The Transylvanian Saxon minority has become the subject of diverse studies with respect to issues related to culture, ethnic identity, the relationship to Germany, and especially the Nazi regime. In this book, Tudor Georgescu raises a novel question as to how far the elites of this minority created eugenic discourses and agendas, and then he answers this question. With the term “Transylvanian Saxon experiment,” Georgescu describes a generic example of eugenics practiced by the Transylvanian Saxon elites who in the interwar period increasingly correlated eugenic concepts with an autochthonous fascist movement. In doing so, they created the image of a “‘eugenic fortress’ that was intended to distinguish the Saxons from ethnic ‘others’” (11). This study considers a broad stretch from 1885 to 1944, but focuses primarily on the period from 1918 up to 1940.

In the analytical approach that Georgescu chooses to pursue, he presents the protagonists of the Transylvanian Saxon eugenic discourse and fascist movement and emphasizes their biographies, agency, and interrelations. Following this plan, the book is structured into six chapters: the first addresses the key protagonists in Saxon eugenics (such as Heinrich Siegmund, Alfred Csallner, Fritz Fabritius, and Wilhelm Schunn), their engagement in the Saxon community, and their networks with German racial anthropologists. The second and third chapters are dedicated to Alfred Csallner, his eugenic proposals and activities in founding and leading several welfare services within the Transylvanian Saxon community. A large part of the book focuses on Fabritius and his leading role in the “Self-Help” organization whose eugenic agenda and operation as a fascist movement in the 1930s is addressed especially in the fifth chapter. Similar to Csallner's welfare projects, eugenic proposals within the Self-Help organization only included positive measures, such as premiums for families with qualitative progeny whose quality should be attested by medical and other examinations. Gerorgescu argues that minority elites tried to transfer their eugenics concepts into community policies using fascist or National Socialist organizational structures as their vehicles, and he remarks that the sources he consulted do not provide clear evidence as to the extent to which these plans were put into practice. In the last chapter the author briefly refers to the developments after 1940 that were marked by the removal of the interwar protagonists from their leadership positions within the Saxon community, although their eugenic/racial-hygiene ideas did not change in any essential way.

The particular merit of this book is that it sharpens the eye for examining eugenic aspirations and the use of a eugenic/racial hygienic language among the Transylvanian Saxon elites. Tudor Georgescu's intention is more than the reconstruction of the eugenic narrative, however. As announced in the book's introduction, this case study aims at contributing to closing a gap in the research on eugenics by addressing a neglected matter: the eugenics agendas of a minority and their attempts at implementation without nation-state structures. But, contrary to what Georgescu suggests, neither has European eugenics been for the most part investigated with respect to “projects proposed and empowered by nation-states” (9); nor is research missing about eugenics concepts that have been elaborated by minorities. In the last several decades, scholarship has dealt with feminist, socialist, anarchist, or Catholic eugenics and provided a wide range of case studies that make clear that eugenics does not necessarily need the state's empowerment. Yet, numerous studies on Jewish eugenics provide a fruitful frame of reference for a comparison of eugenics concepts offered by minority elites.

This study is poorly contextualized in the scholarly research with regard not only to eugenics but also minorities, given that conceptual and theoretical instruments of available minority studies are missing. Finally, the minority issue can only be examined in correlation with both the society in which a minority resides and the external homeland (if there is one, as is the case with Transylvanian Saxons). In order to buttress the argument of a “eugenic fortress,” one expects the book to make readers familiar with Saxon forms of organization, their relationship to the dominant society, and to other minorities. Ethnic “others” and their relation to Saxons, however, are only marginally considered in this study (for example, the few references to mixed marriage), while the limited consideration of the Jews is disproportional to the fundamental position of antisemitism in the self-definition of the Saxon elites.

Nevertheless, the extensive archival research carried out by Tudor Georgescu, especially regarding the welfare institutions founded or directed by Csellner, is helpful for examining bio-political agendas, keeping in mind, however, that not every form of bio-politics and biological determinism is identical with eugenics.