Bone & Soul: Physical Anthropology, the Great War and Nationalism in Eastern Europe

Abstract

During and after the First World War the scientific discourse of racial anthropology served as a tool of ethnic definitions of one’s own and the enemy nations. In the Austrian and German racial anthropology, the notion of Mongolisation was popularly used to represent the Russian enemy as an alien race. This way of thought found its main empirical expression in German and Austro-Hungarian anthropological research on POW’s. Górny shows how active the anthropologists in East-Central Europe have been, not only reacting to the German intellectual currents but also influencing anthropologists of the Central Powers with their own racial theories. This racial discourse found its continuation in post-war East- Central Europe and the Balkans, legitimizing the newly created states.