The book centers on debates about the Romanian national character and race between 1880s and 1950s. It also argues that during the early 1940s anti-Semitism and anti-Roma racism contributed directly to the programme of ethnic purification pursued by the Antonescu regime. Racism and eugenics explain not just the deportation and murder of the Jews but also the deportation and murder of the Roma. The Holocaust in Romania should therefore be understood as the result not just of anti-Semitism but also of biopolitical nationalism. Finally, the book suggests that the eugenic ideal of the ‘perfect’ Romanian did not disappear in 1945 but was embedded in the socialist definitions of the ‘new man’ and ‘perfect’ society emerging under communism.

Marius Turda is Professor and Director of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Oxford Brookes University.

“Marius Turda’s book, the result of excellent research and equally well written, calls for a rethinking of the period of glory of Romanian intellectual life and culture in a necessary critical light, drawing attention to the generalized level of interest in eugenic theories and politics of exclusion around racial notions of identity, society, and state.”
Maria Bucur

“Marius Turda shines a light on the less well-known side of the identity debates of the Romanians who in the interwar period banked on biopolitics and eugenics, indeed at a certain point even on racism. It is a fascinating book about nationalism, the avatars of the biologisation of the nation, and the dangers of modernity; ultimately, it is a warning for us today, a textbook of demon-hunting.”
Constantin Barbulescu

“After it had succeeded where mimetic modernism had failed, achieving through ethnic ontology a synthesis of autochthonism and Europeanism, Romania’s radical anti-modernism left behind its concerns with the perfect language and the perfect space, to concentrate on the perfect human being. And for this it arrived at eugenics, racism, and genocide. This is the story told by this fundamental book.”
Sorin Antohi

“Marius Turda’s book is a troubling study of that part of modern Romanian history that we have hitherto known all too little and that we still do not wish to know: it is the period in which the Romanian state was taking shape as national and unitary, on ethnic, racial, eugenic, and biopolitical foundations. It remains for us, the people of today, to acknowledge critically and to deconstruct this dark inheritance of a mythology of ‘Romanian perfection’ that has not ceased to feed so many expressions of hate that we hear around us daily.”
Ciprian Mihali

“The stigma of slavery, which brought along with it the idea of the racial inferiority of the Roma, was not to be wiped away with the beginnings of the formation of a Romanian nation state, but rather reinforced by the idea of the parallel creation of a ‘perfect Romanian’. The eugenic policies of ‘perfection’ would ultimately lead to the deportation to Transnistria of 25,000 Roma, half of whom were to die there. Marius Turda’s book not only offers a comprehensive perspective on these ideas and actions; it calls on us to reflect on them.”
Adrian Nicolae Furtuna

About the Author
List of Maps and Images
Preface to the English Edition
1. Introduction
2. Ethnic Nationalism
3. The Degeneration of the Race
4. Biopolitics, Anthropology and Serology
5. Stigma and Eugenic Sterilisation
6. The Roma and Romanian Blood
7. About Heredity, but without Eugenics
8. Conclusions
Bibliography
Index