Dark Continent: Europe's Twentieth Century (16 page)

Yet Europe’s governments did not find it easy to lever up birth rates, or to force women out of work and into motherhood. Overall, the number of women in the European labour force barely fell, and in some countries actually rose through the inter-war period. There was no dramatic upward trend in birth rates, and the leading authority on inter-war population policies concludes that they largely failed in their purpose. German birth rates did rise through the 1930s, but the reasons probably had little to do with Nazi policy. The regime’s demographers argued that National Socialism’s “psychic revolution” had prompted Germans to have more children. That argument, however, was weakened by the fact that SS men, who were expected to lead the way in ideological and sexual fervour, set the rest of the population a poor example: by 1939, 61 per cent of the SS were bachelors, and its married men averaged only 1.1 children per family.
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Pro-natalism failed between the wars for many reasons. Perhaps the most important was that governments too often made policy on the cheap. Family allowances, tax rebates and housing subsidies were all ways of getting families to have more children, but the desperate financial situation of most governments made them reluctant to set incentives at a high enough level to make much impact. Few resorted to the imaginative Fascist expedient of taxing bachelors. Most relied on cheaper but equally ineffectual methods such as police repression and medals for prolific mothers.

Official propagandists harping away on the family often sent confusing signals. Mothers did not particularly like to see bearing children as a patriotic responsibility, nor to think that their sons would become cannon fodder. The state, by emphasizing the themes of “duty” and “responsibility,” made parenthood sound like a burden. Worse still, it increasingly
was
a burden from the financial point of view. Job prospects were uncertain, unemployment a constant worry. The very children desired by the state were now prevented by it from
paying their way through work, were forced to spend longer at school, and had now to be properly fed and housed. As the manual-labour economy was increasingly replaced by a new demand for a skilled and literate workforce, the economics of the family shifted dramatically. From being essentially a unit of production as had been the case in the traditional farming and working-class world, it was now turning into a unit of consumption.

Perhaps it is reassuring that the inter-war state should have had such little impact on overall population trends, and was unable entirely to control the reproductive decisions of ordinary individuals. What makes people have more or fewer children remains one of the great mysteries—the causes of the long-term decline in European fertility are no more settled today than the reasons for the unexpected baby boom of the 1950s—and this is perhaps why population trends arouse such apocalyptic fears. Nightmarish images of an overcrowded globe, of a Europe—whose own population is dwindling and ageing—being swamped by fast-breeding immigrants from the Third World are the post-war equivalents of those panics of the inter-war years. On the other hand, even if the inter-war state did not achieve what it wanted—faster-growing national populations—it did intervene in larger and larger areas of people’s personal lives. In ways that combined encouragement and coercion, the state’s desire for an improved biological stock led to a range of new family policies which would endure long after the obsession with population decline had vanished.

THE STATE AS PATERFAMILIAS

Locked away in a Fascist jail, the Italian communist theoretician Antonio Gramsci noted to himself the “educative and formative role of the state. Its aim is always that of creating new and higher types of civilization … of evolving even physically new types of humanity.”
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The social ambitions of the inter-war state bore him out. Parents were no longer left to bring up their children themselves; the fear of national decline led to the emergence of a vast array of official welfare services alongside older private religious or charitable bodies; with the interventionist public sector came the rise of the professional social worker, the housing manager, the school health visitor and the
educational psychologist. The state was meddling in the most intimate matters of private life, offering—it is true—a range of new benefits, but demanding in return adherence to an increasingly explicit model of sexual behaviour.

During, or immediately after, the war, national authorities set up clinics to treat venereal disease and tuberculosis and regulated so far as they could the consumption of that “racial poison,” alcohol. Britain passed laws to bring down infant and maternal mortality, and set up the Ministry of Health in 1919. Its priorities on behalf of child-rearing worried some extreme eugenicists like Sir Robert Hutchinson, President of the Royal College of Physicians, who wondered “whether the … careful saving of infant lives today is really, biologically speaking, as wholesome as the mass production and lavish scrapping of the last century.” But this was very much a minority view: the birth process was increasingly medicalized and professionalized (not always to mothers’ benefit), and the proportion of childbirths which took place in hospital rose from 15 per cent in 1927 to 25 per cent ten years later, and 54 per cent by 1946. Outside the UK, the state’s role was expanding faster and more decisively. In France, the wartime military health service was turned into a new Ministry of Health in 1920. The Italian National Agency for Maternity and Infancy (set up in 1925) publicized modern methods of infant hygiene and promoted the medicalization of childbirth in a country where 93 per cent of all births still took place at home; running centres for mothers and children in light, new, modernist buildings, seaside sanatoriums for working women, summer camps and medical centres, it was only dissolved in 1975.
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The Left—operating usually at the municipal rather than the national level, and strongly influenced by the sweep of Bolshevik ideas in the Soviet Union—developed some of the most comprehensive welfare schemes of the 1920s. Social Democratic town fathers in Germany set up “family care” offices which aimed to “grasp the whole family” in their embrace to save it from the disintegrative force of capitalism. In “Red Vienna”—run between 1919 and 1934 by the most ambitious socialist city council in Europe—Marxist councillors offered a “social contract” with parents, providing special assistance such as baby clothing for needy couples in return for their commitment
to responsible parenting. Where this was lacking, social workers were on hand to remove children to the municipal Child Observation Centres. All this was part of a “Marriage and Population Policy” designed to guarantee the “optimal conditions of upbringing” in the family. The Left as much as the Right believed—in the words of the 1937 Irish constitution—that the “family was the natural, primary and fundamental unit of society,” and it was more inclined than old-fashioned conservatives to use public powers to back this up. In turn, its modernizing activism and its ambition to create a “new human being” provided a model for the interventionist movements of the fascist Right of the 1930s.

Family health was closely connected with living conditions in the built environment. Homes, buildings and the city itself became laboratories for new designs in improved and healthier forms of life. Old nineteenth-century slum dwellings were demolished to make way for family flats on planned estates. Social workers and housing estate managers checked on standards of hygiene and cooking methods. On Red Vienna’s great new municipal estates—some 60,000 new family flats built in fifteen years—communal washrooms and bathrooms were provided: “Instead of densely built house-blocks with narrow courts, only those were erected with large, free inner spaces into which light and air could stream. Each dwelling obtains an ante-room and its own WC inside the dwelling, as well as gas and electric light … Basement dwellings were no longer permitted.” Throughout inter-war Europe cities were rationalized with the aid of sweeping town planning laws, while parks were laid out, and lidos and playgrounds gave scope for the new obsession with sunlight and physical fitness. Praising the achievements of the Berlin city authorities in the 1920s, Oberbürgermeister Gustav Boess pointed to “the new people’s parks, athletic fields and playgrounds, the free baths.”
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The planning of modern life extended from the city to the interior of the home, systematizing movement in the private as well as the public sphere. Under the influence of the international style, left-wing designers modernized family life by treating household tasks as functions, and the family unit as an element of the Machine Age. “The layout is designed on the basis of studies of kitchen procedure, actions, movements etc.,” wrote a Czech architect of his new “production
line” kitchen. “Individual parts of the equipment are placed alongside each other as they come into use. The basic conveyor belt is thus a continuous circle, avoiding criss-crossing and to-and-froing.” With its built-in cupboards and long working surfaces, this kitchen must have seemed highly futuristic to most housewives in the 1920s, a vision of a world in which cooking and indeed daily life were planned and organized along industrial lines. In fact, the mechanization of home life would only really take root in the 1960s with the disappearance of cheap domestic labour; between the wars, middle-class homes in much of Europe still had maid’s quarters to house the dishwasher.
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The Brave New World of the 1920s combined rationalism with moral high-mindedness. Laws controlled overcrowding in order to ensure “social hygiene” by eliminating the dangers posed by slum life to morality and health. Members of the Society of Women Housing Estate Managers visited families on properties owned by the Metropolitan Housing Corporation of London and reported that “the result has been a steady increase in the standards of cleanliness and in the general social health of the majority of their tenants.” The Corporation had set up a “model flat” which it invited residents to visit, forming an “ideal towards which many of the tenants are encouraged to work.” The way in which public housing shaped norms of family behaviour was even clearer in Holland, where special blocks were developed for the segregation of “asocial families.” According to the authorities:

The selected families are placed in these housing compounds on a temporary basis for the purpose of effecting a rehabilitation and making them into clean, dependable and peaceable families. A great deal of attention is given to educating the families in the proper use of their facilities, and in showing them the error of their ways … When a family has demonstrated that it has become a normal family, it is moved into one of the regular municipal housing estates … If it is finally demonstrated that the family is incurable, it is evicted.
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“Incurable” families: here was the language of medical science being applied to social norms and morality in a context far removed from
that of Nazi Germany. In fact, the Third Reich’s obsessions fitted into the broader European debate about social policy. The inter-war state justified its interventions in private life by appealing to notions of professionalism, of scientific expertise and apolitical competence. Middle-class professionals, civil servants and public administrators presented themselves as a modern instrument of social management, doctors working on the body of society and concerned with its health.

American relief officials, for instance, working in Europe after 1918, saw themselves explicitly above the political fray as they distributed food relief to the starving peasants of Poland and the Ukraine, set up children’s clinics and dispensed free milk in Vienna, or supervised the resettlement of millions of refugees in Greece. The Rockefeller Foundation sponsored campaigns to eradicate tuberculosis by “applying the art of advertising to the facts of science.” But Europeans, too, liked to see social policy as a non-political matter, a question of “social hygiene.” In Britain, for instance, members of the British Social Hygiene Council called for the “institutionalization” of the mentally ill, health and sex education in schools, better housing and sanitation and improvements in child nutrition. In France, the Health Ministry was advised by a Conseil Supérieur d’Hygiène Sociale. Society was seen as an object for social engineering, in which enlightened and impartial policy was made in a spirit of rational detachment from political passions.
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Nowhere were the ambiguities of this kind of approach more evident than among the eugenicists—those people, in other words, on both Left and Right who believed that it was indeed possible to produce “better” human beings through the right kind of social policies. Increasingly accepted by social scientists and administrators before the First World War, the eugenics movement was boosted by the mass killing of the war itself. In his address of welcome to the second International Eugenics Congress in 1921, Henry Fairfield Osborn of the American Museum of Natural History declared: “I doubt that there has ever been a moment in the world’s history when an international conference on race character and betterment has been more important than the present. Europe, in patriotic self-sacrifice on both sides of the World War, has lost much of the heritage of centuries of civilization which can never be regained. In certain parts of Europe, the
worst elements of society have gained the ascendancy and threaten the destruction of the best.”
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Prompted by such fears, societies dedicated to the promotion of eugenics, or to its German cousin “racial hygiene,” spread from western Europe and Scandinavia to Spain and the Soviet Union. Enthusiasts promoted national fitness in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and established ties with patriotic sports associations. The Russian Eugenics Office, founded in 1921, called for “comparative work on eugenics by scientific and social workers in all specialties” and forged links with the Eugenic Record Office in the USA, the German Society for Race and Social Biology and the British Eugenics Education Society. Thus the movement was not simply the sinister proto-Nazi precursor it looks like today; it was, rather, a broad church with confidence in its own scientific standing. Believers included social democrats and Liberal reformers like Keynes and Beveridge in Britain, as well as conservatives and right-wing authoritarians. Some were anti-Semites, but some leading German “racial hygienists” were Jews. Some stressed “negative” measures such as sterilization; others “positive” policies to improve fitness, nutrition and public health, warding off racial decline through fresh air, regular exercise and sunbathing. What they shared was confidence in the power of the state and public authorities to shape society for the better.