Document pZO7jgYVoKQZLvDnvQ9xOokB

176 CHAPTER 6 (Gesundheitsfiihrung), embracing both preventive health and the primacy of the public good over individual liberties--the so-called duty to be healthy (Gesundheitspflicht). What may be most disturbing about the Nazi antitobacco cam paign is the rather uncomfortable light it sheds on the relation be tween science and politics at this time. The story is not the familiar one of the suppression of science, or the unwilling conformity of science to political ideals; the relation between science and poli tics--at least in the aspect I shall be treating--was more symbiotic, more supportive. The Nazi war on tobacco shows that what most people would concede to be "good" science can be pursued in the name of antidemocratic ideals. It is therefore not enough to speak only of the suppression or even survival of science; we have to see how dictatorial ideals worked to inspire and guide the science and policies of the time. Early Opposition Antitobacco sentiments were nothing new to the twentieth cen tury. German opposition to smoking, chewing, and snorting to bacco dates from early in the seventeenth century, when the yel low leaf was introduced into Germany by Dutch and English soldiers fighting in the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). The first re corded effort to grow tobacco in Germany, by an Alsatian farmer in Strassburg in 1620, met with resistance from the city council, apparently worried that tobacco growing would cut into the pro duction of more worthy crops, like cereals. Cultivation was com mon in many parts of Germany by the end of the seventeenth century, though certain towns were not exactly tobacco-friendly. In the late 1600s, smoking bans were enacted in Bavaria, Kur: sachsen, and certain parts of Austria. Smoking was banned in Ber lin in 1723, in Konigsberg in 1742, and in Stettin in 1744.3 Penalties for violating such bans could be severe. In Liineberg in 1691, for example, persons found smoking or "drinking" tobacco within the city walls could be put to death. Elsewhere, violation of tobacco laws could lead to fines (fifty gold gulden in Cologne, for exam- THE CAMPAIGN AGAINST TOBACCO 177 pie), arrest, beatings, banishment, conscription into forced labor, or the fire-branding of a mark on the offending individual.4 Many such laws--though usually with lesser penalties--remained on the books in Germany until the "professors' revolution" of 1848, when most were lifted. (Nazi philosophers would later use this coinci dence to argue that liberalism spurred the uptake of corrupting vices like alcohol and tobacco--and that absolute states had had a more reasonable approach to such matters.) The rationale behind many of these bans is not always obvious today, though health was clearly only one of several concerns. The archbishop of Cologne in 1649, for example, complained that smoking corrupted the youth and caused fires. When Friedrich the Great of Prussia banned public smoking in 1764, the fear again was that smoking could pose a fire hazard. Goethe in 1806 sniffed at smoking as a companion of drunkenness, a corruption of the spirit, and a financial burden on the German nation, costing 25 million taler per year. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer derogated smoking as "a substitute for thought," and Immanuel Kant pro claimed tobacco a habit-forming nuisance that, like alcohol, was especially dangerous for children.5 The first German antitobacco organization was established in 1904 (the short-lived Deutsche Tabakgegnerverein zum Schutze fur Nichtraucher); this was followed by a Bund Deutscher Tabakgegner based in the town of Trautenau, in Bohemia (1910), and similar associations in Hanover and Dresden, both founded in 1912. When Czechoslovakia was severed from Austria after the First World War, a Bund Deutscher Tabakgegner in der Tschechoslowakei was established in Prague (1920); that same year in Graz was founded a Bund Deutscher Tabakgegner in Deutschosterreich. The Bohemian organization published the first German-language antitobacco journal--Der Tabakgegner (1912-1932); Dresden's Bund Deutscher Tabakgegner gave rise to a second journal, the Deutsche Tabakgegner (1919-1935).6 The Dresden organization proved to be the most durable of the three: Dresden was Germany's major cen ter of tobacco manufacturing and home to the country's first ciga rette factory--the Russian-owned firm Laferme, established in 1862 with six female rollers and one cutter. Dresden also had one