| “LIFE UNWORTHY OF LIFE”: THE
GENETIC CURE |
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[med…] ical attendants colluding in the death of
patients, usually children, who have been extremely impaired physically and
mentally. But those practices have been restrained by legal limits and strong
public reaction, and have not developed into a systematic program of killing
those designated as unworthy of living.
In Germany, however, such a
project had been discussed from the time of the impact of “scientific
racism” in intellectual circles during the last decade of the nineteenth
century. Central to that development was the stress upon the integrity of the
organic body of the Volk — the collectivity, people, or
nation as embodiment of racial-cultural substance. That kind of focus, as with
any intense nationalism, takes on a biological cast. One views one’s group
as an “organism” whose “life” one must preserve, and whose
“death” one must combat, in ways 'that transcend individual fate.
One such theorist, Adolf Jost, issued an early call for direct medical
killing in a book published in 1895 and significantly entitled “The
Right to Death” (Das Recht auf den Tod). Jost argued that control
over the death of the individual must ultimately belong to the social organism,
the state. This concept is in direct opposition to the Anglo-American tradition
of euthanasia, which emphasizes the individual’s “right to
die” or “right to death” or “right to his or her own
death,” as the ultimate human claim. In contrast, Jost was pointing to the
state’s right to kill. While he spoke of compassion and relief of
suffering of the incurably ill, his focus was mainly on the health of the
Volk and the state. He pointed out that the state already exercises
those “rights” in war, where thousands of individuals are sacrificed
for the good of the state. Ultimately the argument was biological: “The
rights to death [are] the key to the fitness of life.” The state must own
death — must kill — in order to keep the social organism alive and
healthy.²*
The crucial work — “The Permission to Destroy
Life Unworthy of Life” (Die Freigabe der Vernichtung lebensunwerten
Lebens) — was published in 1920 and written jointly by two
distinguished German professors: the jurist Karl Binding, retired after forty
years at the University of Leipzig, and Alfred Hoche, professor of psychiatry
at the University of Freiburg. Carefully argued in the numbered-paragraph form
of the traditional philosophical treatise, the book included as “unworthy
life” not only the incurably ill but large segments of the mentally ill,
the feebleminded, and retarded and deformed children. More than that, the
authors professionalized and medicalized the entire concept. And they stressed
the therapeutic goal of that concept: destroying life unworthy of life is
“purely a healing treatment” and a “healing work.”³
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* The principle was
disseminated by several influential writers. Implicit in some of
Nietzsche’s works, it was embraced by a circle of early
“scientific” racists in Munich, led by the anthropologist Alfred
Ploetz and including the publisher J. F. Lehmann, whose press brought out most
of the group’s pamphlets and books. |
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