Friedrich Burgdorfer (1860-1967). Eine diskursbiographische Studie zur deutschen Demographie im 20. Jahrhundert

Abstract

Bio-political debates about the size, age, quality and productivity of the German population persisted throughout the twentieth century. Depending on specific historical circumstances they may have varied in their intensity and emphases, but—as the controversial claims by the former German federal banker Thilo Sarrazin about the deleterious effects of Arab and Turkish migration and birth rates attest—such debates are not a matter of the past. Indeed, Sarrazin's shrill alarmism evokes the memory of demographical debates of the early twentieth century in which the population statistician Friedrich Burgdörfer played a prominent role. Thomas Bryant's study of Burgdörfer is therefore a timely contribution to the growing scholarship on German bio-politics. He develops what he calls a ‘discourse-biographical’ (diskursbiographisch) approach to his subject-matter, which explores Burgdörfer's life-history in relation to shifting German bio-political debates during the Weimar Republic, Nazism and the early Federal Republic. Burgdörfer emerges in Bryant's story not as a more or less passive articulator of widely accepted patterns of demographic discourse, but as an agent who had a profound influence on changing paradigms in the area. This is somewhat different from Thomas Etzemüller's study of twentieth-century demographic doomsday visions, which argues that people such as Burgdörfer elaborated on well-established discursive matrices that allowed for the construction of similar catastrophic scenarios in different national contexts (Etzemüller, Der ewigwährende Untergang. Der apokalyptische Bevölkerungsdiskurs im 20. Jahrhundert, Bielefeld: transcript, 2007).