Zero family
In 1905 , the psychiatrist and eugenicist Josef Jörger referred to the subjects of his investigation, the people of a Yenish family in the canton of Graubünden, as the “ Zero family ” in his racial hygiene pamphlet of the same name .
In several of her works, the writer Mariella Mehr describes the persecution of the Yeniche in Switzerland, whose psychiatric and eugenic foundations were based on Jörger's theses. Jörger's work on Swiss Yeniche was also of great importance for the National Socialist racial hygiene . Not only did a large number of eugenic-racial hygienic writings refer to the Zero family, Jörger's works were even used for the teaching material of the elementary school. In the minutes of a teachers' council meeting on February 15, 1935, it can be read: [...] Thereupon the subject teachers for biology [...] talk about their teaching experiences up to now and emphasize above all the very great interest shown by the students in the material is met. [...] »Wall boards recommended by the ministry for racial and hereditary education«: »Inferior genetic material› Family Zero ‹«
"Psychiatric Family Stories"
His “Psychiatric Family Stories” provided the collective diagnosis of two Yenish families as “ hereditary diseases ” based on the annotated family trees . The “anonymizing” aliases invented by Jörger for Yenish clans were taken over by the head of the “ Aid Organization for the Children of the Landstrasse ” at Pro Juventute, Alfred Siegfried . The Mehr family was thus devalued to the Zero family. Josef Jörger's scientific defamation of the Yeniche found its progress in the research of Robert Ritter . Ritter appealed to Swiss sources and prepared psychiatric family histories and family trees of traveling families in Germany. With the support of sub-authorities and the police, the Race Hygiene and Population Biological Research Center in the Reich Health Office , headed by Ritter, recorded "Gypsies" in a Gypsy genealogical archive from 1937 - a prerequisite for the Auschwitz deportations from February / March 1943, later in a rural driver genealogical archive, which, however, narrowly researches its regional genealogy limited operation and it ended in 1944, Yeniche and other travelers declared "anti-social".
In 1911 Jörger described the Zero family with the following words: “The Zero family emerged from a capable farming family through marriage to homeless and wandering women. Your story shows how alcohol (especially schnapps) and a bad environment - these two factors are always inseparably linked in our case - a clan of bedbugs in human society is created and reproduced. "
Secondary literature
In her work "Nomaden" - On the History of a Racist Stereotype and its Application, Ute Gerhard describes the connection between Jörger's work and the persecution of the Yeniche during National Socialism :
“For eugenics and racial hygiene , uprooting, dispersing and mixing become factors in the degeneration process and at the same time characteristics of degeneration. [...] At this point I would rather emphasize the " vagabond " or "sedentary man" constructed in this way , who in the 1930s became the object of disciplinary and, in particular, eugenic measures. Instances of this development are above all genealogical studies like those of the director of the "Waldhaus-Chur insane asylum", Dr. J. Jörger […] Jörger's work is becoming quite popular, at least in Germany, and is touted in various places as a successful example of scientific work and as proof of the need for eugenic measures up to and including sterilization . [...] The "vagabondism" functions here not only as a deviance among others, but as the cause of the numerous "aberrations" and "degenerations". The symbolic dimension of the term »aberration« seems to suggest the general connection to vagabonding. [...] The symbolic features bundled in Jörger's narrative of the »Vagantengeschichte« also determine the eugenic-psychiatric diagnosis of the next decades. By assigning the vagante to "camouflaged nonsense " they experience a further aggravation, which is then complemented by the figure of the "sedentary vagante" in the well-known "gypsy researcher" Ritter. He is also concerned with capturing and "eliminating" the "vagants who are no longer vagant". From a psychiatric point of view, it is the figure of the "unsteady psychopath ", a "purely characterological vagabond", characterized by "rapid changes" and the lack of "overriding and persistent goals". The lack of »self-control«, as emphasized by Werner Villinger, underlines the characteristic that is important for the vagabond and for the stereotype of the nomad that has been realized, namely the non-existent autonomous individuality in opposition to the »wanderer« . "
The authors Gustav Hofmann, Brigitte Kepplinger , Gerhart Marckhgott and Hartmut Reese support parts of their report on the question of the Office of Upper Austria. State government, whether the namesake of the state mental hospital Julius Wagner-Jauregg must be viewed as historically burdened also on Josef Jörger's family Zero:
“[The] prevention of procreation of the“ inferior ”[was] at the center of the efforts of the eugenic movement. The focus was on research into the inheritance of diseases and on complexes of characteristics such as “ anti-sociality ”, “ criminal predisposition”, “ alcoholism ” and “nonsense” as well as on the development of appropriate action concepts. [...] At the same time, a series of works was published in which the history of "asocial" families was presented and used as evidence of the heritability of criminal traits. One of the earliest of these studies is the [...] treatise "The Zero Family". In the years that followed, such family histories should increasingly serve as evidence of the need to exclude members of these “asocial” families from procreation. [...] The fictitious names of the families examined were always terms used to characterize the inferior quality of these people. The Zero belonged to the Yeniche, a traveling people similar to the Roma and Sinti . They were and are marginalized and discriminated up to the present day and, like the Roma and Sinti, were among those persecuted by National Socialism for “racial” reasons. [...] However, with his new version , Ploetz opens up the possibility of a significant shift in emphasis in the content of the term: he focuses on the "race" as a possible object of eugenics and explicitly mentions in his definition the "elimination of [...] sub-races [...] from the Racial process ”, ie the“ cleaning ”of an existing breed from“ non-racial ”elements as a dimension of racial hygiene. […] The term “race” is also used in all of the above-mentioned meanings in the corresponding articles in the “Archive for Society and Social Biology” - e.g. For example, there is talk of “Lower Saxon race”, or the population of a few hundred people in a Swiss valley is called “race”: '[…] a lonely mountain valley in Switzerland, […] a place where racial identity and racial purity are very closely related could develop and maintain well. '"
swell
- ↑ J. Jörger: The Zero family. In: Archives for Racial and Social Biology including Racial and Social Hygiene . Vol. 2 (1905), H. 4, 494–559 Digitalisat Internet-Archiv
- ↑ »Searching for Traces«. The Jewish students and the time of National Socialism at the Maria-Theresia-School Augsburg
- ↑ Michael Zimmermann , Racial Utopia and Genocide. The National Socialist "Solution to the Gypsy Question", Hamburg 1996; Quoted in excerpts from Thomas Huonker: The missed goal: Switzerland without gypsies
- ↑ Gruber, Max von and Ernst Rüdin (eds.): Reproduction, inheritance, racial hygiene: illustrated guide through the racial hygiene group of the 1911 International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden. Second supplemented and improved edition
- ^ In: Christof Hamann and Cornelia Sieber (eds.): Media in Conflicts. Holocaust - War - Exclusion . Duisburg Institute for Language and Social Research (DISS) 2000, pp. 223–235 ( online [PDF; 2.4 MB]).
- ↑ Josef Jörger: The Zero Family. Archive for Race and Society Biology 2 (1905), pp. 494–559, here: p. 495.
- ↑ Download report Hofmann et al. ( Memento of December 9, 2012 in the Internet Archive ) (PDF; 604 kB)