Staging the Hygienic Subject: Anatomy, Bodies, and the Public Health Exhibition in Germany, 1911-1931

Abstract

As a rapidly modernizing Germany faced a range of public health challenges at the turn of the twentieth century, a cooperative of doctors, politicians, and industrialists posited the popular exhibition as the most effective medium for public hygiene “enlightenment.” Through strategic deployment of the exhibition medium, organizers sought to reach mainstream audiences and thereby alter the behavior of populations otherwise at risk of disease, malnutrition, and work injury. Employing medical instruments as display objects and providing visitors with interactive opportunities, organizers pioneered an accessible mode of public health education. Prior scholarship on welfare and life reform in modern Germany has often diminished the role of hygiene, casting the hygiene exhibition as a populist, apolitical venture. “Staging the Hygienic Subject: Anatomy, Bodies, and the Public Health Exhibition in Germany, 1911-1931,” analyzes the distinct social and political meanings of hygiene in Germany before and after the First World War. This dissertation identifies the “hygienic subject”—the exhibition visitor whom organizers hoped to persuade to adopt the “healthy” behavior and ideal bodies on display. In restoring the exhibition to its definitive place in fostering cross-class public health instruction, this study examines medical and curatorial tracts, photographs, and visitor reports, venturing into the historical galleries of the popular hygiene exhibition. Employing methods from museum studies and science studies, this dissertation emphasizes the museological, while probing the exhibition’s organizer-visitor-object network. Chapter one examines the spatial syntax of the 1911 International Hygiene Exhibition in Dresden. Inviting visitors to measure their lung capacity with a spirometer or to study their pharynx with a laryngoscope, organizers made hygiene “popular,” leveraging display to enroll a lay and expert audience alike. The second chapter investigates plans for a permanent hygiene museum in light of the 1911 exhibition’s successes. Strategically coupling movements for public health and museum reform, organizers envisioned a museum that would harness principles of commercial display to engage a broad audience in the production of hygiene knowledge. Chapter three studies mobile exhibits customized for the instruction of women and emphasizes how organizers leveraged cultural assumptions about gender and sex to bolster pronatalist campaigns. The final chapter analyzes displays on the subject of “Jewish hygiene” at two landmark hygiene exhibitions in 1911 and 1926. Contrasting the opposing ideological agendas of Jewish and non-Jewish organizers, this chapter considers hygiene’s bearing on the so-called “Jewish question.” Collectively, these chapter case studies demonstrate hygiene’s social significance and the exhibition’s public efficacy, as these events attracted millions of international and domestic visitors and shaped the fields of public health and eugenic science.