This PhD thesis examines a previously unexplored episode in Zurich around 1890, when several elements converged that allowed for a set of social intuitions around the breeding of humans to cross the threshold into scientific respectability. This constituted a first, formative episode of early German eugenics, years before the terms ‘eugenics’ or ‘race hygiene’ were in use.

The first chapter considers early eugenic practice as a form of knowledge production. During the research for this PhD, documentation of the first European eugenic castration cases of 1892 and 1895 was discovered, allowing me to analyse the two catastrophic experiences for the first time. The next four chapters explain how the events of the first could take place.

The second chapter investigates the intellectual environment in Breslau around 1880, where the individuals who first formulated eugenic ideas in Zurich were educated. The intellectual environment of this group included the reading of popular evolutionary theorists like Haeckel, Sterne, and Büchner, as well as socialists like Kautsky and Cabet.

The third chapter concerns the group’s move to Zurich around 1888 and their encounter with the psychiatric hospital of the University of Zurich, known as the Burghölzli, where the two castrations took place. The chapter explores how the group, including writers Gerhart and Carl Hauptmann and Alfred Ploetz, connected with the hospital’s director Auguste Forel and began developing a particular notion of social risk from heredity. In Ploetz’s seminal publication Fitness of Our Race (1895), he condensed their disparate intuitions and ideas into the term race hygiene.

The fourth chapter describes a crisis in psychiatry that coincided with a broader crisis in European societies. The overlayered crises created an environment in which extreme propositions were more likely to be deemed acceptable within the scientific community and beyond; they worked like catalysts for the development and validation of early eugenics.

The fifth and final chapter examines the contribution of playwright Gerhart Hauptmann to the production of eugenic knowledge. Hauptmann’s scandalous first play Before Dawn (1889), which dealt with questions of racial degeneration through alcoholism and the need for careful sexual selection, helped bring these topics to prominence in the German public.