Scholar Marius Turda, who has published extensively on eugenics in various Eastern European countries, has now turned his attention to a book-length study of early Hungarian eugenics with Eugenics and Nation in Early 20th-Century Hungary. The result is a careful reconstruction of the creation of the eugenics community in Hungary, as well as the challenges it faced because of World War I. The book offers a timely addition to the ongoing reassessment of eugenics in Central Europe, and one that tackles difficult language barriers with ease.
Early Hungarian eugenics was inspired by Francis Galton and Charles Darwin but ultimately, according to Turda, focused on “race hygiene” initiatives like improving marriage matches and reducing infectious and venereal diseases. As such, Hungarian eugenics supporters pioneered a number of public health initiatives that would become quite common across Europe during the interwar years: the Stefánia Association for the Protection of Mothers and Infants, the Association of National Protection against Venereal Diseases, the National Military Welfare Office, and so forth. Turda successfully shows the penetration of eugenic thinking at high levels throughout the war, the most dysgenic emergency imaginable.
Turda is excellent at setting his Hungarian historical actors within a wider European scene. He can at many times trace which meetings they have attended abroad, with whom they have corresponded, and what issues have kept them connected to international audiences. He often gives short, pan-European summaries of important dates (like when each country first formed a eugenics committee or society) as a framework for what was going on in Hungary. These are welcome and useful. There is also a brief but exceedingly thoughtful section in the back of the book devoted to giving biographical information on the many historical actors that cross the stage of Turda's work.
Two overarching silences left this reader confused and suggest that Turda's book is designed for specialists. The first has to do with Magyarization and the expression of Hungarian power over non-Hungarian ethnic groups in the eastern half of the empire. Early in the study, Turda claims that Hungarian eugenics during the period under review was not concerned with race, and that indeed the Hungarian word for “race” (faj) was synonymous with the word for “nation” (nemzet) until the end of World War I (9). This seems at odds with the realities of Hungarian influence in the fin de siècle: Did not the process of Magyarization open questions of ethnic hierarchies? This also seems at odds with the core beliefs of one of Hungary's founding members of the eugenics community, Géza Hoffmann, who explicitly spoke against racial mixing (126). If indeed the words for “race” and “nation” were so innocuous, would such concerns come to the fore? Were peoples like the Roma and Sinti simply not an issue to Hungarian eugenicists?
The second, and potentially more confusing, silence in Turda's book regards the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which receives such scant mention—maybe three nods in the first half of the book—as to suggest that it did not exist at all. The title of the book is quite literal in this sense: Hungary is treated as a nation throughout, even though it is yoked to a much larger and complex political entity that begs for explanation and exploration. This strange stance is so strongly carried through that the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, the book's end point, is described not as the beginning of a new nation but as a tragic end: the loss of two-thirds of Hungary's traditional territories and more than three million “Hungarians” (15). Turda is clear that Hungary “lost the peace” (224), suffering loss of life, economic crisis, and disruption from competing nationalist minorities. This is the end that scholars of the Empire are familiar with, and yet his treatment of Hungary as a nation throughout is so strident that the finale seems fresh.
The eugenicists that we meet along the way in Turda's book are varied and fascinating. They are also almost all men. With so many concerns and committees on child mortality, midwifery, marriage, and maternal care, this is striking. Eugenics is at its core about proper reproduction and cannot be addressed without recourse to women's bodies. Women's input, however, was apparently not necessary. The other conversation that seemed not to happen in Hungary, at least before the war, was between the churches and the eugenics movement. It would seem natural that those powers that traditionally controlled attitudes toward sexuality would have an opinion about any new “science” that challenged their authority. Certainly this would come later, with the publication of the papal encyclical Casti Connubii in 1930. However, earlier Catholic and evangelical discomfort with eugenics would be worthy of exploration, if it existed in Hungary at all.
Eugenics and Nation is an extremely useful addition to our growing knowledge about the genesis of eugenics movements across Central Europe. It offers an open door to what have been neglected and misrepresented societies that have, in Turda's words, been “edited out of Hungary's national past” (6). Best of all, it takes a national context and puts it into conversation with a wider movement, letting us see both quirks and continuities as we continue to make sense of this profoundly twentieth-century way of ordering the world.
