7/29/2019 Indo Germans

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The Aryan myth, Germanys other baleful contribution to the history ofracial thinking, emerged entirely outside the sciences of race. As TuskaBenes shows in From Indo-Germans to Aryans: Philology and theRacialization of Salvationist National Rhetoric, 180630, the origins of theAryan myth lie in the complicated history of the secularization and re-theologization of accounts of Indogermanic history anchored in the study6 T HE G ERMAN I NVENTION OF R ACEof language. It was only a matter of time before the characteristics ofIndogermanic languages were linked at once to physiological differences,to agility and creativity of thought, to moral progressand to a tendencytoward territorial expansion. The salvationist rhetoric was only strength-ened over the course of these developments.IV R ACE IN THE P OLITICAL S PHEREThe final section brings us back down to Earth, if for some writers it isthe sacred earth of German nationalism. While it may have seemed to somea scientific category par exellence, race had its grip on reality because ofemerging views and practices of breeding, as well as political and culturalquestions concerning both the assimilation of Jews and Germanys historicaldestiny. The cultural-nationalist context of early-nineteenth-century discus-sions made these questions always more than theoretical. The natural andhuman sciences, for their part, were intimately linked to nationalist con-cerns by scientific views of the relation of Volk, language, and territory.In Policing the Menschen=Racen Sara Eigen identifies the role thatrace played in theories of human improvement that broached the possibility

of selective, state-controlled breeding. Reading Johann Peter Franks widelyinfluential System einer vollständigen medicinischen Policey [System for aComplete Medical Police], initially published in 1779, Eigen finds a provoca-tive manipulation of the terminology associated with the idea of race in Franksprescriptions for building and maintaining a healthy, fertile population. Raceis for Frank a polemical term, designating real hereditary boundaries thatmight, for the purposes of argument and of hygienic-policy implementation,be located at orders of population magnitude ranging from a family througha clan, a region, a nation, and what we now think of as a race, to thecollective human race or species. Frank argues, surprisingly, that the physi-cal and spiritual well-being of individuals, communities, and humanity as awhole requires the dissolution of boundaries between such varying groups bymeans of migration and intermarriage.