The creation of the biological other
Our representation of ‘the other’ depends largely on how our social frame of reference determines this view. Eugenic science, with its race theory and social-darwinian principles, created the ultimate opposition between superior Übermenschen and inferior Untermenschen at the beginning of the last century. Based on biological and statistical principles, a biopolitics was proclaimed that would lead to sterilisation legislation and eventually mass murder and genocidal violence. The other was biological so deviant and threatening that extermination seemed the right solution.
In this lecture, we will analyse how the racial doctrine of the time became marketed via a murderous propaganda machine. Many countries made sterilisation laws to eliminate so-called ‘degenerates’ or ‘hereditarily ill’, but in Nazi Germany they went further. In a gradual process of polarisation and radicalisation it became conceivable, and due to the war context feasible, to remove the other permanently. How could the view towards the ‘Other’ slip so far, and what lessons can we learn from it today?