![]() Height, facial and hair color, physique and performance should be taken into account, the men are tested in long and high jumps, the women in races. A later leader of the movement, Willibald Hentschel, published Mittgart (1904), a pamphlet which called for 100 strong Aryan men and 1000 Aryan women to found a polygamous agrarian colony:Īmong the young applicants, men and women, the best should be selected. Its founder, August Georg Kenstler, published an obscure magazine called Blut und Boden, or ‘Blood and Soil’, preaching the spiritual-biological unity of the German people and their fields. The name comes from medieval German, meaning ‘agriculture man’. Notable in this respect was the Artaman League, which was founded in 1923, emerging out of the German youth movement. Some of these utopias tied their dreams to back-to-the-land agrarianism. They were obsessed with the idea of breeding a new German nobility. Some of these societies acted as match-making services for their members, to help them make eugenic and racially-pure marriage choices (much like alt-right dating apps today). This was a reaction to the emancipation of the Jews in the 19th century, and what was seen as the disastrous mingling of races. The volkisch movement was full of secret societies like the Teutonic Order or the Thule Society, membership of which required you to prove your Aryan purity through genealogy charts and ‘blood-oaths’. The oath-brothers were not alone in imagining an Aryan eugenic utopia. When the Nazis came to power, Ploetz was appointed as a government advisor. Its members saw themselves as a eugenic elite - every founder underwent a physical examination before joining, they practiced archery and hiking together, and unmarried members were advised to consult the Society before choosing a mate. It was dedicated to helping society ‘return to a healthy and blooming, strong and beautiful life’, in Ploetz’ words. His first paper, in 1895, began with a quote from Nietzsche: ‘the way forward led from being a species to a super species.’Įventually, in 1905, he and his fellow oath-brothers established the Racial Hygiene Society, the first eugenics society in the world. ![]() Returning to Europe, Ploetz studied under the pioneering Swiss scientist Auguste Forel, who taught him that most mental and physical illnesses were hereditary, and he started to publish his own work on the improvement of the species. Like Plato before him, he decided any utopian community would fail unless it paid attention to the biological quality of its citizens. But he felt the Icarian commune was in disarray. Ploetz travelled to the US to stay in a socialist commune in Iowa, called the Icarians, and learn about their constitution. A young man called Alfred Ploetz, 19, was chosen to be its future president. They swore to do everything they could to return the German race to the glories of its Teutonic past, and to found a utopian commune. In 1879, in Breslau, a group of idealistic young Germans gathered round an oak tree at midnight to swear an oath. This is the latest entry in my Spiritual Eugenics project, which explores the overlap between eugenics and New Age spirituality.
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