Feeding Experts: Hunger Crisis and the Discourses of Eugenics in the Habsburg Empire, 1916–1918
Feeding Experts: Hunger Crisis and the Discourses of Eugenics in the Habsburg Empire, 1916–1918

Summary/Abstract: Large segments of Austria-Hungary’s population were affected by an escalating food shortage during World War I, leading to widespread undernourishment, particularly in urban areas. This paper argues that this impending crisis significantly empowered scientific experts. Operating between civil society and the imperial state, these experts multiplied and strengthened their connections to both spheres during the war, emerging as major producers of policy advice. This was true even in the realm of biopolitics, where decisions were made about whom to let live and whom to let die. Focusing on eugenics and its scientific proponents, this paper traces their growing interactions with voluntary associations providing food aid and civil administration at central, municipal, and local levels. Spanning four distinct urbanized contexts in the Habsburg Empire – Vienna, Budapest, Northern Bohemia, and Prague – the analysis reveals that eugenic ideas increasingly permeated discussions about food provisioning during the war in each of these locations. By the conflict’s end, eugenics had become a pivotal discourse framing public debate on the hunger crisis, depicting it in racialized terms as an intergenerational biological threat.

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