Landscaping the Human Garden: Twentieth-Century Population Management in a Comparative Framework

Description

For centuries, human perfection has been a powerful goal, but only in the twentieth century were national states able to achieve the capacity to impose radical change on entire societies in the name of rooting out imperfections. The contributions to this volume constitute an ambitious attempt to study a number of significant efforts by twentieth-century states to reshape—either through social policy or brute force—their societies and their populations according to ideologies based on various theories of human perfectibility. The cases examined include Germany during the World War I, the Russian Revolution and the subsequent Soviet regime, Germany under the Nazis, ethnic cleansing in the former Yugoslavia, French anti-abortion policies in the interwar era, the treatment of Japanese Americans during the World War II, attitudes toward postwar Soviet Jewry, the changing role of Israeli war widows, and the particular difficulties facing east central European governments from the World War I until 1956. Contents Contributors Acknowledgments Introduction: Landscaping the Human Garden 1. State Violence as Technique: The Logic of Violence in Soviet Totalitarianism 2. The Transformation of State and Society in World War I Germany 3. Corporatism or Democracy: The Russian Provisional Government of 1917 4. The Dead and the Unborn: French Pronatalism and the Abortion Law of 1920 5. “More Masculine Men, More Feminine Women” The Iconography of Nazi Radal Hatreds 6. Defining Enemies, Making Victims Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust: Germans, Jews, and the Holocaust 7. When Memory Counts: War, Genocide, and Postwar Soviet Jewry 8. Social Darwinism Versus Social Engineering: The “Education” of Japanese Americans During Worid War II 9. How to Construct a Productive, Disciplined, Monoethnic Society: The Dilemma of East Central European Governments, 1914-1956 10. Ethnic Cleansing Between War and Peace Notes Index