Precarious kinship. Negotiations about adoption and incest after 1945

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Constantin Goschler; Professor Dr. Till Kössler
• Subject Area: Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: from 2018 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 398344145

Kinship serves as a fundamental category for structuring social relations. In the 20th century, the category of kinship in a new way became an object of both scientific and political deliberations and personal reflection. This development was brought about by the ascent of hereditary science and new medical reproduction techniques as well as by changes both in realm of family relations and of politics of national and ethnical homogenisation and diversification. The new standardization, nationalization and idealization of kinship made forms of family relations increasingly “precarious”, in which social and biological kinship did not overlap. The topic of nature and nurture was a recurring and central element of these disputes that aimed both at a new ordering of the family as part of the preservation or transformation of social order in a broader sense. Therefore, “kinship” can be used as a so far neglected historical probe into the social and political dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in contemporary societies. Before this background, the research project examines “precarious” kinship in West-Germany after 1945, focusing on the history of adoption and the history of incest. In both cases, the creation of kinship was especially contested. While in the case of adoption kinship seemed to lose any biological foundation, in the case of incest the problem seemed to be a too close intimate and sexual relationship between biological related individuals. However, while biological arguments did regularly play a role in debates about adoption, incest was not only biologically but also culturally constructed. Hence, both cases allow insights into the dynamic changes of what constituted acceptable and inacceptable social relations after the catastrophe of National Socialism and war. Analyzing adoption and incest therefore helps to understand the changing boundaries both of the family and of the larger social and political order.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants