Quote of the day
"Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in a way of feeling." Charles Baudelaire
It turns out that clarifying "romanticism" isn't as easy as I had hoped. It seems to have started during the french revolution and maybe ran up to and into the "modernism" movement. It is agreed that romanticism was a response to the Enlightenment's emphasise on rationality.
The reason any of this concerns me is the film I saw last night "Homo Sapiens 1900" and an earlier film "Architect of Doom". Both were documentaries by Peter Cohen. Aside from the completely new to me archival footage, both films had histories of intellectual movements I was interested in - National socialism and eugenics. I didn't understand to what extent the Nazis were romantics nor how "scientific" the eugenicists were.
Apparantly America was the leader in the eugenics movement with traveling exhibits spreading the word everywhere. This was also a scientific period with the people were deeply interested in the science that seemed able to explain everything.
The Soviets took to brain studies and the theories of Lamarck and later Lishenko which differed from Darwin in believing that aquired traits were inheritable by the next generation. This dovetailed so nicely with the desire for Scientific Marxism to create the "New Man" that soon Stalin cut off any debate on the subject (quite literally, by executing the dessenting scientists).
The Germans stayed with the Darwinian side, but started to emphasize both positive and negative eugenics. The SS even had a program to take babies that otherwise would have been aborted and raise them in special facilities. This was thwarted by rumors that the SS was breeding a super race which conflicted with the core Nazi emphases on the ideal family. After that the authorities focused on negative eugenics and the purifying of the Deutcher Volk. We know how that turned out.
"Romanticism is precisely situated neither in choice of subject nor exact truth, but in a way of feeling." Charles Baudelaire
It turns out that clarifying "romanticism" isn't as easy as I had hoped. It seems to have started during the french revolution and maybe ran up to and into the "modernism" movement. It is agreed that romanticism was a response to the Enlightenment's emphasise on rationality.
The reason any of this concerns me is the film I saw last night "Homo Sapiens 1900" and an earlier film "Architect of Doom". Both were documentaries by Peter Cohen. Aside from the completely new to me archival footage, both films had histories of intellectual movements I was interested in - National socialism and eugenics. I didn't understand to what extent the Nazis were romantics nor how "scientific" the eugenicists were.
Apparantly America was the leader in the eugenics movement with traveling exhibits spreading the word everywhere. This was also a scientific period with the people were deeply interested in the science that seemed able to explain everything.
The Soviets took to brain studies and the theories of Lamarck and later Lishenko which differed from Darwin in believing that aquired traits were inheritable by the next generation. This dovetailed so nicely with the desire for Scientific Marxism to create the "New Man" that soon Stalin cut off any debate on the subject (quite literally, by executing the dessenting scientists).
The Germans stayed with the Darwinian side, but started to emphasize both positive and negative eugenics. The SS even had a program to take babies that otherwise would have been aborted and raise them in special facilities. This was thwarted by rumors that the SS was breeding a super race which conflicted with the core Nazi emphases on the ideal family. After that the authorities focused on negative eugenics and the purifying of the Deutcher Volk. We know how that turned out.
posted by garrison at 12:48 PM
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