14K GOLD OPAL RING

THE tone of the Richard Burton-Elizabeth Taylor ''Private Lives'' is established right off. When Mr. Burton makes his first entrance on to the attractive Deauville hotel terrace designed by David Mitchell, he looks anything but happy. His face is a taut mask, frozen in an expression of less-than-exquisite pain, and there's no bounce as he walks about on his stacked boots. He's not Noel Coward's flippant hero Elyot Chase - he doesn't even seem to be an actor. In his immaculate Savile Row business suit, Mr. Burton mostly resembles a retired millionaire steeling himself for an obligatory annual visit to the accountant. He's bored out of his mind but grimly determined to clip the coupons and sign the papers that will allow him to maintain his cash flow for the next year.

Miss Taylor, soon to follow, is scarcely more buoyant. She enters in the first of several Theoni V. Aldredge costumes that fail to further the illusion of what Coward described as his ''quite exquisite'' heroine. Her curly mop of hair is meant to suggest the fashion of the 1920's but instead recalls the matronly Toni permanents that were in vogue during the 1950's. Not that it matters - Miss Taylor isn't trying to play Amanda Prynne. When she looks at her co-star, her glances betray neither rapture nor revulsion; she looks past him, not at him. It's only when she stares out into the vast reaches of the Lunt-Fontanne that her eyes reveal a hint of sparkle: what she sees then is a full house.

And so you have the complete picture. While this ''Private Lives'' does plod on - and on and on - for another two and a half hours (despite substantial pruning of the script), the first impression it leaves is the last. From the start, the production never even pretends to be anything other than a calculated business venture. Though the irresistible plot mechanics keep Act I sporadically afloat, the two acts to come have all the vitality of a Madame Tussaud's exhibit and all the gaiety of a tax audit. Nothing that happens at any time has any bearing on Coward's classic 1930 comedy.

That play, the seeming inconsequentiality of its dialogue notwithstanding, is a wise and painful statement about both the necessity and the impossibility of love. In this version, whose billed director is Milton Katselas, there's no attempt to mine the gold beneath the text - or to make the most of the on-the-surface dross. Instead we get an intermittent effort by the stars to create the fanmagazine fantasy that their own offstage private lives dovetail neatly with Coward's story of a divorced couple who rekindle their old passion after meeting by chance on their second honeymoons. Announcing that she's ''scared of marriage,'' Miss Taylor takes a disingenuous pause almost long enough to contain a whole one-act Coward play and then winks at the audience, lest we miss the purple irony.

But life doesn't imitate art in this ''Private Lives'' - it obliterates it. Early on, we see that, unlike Elyot and Amanda, Mr. Burton and Miss Taylor have little lingering affection for each other - or none that they can either convey or fake on stage. When Mr. Burton finally crosses from his side of the terrace to embrace Miss Taylor in Act I, he approaches the task with the stealthy gait of Count Dracula stalking a victim. When, in the Paris flat of Act II, he grabs his co-star's (covered) breast from behind, he evinces the perfunctory, clinical detachment of a physician who's examined too many patients in one day - and Miss Taylor responds as if under anesthesia. Even the slapstick battle to follow fails to light a fire -it's a ghost of a pillow fight that makes us wonder whether Amanda's address might be the Rue Morgue.

Between these vulgar displays, which are thrown to the voyeuristic multitudes like so many stale breadcrusts, we can do little but anticipate the intermissions (which must be among the longest in Broadway history), recoil at the overacting of John Cullum and Kathryn Walker as the discarded spouses and dwell sadly on the dimming of the stars' luster since they last appeared in their respective revivals of ''The Little Foxes'' and ''Camelot.''

Miss Taylor lists about, her hands fluttering idly, like a windup doll in need of a new mainspring. Her voice - sometimes a Southernaccented falsetto, sometimes a campy screech -often mangles simple words (like ''pompous'') and occasionally defies the amplification system by evaporating entirely. The single line she speaks with conviction is a plaintive, ''How long, oh Lord, how long?'' Mr. Burton's voice, by contrast, remains a crisp, mellifluous instrument that snares a few legitimate laughs on some of Coward's more barbed lines. But the words could well be piped in, so robotic is the figure from which they emanate.

Perhaps if the stars acted as if they were enjoying themselves, this evening would have worked as a trashily amusing old-time burlesque stunt, redolent of that vanished era when tabloid celebrities exploited their f

Evolution used to Justify Existing German Racism

Schleunes noted, rather poignantly, that the reason the publication of Darwin’s 1859 work had an immediate impact in Germany, and their Jewish policy, was because:

‘Darwin’s notion of struggle for survival … legitimized by the latest scientific views, justified the racists’ conception of superior and inferior peoples and nations and validated the conflict between them.’ 36

The Darwinian revolution and the works of its chief German spokesman and most eminent scientist, Professor Haeckel, gave the racists something that they were confident was powerful verification of their race beliefs.37 The support of the science establishment resulted in racist thought having a much wider circulation than otherwise possible, and enormous satisfaction ‘that one’s prejudices were actually expressions of scientific truth’.36

And what greater authority than science could racists have for their views? Konrad Lorenz, one of the most eminent animal-behavior scientists then, and often credited as being the founder of his field, stated that:

‘Just as in cancer the best treatment is to eradicate the parasitic growth as quickly as possible, the eugenic defense against the dysgenic social effects of afflicted subpopulations is of necessity limited to equally drastic measures ….

When these inferior elements are not effectively eliminated from a [healthy] population, then — just as when the cells of a malignant tumor are allowed to proliferate throughout the human body — they destroy the host body as well as themselves.’ 38

Lorenz’s works were important in developing the Nazi program designed to eradicate the ‘parasitic growth’ of inferior races. The government’s programs to insure the ‘German Volk’ maintained their superiority made racism almost unassailable. Although King claimed that ‘the holocaust … pretended to have a scientific genetic basis’,39 the position of the government and university elite of the time was so entrenched that few contemporary scientists seriously questioned it.

The anti-Semitic attitudes of the German people were only partly to blame in causing the holocaust — only when Darwinism was added to the preexisting attitudes did a lethal combination result.

Eugenics Becomes More Extreme

The first step in an eugenic program was to determine which groups were genetically superior; a judgment that was heavily influenced by culture. The ideal traits were:

‘ … a human type whose appearance had been described by the race theorist Hans F.K. Gunther as “blond, tall, long-skulled, with narrow faces, pronounced chins, narrow noses with a high bridge, soft hair, widely spaced pale-coloured eyes, pinky-white skin colour”‘. 40

Although superficial observations enable most people to make a broad classification of race, when explored in depth, race status is by no means easy to determine, as the Nazis soon found out.

Many of the groups that they felt were inferior, such as the Slovaks, Jews, Gypsies, and others, were not easily distinguishable from the pure ‘Aryan’ race. In grouping persons into races to select the ‘best’, the Nazis measured a wide variety of physical traits including brain case sizes.

The Nazis relied heavily upon the work of Hans F.K. Gunther, professor of ‘racial science’ at the University of Jena.

Although Gunther’s ‘personal relationships with the party were stormy at times, his racial ideas were accepted’. They received wide support throughout the German government, and were an important influence in German policy.41 Gunther recognized that, although ‘a race may not be pure, its members share certain dominant characteristics’, thus paving the way for stereotyping.41

Gunther concluded that all Aryans share an ideal Nordic type which contrasted with the Jews, whom he concluded were a mixture of races.

Gunther stressed a person’s genealogical lineage, anthropological measurement of skulls and evaluations of physical appearance, were all used to determine their race.

Even though physical appearance was stressed, ‘the body is the showplace of the soul’ and ‘the soul is primary’.42 Select females with the necessary superior race traits were even placed in special homes and kept pregnant as long as they remained in the program.

Nonetheless, research on the offspring of the experiment concluded that, as is now known, IQ regressed toward the population mean and the IQs of the offspring were generally lower than that of the parents.

The Bad Blood Theory

Darwinism not only influenced the Nazi attitude toward Jews, but other cultural and ethnic groups as well.

Even mental patients were included later, in part because it was then believed that heredity had a major influence on mental illness (or they possibly had some Jewish or other non-Aryan blood in them), and consequently had to be destroyed.

Poliakov notes that many intellectuals in the early 1900s accepted telegony, the idea that ‘bad blood’ would contaminate a race line forever, or

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