blurred the lines
between the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘good’ - or the ‘healthy’ in the context of medicine. In
this way, the achievement of physical beauty appeared as an end in itself and Nazi
politics became a politics of culture.
A stark example of this practice of conceptual conflation is found in a slide show created
by the Nazi art theoretician Paul Schultze Naumburg10. In January 1931 Schultze
Naumburg toured Germany with what he claimed was a demonstration of how modern
art showed signs of mental illness. The slide show consisted of modern art portraits
placed side by side with photos of mentally ill or physically deformed patients. The
9
Cited in [A], and reviewed in Barron (1991).
Reproduced in [A], also see Barron (1991).
10
9
similarities between the paired images were supposed evidence of a link between
“physical degeneration and artistic perversion”11.
Art had to be rid of the so-called Jewish, Bolshevist degeneracy in its midst, and did so
by excluding modern art pieces from its public spaces of art appreciation, by exhibiting
them in ‘art camps’ and eventually by destroying such pieces. In the words of Naumberg:
In the World of German art, a struggle to the death rages not unlike the
struggle in politics and it must be fought with the same gravity and
singleness of mind. [A] (emphasis added)
The example of Nazi aesthetics in action, the rhetoric and practice of ‘art hygiene’,
mirrors the racial purges that were to occur upon the Nazis’ seizure of power.
Given the orienting task of Nazism to ‘achieve’ the Beautiful and the conflation of the
Beautiful with the Healthy, the parallels between art hygiene on the one hand and racial
hygiene on the other are not too surprising. Still, one cannot but wonder about the
biological conceptions of health and race that legitimized such depictions of healthy
German bodies. How could Hitler point to the statue of the Discus Thrower and assume
that the physical beauty of the athlete was due to his racial purity, rather than the long
hours spent in ‘discus practice’?
The next section examines how Nazi culture’s aesthetic norms were articulated within the
life sciences and Nazi medical practice. I argue that the identification of aesthetic norms
with vital norms was enabled by the rhetoric of racial hygiene and biological holism.
11
Ibid.
10
2. Nazi Cosmetics
National Socialism is politically applied biology.
-Hans Schemm
One could identify two biological theories that functioned as, what Mehrtens calls
“vehicles of transport” of Nazi ideology12: eugenic theories of ‘racial hygiene’
(Rassenhygiene), and holism.
According to historian Robert Proctor13, one can trace the intellectual origins of Nazi
racial hygiene to the theory of Social Darwinism developed in the late nineteenth century.
Social Darwinists took the theory of natural selection introduced by The Origin of
Species in 1859 to apply within human societies. In 1895, in what has come to be
considered the founding document of racial hygiene, or eugenics, Alfred Ploetz warned
of the degeneration of the German race. Providing medical care to the ‘weak’ was
“counterselecting” the ‘unfit’ elements in the race and was thus causing the weak to
multiply at faster rates than the talented and the gifted14. Other mechanisms of counterselection included wars and revolutions, which resulted in the death or injury of the
young and able-bodied, while the provision of welfare to the misfits and the poor further
impoverished the genetic stock of the race. What was the solution?
Racial hygiene (Rassenhygiene), a term coined by Ploetz, put forth the health of the Race
as more important than that of the individual. It was suggested that “intelligent racial
12
See Harrington (1996), 193.
See Proctor (1988).
14
Proctor (1988), 15.
13
11
hygiene might eliminate the need for a struggle for existence altogether”15. The program
of racial hygiene was sympathetic to socialism but objected to socialist medicine’s
promotion of the procreation of the ‘weak’. Unlike Malthusians, racial hygienists did not
propose birth control for all the members of a population but suggested that we promote
the procreation of the ‘fit’ while refraining from ‘counter-selecting’ the ‘unfit’.
At the heart of racial hygiene was social Darwinists’ assumption that societies function
like natural environments and that social forces act like natural forces in the formation of
the objective categories of ‘fit’ and ‘unfit’ individuals. The fact that an individual was
‘weak’, say an alcoholic or a criminal, reflected a biologically real trait that would be
eliminated by natural selection and hence should be eliminated by social selection –or at
least should not be privileged by social protectionism. Genetics were supposed to differ at
the level of individuals, races and race mixtures and genetic traits were considered fixed
and inherited rather than learnt, or environmentally influenced.
It should be noted that distinct political programmes have been historically associated
with what are commonly distinguished as ‘Darwinist’ and ‘Lamarckian’ theories of
selection16. Darwinism moved genetic heritage out of the realm of the social and into the
realm of the private. It was not a particular environment that shaped the acquisition of
genetic traits through the demands it placed on the organism but rather chance genetic
mutations that caused traits to be expressed. Organisms were thus born fit or unfit, as a
15
Ibid.
These two schools of thought should perhaps not be tagged by these authors’ names as their work is not
distinct from each other in these traditionally supposed and clear but crude ways. But I am assuming
Proctor’s discussion here for consistency.
16
12
matter of chance, and did not all start off on the same footing in their struggle for
survival. Exporting these notions into human societies made Darwinism sympathetic to
more liberal politics whereas Lamarckianism was associated with socialist notions of the
importance of environmental influences on health.
In 1905, Alfred Ploetz together with psychiatrist Ernst Rudin, lawyer Anastasius
Nordenholz and anthropologist Richard Thurnwald founded the Society for Racial
Hygiene to further promote the hygiene of the human race. It should be noted that the aim
of this programme was not stated in racist terms. Racial hygiene, or eugenics, aimed to
improve the human race in general –or at least western Kulturrassen. In 1895 Ploetz
called anti-Semitism a “useless ploy”, maintained that there are no pure races and that
racial mixing between races that were not “too far apart”17 was a mechanism that would
increase fitness. One of the first members of the society for racial hygiene, Wilhelm
Schallmeyer, explicitly distinguished between what he called Nordic superiority “race
propaganda”18 and the value-free, objective goals of racial science.
However, as Robert Proctor remarks, the line between the Nordic movement and Racial
Hygiene became increasingly thinner. In the early 1920s the Society for Racial Hygiene
contained a Nordic division organized by Ploetz. It now denounced anti-Semitism on the
basis that Jews were not “really” Semitic anymore: racial intermarriage meant that Jews
were mostly Aryan by now. Even starting in 1907, Ploetz, Fritz Lenz and F. Wollny had
established a secret Nordic Ring which cultivated German racial character through
17
18
Quoted in Proctor (1988), 21.
Quoted in Proctor (1988), 21.
13
training and sports and popularized de Gobineau’s vision of “the German Volk, last
bastion of the Nordic race”.19
In the 1920s racial hygiene became identified with the Nordic movement. Ploetz was
appointed honorary professor of racial hygiene at Munich and won the Goethe medallion
in 1936. Ploetz was also awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1936 for his pacifist ideas: he
claimed that war was bad for the race as it went against the selection of the fittest. Hitler
himself agreed. He maintained that the Nazis were “profoundly and philosophically
committed to peace”.20 In 1937 Ploetz joined the Nazi party.
Racial hygiene provided National Socialism with the conceptual tools it needed to
articulate the urgency and importance of ridding the German ‘germ plasm’ of degenerate
elements. Images of a Beautiful, old race found in the art of the ancients, were those of
pure-blood Nordic people as they once had looked, before succumbing to the racial
intermarrying and racial degeneration that corroded their genetic stock. Racial hygiene
legitimated the aims of the genetic doctor to improve the health of the whole race, at the
cost of individuals’ health. The need for a new kind of doctor to take care of the Race
presupposed that the health of a race was of a different quality than individual health. It
was not the simple sum of individual ‘healths’ that determined the health of a race but
rather something about the individuals, their genetic heritage, that added to the health of
the race. A trait which was not correlated with health on an individual level emerged as a
critical measure of health on the level of the race.
19
20
Quoted in Proctor (1988), 25.
Quoted in Proctor (1988), 29.
14
Schultze Naumberg’s slide show and the Nazis’ ways of purging their art from ‘Jewish
Bolshevist degeneracy’ foreshadowed the fate of the mentally ill and physically deformed
patients as well as that of communists and Jews. The ‘perverse’ elements that Nazi racial
hygiene focused on ridding the German race from included so-called mental and sexual
‘degenerates’, as well as Jews. The method adopted was ‘racial’ exclusion by means of
controlled reproduction and eventually extermination.
Nazi policy on racial hygiene progressed from the sterilization of supposed
“homozygous” carriers of genetic diseases (Sterilization Law -July 14 1933) and the
Nuremberg Laws of 1935 preventing so called ‘inter-racial’ marriage between Jews and
non-Jews, to the extermination of mentally ill patients starting in August 1939 (Operation
T4), two weeks before the Polish invasion, and the ‘Final Solution’ to exterminate all
Jews at the start of 1941. (Operation 14 f 13 to destroy all concentration camp inmates
not willing or able to work)
At the same time as ridding the ‘unfit’, German social medicine made some truly
progressive steps towards benefitting the fit. Nazi propaganda movies stressed the
importance of diet for health, promoting the consumption of “whole” grain bread, and
‘natural’ foods, speaking against additives and preservatives and even making
contemporary connections between diet and cancer. (Hitler himself was a vegetarian and
he abstained from alcohol use, as did many Nazi officials.) The Nazis launched the first
most vigilant anti-tobacco campaigns and a Nazi researcher was the first to publish
15
statistical results linking smoking to lung-cancer and mouth and lip cancer.21 Nazis were
the first to talk of environmental health hazards and link asbestos to carcinogenesis, they
were progressive in protecting the health of mothers and the fetus, speaking against
smoking and drinking while pregnant.
What enabled the Nazi rhetoric about the Body of the German Volk and suggested both a
return to Nature and the importance of environmental causes of health outcomes was
holism. “Holistic” science had a long history in Germany emerging in opposition to what
was thought to be the “mechanistic” (and British) science of Newton.
As Anne Harrington discusses in Re-enchanted Science (Harington 1996) holistic
thinking can be traced back to the early nineteenth century to the Naturphilosophie of
scientists and philosophers influenced by the Romantic impulse of their times. What
these thinkers felt was that Newton “had been born into a universe of color, quality, and
spontaneity and had proceeded ruthlessly to transform it into a cold, quality-less and
impersonal realm of homogenous and three dimensional space, where particles of matter
danced like marionettes to mathematically calculable laws.”22
Instead of this atomized and fragmented view of nature, natural philosophers like Fichte,
Hegel, Schiller and Schelling argued for a sense of wholeness and synthesis in the realms
of mind and nature. These so-called neo-Kantian philosophers found a great resource in
Kant’s argument in the Critique of Judgment that although our innate categories of
21
22
See Proctor (1999), 183-186.
Harrington (1996), 4.
16
reasoning of mechanistic causality were sufficient to explain and analyze non-living
reality, for the purpose of explaining living phenomena, an extra principle of teleological
causality had to be introduced: “natural purpose” [Naturzweck]. This principle was meant
to capture the sense of “purposiveness” that organismic processes seemed to possess for
the organism as a whole.
More suggestive, with respect to this case, is the parallel Kant drew between “teleological
judgment” and what he called “aesthetic judgment”. Kant suggested that similar forms of
reasoning were involved in understanding the nature of living phenomena as were
involved in grasping the nature of the beautiful or sublime. In a move implicitly
endorsing this Kantian thesis, a propaganda of aesthetics –films, exhibitions and rallies of
beautiful bodies juxtaposed to degenerate ones– was used by the Nazis to argue about
Life.
The Nazi spectacle aimed to recruit German “aesthetic judgment” on the side of Nazi
rhetoric regarding the “phenomenon” of the (living) German race. The Beauty inherent in
the biological Purity of the German race was first sensed –seen in paintings, heard in
operas, tasted in whole-wheat bread, was felt to be the case –and thus presented as a goal:
an ideal that could be sought by means of racial purification. The Nazis’ rhetoric found a
vehicle in the ideas of a long tradition of German philosophical thinking and the practices
of German cultural life.
17
One of the intellectuals most revered by the Nazis was Johann Wolfgann von Goethe who
found in Kant an inspiration for his aesthetic-teleological vision of living nature.
Observing and comparing many different plants and processes of growth or
metamorphosis in nature Goethe concluded that the apparent chaos in the multiplicity of
natural forms could in fact be classed under fewer fundamental forms or Gestalten. Much
like Platonic forms could be accessed by our intuition, one could deduce the fundamental
Gestalten from their observed expressions by using the pure judgment of mind to classify
and abstract from one’s observations. In Goethe’s own words:
In every living being, we find that those things which we call parts are
inseparable from the Whole to such an extent, that they can only be
conceived in and with the latter; and the parts can neither be the measure
of the Whole, nor the Whole be the measure of the parts. So [in turn] a
circumscribed living being [an organismic Whole] takes part in the Infinite
[the all encompassing Whole]; it has something of infinity within itself.23
Soon after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, Karl Zimmerman, who would later be
appointed Reich representative for racial education, asserts:
All in all, the National Socialistic conception of state and culture is that of
an organic whole. As an organic whole, the volkisch state is more than the
sum of its parts, and indeed because these parts, called individuals, are
fitted together to make a higher unity, within which they in turn become
capable of a higher level of life achievement, while also enjoying an
enhanced sense of security. The individual is bound to this sort of freedom
through the fulfillment of his duty in the service of the whole.24
The new “holistic” way of approaching biology did not apply one theory uniformly
across cases but rather emerged in opposition to mechanistic or atomistic thinking and
characterized a family of different biological theories. Still, what all holistic approaches
had in common was “[T]he need to do justice to organismic purposiveness or teleological
23
24
Quoted in Harrington (1996), 5.
Quoted in Harrington (1996), 176 (emphasis added).
18
functioning –to questions of ‘what for?’ and not merely ‘how?’”.25 Among the different
kinds of holism, some were concerned with finding ways to describe organismic
processes in terms of their role for the whole organism, some were concerned with an
integrated theory of the function of the mind and body of humans [and was the origin of
modern psychosomatics] and some attempted to make sense of individual organisms as
part of a greater “whole”, whether on the level of their immediate environment or the
cosmic evolutionary process. Another kind of holism was what Harrington calls “clinical
holism” which attempted to integrate naturopathic and traditional forms of medicine with
modern biomedical medicine26.
The crucial function of holism within Nazi propaganda was to legitimate the hierarchical
and centralized organization of the Party. Metaphors like the one cited above by
Zimmerman, of the Body of the German Volk being led by its ‘brain’, its Fuhrer seemed
to suggest Nazism as a/the natural form of governance. Just like organisms functioned
according to their Naturzweck, organizing their part processes to satisfy the realization of
their natural purpose, so should the German people organize according to the
Fuhrerprinzip in order to realize their higher purpose.
This example of the usurpation of the power of biological talk by a political ideology
makes one wonder about the elements of biological theories in general that could allow
for such abuse. It seems that the very subject of the life sciences includes and addresses
25
Harrington (1996), xvii.
This form of holism was also popular in the early pre-war years of Nazism. There was a law passed to
allow natural healers to practice –and have them register their occupation- while the Ministry of the Interior
formed in 1933 a Healers’ League of Germany. Proctor (1988), 228-229.
26
19
humans in a much more direct way than say physics. The language of the life sciences
has available a vocabulary of body, of feeling, of function that talks of humans at a most
intuitive or primary level. Metaphors made between humans and biological organisms or
life processes are much more appealing and compelling at a basic level than, say,
comparisons with mechanical or information systems.
In particular, medicine seems to be valued and action-inducing. It talks of the health and
disease of organisms distinguishing the ‘bad’ from the ‘good’. What is to be qualified as
healthy or unhealthy comes with a definite value and suggests a definite action – it is
something to be pursued or avoided. Further, medicine articulates a method to achieve the
aim of health. A disease can be conceived in different ways and approached in different
manners. As Georges Canguilhem (1989 [1966]) notes, in the history of medicine there
have been ontological conceptions of disease, where the disease is seen as caused by a
foreign agent, a “germ” that invades the body, or there have been dynamic conceptions of
disease, where disease is seen as a state of disequilibrium, a loss of harmony between the
organism and its environment and in particular, as an attempt of nature to establish a new
equilibrium in the organism. Both conceptions of disease, Canguilhem calls “optimistic”:
in the first case, the cause of disease is seen as something ontologically real that could
hence be physically isolated and destroyed and the second, although not relying on the
ability of human agents to intervene and overcome nature, assumes that ‘the way of
nature’ and medical techniques that reinforce or imitate natural therapeutic reactions
could restore the organism’s health.
20
In the case of the Nazis, the metaphor of the Body of the Volk, given in holistic terms,
allowed an ontological definition of disease to be put to use. Disease was thought to be
caused by some “germ”: the Jew, the insane, the homosexual, the Gypsy. This
‘optimistic’ conception of disease meant that human Nazi agents could get rid of the
‘parasites’ that had invaded the body of the Volk. Indeed Zyklon B, the poisonous gas
used for the mass exterminations of Jews in the final most “efficient” stages of 14 f 13
was a pesticide.
Unsurprisingly there was a movie made by the Nazis, in 1938, to promote the use of this
gas. The theme of the movie was ‘pest control’, the images shown, were of vermin, rats
and insects chewing away on the pristine sacks of flour and drilling holes in wooden
statues of classic male bodies. Parallel that to another propaganda movie, “The Eternal
Jew” premiered on November 28th 1940 in one of Berlin’s largest cinemas. Images of the
Jewish ghetto in Warsaw likened Jews to vermin, pictured them eating from the trash
cans, and aimed to show Jews “as they really are”:
The civilized Jews that we know in Germany give us only an incomplete
picture of their racial character. This is how Jews really look before they
conceal themselves behind the masks of civilized Europeans. [A]
Once more, Nazi culture horribly hints at the method in which Nazi goals would be
articulated. In the words of Himmler addressing the SS in the April of 1943:
Anti-Semitism is like getting de-loused. Getting rid of lice is hardly a
philosophical issue; it is a matter of cleanliness. (…) We shall soon be deloused. There are now only 20,000 left. They will soon be extinct in all of
Germany. [A]
21
Although the central ideas in racial hygiene were epistemically flawed –the idea of
genetic races to start with – , holism nevertheless seems to have had in store the tools to
articulate explicitly anti-authoritarian perceptions of the organism. Quite a few advocates
of holistic biology were explicitly opposed to Nazi politics, even some with anti-Semitic
feelings.27 For the sake of completeness, but also for the sake of witnessing one more
example of politically suggestive biological language, it is interesting to see how the
concept of organismic freedom was articulated by holistic neuropsychiatrist Kurt
Goldstein.
Goldstein was a Jew who had published a monograph on race hygiene in 1913 and was
prosecuted by the Nazis for being Jewish and a member of the Democratic Socialist Party
[SPD]. After losing his job on April 1st 1933, along with all Jewish doctors, and his
position at the University of Berlin, being imprisoned and tortured, he succeeded in
escaping to Amsterdam where he worked for a year at a temporary position in the local
university. He eventually immigrated to the United States in 1935 whereupon he
published the book he had dictated to his secretary while in exile in Amsterdam.28 The
book was based on his studies on patients that had suffered brain-injuries during WWI.
27
Consider the example of Hans Driesch, a vitalist embryologist and philosopher (Harrington 1996, 189),
whose work was of interest to the Nazis but who was himself opposed to Nazi politics and one of the first
non-Jewish professors retired by the Nazis in 1933, or that of behavioural biologist Jacob Johann von
Uexcull who had stark anti-Semitic feelings and corresponded in private with English race-theorist Houston
Stewart Chamberlain, but criticized Alfred Rosenberg as an ideologue who distorted Chamberlain’s basic
message (Harrington 1996, 68). Harrington’s Reenchanted Science (1996) chapters six and two are
dedicated to the relation of Driesch and von Uexcull’s work to Nazism respectively.
28
Harrington dedicates chapter five of Reenchanted Science to a discussion of Goldstein: Harrington
(1996), 140-174.
22
3. Holism in Exile -The Case of Kurt Goldstein
Kurt Goldstein’s book The Organism hoped to demonstrate how a ‘holistic’ way of
seeing biological organisms offers an understanding of living beings that is more
complete and useful than that attained through atomistic, natural science based methods.
In place of the fragmentation and alienation that atomistic science seemed to promote,
“holistic science” went in search of the “natural purpose” that Kant saw as needed to
grasp the nature of living beings; this purpose could only be glimpsed at by holding the
whole organism, within its environment, in perspective. Given that Goldstein wrote his
book [dictated it rather] while in Nazi-imposed exile, while holism was being ‘nazified’
at home, it is interesting to examine the function that the idea of ‘organismic freedom’
has within Kurt Goldstein’s book.
I argue that there are two levels on which the concept of freedom functions in Goldstein’s
book. First, on a factual level, “personal freedom” and individuality are used to capture
what Goldstein repeatedly calls an “essential” characteristic of human nature. Second, on
a [political] theoretical level, granting the individual personal freedom and stressing its
essence for actualizing his or her potential distinguishes Goldstein’s theory from the
holist metaphors that resonate with fascist ideology.
Though Goldstein explicitly draws from disciplines like psychology and philosophy to
justify the use of his theory, political theory is not one of the disciplines “concerned with
the nature of man” that Goldstein applies his holistic method to. Still the meta-aim of his
23
book is to show that the holistic method might be “useful for the solution of various
problems which (…) seem to be divergent and which have, until now, been treated as
unrelated to each other.”29 And it would be an omission, by Goldstein’s own holistic
method, not to appreciate his work within its spatiotemporal ‘milieu’ and not to
acknowledge the functional significance of personal freedom within a broader political
project.
A first hint of how important the concept of freedom was for Goldstein is found in his
methodological suggestions. Central to Goldstein’s argument for a holistic view is the
idea that the organism exists within a “milieu”, an environment that the organism can
select and modify. When dissecting organismic processes from their milieu, an
incomplete and often incorrect view of the organism is what is left. Goldstein insists that
our attention encompass the phenomenon that the whole organism presents whether in a
pathological or a normal state. He requires symptoms to be ranked without any
preference to what seemed more central or outlying with respect to the pathology and
prefers a detailed, qualitative description of the phenomenon at hand over multiple
concurring descriptions of some partial organismic process.
In seeking knowledge of “the essence” of the organism, and seeking such knowledge
through a “naturalistic” observation of the organism within its milieu, Goldstein
presupposes that the organism actually has such an individuating character and further,
strives to “realize” this character under “normal” conditions –that is once left unimpeded
by the experimenter, once free. Further, it is assumed that the individual always
29
Goldstein (1963), vi
24
withholds the capacity to change its own milieu, even if the change occurrs
unconsciously.
So far, Goldstein’s conception of the organism seems to resonate with a liberal politics of
non-intervention. Still, individual case studies are seen as an adequate evidence base for
arriving at some general principles guiding organismic behaviour. By privileging
complete accounts of individual cases over partial accounts of many cases, Goldstein is
assuming that the organism’s “essence” is discernible through the study of just a few [or
even one] organism thoroughly. In other words, Goldstein is assuming that all organisms
will behave in a similar “lawful” manner in exhibiting and realizing their essence.
In fact, Goldstein lists specific rules, which he claims determine organismic life30. For
example, Goldstein distinguishes between two classes of total behaviour: ordered
behaviour and disordered or catastrophic behaviour. According to Goldstein, ordered
behaviour is made up of responses that are characterized as constant, correct and
adequate with respect to the organism’s individual character, its membership in a
particular species and its place within particular circumstances. Catastrophic behaviour,
on the other hand, is observed when the organism is in shock and includes inconstant,
inconsistent responses and embedded anxiety.
Goldstein makes the normative claim that the organism tends to return to and/or preserve
ordered behaviour. This is achieved by a modification of the organism’s milieu, so-called
milieu “shrinkage”, produced by the organism itself, consciously or most often
30
Goldstein (1995), 48-67
25
unconsciously. In some cases the organism avoids catastrophic situations by substituting
affected performances and by, most often, lacking a self-perception of the defect. In other
cases the organism exhibits a tendency to an undisturbed state by constantly engaging in
activities that it could pull off and which, at the same time, served to isolate it from any
outside disturbances.
At first sight, it looks as if there is a tension between the idea of personal freedom and the
existence of all these rules governing organismic behaviour. However, these rules
delimited organismic behaviour in a negative rather than a positive way: they say more
about what the normal organism cannot do than about what it could do. This is because
Goldstein’s preliminary discussion aims to express the regularities found across
organismic behaviour by citing rules derived from the observation of pathological cases.
As Goldstein himself stresses, starting with the study of the pathological inheres the
danger of neglecting the positive characteristics making up an ordered, healthy state.
Goldstein stresses the importance of the first performances to be lost in a pathological
case such as that of a brain damaged patient:
We might venture to say that the most complicated performances, those
first to be impaired, are probably the ones most essential and most vital to
the existence of the organism, and further, with respect to the nature of the
organism, they have the highest functional significance. Through the
deterioration of those performances the organism loses its most
characteristic properties. Goldstein (1963), 46 (emphasis added)
What are those first performances to be lost? They are not those “automatic”
performances that ensure the organism’s mere existence:
26
(…) [T]he normal organism is characterized as a “Being” in a temporal
succession of definite form. For the realization of this “Being”, the
existence, the “mere being alive”, plays of course a prominent but by no
means the essential role. (…) Preservation of material existence becomes
“essential” only after defect sets in, and possibly in certain emergencies. In
the latter case, the body achieves the position of supreme importance, since
all the other possibilities of self-realization are bound to it. Goldstein
(1963), 47.
What happens to the brain-injured patient is a loss of freedom:
[Or] we might point to the patient’s inability to emancipate and withhold
himself from the world, the shrinkage of his freedom, and his greater
bondage to the demands of environment. The most general formula to
which the change can be reduced is probably that the patient has lost the
capacity to deal with that which is not real –with the possible. Goldstein
(1963), 44 (Emphasis added).
Goldstein calls this capacity to ‘deal with the possible’ the abstract attitude.
What is essential for a human organism is, then, this capacity to engage in “abstract
behaviour”, her ability to free herself from the actual -her physical or social environmentand entertain the “possible”.
Abstract behaviour is essential to the human organism in one more significant way.
Abstract behaviour is what, according to Goldstein, enables us to shift from the point of
view of the subject to that of the object and what enables, eventually, our ability to
experience the “sphere of immediacy”.
When we are in this sphere, subject-object experiences remain more or less
in the background and the feeling of unity comprising ourselves and the
world in all respects and particularly in our relation to other human beings
is dominant. This I term the ‘sphere of immediacy’. Goldstein (1963), 20
(Emphasis added).
27
This experience of immediacy is not a subjective or “an irrational assumption”31 but
rather is governed by specific laws, which Goldstein differentiates from so-called logical
reasoning.
Goldstein calls the sphere of immediacy “not easy to describe” and says that “it has to be
experienced in definite situations.”32 Specifically:
The experience of immediacy cannot be reached by the discursive
procedure or by any kind of synthesis. It may be achieved only by
surrendering ourselves to the world with which we come in contact
without fearing to lose our relation to the ordered world. Goldstein
(1995), 21.
Again, Goldstein hints at a generalized framework of ‘lawful’ behaviours, but one which,
instead of limiting organismic behaviour, institutionalizes the special character of its
“freedom”: it renders essential to humans both a capacity for holding an “unbound”
abstract attitude and at the same time a capacity for surrendering to the world and
experiencing the “bound” unity of all existence, especially all human existence. It is the
mark of ultimate freedom for Goldstein to be capable of ‘opening up’ your individual
attitude so that nothing impinges on it --nor it on anything.
As essential as the abstract attitude and what we could call the “immediate attitude” are
for Goldstein, Goldstein refrains from providing a universal norm for ‘health’. A single
norm of Aryan health could not have been articulated in terms of Beautiful bodies if
handicapped or injured patients could also have been perceived as healthy. Rather, in
accordance with a broader understanding of health, Goldstein determines the ‘normal’ on
31
32
Goldstein (1995), 20
Ibid.
28
an individual organismic basis by examining whether the organism can ‘adequately’
respond to its milieu or not:
An organism that actualizes its essential peculiarities, or –what really
means the same thing- meets its adequate milieu and the tasks arising
from it, is ‘normal’. Goldstein (1963), 325 (emphasis added).
When the organism has to adapt to a new, shrunken milieu as a result of injury or
disease, recovery can be obtained. The reconciliation of preserved and disturbed
performances enable the organism’s responsiveness to its environment.
Being well means to be capable of ordered behaviour that may prevail
in spite of the impossibility of certain performances that were formerly
possible. Goldstein (1963), 331.
Goldstein points out that although adaptation occurs, defects will always still exist. The
defective organism will exhibit its limitations in the absence of medical care. Thus the
goal of medical practice is twofold: 1) to eradicate the damage, 2) to rearrange the
milieu of the organism to an environment adequate to the new condition, if the damage
cannot
be
eradicated.
Ways
of
milieu
rearrangement
included
medication,
hospitalization, diet, renouncing/entering certain human relations.
It is most important to this case that Goldstein values the organism’s individual freedom
in the context of medical care. He articulates principles that the Nazis’ experimentation
on human prisoners and patients would most certainly have violated. Goldstein points
out that medical action “requires an encroachment on the freedom”33 of the patient. A
choice between a greater loss of freedom or greater suffering has to be made. Once a
patient’s milieu is limited, suffering from catastrophic reactions towards an inadequate
33
Goldstein (1963), 341
29
milieu can be reduced but so will the patient’s capacity to actualize her essential –
uninhibited – nature. Further, Goldstein sees that recovery needs to be embedded in the
community of fellow man, where an appropriate milieu can be sought for the anomalous
without trespassing on their “essence of being”: Freedom.
His commitments lead Goldstein to explicitly dismiss the possibility of eugenic
breeding, which was so prominent within Nazi science. According to Goldstein, freedom
and identity cannot not be curbed without limit. Just as technological interventions face
a limit in their ability to overpower Nature, there was a bearable limit to the force one
can apply on living beings without completely negating their Nature. If one were to
breed pure lines of humans with respect to their most essential –hence dominant–
characteristic that would have been a line of free humans.
4. The Relevance of this Story
Historian Robert Proctor has written two books on the subject of Nazi medicine34. His
earliest book is a rather finger-pointing account of how doctors were actively and
voluntarily involved in the Nazis’ extermination of ‘unfit’ individuals. His later book
however describes the pioneering work that Nazi doctors did in cancer research and
treatment and how the Nazi government promoted health awareness. In the very last
paragraph of his later book Proctor says: “(…) we need to better understand how the
routine practice of science can so easily coexist with the routine exercise of cruelty.”35
34
35
See Proctor (1988) and Proctor (1999).
Proctor (1999) (emphasis added).
30
There is a common assumption – or maybe a case of wishful thinking – that this
statement exemplifies. The practice of science is assumed to contrast with the practice of
cruelty, or at least be, in principle, distinct from immoral practices. Proctor belongs to a
line of scholars who have successfully demonstrated that science is not value-free. And
yet the values that science carries are still hoped to be ‘good’ ones. The cruelty of Nazi
medicine is at least as shocking for its content, as for the fact that it was doctors who
were so cruel.
Indeed, the practice of medicine has been perceived, since antiquity, as performing – or at
least aspiring to perform – a positive service to humanity. Plato describes medicine as a
craft carried out, not for its own sake, but rather for the purpose of healing. The ancient
Greek word for medicine, iatrike comes from the verb iatreuo which means ‘to cure’.
Now, presumably, healing involves establishing or preserving the health of the patient
and getting rid of disease. Therefore, the practice of healing is necessarily oriented by a
prior understanding of what constitutes health, what constitutes disease and what
technologies can effectively mediate between the two.
Nazi medicine can be called medicine because it did orient itself towards the
establishment of health and the curing of disease. However, the notions of health and
disease that Nazi doctors worked with as well as their notion of a Body reflected the
cultural standards of Nazi ideology rather than biologically real, vital norms. The
conflation of social-aesthetic norms of beauty with biological norms of health was a most
31
powerful propaganda tool for the ‘naturalization’ and ‘beautification’ of a political
regime that was most unjust – and certainly now seen as ugly – at heart.
Why is this a case still worth our attention? The vision of the enhancement of a
degenerate race could arguably present us one of the first examples of the blurring line
between the concepts of ‘treatment’ and ‘enhancement’. Such distictions are already
(more visibly) blurred by certain cosmetic medical procedures but they are arguably a
topic for further philosophical and historical investigation. Imagined genetic, or other,
human enhancement technologies bank on exactly such a notion of healing: not of
healing as getting rid of an ill, but rather as increasing a good, often by externally
modifying an organism to address its (hoped to be expanded) milieu.36
Further, the conflation of vital norms of physical health with aesthetic norms of racial
purity, which served to legitimize Nazi hegemony, seems to exemplify a contemporary
attitude in biopolitics. The power of aesthetic norms to orient vital practices horribly
demonstrated by the use of Nazi propaganda facilitates conflating “the healthy” and “the
better”, “treatment and enhancement” – is a future that Nikolas Rose sees in the horizon
of molecular politics.37
Nikolas Rose seems right to distinguish between modern biopolitics as managing
‘somatic individuals’ from the biopolitics of old, which he describes as being aimed at
36
See Hacking (2006) for a discussion of Rabinow’s notion of biosociality. Hacking there hints at the
social and philosophical impacts of the emergence of new social groupings on the basis of new, and
imagined as enhanced, biological ones by reference to a personal anecdote: giving a lecture in front of an
audience not at all opposed to the idea of a biotechnologically enhanced trans-humanity.
37
Rose (2001), 16
32
the ‘body politic’ en masse. He is right to point out that the emergence of a new
molecular politics owes a lot to the shift in the truth regime of modern biology. But
Rose’s description de-emphasizes the similarities still in place across these paradigms,
and focuses on an effect on the level of form not content.
It is important to ask how much of the difference is due to a historical shift from
centralized to more liberal forms of governance and so exemplifies a restructuring of the
loci of biopower rather than a radical change in its dictates. Although ‘somatic
individuals’ are now to be healthy for their own sake rather than for the sake of the race,
the message transmitted to them is still a “duty to be Healthy”. How is this Health to be
understood? Is it still in terms of ‘Beauty’? Why should or should this not be the case and
when?
Finally, it is important to situate the influence of ‘cultures in action’ and ‘cultures of
action’ on the practice of biomedical science. Norms of health and beauty are still
implicitly conflated via pictorial representations that embody certain cultures in action.
The mechanisms of power may not cast away pariahs as ‘parasites’ menacing the body of
the Volk, but are they not still managed within (new) spaces of exception like “fat farms”
or “emergency rooms”? In these ways it seems that the case of the Nazis is more
contemporary than we might like.
33
Conclusion
In Euthyphro, Plato has Socrates point out that our conceptions of the good, the just and
the beautiful are what form the source of moral disputes:
Socrates: (…) the just and the unjust, the beautiful and the ugly, the
good and the bad. Are these not the subjects of difference about
which, when we are unable to come to a satisfactory decision, you
and I and other men become hostile to each other whenever we do?
Euthyphro, par. 7d, lines 2-538
What the Nazis accomplished was a culture that identified its ideas of beauty and
goodness –or health- in the form of the ancient Nordic Race and thereby qualified the
means of achieving such Health and Beauty as Just. By appealing to the inherent value of
health while conflating the concept itself with a social-aesthetic norm of “German-ness”
the Nazis succeeded in what Emanuel Todd calls the only successful revolution of the
twentieth century.
Is the answer to avoiding another Holocaust to ration culture? Separate it from science? I
think the answer lies not in censorship –what would constitute milieu “shrinkage” by
Goldstein’s standards– but rather in developing ways to address and accommodate ever
evolving and expanding milieux where science is made and that science affects –acting in
what Goldstein would call ‘freedom’. This means developing ways to distinguish,
appraise and choose from all kinds of tools, and keeping in mind all kinds of effects,
whether prima facie aesthetic or prima facie epistemic, that may shape science practice
and –even in irrational ways– end up ratifying science policy. Life is not lived in
38
Cooper, John M. ed. (1997), 7
34
disciplines. And human productions falling under the purview of traditionally distinct
disciplinary boundaries cannot be held apart by force of a system of inquiry.
References
Film material
[A] The Architecture of Doom, directed by O. Kamm, research of Peter Cohen, POJ
Filmproduktion AB, Filminstitutet 1991
Published material
Agamben, Giorgio (1998), Homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life, trans. Danile
Heller-Roazen, Stanford University Press
Barron, Stephanie ed. (1991), 'Degenerate Art:' The Fate of the Avant-Garde in Nazi
Germany, New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc.
Canguilhem, Georges (1989 [1966]), The Normal and the Pathological, Zone Books,
New York
Cooper, John M. ed. (1997), Plato: The Complete Works, Hackett Publishing Company,
Inc.
Goldstein, Kurt (1995 [1935]), The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived
from Pathological Data in Man, Zone Books, New York; also cited as Goldstein (1963),
a 1963 edition of the same work published by Beacon Press.
Hacking, Ian (2006), “Genetics Biosocial Groups and the Future of Identity”, Daedalus, Fall,
81-95
Harrington, Anne (1996) Reenchanted Science- Holism in German Culture from Wilhelm
II to Hitler, Princeton University Press
Kant, Immanuel (2000 [1790]), The Critique of Judgment, trans. by J.H. Bernard,
Prometheus Books, New York
Klawiter, Maren (1999), “Racing for the Cure, Walking Women, and Toxic Touring:
Mapping Cultures of Action within the Bay Area Terrain of Breast Cancer”, Social
Problems, February 1999, 46(1): 104-126
35
Levi, Neil and Michael Rothberg eds. (2003), The Holocaust- Theoretical Readings,
Rutgers University Press
Proctor, Robert N (1988), Racial Hygiene –Medicine under the Nazis, Harvard University
Press
Proctor, Robert N (1999), The Nazi War on Cancer, Princeton University Press
Rose, Nikolas (2001), “The Politics of Life Itself”, Theory, Culture and Society 2001,
18(6): 1-30
Shah, Nayan (2001), Contagious Divides – Epidemics and Race in San Francisco’s
Chinatown, University of California Press American Crossroads Series
36