Lies of the Land: How Eugenics Tried to Hijack the North

February 21, 2022

(Nature) – German historian of culture and science Bernd Brunner, in his book Extreme North, weaves a darker tapestry, layering legends over the science and history of the north to describe a place that is real, remote, inscrutable and cold. Indigenous peoples of the Arctic — including the Sámi of Finland, Norway and Sweden, the Chukchi and Nenets of Russia and the Inuit of Alaska, Canada and Greenland — have lived in the north for thousands of years. For others, especially racist eugenicists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the north symbolized Utopia, the incubator of a ‘master race’. Brunner untangles the origin of these pseudoscientific ideas, from the veneration of the Vikings and Old Norse sagas to the doctrine of ‘Nordic’ superiority promoted by Nazi ideologues. (Read More)