In Anthropology at War, Andrew D. Evans offers an insightful and engaging analysis of the research conducted by German and Austrian physical anthropologists among the inmates of prisoner-of-war (POW) camps during World War I. When the war broke out in August 1914, German and Austrian anthropologists, like scientists and scholars in many fields in many nations, rallied to the flag. Their motivations included both a genuinely patriotic desire to help their nation at war and also a hope that linking their disciplines to the war effort of their nations would bring support and resources from the state. The studies of captured enemies in POW camps directed by the German anthropologists Egon von Eickstedt and Otto Reche and the Austrian Rudolf Pöch exemplified both of these motives. German and Austrian POW camps presented excellent locations for comparative anthropological research as they were filled with soldiers not only from the enemies of the Central Powers but also from many of the colonies ruled by those nations.
The studies led by Eickstedt, Reche, and Pöch, Evans argues, used scientific expertise to lend ideological support to the war effort of the Central Powers. Eickstedt studied Russian subjects to elaborate the racial difference between Germans and these various ethnic groups, suggesting that the conflict was also a kind of race war. The research conducted by Reche indicated that the nationalities in eastern and western Europe over which German expansionists hoped to establish sovereignty already resembled Germans racially, thus prefiguring German war aims in biological terms. Pöch carried out perhaps the most difficult ideological task, attempting to show through physical anthropological studies that a significant racial difference existed between, on the one hand, the many nationalities of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, on the other, the nationalities of its enemies.
For Evans, the research conducted by physical anthropologists in POW camps in support of German war aims helps to explain a shift in German anthropology from the antiracist and liberal views that he finds predominant in the discipline in the nineteenth century to the frankly racist anthropology practiced with increasing frequency in the Weimar Republic and especially under National Socialism. Such narratives of declension from liberalism to racism dominate the historiography of German anthropology. These narratives rely upon a set of assumptions about liberalism, empire, and the German Sonderweg that have continued to burden the historiography of German anthropology even after many historians of liberalism, empire, and Germany have abandoned them. Evans, it must be said, is no more at fault for these weaknesses than are any of the other historians of anthropology who continue to elaborate the liberalism-to-racism narrative. Evans should also be complimented on his scrupulous discussions of this historiography and his fair treatment of views, including my own, with which he disagrees in part.
The problem with the liberalism-to-racism narrative is not that many nineteenth-century anthropologists were not liberal but rather that racism and imperialism were central to, rather than betrayals of, much nineteenth-century liberalism. Evans, like many other historians of anthropology, offers a schematic definition of liberalism that exaggerates its commitment to human universalism while minimizing its opposition to more democratic doctrines on its left. This double movement bowdlerizes liberalism by placing it in a simple binary opposition to an amalgamated racist-nationalist-conservative politics. Evans, more than most historians of anthropology, carefully discusses what he means by liberalism (pp. 61 ff), acknowledging that liberals, especially in the nineteenth century, could be antidemocratic and support imperialism. Nonetheless, he presents imperialism and racism as exceptions from liberalism. In fact, as Matthew Fitzpatrick has recently shown for the case of Germany, and as even unusually democratic liberals such as John Stuart Mill made clear in their own writings, imperialism and even racism were central aspects of much liberalism, in Germany and elsewhere.
The fine account Evans provides of the anthropology conducted in German and Austro-Hungarian POW camps suggests continuity with, rather than a break from, nineteenth-century liberal anthropology. Nineteenth-century anthropologists not only lent ideological support to the colonial project, but they also participated directly in the project through the steady supply of severed heads and other body parts they received from colonial battlefields and prisons. German anthropologists even conducted studies similar to those that Evans discusses among French POWs held near Berlin during the Franco-Prussian War, and such studies—and much worse—were routine in colonial prisons.
In Anthropology at War, like much historiography of German anthropology, the rejection of some types of racism and some imperialist politics by liberal anthropologists is too often presented as antiracism and anti-imperialism. Indeed, even totally non-biological hierarchical distinctions of culture, no less than hierarchical distinctions of race, functioned as ideological support for colonialism in Germany and elsewhere. We see such cultural racism in the Prussian anti-Catholic campaigns of the 1870s, which the liberal anthropologist par excellence, Rudolf Virchow, as Evans notes, was the first to applaud as a “Kulturkampf.” This “struggle for culture” was, as Michael Gross and other historians have shown, both central to German liberalism and also a central component of Prussian imperialism and anti-Polish racism in the east.
Taking historiography beyond the Sonderweg requires rejecting normative concepts of modernization theory, including a stylized liberalism and Enlightenment tradition, and studying instead the specific practices of government developed in the political and economic transformations of the nineteenth century and beyond. These new practices of government included managing populations through the elaboration of racial knowledge and power in anthropological studies of populations increasingly connected by trade and economic exploitation, solidarities and the most brutal atrocities, diplomacy and war. Andrew Evans has written a fine study of an important and fascinating moment in the emergence of these new practices of government.
