Nazis, Mythology, And Totalitarian Minds in Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night.

THERE WERE MANY Darwinian eugenicists in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century and one, Fritz Lenz, justified his race eugenics by calling on Darwin's cousin, Francis Galton, and his science, to formulate Nazi race policy. This same policy is explored by Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night (1961) in the context of totalitarianism, and his notion of the "totalitarian mind," a mind, as we discover, manufactured by a Nazi mythology based on the ideology of social Darwinism. In Racial Hygiene, Robert Proctor argues that Lenz's ideas were influenced by Galton's science, quoting Lenz thusly: Proctor investigates two other Germans who advocated Darwinian eugenics: Edwin Baur and Eugen Fischer. They contributed to the Nazi eugenics program as well, but of the three, Lenz was the one most closely associated with Nazi race policy and whose works Hitler had read. Proctor claims that: