Biopolitics in Central and Eastern Europe in the 20th Century by Klich-Kluczewska, Barbara; von Puttkamer, Joachim; Rebitschek, Immo;

Short description:

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 20th century.

Long description:

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.

Table of Contents:

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