Alfred Grotjahn

Alfred Grotjahn was a German physician, social hygienist, eugenicist, journalist-author and, for three years between 1921 and 1924, a Member of the Reichstag in the recently launched German republic. He became celebrated as a pioneer, and among admirers an inventor, of the discipline of "social hygiene" which, in Germany, was not merely an ephemeral euphemism for the sociological study of sexually transmitted diseases, but embraced a series of topics along the interface between sociology and medicine. When first he publicised his ideas at the start of the twentieth century he encountered a barrage of opposition from the powerful and increasingly politicised Eugenics lobby, but during the next three decades some of his own thinking came closer to that of the eugenicists: by the time he died he was sometimes identified as part of the eugenics movement. After he died, many of his ideas remained mainstream in Germany and among some medical scholars in North America through the 1930s, but by 1945 they had become discredited across Europe, alongside those of the eugenics movement itself, by their association with the Hitlerite atrocities. Within Germany, despite a few of his ideas turning up as government policy, Grotjahn was in the short term airbrushed out of history during the 1930s on account of his Jewish provenance. His son emigrated to the United States in 1937, ending up in Los Angeles, where he acquired notability on his own account as a psychoanalyst.