The Renewal of the Family Idea in Germany

Chapter 1 of Hans Guenther's "Heredity and Environment"

 The renewal of the family idea in Germany

The nationalist world of thought in the years between 1919 and 1933 was characterized by views that no longer explained people's actions and omissions primarily in terms of their environment, especially their economic environment, but primarily in terms of their genetic makeup. This meant that views that can be traced back to the second half of the 19th century triumphed: namely, to Gobineau, Galton, Ammon, Lapouge, Mendel and some of their contemporaries.

These men and a few others that I will mention represent the contradiction to the teachings that attempted to be realized in the French Revolution. In the middle of the 19th century, the century of theories of equality and the environment, Count Gobineau also spoke of the inequality of human races and individuals, and the research into ancestry and heredity from Darwin to the present day has created the scientific basis for such a claim of inherited and hereditary inequality. This, however, was opposed to democracy as understood in the 19th century by an aristocratic idea, as Haeckel had already stated that only aristocratic conclusions can be drawn from the theory of ancestry.

for a national state, which as such wants and must draw its strength from a growth-based (organic) view of life - and the doctrine of the origin and descent of living beings, of heredity and selection, have contributed a great deal to the awakening of a growth-based view of life - I say: for a state so educated, the new knowledge would have to have an immediate effect in different directions. This state could no longer expect to raise and strengthen its people through environmental improvements alone; rather, it would have to strive to understand the hereditary value or worthlessness of its population and to find ways of increasing the higher-value genetic makeup of all classes and reducing the lower-value genetic makeup of all classes. The number of children in marriages of people of different genetic makeup would have to take on a completely different meaning for a state so educated than it has hitherto.

A state educated in the science of life (biology) should be concerned with creating a living view of the nature and importance of the family among the people, and establishing a new sense of family. The idea that the family should be the core of the state idea has almost been lost in today's Europe.

Extermination can be carried out largely through laws, but improvement will only be possible through the revival of a sense of family from aristocratic sentiments. In turn, aristocratic sentiments can, by their very nature, only be directed at what is inherited and born, not at what is acquired and can be acquired, and so such a sentiment must seek its strength precisely in the teachings of heredity and selection.

In Europe, almost everything in family matters is being rebuilt. In the legal code, the German family is treated as a remnant of what the Indo-European, Germanic and German family once was. One only has to read through the records on family law to see that the 19th century left almost nothing of the family of earlier times. In contrast, we can see that in some German regions, clan associations were preserved as legal entities until the 18th century, and in some cases even into the 19th century. Clan associations that have taken over, in a way that is valuable to life law, some of what the state insurance and welfare institutions of the 19th and 20th centuries tried to take over in a way that was questionable or harmful to life law.

\Quite logically, communism and parts of proletarian socialism wanted to completely eliminate this remnant, which liberal views and legislation had left the family in a somewhat embarrassing state. The family was described as pointless, harmful and hostile to progress and its elimination was demanded.

\I would now like to give a few examples of how the nature of the family and the importance of the family for the people and the state have been misunderstood or simply overlooked in legislation and administration, but also in the sciences, since the middle of the 19th century:

I have already spoken about the remnant of the earlier significance of the family in the Civil Code. How little the attention of the state authorities, but also of population scientists, social scientists (sociologists) and others was directed towards the family is shown by the fact that in general the censuses tried to record individuals and their relationships outside the family through their questionnaires, so that it was not possible for population statistics to gain a picture of the family life of the people. Statisticians such as Jahn and Burgdörfer have repeatedly warned and warned against this.

The sciences that were supposed to deal with the family have also failed in many ways, at least here in Germany. It seems to me characteristic of the current situation that there is not even a thorough presentation of the history of the German family, just as there is a history of the North American family or a history of the French family. North America in particular should be mentioned here, which has produced a series of excellent works on the family and the current state of the family, and the first books that deal with the family from the standpoint of genetic health theory (eugenics) also come from North America. The sense of family was expressed in North America as early as 1887 with the founding of a league for the protection of the family (National League for the Protection of the Family)

If we look at what is said about the family in German works on social science (sociology) or in handbooks of political science and the like, we often see a certain embarrassment on the part of the authors, who try to say something correct about the family, to discuss views and to cite literature. But almost nowhere is the family understood in a living spirit, almost nowhere is the importance of the family for the people and the state recognized, or the importance of the family for any plan for national improvement even suspected. More or less ingenious studies of the disintegrating marriages of our time, which were then correctly interpreted as "couple relationships" or "society of two" or "household community", could not result in a deeper scientific examination of the nature of the family, let alone a revival of the sense of family.

From outside, through the pressure of the advancing hereditary health theory, which had to place the family at the centre of attention, and even more from outside, many representatives of social science, historical research and other disciplines were finally drawn to the family. From the flourishing family research - Ottokar Lorenz, Armin Tille, Friedrich von Klode and others should be mentioned here - further decisive impulses emerged to deepen the views on the family. The churches have never ignored family life, and the Catholic Church has already attempted to counteract the signs of disintegration in family life with the letter of the bishops' meeting in Fulda in 1913. The Protestant Church, which is less inclined to consider forms of community than the Catholic Church, opposed the disintegration later, at a time when political Catholicism had joined forces with parties and men who were clearly participating in the disintegration of the German family.

There is no uniform tradition of scientific or ideological research into the family in Germany. Everything has to be created from scratch, and the authorities should consider establishing an institute or research group for research into the family with the associations dedicated to family research and ethnic development, perhaps an institute that would range from ethnology and folklore to demography and social studies and even genetic health.

If we ask ourselves where research into the nature and significance of the family should begin, since there is no uniform tradition on all these questions and since all too many recent studies on these subjects contain at best sterile-correct statements, but rarely allow us to sense anything of the living nature of the family - if we ask ourselves in this way about the starting point of research into the family, then as far as I can see we must go back to two men who have always seemed to me to be the last two important folklore researchers who still thought in a growth-oriented (organic) way; we must go back to Frédéric le Play and Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl.

There is certainly plenty of noteworthy work before and alongside these two men. We Germans could cite Justus Möser, then from the 19th century Robert von Mohl and Albert Schäffle. The French can name August Comte, but the fruitful and profound reflections that we will build on seem to me to be expressed in le Play and Kiehl, especially in le Play.

So here are a few words about these two men, who in turn represent part of the contradiction that opposed the ideas of the French Revolution in the middle of the liberal 19th century.

The Norman Le Play, 1806—1882, engineer, economist, social scientist, became professor in Paris in 1840 and senator in 1867; Napoleon II held him in high esteem and awarded him the cross of the Legion of Honour. His Organisation de la Famille was published in 1870, the 3rd edition in 1884.

Like Gobineau and Galton, Le Play represents a counterattack against the teachings of the French Revolution. In the ideas of order in rural life before the Revolution, he saw the intelligence of the past. In high school, Le Play had read Tacitus' descriptions of Germanic life; in 1825, in Paris, he had met two German students who showed him that Rousseau's main mistake was that he claimed that man was good by nature and that it was only social institutions that made him bad. This was precisely the opinion of the proletarian socialists of the 19th century, which for this reason rejected any hereditary health care and derided it as a step backwards, because the hereditary health theory did not want to see the root evil in the allegedly wrong social order, but in the increase in inferior genetic traits - an increase to which a social order that uprooted the hereditarily best sexes in increasing numbers certainly contributed. Le Play realized more and more clearly that the dissolution of the family, in connection with the destructive laws on rural land ownership, was the most powerful evil in the life of the Western peoples.

One of his teachers, an Englishman, had described northern Germany as a "land of wisdom" where he would still find the healthy order that mattered. In 1829, Le Play traveled to northern Germany and researched the state of family life. He investigated the circumstances of mining families in the Harz Mountains and wrote about it. From 1830 onwards, he was constantly travelling for years and developed his method of describing families, which he regarded as the key to all social science knowledge.

In order to capture the social conditions of a country and a period of time, the precise description of a working family seemed to him to be the most important thing. In 1855, his work Les Ouvriers Européens was published, in which he describes 57 families from many European countries and regions of North Africa that he found characteristic, along with details of their income and expenditure and his conclusions from them. "Ouvriers" workers are all classes that primarily work by hand, not just wage workers in industry.

Through this social science approach, Le Play became the founder of the Frédéric Le Play school of social science, which even then was occasionally outside of public attention and is now almost overlooked.

In 1833, Count Rayneral, the French ambassador in Madrid, drew the attention of the young Le Play, who was travelling in Spain, to the importance of rural inheritance law and explained to him that equal division of inheritance (real division) was the root of all evil in France. Bonaparte had enforced this equal division of inheritance during the French Revolution in order to undermine the capable families who opposed him; on the other hand, he had established majorates for the families of his favourites.