Today genealogy enjoys a wide range of enthusiastic practitioners, and almost every extended family has a self-appointed family historian. Along with professional historians, genealogists are ubiquitous at archives both in Germany and the United States. Of course this was not always so; until about one hundred years ago genealogy was the almost exclusive purview of nobles and aristocrats who had rather immediate concerns driving their inquiries into their families' pasts. That changed around 1900 in Germany, when in the words of a “how-to” guide for amateur researchers written in 1920, genealogy underwent a transformation from a “nobleman's sport” to a bourgeois “science.”Footnote ¹ This meant that, “today the middle class constitutes four fifths, nay nine tenths, of the biggest genealogical societies.”Footnote ² According to the growing corpus of genealogical literature, the middle class had marked family research with superior values and a greater dedication to truth and knowledge. Beyond the rhetoric, the bourgeois acceptance of genealogy altered the ways that middle-class families saw and remembered the past.

In the nineteenth century families collected heirlooms and composed chronicles; after 1900 they would increasingly “research” their pasts. Moreover, the once vernacular practice of family memory mimicked the academic study of “history,” and like it sought to legitimize itself as a “scientific” discipline. This change greatly altered relationships to the past; family keepsakes were converted from cherished mementos into objects of historical analysis. The new emphasis on “research” altered domestic memory's gender dynamics. Like the scientifically conceived discipline of history reigning in the late nineteenth century, the newly rationalized pursuit of family history was almost exclusively a male enterprise.Footnote ³ Its practitioners felt that women did not possess the rational acumen to accomplish dispassionate historical study. Women, who had acted as the guardians of memory for so long in the middle-class family, faced a challenge to that role at the same time that they made greater claims for participation in the public sphere. Although they certainly still very actively participated in commemoration, for the most part women's memorial practices were deemed less “scientific” and hence inferior to the more research-oriented methods associated with men.

New definitions of family laid the foundation for changes in its commemoration. Sentiment, once seen as the great glue of the family, made room for blood. In the period after 1900, discourses and publications on family historical research aligned themselves with other discourses on eugenics and biology. Advocates of family research thought that genealogy would contribute to proper racial hygiene, and that the knowledge of one's ancestors it imparted could predict either strength or disease and degeneracy. That intersection dovetailed with a German nationalism increasingly defined by blood and heredity. Because nations derive legitimacy by claiming to be family writ large,Footnote ⁴ ideas about national belonging inevitably redefine the family. Throughout the nineteenth century family contributed to the nation by imparting proper national values and thus training children to work for the good of the nation in adulthood. That ideal would be augmented and altered by newer understandings of the nation and the role of domestic life within it. At the turn of the century both the domestic family and the national family increasingly defined themselves in terms of blood and genealogy.

The burgeoning historiography of memory has mostly focused on public and national expressions of memoryFootnote ⁵ rather than private, vernacular forms of memory.Footnote ⁶ Prior studies have contributed greatly to our understanding of nationalism and politics in the modern era, but their emphasis on the public realm ignores many of memory's most significant manifestations. Our own day-to-day existence affirms the personal nature of memory, its unpredictability, and its unparalleled power. Proust's madeleine famously demonstrated memory's irresistible pull, but each of us has our own personal triggers, be they the smell of an uncle's pipe tobacco, a hit song from a swimming-pool summer, or a box of baseball cards moldering in the basement. Today's homes bear evidence of private memory with their voluminous photo albums, extensive scrapbooks, and stacks of videotapes recording weddings and other family events. Like the family itself, the genre of family memory can and ought to be historicized. The particular case of turn-of-the-century genealogy illustrates how concerns and beliefs about the family found expression in a quotidian context.

Germans often linked the health of families to the nation's destiny. A key site for the dissemination of German culture and national feeling in the nineteenth century, it became the breeding ground for physically sound Germans in the twentieth. Historians of Wilhelmine Germany have begun to explore the presence of the nation within domestic life, an important trend that this study advances. For example, Marion Kaplan's pioneering scholarship has shown how women operating in the domestic realm forged German-Jewish identity at the turn of the century.Footnote ⁷ More recently, Nancy Reagin has pointed to the ways that Germans used domesticity, particularly values of cleanliness, to define themselves.Footnote ⁸ Building on their work, this study will argue that family memory and its attendant practices followed changes in German national identity. Last, histories of eugenics have tended to examine the debates and ideas of scientists and less their adoption by lay people.Footnote ⁹ The growth of genealogy and its practice by amateurs allow us to understand how the turn-of-the-century obsession with human biology manifested itself in popular, everyday contexts.

Goethe and Schiller as Barometers of Family Ideals

Changing depictions of Goethe and Schiller illustrate the changing nature of family's importance for national well-being. During the nineteenth century, when family built the nation through preserving national values and forming good Germans, popular publications placed Goethe and Schiller within a domestic context, stressing how good parenting had formed their genius. At the start of the twentieth century the biological health of individual families became instrumental to building a strong German nation, and Goethe and Schiller went from products of German domesticity to ideal biological specimens, their genius the result of a serendipitous mix of blood.

During the mid-nineteenth century the “family magazines” Die Gartenlaube and Daheim, the top-selling periodicals of the day,Footnote ¹⁰ turned Goethe and Schiller into the ideal products of proper German family life. In 1855 Die Gartenlaube presented fawning portrayals of both “Goethe's Parents” and “Schiller's Parents.” The former stressed Goethe's devotion to his mother, and his sadness after her death.Footnote ¹¹ Turning Goethe into a family-centered individual was no mean feat considering his libertine reputation. The biography of Schiller's parents made the connection between greatness and family more explicit: “because it is necessary to restore the memories of the greatest and most precious minds of our nation, so it is also certainly interesting to get to know the ‘flesh and blood’ that they have sprung up from.” The author continued, “Just as with Goethe, Schiller also shows the great influence of his parents, namely his mother, on the inner nature of the son.”Footnote ¹² Presenting Germany's greatest writers in this fashion echoed other discourses in family magazines that reinforced the centrality of the parents' role as moral educators to their children.

Daheim depicted a Schiller strongly devoted to his wife and children, acting the part of the bourgeois father in the home. For example, an article entitled “Schiller at Home” from 1865 emphasized Schiller's attentions to his children, especially his dedication to his children's education.Footnote ¹³ An accompanying lithograph pictured him sitting in his study alongside his wife and children, even though bourgeois men saw their studies as their own inner sanctum walled off from the clamor of children.Footnote ¹⁴ By transforming Goethe and Schiller into the products of loving families, and by making the latter a doting father and husband, family magazines affirmed the larger notions of the family in the bourgeois mind. Not only did the family form society's bedrock and mold genius, it lay at the foundation of a specifically German greatness.

That conviction found expression all over German culture from the mid-nineteenth century onward. Popular novels of the 1850s advocated family values, seeing in them the necessary foundations of a united German nation. Important novels such as Gustav Freytag's Soll und Haben (Debit and Credit) and especially Adalbert Stifter's Der Nachsommer (Indian Summer) praised the bourgeois family. The latter considered it an important bulwark against modernity through its capacity to impart tradition.Footnote ¹⁵ Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl's Die Familie, the first sociological study of the German family, claimed that Germans possessed a uniquely strong devotion to family stretching back to Tacitus,Footnote ¹⁶ and that a revival of family values would be instrumental for the creation of a united Germany.Footnote ¹⁷ Popular new “family magazines” such as Daheim and Die Gartenlaube brought these ideas to the masses and consistently linked the values imparted in the home to the nation's future well-being.

Genealogical understandings of the family changed the nineteenth century's domestic ideology by emphasizing the biological sources of an individual's nature over family upbringing. A person's fate and personality could thus be traced to his or her ancestry, with family research as the tool to uncover these mysteries of the self. Two book-length genealogical studies of Goethe and Schiller, popular symbols of the nation and Germany's two greatest men of letters, illustrate how the biological notion of family gained currency in the early twentieth century. Furthermore, these two works displayed genealogy's newly endowed explanatory powers in their ability to locate greatness through blood.

Goethe's Ancestors of 1908 by Karl Knetsch,Footnote ¹⁸ and Schiller's Ancestors: A Family-Historical Undertaking of 1907 by Richard WeltrichFootnote ¹⁹ claimed a greater understanding of these two great Germans could be discovered through their genealogy.Footnote ²⁰ These books operated essentially as polemics in support of genealogy, and within their pages the two giants of German literature would take on much different forms than they did in the family magazines of the prior century.

Richard Weltrich, in his look at Schiller's family, claimed that “not all of individuality … finds its explanation in this relationship of dependence, yet a part of it does, a part of the bodily and mental construction, tendencies, and characteristics of the individual.”Footnote ²¹ Thus, knowledge of Schillers from the sixteenth century and beyond could explain the sources of Friedrich Schiller's greatness. Knetsch's research into Goethe's ancestry went even further, finding in him a “certain mix of blood” that contributed to his genius: “To close we examine the German regions, whose sons and daughters may have contributed to the origins of Goethe, so it is essential to explain that the mix of blood is divided three ways in equal strength by national characters of three completely different German tribes, the Thuringers, the Schwabians, and the Hessians.”Footnote ²² Knetsch even assigned aspects of Goethe's personality to the regions where his ancestors had lived, and ended by noting that “the greatest intelligence appeared in southern Germany and Hesse.”

Instead of being formed by loving families, now Germany's literary giants simply derived their greatness from genetics. The interest in the biological make-up of Germany's greatest literary figures reflected a general interest in heredity that would also inform private memory, encouraging thousands of families to research their own genealogies.

Family and Memory in the Nineteenth Century

Before delving into the subject of genealogy, it is important to understand the traditions of familial remembrance in the nineteenth century before genealogy's rise. Families memorialized themselves through writing chronicles, collecting heirlooms, and celebrating commemorative rituals. In that regard silver and golden wedding anniversaries became popular ways to celebrate the founding of a family, gathering in relatives far and wide and producing mementos for the trip home. Families assiduously collected and displayed such mementos, prizing them and holding them dear in their memories. Even seemingly mundane, utilitarian items such as curtains could be invested with a heightened meaning. For example, an 1850 diary entry from the Bremen widow Engel Marie Thiermann noted the ability of her summer curtains to evoke the past: “Today the curtains given for my wedding forty years ago and knitted by my cousin, have been put up in the living room and the room next to it, they look as good as new. If I only look into them, each time my Hermann's [her deceased husband] eyes live again, too, and the same [curtains] decorated the room for Johann's [her son's] baptism.”Footnote ²³ The curtains, woven by family members, given for her wedding, and present at important events in the history of the home, conjured up the past. In looking at them, she was able to relive the baptism of her son and to think of her husband living again. The memory culture of the time allowed Thiermann to see her curtains in such a vivid way, and her example well displays memory's potential to invest even the most common items with memorial significance.

An emotional commitment to the past extended to written forms of memory. Two of the most popular forms of written family memory were chronicles composed year by year and unpublished memoirs written by family matriarchs and patriarchs with posterity their audience. In style and intent, the genre of family memory consistently deployed a comedic narrative that excluded all traces of dischord in its scenes of domestic bliss.

As Hayden White has shown, historians craft their accounts with narrative plots,Footnote ²⁴ the comedic narratives of amateur historians being no exception. White writes of the plot of comedy, “In Comedy, hope is held out for the temporary triumph of man over his world by the prospect of occasional reconciliations of the forces at play in the social and natural worlds. Such reconciliations are symbolized in the festive occasions which the Comic writer traditionally uses to terminate his dramatic accounts of change and transformation”Footnote ²⁵ [italics his]. Fitting with that tendency toward reconciliation, many who wrote of their childhoods ended with the confirmation ritual, and others who wrote yearly accounts ended with the “festive occasion” of Christmas.

Despite the diversity of its participants, the genre of family memory exhibits a numbing blandness because almost all accounts of the past conform to the comedic narrative's rules. This is especially true of memoirs intended for a family audience, which comprise the vast majority of the unpublished autobiographies. Whereas published memoirs strove to elucidate an individual's experience and uniqueness, family-oriented autobiographies rarely veered outside pre-established formulas that normalized individual experience and praised the power of family. Authors typically idealized their childhoods, constructing a family idyll so pleasant as to render the modern reader immediately incredulous.Footnote ²⁶ Here is an early example written in 1828 by Anton Daniel Albers, a Bremen businessman, who opined about his mother in a rather typical fashion: “My mother was the model of a tender spouse and a good housewife, in the pious Christian sense, charitable, liking everyone and beloved by all. Her motherly sense of duty will never be forgotten.”Footnote ²⁷ Albers' praise of his mother reflects the salutary intent of the genre, one guaranteed to present the family past in the most pleasant light. For that reason, many authors, both famous such as Theodor Fontane and among the masses of amateurs, ended their memoirs with their coming of age, preferring to preserve their childhood in the amber of nostalgia.Footnote ²⁸ Because memoirs worked within the genre of family memory, creating a picture of the inevitably harmonious childhood home mattered most of all, which is probably why so many do not extend past the childhood years of their authors.

An extended chronicle written by Christel Sengstack of Bremen between 1820 and 1861 offers a particularly rich example of the comedic narrative inherent in the genre of family memory. She recorded the events of her family: births, deaths, weddings, and holidays, beginning and ending each yearly summary with a devotional dedication. Sengstack strove for accuracy and even had a methodology of sorts, consulting notes taken throughout the year as well as her husband's diary and the memory of her daughters. Her chronicle consistently interpreted family events in a comedic light, even when faced by the deaths of loved ones. For example, after the death of her husband in 1855, she credited the love of her family with holding her back from despair, “Without these children and children's children life would be too painful for me to carry on, but all is made pleasant for me by them.”Footnote ²⁹ Throughout her chronicle she praised the power of familial love in a similar fashion, making it capable of soothing the deepest pains. In like manner other chroniclers deployed and emphasized harmony and reconciliation in their accounts of family life.

Biological Discourses

Victorian notions of the family soon ran up against different realities at the turn of the century. Literature of the time was rife with broken families, social thinkers fretted over the supposed decadence of masculinity, feminists challenged traditional female roles, and the Youth Movement pulled adolescents out of the parental orbit. Most importantly, eugenics gained popularity and reflected a growing willingness to define family in biological terms.

Thomas Mann's landmark 1901 novel Buddenbrooks provides a good starting point and apt symbol of this new mood of anxiety about the family, for it fit with a general trend at the time, in Germany and elsewhere, to plot novels around a family in decline.Footnote ³⁰ The family's downfall marked itself on the bodies of the Buddenbrooks themselves in the form of physical and mental ailments. Tom, replacing his father Johann as patriarch, is unable to keep the family business financially competitive, and later dies an early death. His brother Christian is a neuraesthentic aesthete who ends the book in an asylum, and their sister Tony, involved in two failed marriages, suffers from chronic stomach ailments. The family had placed its hopes in the hands of Tom's son Hanno, but he turns out to have unhealthy interests in both piano playing and in his effeminate friend Kai before perishing of typhus. Instead of the visions of domestic bliss and harmony preferred by the nineteenth century, Mann presented familial decline, disharmony, and death in a starkly unsentimental fashion.

Mann's literary work, so symbolic of the changing status of the family, certainly fed off the fin-de-siècle's concerns. During that time, “decadence” and “degeneration” permeated artistic and social discourses, expressed most adamantly concerning the supposedly perilous state of masculinity. For example, Max Nordau, in his famous 1896 work Degeneration, warned of the modern world's effects on genetics, positing that the stresses and strains demanded by urban life were wearing down the collective nerves of the European male.Footnote ³¹ Proper national families required strong, upright, masculine men to lead them, thus dissipating masculinity would inevitably be followed by national ruin.Footnote ³²

The notions of acquired genetics driving Nordau and others would soon be discredited, but their root concerns remained salient to political and social debates. Mendelian genetics gained more followers after 1900, eventually becoming the consensus view,Footnote ³³ and it looked to reproduction rather than society for explanations. Scientists thus sought out hereditary causes for disease and social problems, most commonly singling out tuberculosis and alcoholism.Footnote ³⁴ In essence, geneticists transformed degeneration into a hereditary problem that could be controlled by selective breeding.

Many responded to new discoveries in genetics by prescribing a dose of “racial hygiene” to prevent disease and degeneration, exemplified by Alfred Ploetz's foundation of the Archiv für Rassen- und Gesellschaftsbiologie (Journal for Racial and Social Biology) in 1904.Footnote ³⁵ Advocates of racial hygiene included scientists, thinkers, and even members of the general public. Friedrich Alfred Krupp of the famed arms-making family piqued public interest in the subject by offering an essay prize competition that asked, “What can the theory of evolution tell us about domestic political development and legislation of the state?”Footnote ³⁶ The winner, Walter Schallmeyer, claimed that while the nineteenth century had understood Darwin's ideas on a theoretical plane, twentieth-century society would be “called upon to apply the theory of descent to everyday life.”Footnote ³⁷

Supporters of eugenics echoed his implied advocacy of direct state intervention into reproduction and the family. Proposals for the castration and sterilization of those seen as unfit for reproduction grew around the turn of the century, along with the permanent incarceration of “habitual criminals.”Footnote ³⁸ Proposals advocating sterilization and the tight restriction of marriage violated taboos against public meddling with the private world of the home, supposedly a site of refuge, not state management.Footnote ³⁹

Biological explanations of national health reached a wide and receptive audience across a varied political spectrum. Certainly elements of the hard right embraced racialist thinking. For example, Houston Stewart Chamberlain's flagrant racial nationalism in The Origins of the Nineteenth Century became a literary sensation, and even the Kaiser was an enthusiastic reader.Footnote ⁴⁰ Despite the prevalence of racialist thought among the proto-fascist set, others embraced eugenics and racial hygiene in ways that did not necessarily imply notions of Aryan superiority. As Sheila Faith Weiss has shown, while most advocates of eugenics in the Wilhelmine period had racist attitudes, by and large they did not subscribe to the racialist vision of thinkers such as Chamberlain.Footnote ⁴¹ Some socialists, including SPD leader Isaac Bebel, incorporated social biology into their thought.Footnote ⁴² In this context and others eugenics catered to idealists who wanted to “improve” and reform society, not necessarily to racial supremacists. Outside politics eugenics was very much present in the popular culture of the time. For instance, the well-attended International Hygiene Exhibition of Dresden in 1911, later to become the still extant Hygiene Museum, contained a section on “racial hygiene.”Footnote ⁴³

Eugenics achieved wide popularity in several other nations as well, including the United States, which Alfred Ploetz himself identified as a leader in the field.Footnote ⁴⁴ In Germany, however, the stakes were higher, because national belonging and national health were increasingly defined by biology rather than Bildung. The 1913 law on citizenship and naturalization made German citizenship a “community of descent.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Germans who emigrated maintained citizenship, while “non-German” immigrants living in Germany and even their German-born children faced exclusion. Meanwhile, many eugenicists raised concerns over the falling birthrate, which they considered a harbinger of national decline.Footnote ⁴⁶ With the nation defined biologically and its fate tied up in reproduction, the family and its reproductive functions came to be a source of greater concern and state intervention, evidenced by the government's concerted pro-natalist push during World War I.Footnote ⁴⁷ Nineteenth-century ideas of the family as a refuge from the modern world's vagaries and as cherished site for education and personal development now had to share space with a much more biological vision of the family's relation to the nation.

Genealogical Discourses

Ordinary people soon applied biological definitions of family in their daily lives through the practice of genealogy. After the turn of the century, several new books and nine nationally circulated periodicals catered to the growing demand for advice and instruction by the burgeoning ranks of genealogists and family historians.Footnote ⁴⁸ These works continually emphasized genealogy's scientific and rigorous nature, all the while making the case that genealogy represented a perfectly respectable pursuit for the middle class. The first publications on bourgeois genealogy appeared in 1889, and the Center for Personal and Family History, which published periodicals and pamphlets meant to instruct and advise those researching their family pasts, formed in Leipzig in 1904.Footnote ⁴⁹ Other guides and resources soon followed. In 1907 Eduard Heydenreich published the most definitive guide, the two-volume Family Historical Source Inquiry, later expanded and republished in 1913 as The Handbook of Practical Genealogy.Footnote ⁵⁰ The more accessible Pocket Book for Family-History Research first appeared in 1919 and was already in its third edition by 1924.Footnote ⁵¹ Another guide had sold 300,000 copies before the First World War.Footnote ⁵² Those wishing to research their own family's past now possessed more resources than at any time before.

Bourgeois genealogy would be scientific genealogy, in tune with bourgeois values of Bildung and a general faith in science and reasoned inquiry.Footnote ⁵³ Genealogical literature laid out a strict methodological template for its readers, instruction that would ensure properly scientific outcomes. For example, the second edition of The Pocketbook for Family-Historical Research advised conscientious genealogists to follow a three-part process: question formulation, detailed research, and summarization. Well-formulated research questions would avoid “wasted work,” detailed research entailed assembling and organizing evidence, and summarization was to be thorough and able to “separate . . . what is certain and uncertain.” When in doubt, a researcher ought to “ask advice from an expert.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Like any good scientist then, a family researcher began with specific and well-crafted questions, and then investigated them with the utmost rigor. This advice transformed memory work into a scientific practice, with hypotheses to test and evidence to weigh. Rather than merely seeking to remember a lost loved one through preserving a lock of hair or box of letters, one embarked on a genealogical quest only after formulating the proper research model.

Genealogy demanded that researchers commit to their projects with the dedication and precision of academic historians and consequently to aspire to the most rigorous professional standards. Eduard Heydenreich's massive two-volume guide to family research, Family Historical Source Inquiry, published in 1907 and again in an expanded edition as The Practical Handbook of Genealogy in 1913, exemplified these values and expectations. His guide, like other literature at the time, offered extensive instruction and information on how to research one's family past, with a comprehensive catalog of archival and bibliographic resources filling the entirety of the second volume. Amateur researchers could then use the catalog to seek out traces of their own ancestors.

The emphasis on rigor and accuracy emerged most forcefully in the discussion of the different family historical sources available to researchers. Heydenreich and others claimed that written sources, especially records and archives, were the most accurate and important materials. On the other hand, he disdained the oral storytelling traditions: “The words of Wilhelm von Humboldt remain true, that there is nothing so rare as a literally true story.” Oral story-telling suffered from “subjectivity” and “the need for aesthetization.”Footnote ⁵⁵ His criticisms of oral story-telling and his concomitant fetishization of the archive stemmed from the historical thought of the time, which elevated the archive to the one true source of historical truth. The sentimental attachments to family stories had to bow to the rigor of scientific inquiry for family researchers. Women had traditionally been the most important carriers of oral tradition within the family, and the debasement of such traditions lessened the once important role for women in family memory, just as the male role of rational, scientific examiner of the family past achieved even greater prestige.

The devaluing of family memory's “subjective” aspects extended to the material traces of the past, especially to heirlooms. Nineteenth-century families had greatly valued relics from the past, proudly displaying them in the home, and even given them personalities.Footnote ⁵⁶ In the realm of family research, however, these prized possessions took on a wholly different aura, becoming archeological remnants of family history. According to Heydenreich, one could find the year a table was made, for instance, or “tobacco tins, pipes, and other movable possessions with the name or monogram of the great-grandfather or grandfather.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Under the dispassionate eyes of the researcher, the cherished relics, which had once possessed palpably emotional, commemorative meaning, were transformed into rather cold and distant “historical sources.” This metamorphosis points to the more rationalized and scientized nature of the new family historical practices of the time. Not only did family researchers look in archives and registries instead of the home for the bulk of their information about their family past, they changed the very meaning of treasured family objects. Although the transformation of heirlooms into historical “sources” did not completely reduce their emotional value to that of a museum piece, the ability to shift such powerful objects' meaning into fodder for scientific inquiry demonstrates the more rigidly historical nature of family “research” compared to older modes of commemoration.

The impulse toward scientific rigor expressed itself most forcefully in the very methods of recording genealogy, an area where popularizers of scientific family history research called for drastic changes in the name of greater biological precision. Traditional genealogical tables, called “Family Trees” (Stammbäume), had shown only a straight line of direct descendants, something genealogists considered wholly inadequate for an understanding of heredity. They advocated replacing the trees with the Ahnentafel (literally “ancestors' table”). This new chart displayed all direct ancestors of a particular individual on both sides of the family. The Ahnentafel's advantage lay in its ability to take into account all family members from previous generations because it showed all those with a genetic link, not just those from the father's side. Explaining the larger meaning of this difference, Robert Sommer, in his Family Research and Hereditary Theory (Familienforschung und Vererbungslehre) of 1907, wrote that, “In this way [with the Stammbaum] all blood relationships outside the direct line are excluded. These simplistic lines of generations are too deficient to study hereditary facts.”Footnote ⁵⁸ As the last sentence implies, genealogists would seek more than names of ancestors, but also clues to their psychological make-up and susceptibility to disease.

Like other advocates of genealogy, Jena biology professor Julius Grober singled out many budding family researchers who combined the old family tree method with the Ahnentafel display in their genealogies. In his view, “The assessment of the Ahnentafel and the family tree for the proof of the purity of descent is completely different; the former shows everything, the latter only a little. The two concepts are often mixed by those uneducated in genealogy to great harm.”Footnote ⁵⁹ The disapproval expressed by Grober over the “harm” caused by mixing the two methods echoed the larger belief that genealogical inquiry be held up to the strictest standards of scientific methodology. The literature made clear that genealogy was not a hobby to be practiced by frivolous aristocrats, it was serious business. The ascendancy of the Ahnentafel over the Stammbaum thus mirrored the rise of scientific, bourgeois genealogy over the aristocratic variety, which had no need for anything more extensive than a straight family tree.

Support for the Ahenentafel did not completely rule out older forms of family memory, but genealogists wanted traditional practices to adjust to contemporary concerns. For example, Robert Sommer called for a revival of the family chronicle, but felt it should be written with an eye toward the health and genetics of the family. He laid out a “natural-historical schema” for the organization of chronicle entries, intended to track the “mental and physical” progress of family members throughout their lives. It included a parental duty to record the circumstances of the conception and the mental state of the mother during pregnancy, information that could factor into the future development of the child. He touted such a demanding family chronicle for its ability to foster “family consciousness,” but mostly for its value in furthering family research, claiming, “These thoughts appear exportable, if a large number of families or representatives should be united in the conviction that this style of establishment [the chronicle] not only enhances family consciousness but can also carry a great meaning for family research in general.”Footnote ⁶⁰ He hoped that this method of chronicling, with the support of “family research organizations,” would become the norm for all.

Genealogical literature promoted the social and national benefits of family research, first in terms of its expression of familial devotion, and second in its contributions to national racial hygiene. In the second edition of Heydenreich's guide, Karl Lamprecht, professor of history at the University of Leipzig argued that German society benefited from greater knowledge of family history.Footnote ⁶¹ Heydenreich, in his own introduction to the first edition of the guide, noted the growing number of genealogists within the middle class and the need for a proper understanding of family historical sources.Footnote ⁶² In extolling the social benefits of genealogy, he quoted Dr. H. Grotefend, an archivist in Schwerin, who claimed that family research was one of the “purest” and “most fertile” grounds for instilling love for the family.Footnote ⁶³ Family history had such value because the family was “the first and original community in life, it is the foundation and the model of all societal and governmental communal structures.”Footnote ⁶⁴ For advocates of genealogy, the importance of the family and its history required that research of the family be methodologically sound and consequently accurate in its findings.

The valorization of domestic feeling in these statements differed little from the general praise of domesticity that marked the nineteenth century. Genealogy raised the stakes of family research, however, in its implications for racial hygiene. Issues of heredity never lurked far beneath the advice offered for family researchers. Heydenreich's guides to family historical research concerned themselves more with archival methods than with genealogical ones, but the first volume of the second edition ended with an article on the implications of genealogy for “anthropology and psychiatry.” Written by the aforementioned Robert Sommer, it named several diseases passed down through birth that could be tracked through a family genealogy, including psychiatric afflictions such as hysteria and suicidal tendencies.Footnote ⁶⁵ These concerns fit into a wider discourse on genealogy and heredity that saw much practical value in genealogy for the prevention of disease.

That discourse could be found in scientific journals as well. For example, an influential article often cited in later genealogical publications written by the aforementioned Julius Grober explicitly linked national health and genealogy. His 1904 piece in the Archiv für Rasse- und Gesellschafts-Biologie (Journal for Racial and Social Biology),Footnote ⁶⁶ the organ of the Racial Hygiene Society, aptly laid out the case for genealogy as an essential component of national health. Connecting genealogy to the burgeoning discourse on degeneration of the time, he cited the appearance of familial degeneration in the novels of Zola, and especially in Mann's Buddenbrooks, seeing in them evidence of familiarity with the “Ahnentafel method.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Degeneracy's threats justified the Ahnentafel because proper knowledge of heredity could prevent disease and thus strengthen the health of the nation. The Ahnentafel identified and combated “dreaded harms” that included “tuberculosis, syphilis, and alcoholism,” diseases related to “racial degeneration.”Footnote ⁶⁸ For that reason the “Ahnentafel method” was more than a mere geneticist's tool, it ought to be universally practiced by the members of the nation.

In his hopes for a “good” or “pure” Ahnentafel for “modern man,”Footnote ⁶⁹ Grober did not propose a specific mechanism, but some kind of restriction on those with undesirable genetic material implied in his comments. Others who promoted the benefits of genealogy did not shy away from demanding legal and societal changes to ensure “purity.” For example, the Pocket Book for Family Historical Research edition of 1922 proposed legal restrictions on reproduction, including the “banning of marriage” (Eheverbot) for the unfit, and “sterilization of sick or polluted individuals (for example as introduced in America) or prolonged internment of the sick.”Footnote ⁷⁰ These proposals were hardly novel, eugenics and racial hygiene had become political issues even before the 1920s. In 1912 the Prussian government funded a study on falling birth rates,Footnote ⁷¹ and during World War I, advocates for racial hygiene pushed civil servants to allow marriage licenses only to couples who could prove through a physician that they did not possess hereditary diseases. Calls for restricted marriages and sterilization may bring about associations with the Nazi regime, but the new science of genealogy by no means made Nazism inevitable or even necessarily embraced notions of Aryan racial superiority.Footnote ⁷² Nevertheless, it transported biological definitions of family into the everyday life of the home.

Research and Genealogy in the Home

The growing presence of genealogical literature within family archives and the frequent new editions of genealogical guides around 1900 pointed to a growing and avid interest in genealogy. In fact, after the 1890s family archives displayed a sudden increase in previously absent genealogical material that corresponded with the rapid growth of genealogical literature aimed at the middle class.Footnote ⁷³ During this time families also organized their archives more systematically, aware that the relics of their past ought to be given the same treatment as official documents.Footnote ⁷⁴ The new family histories differed from chronicles in that their authors did not merely record family events, year after year, but actually strove to plumb the depths of the family past and even to discover family origins. Despite these changes, the comedic narrative of family life persisted.

Newer memory practices had wide-reaching gender implications. The shift toward family historical research away from commemorative preservation reduced the role of women, who had been the most important custodians of the past. Family research, with its pretensions to “scientific” historical study, privileged men. Women were excluded from the historical profession and even amateur antiquarian societies,Footnote ⁷⁵ and as Bonnie Smith has argued, the historical profession of the time defined itself against femininity: “It was in dialogue with the more popular amateur vision—that is, with femininity, everyday life, and their attendant superficiality—that historical science took shape as a matter of national importance, as genderless universal truth, and simultaneously as a discipline mostly for men.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Furthermore as Christina Crosby has shown, because historians of the time took abstract “Universal Man” as their subject, women could not even be proper subjects of historical analysis.Footnote ⁷⁷ Women continued to contribute robustly to their family's memory work, but did so as storytellers, and not as historical researchers uncovering lost ancestors.

Family archives themselves bore the marks of the changing landscape of family memory. The appearance of Ahnentafeln in family archives around the turn of the century shows that many took the advice of genealogical manuals to heart. Many family archives had previously contained records of family heredity, but these family trees usually did not involve research, but rather merely recorded the members of the family back to the grandparents, with new family members added as they were born. For example, the Boisselier family archive in Bremen contains a family tree literally drawn out on paper with a trunk and branches patterned over a large, fold-out map. Names have been penned into the tree's various branches with the original entries ending in the 1830s.Footnote ⁷⁸

Around the turn of the century a self-consciously “scientific” and historical approach started marking such endeavors. The Sengstack family, whom we examined earlier through the chronicle of Christel Marie Sengstack, illustrates the turn to research over memory. In 1902, the family privately printed a Sengstack Stammbaum traced back to Heinrich Sengstack, born in 1695. Several pages for different branches of the family followed, along with space for notations to be written in for future family members. The introduction, authored by four male members of the extended Sengstack family, attested to the changes occurring in family memory, especially to the prominence of men in family memory pursuits. It began with the claim that the family needed a new and updated family tree, and that in responding to that need the authors had researched documents and records to put the book together. They noted their methodical searches through the registries at four Bremen churches and lamented the “inadequate variety” of sources, a problem compounded by the many variations of the family name found therein.Footnote ⁷⁹

Despite the difficulty of the research, the authors still managed to provide a fairly extensive list of Sengstack ancestors, attesting to their heroic and implicitly masculine conquest of the archives. Their emphasis on documentary research in official registers reflected the general trends of family research that stressed the need for methodological rigor and archival sources. At the end, the four names of the men involved are listed, adding a sense of bourgeois male stolidity to the text, a legitimacy that a woman's name would not.Footnote ⁸⁰ The emphasis on historical accuracy extended to the intended use of the book. The authors ended their introduction by “strongly asking” its owners to keep up “exact” and “yearly” notations of changes in the family as to “keep the family table in order.” A transcription of a family will from the seventeenth century placed after the introduction added an even greater sense of historical accuracy in its presentation of documentary proof of the authors' exploits. In any case, the emphasis on research and documentary evidence is a far cry from the impressionistic narratives employed in former times.

The gender division between male research and female storytelling manifested itself in the Sengstack family archives. While men researched genealogy in registry offices, women wrote down memories and stories. During the 1920s, Auguste Boyes, granddaughter of Christel Sengstack, typed a series of short one- to two-page sketches of her parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles. Her own memories and stories from other family members informed these accounts, not archival research. Unlike the Stammbaum, Boyes only discussed ancestors within living memory and did not dig into the past in order to get information about distant ancestors. Similarly, in 1929 another woman in the Sengstack family, Helene Schaefer, composed a short typed piece of the stories that her aunt had passed down to her. She continued the feminine genre of oral tradition and grounded her project in a desire to ward off oblivion: “In today's fast moving times with its many demands … there is little time and often little interest for that which occurred to the family in past eras. It is a shame if what is old will always be forgotten. And so I will relate what I had heard from my dear old Aunt Emma Grund, born Sengstack.”Footnote ⁸¹ That concern echoed her ancestor, Christel Sengstack, and persisted more openly in the more “subjective” female forms of family memory. While women continued nineteenth-century memory practices, they did not participate as much in those of the twentieth, whose scientific pretensions excluded them.

The early twentieth-century archive of the Kippenberg family of Hamburg and Bremen can further illustrate the association of women with oral tradition. The matriarch, Johanne Kippenberg, set down a richly detailed memoir of her childhood in the small town of Jever. She began by quoting from a letter that her deceased husband August had written years before in which he lamented that, “our bourgeois class typically concerns itself little with establishing connections with past family relations beyond those of this life” and so pledged to write an account of his life for posterity, but died before he could do so. Johanne Kippenberg used this as motivation to write her own account of her childhood. In contrast to this more subjective style of remembrance that relied on memory recall rather than research, her son Hermann constructed a thorough Ahnentafel of the Kippenberg family. Like other Ahnentafeln it laid out the family's genealogy on a color-coded chart without an accompanying narrative.

Other members of the family took a more narrative approach, but one marked by objective research. Berthold, the youngest son, wrote a summary of the life of Ernst, his older brother who died when Berthold was only one year old and before he could have any memory of him. To overcome the gulf of oblivion, Berthold Kippenberg used the correspondence between his father and brother to construct a “Lebensbild” of Ernst, gaining insight into his character through historical research. This project, among others in the Kippenberg family, shows how family archives could be used to construct historical narratives, mirroring the rhetoric of genealogical literature calling for methodological rigor rather than subjective storytelling.Footnote ⁸²

Often family researchers used documents to get a sense not only of their ancestors, but of the Zeitgeist in which they lived. Gustav Parthey, a Berlin book dealer, wrote down a personal memoir of his childhood in the 1860s that offered a glimpse into his early life, as well as historical events such as the occupation of Berlin by Napoleon's army. Long after his death his grandson Ernst Friedel reprinted Parthey's unpublished memoir and added an introduction that discussed its importance. According to Friedel, Parthey's account did more than provide information about deceased ancestors; it painted a picture of the “educated, prosperous Bürgertum of old Berlin” and offered “many glimpses” into the “customs of the old social classes.”Footnote ⁸³ Rather than being a mere relic of his grandfather's life, in the research-driven domestic memory of the time Parthey's memoir became a primary source, an archival document.

Though the more rationalized notions of “family research” could transform family relics into “sources,” by no means did new practices eliminate emotion from memory work or overturn the prevailing comedic narrative.Footnote ⁸⁴ As one of the advocates of the Ahnentafel, Julius Grober's family archive provides an interesting example of the co-existence between scientific family “research” and the sentimental, comedic narrative traditionally found in the genre of family memory. Grober left behind extensive documentation of his family's life, including a massive multi-volume memoir, a transcribed copy of his war diary, biographical sketches of both of his parents, a photo album of pictures from his father's summer home, an essay on his memories of the home, and, most curiously, a fictionalized history of Michael Grober, the oldest ancestor he managed to find in his genealogical research. While Grober engaged with his family past in a highly historical and scientific way, there is little doubt that his massive memory work project was a labor of love.

A photo album chronicling life at his father's summer home in Huchting, outside Bremen, best expressed his sentimentality. Grober added pictures of the home and family members for a decade, the last photo showing him sitting in his military uniform with his daughter on a swing, dated 1915.Footnote ⁸⁵ The pictures were fairly typical family photographs, with children frolicking and parents relaxing. A poem taken from the anniversary of his parents' silver wedding anniversary in 1900 opened the album and set a sentimental tone from the beginning. He would later write a short essay on the summer home and his memories there, praising it as a great escape and as a place where his father, an enthusiastic gardener, could be most happy. In it, Grober commented on the joy his father derived from nature there: “The children and later the grandchildren learned from him the names, calls, and songs of the birds, how often he told me how much joy it gave him that he could teach his grandchildren the names of the flowers.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Idyllic musings such as these defined the album and clearly fit into the standard tropes of the genre of family memory. By gathering the generations together and presenting them in a harmonious domestic world, Grober stressed the continuity and stability of family in ways similar to family memoirists and chroniclers of the nineteenth century.

His well-developed family sentiments seem to have driven his more scientific memory work rather than impeding it. Grober still undertook genealogical projects, and though he tended to write them after World War I, his memoirs show that he had been researching his family for decades. The memoirs also exhibit a continuing interest with his family's past, and a strong desire to discover the histories of his earliest known ancestors. Above all, he practiced what he preached in terms of the Ahnentafel and continued to research and update it through the years, undertaking several research trips. For example, he made such a trip to the village of Bassum, outside Bremen, in the summer of 1906 where he visited a rural pastor who was related to Grober and who helped him find documents linked to his grandmother on his mother's side. He did this in order to flesh out the Ahnentafel for his daughters, which meant more work because that project required researching his wife's genealogy as well as his own.Footnote ⁸⁷ In this manner Grober was both the cold-eyed researcher and the misty-eyed romantic in his memory work, proof that research-oriented memory coexisted with rather than eliminated the traditional comedic, sentimental narrative of family life.

Postscript: Nazi Genealogy

Under the National Socialist state, genealogy went from a pastime to a requirement under the Nuremberg Laws. Germans had to fill out an Ahnenpass (literally “ancestors passport”) proving Aryan ancestry through their great-grandparents' generation or else face harsh discrimination. The racialist state wholeheartedly endorsed a biological vision of the family's role, terming it “the primordial cell of the Volk.”Footnote ⁸⁸ To encourage racial consciousness in youth, schools taught children how to construct their own genealogies.Footnote ⁸⁹ Thus in about forty years genealogy had been transformed from the exclusive province of the nobility to a bourgeois “science” and finally to a national duty.

This was not just a matter of state policy; individual families responded in some cases by linking their family's genealogy to the greater good of the Volksgemeinschaft. For evidence, we can turn to the Sengstack family once again. One Werner Sengstack of Hamburg wrote an essay in 1937 reporting on his own genealogical research, a report that parroted the language of National Socialism. He began the essay by claiming that the Nazi state's “new worldview” and “the rising consciousness of the family and racial problem” had inspired his research. He hoped that his work would “not just contribute to our family as a nucleus, but also serve as a source of strength for the nation.”Footnote ⁹⁰ In giving thanks to relatives who assisted him, Sengstack admonished the younger members of the family to continue his work, citing its importance to the nation: “This plea for working together goes out especially to all of the young members of the clan, who on the grounds of the laws of the Reich's government should follow and take part in the important ideas of family research (Ahnenforschung) and proof of ancestry.”Footnote ⁹¹ This statement directly connected Nazi ideas of race and family to the application of genealogical research in the everyday realm of the home. The rise of genealogy at the turn of the century did not inevitably lead down the road to fascism, but it certainly normalized and popularized a practice instrumental for the implementation of Nazi racial policy. Furthermore, by freighting family genealogy with national importance, this relatively benign domestic practice could be exploited to bolster the national socialist state in the everyday.