"Vaccination as biopolitics and social practice from the German Empire to the Federal Republic"

The initial reluctance to vaccinate evidently reflected a programmatic contradiction in Nazi health policy: the contrast between “racial hygiene” ideas that aimed at optimizing hereditary biology on the one hand; and a prevention policy on the other, which envisaged population and defense policy goals. More than ever, vaccination raised the question of how the “national body” should actually be understood and treated. Therefore, in the discussions since 1933, medical considerations have by no means been in the foreground. Rather, it was about the weighting of the needs of the "national comrade" compared to the requirements of the "national body" as well as threatening dangers from which the "national community" had to be protected. Answers to these questions seemed more urgent than ever “in view of the […] low risk of smallpox” 64 and the growing criticism of vaccination, as observed by the Reich Ministry of the Interior. Interior Minister Wilhelm Frick therefore assumed at the beginning of 1934 that a "revision of the vaccination law [...] would probably bring the conscience clause" 65. 66 This revision also makes sense because it takes “a far-reaching popular feeling into account” 67 so that previous measures against vaccination opponents “should be lifted as soon as possible” 68.

Such considerations formed the starting point of a commission in the Reich Ministry of the Interior, which worked on a revision of compulsory vaccination in March 1934. In this meeting, Johannes Breger from the Reich Health Office summed up the fundamental dilemma. If the motto used to be that possible damage to the individual was “the price” “with which the German people pay for their protection against smallpox” 69, then after the “seizure of power” one had to “check whether it corresponded to state ethics to demand such a sacrifice”. An examination is all the more urgent because "a large part of the German population rejects compulsory vaccination", as Ministerial Director Arthur Gütt from the Ministry of the Interior added. His colleague von Kapff took another step further, when he stylized the compulsory vaccination as a touchstone of the National Socialist world view: "Should the compulsory vaccination continue", "the majority of the people will doubt that in medical policy [...] National Socialist principles are decisive". Kapff received support from the President of the Dresden State Health Office, Weber, who saw “limited voluntariness” as a contemporary answer to the vaccination question. After all, “the conditions today are very different than they used to be. Thanks to the education of the National Socialist government, the people's views had changed so that more could be achieved voluntarily than previously with repeated forced vaccinations. Not all members of the commission could agree with this view. From Hamburg, Professor Paschen protested that the state was carelessly giving up its powers. Vaccination should “not be left to the discretion of the individual” but should “be enforced by law”.

The objection of the army medical inspector Anton Waldmann weighed more heavily. A personal decision of the "comrade" when vaccinating would contradict "the leader's principle" and thus increase the risk of epidemics "among the people", which "in the event of a future war forced upon us [...] would prevent the army from freedom of movement". At the end of the meeting, these military-political reasons led to the realization that there were still reservations about the abolition of compulsory vaccination. The commission therefore did not come to a conclusive conclusion, from which an important finding can be gained: in 1933 there was no concept ready for a main instrument of modern population policy. After the "seizure of power", an unusually open discussion was held about the modern precautionary measures70. The fact that the self-responsibility of the “national comrade” was an important argument, and that state coercion was even seen as a contradiction to National Socialist ethics, shows two things: the programmatic contradictions of health policy and the ambiguity about the legitimacy of state coercion vis-à-vis “national comrades”. One could summarize that vaccination mutated into a litmus test for the “consent dictatorship” 71 in the early phase of the “Third Reich”. After all, when it came to vaccinations, it was the “completely normal Germans” who one wanted to win for the “National Community”.

This is an excerpt from a book analyzing Sartre's writing from the decade from 1950-1960 after his time in occupied France.

From Reason and Violence, R.D. Laing & D.G. Cooper, 1964:

The survival group is first a practical invention in each of the permanence of a common unity through each other. It is freedom wishing to become inert, praxis seeking a way of metamorphosing itself into exis [a way out]. When a multiplicity of freedoms makes common praxis in order to find a basis of the permanence of the group, it produces by itself a form of reciprocity mediated by its own inertia. This new form of reciprocity Sartre calls the pledge. The pledge takes different forms. The historical act is not the necessary form of the pledge. It can be seen as the resistance of the survival group against separationist action, whether of going away or differentiation; as guarantee of the future through a lack of change produced in the group by freedom. Paradoxically, as provision of stability, as promise of permanence, and so forth, it affords the basis of all separation and differentiation. The pledge, however, is not a social contract, in Rousseau's sense, but the necessary passage from an immediate form of the group in danger of dissolution to another more reflective permanent form.

The pledge, as an invention of praxis, is the affirmation by the thirds of the permanence of the group as negation of its permanent possibility of negation through the multiplicity of alterity [the state of being different]. The threat to the permanence of the group is, of course, not necessarily the physical extermination of its members. By the pledge the group seeks to make itself its own instrument against seriality, which threatens it with dissolution.

The pledge is not a subjective determination. It is a real modification of the group by my regulative action. It is my guarantee to the others that it is impossible for serial alterity to be introduced into the group through me. This guarantee cannot, however, annul the permanent possibility that I can 'freely', that is, by my individual praxis, abandon my post, go over to the enemy. Treason and desertion can never be annulled as possibilities, but I have sworn my loyalty, I have given my pledge as guarantee against this exercise of my own freedom. I seek to utilize my own and everyone else's presence in the group as a third, as regulator, as my common-being, as a fact that cannot be transcended. I seek to convert my free being-in-the-group into an exigency that there is no way through or round, by the invention, as far as it is possible, of an inorganic, non-dialectical, rigid future. This rigid substantiation of my future is endowed with the triple characteristics of being the exigence, container, and ground of all my subsequent praxis. But there is no new dialectic.

Now, thus far two developments of the group-in-fusion have been distinguished for clarity—survival group and pledged group. We must now consider more closely the intelligibility of the pledge. The individual and the group praxis of the group-in-fusion have been seen to be comprehensible. Is the re-invention of the pledge in defined circumstances a process that is dialectical and comprehendible? The pledge becomes intelligible as the common action of the group on itself. We said above that the group undergoes a transformation in and through the common action of the pledge. How then does the unity of the group-in-fusion compare with that of the pledge group? The former is a fusion in the face of material danger. In this fusion, real work is done. In the pledge group, on the other hand, nothing material binds the members, the danger is not real, it is only possible. The origin of the pledge is anxiety. Once the real menace from outside has passed, the danger to the permanence of the group is from dispersion and seriality. A reflexive fear arises.

There is not enough to fear to keep the group together now that the danger seems remote. The condition of the permanence of the group is thus the negation of the absence of fear. Fear must be reinvented. The fundamental reinvention, at the heart of the pledge, is the project of substituting a real fear, produced by the group itself, for the external fear that is becoming remote, and whose very remoteness is suspected as deceptive. And this fear as free product and corrective action of the group against serial dissolution is terror induced by the violence of common freedom. Terror is the reign in the group of absolute violence on its members.

The essential basis for this transformation is the risk of death that each runs at the heart of the group as possible agent of dispersion. The pledge group is a common product of reciprocities mediated under the statute of violence. Through this form of unification, the being-in-the-group becomes a limit that can be breached only with the certitude of dying.

Traced back to original praxis, man is in the position of absolute power of man over man. But in the vicissitudes of alienation, God can be substituted for the guillotine. The pledge, the oath of loyalty, backed up by violence, is the original free attempt to strike terror into each by each, in so far as it must constantly reactualize violence as the intelligible negation of individual freedom by common praxis.

This is the pledge. Its intelligibility is complete, since it is a question of a free transcendent of elements already given, towards an objective already posited. My pledge offers him and them a guarantee and invites violence as his and their right to suppress me if I default. By the same token the unmitigated pledge creates Terror, and invents treason, since there is now no excuse for defection. While the circumstances are not particularly constraining, I can remain on a level where violence-terror, loyalty-treachery, are not experienced in ultimate form. But the fundamental structure of the pledged group is violence-terror since I have freely consented to the possible liquidation of my person. My right over the other is my obligation to them, and contains in itself, implicitly, death as my possible destiny.