Mendel stamp, Czechslovakia
          1965

Philatelic Politics: Czechoslovakia Mendel 60h stamp, 1965

   Gregor Mendel, the "Father of Genetics", was born in Moravia, which after World War One was incorporated into the new state of Czechoslovakia. After World War Two, Czechoslovakia fell into the Eastern Bloc as part of the Warsaw Pact countries controlled from Moscow. Mendelian Genetics had been under attack in Soviet Russia because of its supposed philosophical conflict with Marxist-Leninist theory. Genetics was officially condemned in 1948 at a Congress organized by the pseudo-scientist Trofim Lysenko as bourgeois, anti-Marxist "Mendelist - Morganism". Scientific research was under heavy state control in the eastern Bloc, and there appears to have been little if any genetics research in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, etc. thereafter. The situation did not improve until the fall of Khrushchev in 1964, which was strongly influenced by crop failures due to his reliance on Lysenko's worthless methods. Soviet biologists thereafter condemned Lysenko's theories, and his malign affect on Soviet agronomy, biology, and genetics.

    This Czechoslovakian stamp from 1965 therefore tells a story.
It acknowledges the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), illustrates a pea plant [upper left], a replicating DNA molecule [bottom left], and rather incongruously a fuchsia [lower left corner]. 1965 was the 100th anniversary of the publication of Mendel's two scientific papers outlining Mendelian Genetics, a significant event in world science and presumably a source of pride to Moravian Czechs. Its printing is on the exact cusp of the rehabilitation of genetics, and may be a sign of which way the winds were blowing.

Mendel
            Danzig stamp & postcard

    The same image of Mendel occurs in other dark contexts. After World War I, the German city of Danzig became a "Freie Stadt" (Free State), separated from Germany by a land connection, known as the Polish Corridor, from the new state of Poland to the Baltic Sea. The existence of the Corridor and the supposed oppression of the German minority in Danzig became the excuse for the German invasion of Poland that started World War II. The original name of the city, Gdansk, was restored in post-war Poland.

    Of special interest in these items is the association of the icon of Genetics with Nazi politics.
The 10p stamp reads "Healthy children - Happy future." The texts above and below the portrait on the postcard read "Health Care of the German People" and "Take care of the bloodstream of future generations;" the postmark includes "Health of the German People" along with the swastika. All of these are slogans associated with the Nazi eugenics program, promoted as the "science of race hygiene."

    In its darker form, "care for the bloodstream" included the involuntary sterilization and killing of persons regarded as "
"Lebens unwertes Leben" ("Life unworthy of Life"). Initially, this policy included institutionalized persons in mental asylums and hospitals, including children, regarded by the State as having hereditary defects and as drains on state resources. Industrial-scale methods of killing advocated by the Aktion T4 program and used subsequently in the extermination camps were first developed in these institutions.



    Postage stamps have at other times and places had significant political impact. The 3d Jersey Island stamp [below left] was designed and issued during the German occupation of the British-ruled Channel Islands during World War II. Any reference to the British crown was banned: the designer however worked the initials GR (Georgius Reginus, King George) into the script patterns on either side of the "3d".

    The Serbian "death mask" stamps [below right, inverted] featured two overlapping busts of the founder of the new Serbian state alongside that of King Peter I, who succeeded to the Serbian throne in 1904 after the assassination of King Alexander. When the stamp is turned upside down, the "death mask" face of the former king is clearly visible,
complete with bristling eyebrow and mustaches, at the intersection of the two faces in the medallion. Rumor has it that the printer was bribed by King Alexander's mother.

Jersey 3d GR stampSerbian
            "Death Mask" stamp


Gdansk material provided by Hielke De Jong; all text material © 2022 by Steven M. Carr