Re-Producing the Future Human: Dignity, Eugenics, and Governing Reproductive Technology in Neoliberal Germany The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Loveland, Kristen. 2017. Re-Producing the Future Human: Dignity, Eugenics, and Governing Reproductive Technology in Neoliberal Germany. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University, Graduate School of Arts & Sciences. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42061472 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA Re-producing the Future Human: Dignity, Eugenics, and Governing Reproductive Technology in Neoliberal Germany A dissertation presented by Kristen Loveland to The Department of History in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts August 2017 ! © 2017 Kristen Loveland All rights reserved. ! Dissertation Advisor: Peter Gordon Kristen Loveland Re-producing the Future Human: Dignity, Eugenics, and Governing Reproductive Technology in Neoliberal Germany Abstract Over the course of the 1980s and the 1990s, West Germany and then Germany developed the most restrictive law in the advanced industrialized world to regulate reproductive and genetic technologies. Under the Embryo Protection Act of 1990. the government criminalized egg and embryo donations, sex selection, alterations to the human germ line, and any use of reproductive technologies leading to “divided motherhood.” In the early 2000s, after intense public controversy, the German parliament decided to maintain a ban on preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD). My dissertation asks why Germans were so concerned about these technologies. To the extent that this question has been posed, scholars have mainly attributed German anxieties to the specter of the Nazi past. But although the Nazi past certainly mattered, this dissertation argues that Germans worried as much if not more about the pathologies of liberalism, especially the development of neoliberalism from the 1970s onward. Critiques of reproduction were therefore a locus for broad political and economic critiques in late-twentieth-century Germany. This dissertation explicates those critiques by tracing the changing meanings of two concepts in particular, human dignity and eugenics. These concepts structured debates on reproduction but were also constituted by them. Analyzing the concepts of human dignity and eugenics shows that in the 1980s German critics feared the technologization of reproduction, through which scientists and doctors would pursue a perfectionist eugenics. In so doing, such actors would supersede God’s role in creation and iii destroy the Christian subject, in particular one's ability to grow out of imperfection toward a closer union with God. By the end of the century, critics grew suspicious of individual decisionmaking. They came to fear the marketization of reproduction—namely that the logic of the market dictated the everyday reproductive decisionmaking of individual parents. Critics now reconceptualized both dignity and eugenics. They invoked dignity in a Kantian more than Christian register, and for the first time they spoke of eugenics as inherently unacceptable, whether orchestrated from above or arising from individual choices below. iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments........................................................................................................ vi Dedication...................................................................................................................xii List of Abbreviations..................................................................................................xiii Terminology.............................................................................................................. .xiv Introduction.................................................................................................................. 1 I. BEFORE THE TEST TUBE Chapter 1: Foundations of the Postwar Consensus: Memory, Market, and Motherhood......................................................... 30 II. TECHNOLOGY AND THE SPECTER OF HUMAN PERFECTION IN THE 1980S Chapter 2: Supplanting God: The Dignity of Defect.................................................67 Chapter 3: Eugenics after Fascism: Negotiating the Nazi Past.................................118 III. THE MARKET AND THE FATE OF THE LIBERAL SUBJECT IN THE LONG 1990S Chapter 4: Neoliberal Reproduction: The Feminist and Disability Rights Critique.........................................167 Chapter 5: Human Dignity Versus the Market Economy: Reunification and the Regeneration of German Liberalism..................216 Conclusion................................................................................................................ 262 Bibliography............................................................................................................. 270 Acknowledgments It was the prospect of finally having the opportunity to thank all those to whom I owe so much that spurred me on in the last few weeks of writing. Having placed the last period in the dissertation, I am now at leisure to reveal its underlying architecture—that is, the system of institutions, teachers, colleagues, friends, and family who have most influenced my scholarship. My education began as an undergraduate at Columbia University, a place that changed me in too many ways to name here, but which convinced me that the mission of a university and its teachers could be a noble one. I studied in different disciplines at the University of Cambridge and Harvard University versus New York University School of Law, but all three provided crucial environments for my development as a researcher, teacher, and scholar. Certain administrators deserve special thanks for helping me negotiate the labyrinth that is the university bureaucracy. My thanks to Lisa Koederitz and Alex Lu at NYU Law and Daniel Bertwell at Harvard. The Centre for History and Economics at the University of Cambridge, and especially Inga Huld Markan and Mary-Rose Cheadle, provided a warm welcome and institutional base during my write-up year. My gratitude to Emma Rothschild for providing me the opportunity to be a Research Visitor there. King’s College was a second home at Cambridge—so much so that I sometimes forgot I had no formal affiliation. If I’m lucky, they did too. Although a few of my uncles are still convinced that I have been paying for my education all this time, a number of fellowships and foundations have provided generous support throughout my graduate education. I am especially grateful to the Harvard Presidential Fellowship, which supported my doctoral studies throughout and guaranteed a critical final year of funding, and to NYU Law’s Furman Academic Scholars Program, which made my decision to pair a J.D. with the Ph.D. an easy one. Thanks also to the Weatherhead Center for International ! vi Affairs at Harvard and the Conference Group for Central European History, which provided support for pre-dissertation research; to the Berlin Program for Advanced German and European Studies and the International Dissertation Research Fellowship of the Social Science Research Council, which funded my year in Germany; and to the Jerrold Seigel Fellowship in Intellectual and Cultural History and the John Anson Kittredge Educational Fund, which allowed me to do important follow-up research. I have been singularly lucky in the teachers who have trained me. At Cambridge, Richard Evans taught me how to be an historian of Germany and, most important, shepherded me through my first major research project. Adam Tooze’s seminar on the End of History remains a highlight of my graduate education, both for its ever-energetic teacher and for its topic. It was Adam who first sparked an abiding interest in how thinkers have conceived the end of human development—a question that underlays this dissertation. From the first time I walked into his office, Peter Gordon has offered unfailing encouragement and support. Even when I wandered away to law school, Peter never doubted that I would finish this project—at least not to me—and so neither did I. His guidance has proved essential to its writing. As I sought to organize concepts and actors, he challenged me never to lose the complexity of the ideas or historical moment. I have been fortunate to have not one but two peerless advisers. Judith Surkis understood what this dissertation was about long before I did. Whenever I started to lose the thread, I tried to imagine the advice Judith would give, the author she might point me to, the critique she might suggest. Often I did not have to imagine, because she made time to talk, no matter where in the world I or she might be. Many of the best parts of this dissertation are due to her (the errors, of course, being all mine). Samuel Moyn introduced me to intellectual history in a seminal seminar long ago at Columbia. In many ways, he was my first teacher. I owe to him my specialty, even my discipline—I might have ! vii abandoned the field had I not realized that one could be an historian who primarily studies books, concepts, and ideas—and a critical attitude toward supposed historiographical truths. From