Precarious kinship. Negotiations about adoption and incest after 1945

亲属关系是构建社会关系的基本范畴。在20世纪，一种新的亲属关系范畴成为科学、政治和个人反思的对象。这一发展是由遗传科学和新的医学生殖技术的兴起以及家庭关系领域和民族和种族同质化和多样化政治的变化所带来的。亲属关系的新标准化、民族化和理想化使各种形式的家庭关系日益“岌岌可危”，其中社会和生物亲属关系并不重叠。先天和教养问题是这些争端的一个反复出现的核心因素，其目的既是为了建立新的家庭秩序，也是为了在更广泛的意义上维护或改变社会秩序。因此，“亲属关系”可以作为一种迄今被忽视的历史探索，来探讨当代社会中包容和排斥的社会和政治动态。在此背景之前，该研究项目考察了1945年后西德不稳定的亲属关系，重点是收养历史和乱伦历史。在这两个案例中，亲属关系的建立都受到了特别的质疑。在收养的情况下，亲属关系似乎失去了任何生物学基础，而在乱伦的情况下，问题似乎是与生物相关的个人之间过于亲密的亲密和性关系。然而，虽然生物学上的争论确实经常在关于收养的辩论中发挥作用，但乱伦不仅是生物上的，而且是文化上的。因此，这两个案例都允许我们深入了解在国家社会主义和战争的灾难之后，什么构成了可接受和不可接受的社会关系的动态变化。因此，分析收养和乱伦有助于理解家庭和更大的社会和政治秩序不断变化的边界。

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.