The Bethel Mission to East Africa and German Protestant debates over Eugenics, 1880-1933 A ...

379 Pages·2013·1.6 MB·English

by  Mollie Madden

Work not Alms: The Bethel Mission to East Africa and German Protestant debates over
Eugenics, 1880-1933

A Dissertation
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF
UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
BY

Edward N. Snyder

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Eric D. Weitz, Adviser

December, 2013
Copyright, Edward Nelson Snyder, 2013
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Acknowledgements

There are many people to whom I am deeply indebted for helping me to complete this
project. First and foremost, I would like to thank my adviser Eric Weitz. His thoughtful
comments and keen eye for detail throughout this process were invaluable. The strengths
of this project are the result of his guidance. I am also particularly grateful to Gary
Cohen for reading multiple drafts of this project. Along with Eric he has been a constant
source of encouragement throughout my graduate career. Leslie Morris, Alec Isaacman
and Ron Aminzade have also read and provided valuable feedback. Before his untimely
passing, Stephen Feinstein also offered valuable advice and always had a joke ready to
make me laugh.

Over the course of this project I consulted several archives in Germany, the staffs of
which were incredibly helpful. I would like to acknowledge especially the staff at the
Hauptarchiv Bethel in Bielefeld for all of their help and encouragement. I cannot thank
Friedrich Wilhelm Schabbon and Jochen Striewisch enough for helping track down every
random citation I requested and ensuring that I had everything I needed in Bielefeld.
Since my first visit to the archive as a timid undergraduate and now as the
Stammbenutzer they have been an absolutely invaluable resource.

I would not have finished this project without the help of numerous people along the way.
Larry Jones and Peter Böhm, my undergraduate advisors, colleagues and friends have
been pillars of support and encouragement since my days as an undergraduate at Canisius
College. I would not be where I am today without their steady guidance. While the
rigors of graduate school can be tough, I was blessed to have the support of numerous
friends along the way. I would like to thank Greg Halfond, Eric Roubinek, Eric Otremba,
Will Cremer, Tim Smit, Leslie Schumacher, Adam Blackler, Anthony Cantor and
especially Christopher Marshall for encouraging me in ways that are too numerous to
describe. Over the course of researching and writing I also had several technological
challenges, which I would not have solved without the eternal patience of Phil Voxland.

Finally, I would like to thank my wonderful wife, Mollie Madden. She read, commented
on, and copy edited numerous drafts of this work. She also brought a much needed sense
of order to my citations and references. I cannot express the value of her constant
support throughout this project. Any remaining errors are, of course, my own.
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Abstract

This dissertation examines the influence of Protestant missionaries in Africa on the
development of Protestant poor relief policies in Germany during the period of 1850-
1933. Specifically, it seeks to understand better how and why Protestants embraced
eugenics during the early twentieth century. To this end it uses the famous Bethel
institutions in Bielefeld as a case study. With both a foreign and domestic mission,
Bethel provides the unique opportunity to study the interaction between the two in a
single context. In Globalization and the Nation in Imperial Germany, Sebastian Conrad
suggests that the Bethel missionaries were responsible for pushing the adoption of
eugenic policies in Germany upon returning to Bielefeld after 1918. While Conrad’s
assertion that the foreign mission had an extensive influence on the development of
Protestant social welfare policies, he misstates the role of the missionaries. Rather than
advocating for the adoption of eugenic policies the Bethel missionaries formed the core
pocket of opposition to eugenic ideas after 1918.
Prior to WWI Friedrich von Bodelschwingh, a nationalist, conservative pastor and
director of the famous Bethel institutions in Bielefeld developed a philosophy of poor
relief that stressed a strong work ethic, notions of responsibility, the importance of
familial structures, and a mixture of Protestantism and German nationalism. His
philosophy drew heavily on the pioneering work of Johann Wichern, the founder of the
Inner Mission and the methods used by Protestant missionaries to western Africa during
the early nineteenth century. His efforts were a response to the fears of German
Protestants in the wake of the failed revolutions of 1848. They feared the potential
impact of unemployed migrant workers on Germany’s social and political stability.
Living on the margins of society, Protestant reformers worried that they would become
interested in radical ideologies like Communism and thus hostile to the church and the
conservative monarchy.
The foreign mission was central to the formation and development of
Bodelschwingh’s philosophy. Even before arriving at Bethel in 1872, he had made a
practical attempt to articulate his ideas as a missionary in Paris among working class
Germans. At Bethel Bodelschwingh took his ideas further by founding an actual worker
colony. The colony, located outside the city and using a highly regimented lifestyle,
stressed the same philosophy he had articulated in Paris. Only after the performance of
physical labor would one receive assistance. These colonies, because of their perceived
potential to transform marginalized, disaffected individuals into loyal and productive
members of society, were wildly popular with Protestant reformers and the Monarchy
and therefore received substantial support from the state and gradually spread across the
country. Given Bodelschwingh’s success with the Inner Mission, colonial authorities,
hoping he could use the same philosophy in Africa to transform Africans into loyal and
productive colonial subjects, offered him control over the fledgling Evangelische Mission
nach Deutsch Ostafrika (EMDOA). Thus, the EMDOA operated according to the exact
same philosophy as the community in Germany.
As Bodelschwingh grew older, he gradually withdrew from the every day
management of the community and focused his remaining efforts on building the mission
in Africa. At Bethel, however, his philosophy came under assault. Modern, “scientific”
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ideas like eugenics made inroads at Bethel, and by the mid 1920s they heavily influenced
the care the institution provided. As for the foreign mission, Conrad maintains that the
missionaries using Bodelschwingh’s philosophy made racial judgments about the ability
of Africans to work. These attitudes, he suggests, caused the missionaries who returned
to Bielefeld in 1918 to favor a more biological understanding of poverty, thus opening
the door wide for the implementation of eugenic policies like sterilization.
While Conrad is correct to assert that the returning missionaries were active
participants in debates over social welfare in Germany after the war, his conclusion about
their attitudes toward eugenics is incorrect. Rather, the missionaries returned from Africa
in 1918 still devoted to Bodelschwingh’s philosophy and were horrified to discover that
Bethel’s leadership was interested in adopting eugenic practices. Many of the
missionaries transferred to Bethel’s public relations center where they produced a steady
stream of material that was highly critical of eugenic practices. Given their experience in
Africa, which largely insulated them from the problems Bethel’s leaders faced in
Germany, the missionaries never experienced any challenges to their faith in
Bodelschwingh’s philosophy. Most notably, they never had to cope with the devastating
food shortages that confronted those in Bielefeld during the war. Furthermore, these
debates occur within the context of the professionalization of Bethel’s medical staff, who
increasingly supported eugenics. Thus the missionaries formed the one major pocket of
resistance to eugenics at Bethel.
Ultimately, at least in the case of the Bethel mission, the colonies were not always
“laboratories of modernity,” contrary to Hannah Arendt’s argument in Origins of
Totalitarianism. Instead, the returning missionaries served as a conservative, moderating
voice in debates over the Protestant administration of social welfare. At the same time,
the case of Bethel also shows the complexities of the colonial legacy in Germany,
therefore requiring a more nuanced view of the relationship between Germany’s colonial
history and the racial policies of the Third Reich.
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TABLE of CONTENTS

Chapter 1: Introduction 1

Chapter 2: The Development of Modern Protestant Social Welfare and the 65

Origins of the Bodelschwingh Philosophy

Chapter 3: Arbeitserziehung and the Worker Colony: The Development of 107

Bodelschwing’s Philosophy

Chapter 4: Arbeitserziehung in the Bethel Mission in East Africa 150

Chapter 5: Bodelschwingh’s Philosophy Challenged: Eugenics at Bethel 206

Chapter 6: Bodelschwingh’s Philosophy Defended: The Bethel Missionaries 258

and Eugenics, 1914–1933

Chapter 7: Conclusion 321

Bibliography 328
1

Chapter 1: Introduction

In 1890 the conservative Lutheran pastor Friedrich von Bodelschwingh made an
agreement with the Evangelische Mission nach Deutsch Ostafrika (EMDOA) to supply
the fledgling organization with missionaries trained at his Nazareth institution for
Diakonie in Bielefeld. By the time he reached this decision, Bodelschwingh had already
transformed his Bethel community from a small haven for young boys with epilepsy to
one of Germany’s premier centers for Protestant-run social welfare. At the heart of this
transformation was a philosophy Bodelschwingh had developed as a missionary to
German migrant worker communities in the slums of Paris that highlighted the work
ethic, notions of responsibility, the centrality of religion, and strong familial structures as
the keys to combating poverty successfully. After he assumed control over the EMDOA,
there was little doubt that the same philosophy would also become the driving motor
behind the mission’s activities in East Africa. In this sense, the relationship between
Bethel and the EMDOA would have a momentous impact on the future of both German
missionary activity in Africa and social welfare in Germany.
After receiving their training in Bielefeld, the newly-minted missionaries departed
for the German colony in East Africa and worked primarily in the Usambara highlands.
Profoundly loyal to their teacher Bodelschwingh, they worked diligently to implement his
philosophy in Africa as a sign of their deep devotion both to his worldview and to him
personally. Yet while they worked in Africa, changes in Germany placed increasing
pressure on Bethel’s leadership to reduce the influence of Bodelschwingh’s philosophy
and embrace more modern, scientific forms of social welfare. While Bodelschwingh
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fought against this transition, his death in 1910 opened the door to an influx of new ideas
like eugenics. Furthermore Bodelschwingh’s son and successor, Friedrich (Fritz) von
Bodelschwingh Jr. displayed a greater willingness to consider the benefits of modern
science as a way to distinguish his tenure as Bethel’s director from that of his father’s.
In addition to the structural changes following the elder Bodelschwingh’s death,
the devastating impact of the First World War also placed extraordinary pressure on
Bethel’s leadership to reconsider the applicability of the older philosophy. Horrified by
the merciless effect of severe food shortages on Bethel’s patient population, the
community’s leaders, led by the younger Bodelschwingh, began to consider seriously the
benefits of modern scientific ideas like eugenics. Unlike the elder Bodelschwingh’s
philosophy, which prescribed therapeutic measures that stressed work and notions of
responsibility to combat deviancy and poverty, eugenics appeared to be a silver bullet
solution that would easily relieve social welfare providers of the responsibility for caring
for future generations of the poor.
Yet not everyone within the greater Bethel community saw modern science as a
miracle cure that would solve all of its problems in the wake of the war. Among the most
adamant opponents of this shift were the missionaries who were forced to return to
Bielefeld in 1918 following Germany’s defeat in World War I. Given their experiences
in East Africa, most notably at the station Lutindi, the Bethel missionaries were firmly
convinced that Bodelschwingh’s philosophy could help integrate Africans into the
colonial state while transforming them into productive members of colonial society.
Furthermore, their wartime experience was notably less traumatic than that of their
colleagues in Germany. . As a result, they never felt the need to question their devotion
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to Bodelschwingh’s work-oriented philosophy and returned to Europe just as dedicated to
it as when they had left for Africa years earlier. Horrified by the inroads modern science
had made into the community during their absence, they formed the foundation of
resistance at Bethel against the incorporation of science into the way Bethel practiced
social welfare.
Using the Bethel institutions in Bielefeld this study examines how and why
German Protestants embraced modern, scientific ideas like eugenics. In the process, it
moves from the back-alleys of mid-nineteenth-century Paris to the Bethel institutions in
the East Westphalian city of Bielefeld to the Usambara highlands in Tanganyika, the
focal point of Bethel’s missionary endeavors. It demonstrates clearly that Protestant
social welfare in Germany developed across national borders in Europe and through the
transferring of ideas between Europe and Africa. The development of Protestant social
welfare in Germany was truly a transnational process. Although Protestant social welfare
has been the subject of numerous historical inquiries, none of those studies examine the
impact of actors outside Europe on its evolution. Therefore, the historiography misses a
key component of the larger story.
By examining the impact of individuals in Germany’s colonies on social welfare
debates among German Protestants, this dissertation also questions the nature of
Germany’s colonial legacy. The Bethel missionaries returned to Europe just as devoted
to Bodelschwingh’s philosophy as when they left for Africa decades earlier. In this sense
their experiences in Africa only reinforced the effectiveness of their larger theoretical
approach to social welfare questions. As a result, the Bethel missionaries demonstrate
that the colonies were not always laboratories of modernity and that those individuals
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who spent time there did not automatically return with more radical ideas. In other
words, the colonies were not a direct precursor to the radical, racial policies of the Third
Reich.
Given this study’s wide ranging scope, it is part of several distinct
historiographies. Therefore, in the following sections of this introduction I will discuss
the main bodies of literature to which this dissertation contributes. First, I will discuss
the historiography of social welfare in modern Germany, an extremely large and complex
body of literature. Therefore, I will focus specifically on the literature concerning poor
relief in Germany. Within this context I will examine how this body of literature
discusses the role of work as an aspect of poverty relief as well as the relationship
between scientific ideas like eugenics and poor relief policies. A second, related body of
literature is the historiography of Protestantism in modern Germany. Deeply concerned
about the social dangers posed by modernization and industrialization, Protestants
participated actively in social welfare debates; especially those concerning poor relief. In
this section I will define what I mean by Protestant social welfare and pay particular
attention to how local histories have treated the influence of eugenics and the mission
within the larger Bethel community. Finally, this dissertation is also part of the larger
historiography of German imperialism. In this respect, I will discuss how historians have
treated the relationship between Germany and its colonies in Africa. An extremely
important aspect of this historiography is the emerging literature on transnationalism. In
addition to analyzing this new and growing body of literature, I will also explain how I
understand the term transnational and how my work fits into this larger historiography.
Social Welfare: Poverty Relief at the Margins of History?