The strength of the Transylvanian Saxons’ support for German National Socialism from the mid to late 1930s may lead one to assume that expressions of fascism and eugenics within this community were imported. However, The Eugenic Fortress: The Transylvanian Saxon Experiment in Interwar Romania shows this was far from the case. Instead, we see how from the 1900s to the 1940s, Saxons ‘define, deliberate, legislate, and even execute a eugenic agenda’, which represented ‘a novel ideological and practical tool with which to re-homogenise and re-entrench a redefined sense of self behind the race-hygienic walls of a eugenic fortress’ (p. 256). This is a fascinating study of a German ethnic minority fighting for its very existence, often not against its host state, Romania, but itself and such dysgenic demons as alcohol and tobacco abuse, emigration and ethnically mixed marriages.

Georgescu offers a valuable contribution to the transnational history of eugenics, mapping the evolution of the Saxon movement from its infancy (decades before the rise of Hitler and the Nazis) in academic journals led by doctor and publicist, Heinrich Siegmund in the early twentieth century, its interwar politicisation and institutionalisation under the leadership of priest and population statistician, Alfred Csallner, to its rapid absorption into Fritz Fabritius’s fascist Self-Help party in the 1930s and notable support from Adolf Hitler et al. in the fatherland. Fuelled by biological determinism, the mantra of racial rejuvenation persists throughout the decades becoming increasingly radicalised and later politically endorsed in often desperate bids to overcome perceived demographic, geographical and biological degeneration. The practical measures suggested, and later adopted, include the eugenic indoctrination and training of the population, recapturing and increasing Lebensraum, ensuring the ethnic homogeneity of the Saxons, and to increase the hereditary quality and numerical quantity of the population.

Along with The Eugenic Fortress’s main character, Csallner, in journal articles, speeches and, later, public policies, Saxon eugenicists stressed the existence of a Transylvanian racial hierarchy, with the Saxons on top, followed by the Hungarians, then finally the Romanians, Jews and Roma Gypsies. While their pronouncements began as academic lamentations on the mass emigration of Saxons, the increase in unions between Saxon women and Hungarian or worse, Romanian, men, and the increasing loss of Lebensraum to Romanian state reforms and capitalist enterprise, it ended in a national culture of eugenic ‘neighbourhoods’, laws against ‘mixed marriages’, marriage certificates with pedigree charts and prestigious award ceremonies for the genetically well endowed: ‘honorary gifts empowered the eugenic discourse through the provision of fiscal incentives to found the large hereditarily valuable families demanded by the eugenic and fascist movements’ (p. 228). Through genealogical study, Saxon eugenics encouraged ‘everyone to study their particular ancestry, to have them identify that which was desirable (and what less so) in their hereditary makeup’ (p. 147). The movement continuously portrayed itself as the saviour of the once powerful, but now waning, German community in Transylvania, underlining its indigenous nature.

This book also adds an important chapter to the history of religion and eugenics (and collaborations between the two), at one time seen as two opposing forces. Eugenicists bemoaned the money wasted by Saxons on alcohol and tobacco, that could be used to increase Lebensraum and so priests and politicians alike were called on to publicly denounce them as ‘the agents of degeneration they were’ (p. 118). Thus, Csallner implored his ecclesiastical colleagues to ‘live up to their particular role in Saxon society as its educators and spiritual shepherds, by taking up the race-hygienic cause’ (p. 125). We are also told of an abortive attempt using the church and medical officials to produce a ‘hereditary fitness card index’ (p. 133), documenting the hereditary worth and talents of families in the community to influence individual career choices and increase the birth rate where desirable. In the 1920s, before the ascendency of fascism, churchmen were seen as potential, if often unwilling, eugenic preachers.

Amid widespread dissatisfaction with interwar modernity and ‘the form and function of Saxon politics’ (p. 192), the National Socialist Self-Help Movement of the Germans in Romania gained increased political status. This resulted in a radicalisation of eugenic rhetoric buoyed by the support of violent youth groups, both significant components of the fascist push for national rejuvenation. Negative measures like sterilisation – so popular in other countries at the time – were overlooked in favour of positive racial hygiene that placed ‘physical education on a par with academic training’ and encouraged citizens to start ‘large, “valuable” families’ (p. 213). In accordance with Self-Help’s Third Reich benefactors, the exclusion of Jewish people was a ‘practical benchmark towards re-homogenising the Saxon national body and Lebensraum’. Elsewhere, in a remarkable example of how eugenic racism became part of Saxon society, we hear the story of a German ‘girl’ who ‘had obligations to her nation that went beyond her personal happiness. While she was free to marry whom she desired, the national community reserved the right to exclude her for abandoning her heritage’ (p. 111). As the study ends in the 1940s before eugenics was widely discredited, Saxon eugenic discourse moved from what was once passive education to totalitarian influence, as one eugenicist concluded ‘the individual’s health is no longer his private matter; […] the right of a person to his own body is surpassed by the nation’s right over it’ (p. 253).

This study provides a fascinating insight into the existential struggles of an ethnic minority trying to make sense of the unpredictable challenges of the post-war climate after the First World War. The modernist desire for national rebirth was shared in other countries (and in other manifestations within Romania itself), yet Georgescu brilliantly tells the story of the changing nature of Saxon identity, which was consumed by the need to build a Eugenic Fortress.