Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

There are, to be sure, a number of volumes dedicated to the agricultural policies of the different fascist regimes.[46] But agriculture’s lower cultural status, associated with misperception of its low-tech nature, has apparently inhibited the more ambitious historians of generic fascism from including it in their discussions.[47] Who wants to deal with pigs and potatoes when one can explore film, sports, and architecture? Historians of agriculture haven’t helped. Gustavo Corni and Horst Gies’s still-canonical study of the food policies of the Third Reich, for example, teaches us more about the many flaws of Nazi agricultural bureaucracy and its repeated broken promises than about the importance of food for the institutionalization and dynamics of the regime.[48] In common with many other authors, Corni and Gies emphasize the apparent contradiction between fascist praise of traditional peasant culture and modern demands for productivity, ignoring that what was at stake was a single modernist project of inventing a new organic national community. This book intends to overcome the common perception among fascist studies that talk of soil and peasantry is atavistic and in conflict with more modern sensibilities.[49] I suggest that the “ideology of the land” already present in the very first formulations of the fascist credo, and famously summarized by the Nazi dictum “Blut und Boden” (“Blood and soil”) and the slogan “Bisogna ruralizzare l’Italia” (“Italy must be ruralized”), was as modernist as the aviation craze of fascist Italy or the smooth lines of the German Autobahn.[50]

Model Organisms, Industrialized Organisms, and Fascism

The bulk of my narrative is concerned with examining the modernist nature of the fascist “back to the land” movement by following the new organisms that promised to root Italians, Portuguese, and Germans in their respective national soils and to sustain them in their imperial possessions. It emphasizes the fact that such organisms were technoscientific organisms—modern products of scientific breeding operations. The Ardito strain of wheat with which Mussolini fought his Battaglia del Grano was a new variety developed by Italian geneticists that promised Italy self-sufficiency in grain. The sheep that bolstered Heinrich Himmler’s dreams of thriving German settler communities in eastern Europe’s steppes were standardized animals coming from the Institute of Animal Breeding of the University of Halle. And the same goes for the pigs, potatoes, cotton, and coffee gathered in the text.

We already know how plant breeding thrived as scientific field in the context of the Nazi political economy and how it earned generous support from Hitler’s regime.[51] But the more significant studies on this topic either dismiss the relation between “Blut und Boden” ideology and breeders’ activities or consider modernization efforts in agriculture only as a matter of preparedness for war.[52] Taking agriculture as seriously as fascist ideologues—Nazis included—actually did, and placing it at the center of their modernist experiment of inventing a national community instead of just seeing it as a proxy for other projects, make the importance of breeders’ new organisms more obvious. Technoscientific organisms were to embody the fascist response to the major problem of how European societies should live in the new global economy of food.[53] When fascists came to power, as we shall see, breeders were happy to tailor their creations to serve fascist ideology. But before that, breeders’ organisms were already making fascist radical visions of the national body thriving on the national soil into plausible policies. Breeders’ animals and plants were not just tools of fascism; they were major elements in imagining a fascist alternative modernity.

Since the 1990s, historians of science have been exploring standardized life forms in order to understand processes of production of biological knowledge. Widespread circulation of standardized model organisms has been significantly identified with the expansion of communities of researchers built around them. Robert Kohler’s fruit flies, Karen Rader’s mice, and Angela Creager’s Tobacco Mosaic Virus are now common elements in historians’ accounts of the development of the biological sciences.[54] Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, with his “epistemology of the concrete,” has been exceptionally productive in revealing how work on model organisms has led to new epistemic things.[55] These model organisms constitute “future generating machines” whose manipulation, Rheinberger writes, “can generate insights into the constitution, functioning, development, or evolution of an entire class of organisms.”[56] Rheinberger’s work points not only at the relevance of such organisms as crucial objects for historians of the life sciences but also at a way of writing history of science as organism-centered narratives. The structure of the present book, with its chapters organized around different domesticated plants and animals, owes much to Rheinberger’s collection of model organisms.[57]

As the expanding literature on the “cultural history of heredity” has eloquently demonstrated, focusing on organisms doesn’t imply a narrowing of historians’ perspectives, having led instead to an appreciation of the “economic and social preconditions for the coming into being of genetics, such as the beginning of agro-industrial mass production of organic raw materials and foodstuffs, as well as of drugs and vaccines, toward the end of the nineteenth century.”[58] This body of scholarship suggests that the history of model organisms and that of industrialized organisms go hand in hand.[59] To illustrate this, it suffices to point out that two basic concepts of the new science of genetics at the beginning of the twentieth century, the “pure line” and the “clone,” were direct products of breeders’ practices.[60] The “pure line” will have a prominent presence throughout the present book because of its role in forming the modernist belief in the unlimited human ability to tinker with life.

By the late nineteenth century, a growing number of breeders were rambling around farmers’ fields, identifying interesting plants, and reproducing them through self-fertilization, carefully documenting the characteristics of the progeny.[61] Through this so-called pedigree selection, breeders produced what Wilhelm Johannsen would famously call “pure lines”—alleged homozygotic stable varieties selected for some important feature such as pest resistance, early ripening, or milling properties.[62] They then combined different properties by crossing different pure lines to obtain the hybrids that made them famous in the seed market. Whereas chemists demonstrated their demiurgic power by creatively combining elements to produce new compounds, breeders promised endless innovation in the production of living things by hybridizing pure lines.[63]

46

For a review of such literature for the Nazi case, see Mark Finlay “New sources, new theses, and new organizations in the new Germany: Recent research on the history of German agriculture,” Agricultural History 75, no. 3 (2001): 279–307. The following works are particularly significant: Gustavo Corni and Horst Gies, Brot—Butter—Kanonen. Die Ernährungswirtschaft in Deutschland unter der Diktatur Hitlers (Akademie, 1997); Gustavo Corni, Hitler and the Peasants: Agrarian Policy of the Third Reich, 1930–1939 (Oxford University Press, 1990); John Edgar Farquharson, The Plough and the Swastika (SAGE, 1976); Adam Tooze, The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of Nazi War Economy (Allen Lane, 2006). For Italy I find the following sources particularly usefuclass="underline" Massimo Legnani, Domenico Petri, and Giorgio Rochat, eds., Le Campagne Emiliane in Periodo Fascista. Materiale e Ricerche sulla Battaglia del Grano (CLUE, 1982); L. Segre, La “battaglia” del grano (Clesav, 1982); M. Stampacchia, “Ruralizzare l’Italia!.” Agricolture e bonifiche tra Mussolini e Serpieri, 1928–1943 (Angeli, 2000); Alexander Nützenadel, Landwirtschaft, Staat un Autarkie. Agrarpolitik im faschistischen Italien, 1922–1943 (Max Niemeyer, 1997). For Portugal, the best source is still Fernando Oliveira Baptista, A Politica Agrária do Estado Novo (Afrontamento, 1993). See also Manuel Lucena, “Salazar e a intervenção no sector primário,” Análise Social 26 (1991): 97–206; Dulce Freire, Inês Fonseca, and Paula Godinho, eds., Mundo Rural. Transformação e resistência na Península Ibérica (século XX) (Colibri, 2009).

47

David Edgerton has eloquently dealt with similar simplifications by general historians about the role of technology in history, namely their obsession with technological innovation at the expense of technologies in use. His criticism of the lack of attention given to horses in World War II is a perfect parallel to my point here about the absence of agriculture in discussions of generic fascism. David Edgerton, Shock of the Old: Technology and Global History Since 1900. (Profile Books, 2011).

48

Corni and Gies, Brot—Butter—Kanonen. See the devastating critique by Adam Tooze on page 713 of Wages of Destruction. See also the unfortunate comparison essayed by Gustavo Corni between Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany agriculture policies on pages 269–273 of Hitler and the Peasants. Corni suggests a deep contrast between Nazi ruralism and Italian fascist modernizers, stating even than in Germany academics and technocrats had no say in Nazi agrarian policies. As was shown by Adam Tooze and as is shown in the present book, there is no basis for such contrast. There is also a tendency to focus on the broken promises of fascist agrarian policies at the expense of understanding its contribution for the institutionalization of the regime in the Portuguese literature—see, e.g., Baptista, A Politica Agrária do Estado Novo.

49

Even Roger Griffin, the champion of fascism as modernism, discards the modernist nature of Blut und Boden. See his article “Modernity, modernism, and fascism.” As Adam Tooze has emphatically declared in his reevaluation of the role of agriculture in Nazi economic history (Wages of Destruction, pp. 166–167), “too often the preoccupation of Hitler and his followers with problems of Lebensraum, food and agriculture is seen as prima facie evidence of their atavism and backwardness. This could not be more wrong.”

50

It doesn’t take much to perceive the modernist nature of the famous formulation by Maurice Barrès, one of the first ideologues of fascism, of the cult of the land and the ancestors. Revealingly enough, this earned Barrès and his followers the status of “futurists of the past.” On the notion of futurism of the past, see Hermínio Martins, Classe, status e poder: e outros ensaios sobre o Portugal contemporâneo (Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 1998), 25. On Barrès, see Zeev Sternhell, Maurice Barrès et le nationalisme français (Librairie Armand Colin, 1972).

51

See Susanne Heim, Kalorien, Kautschuk, Karrieren: Pflanzenzüchtung und landwirtschaftliche Forschung in Kaiser-Wilhelm-Instituten 1933–1945 (Wallstein, 2003); Susanne Heim, ed., Autarkie und Ostexpansion. Pflanzenzucht und Agrarforschung in Nationalsozialismus (Wallstein, 2002); Thomas Wieland, ‘Wir beherrschen den pflanzlichen Organismus besser,…’: Wissenschaftliche Pflanzenzüchtung in Deutschland, 1889–1945 (Deutsches Museum, 2004); Joachim Drews, Die Nazi-Bohne. Anbau, Verwendung und Auswirkung der Sojabohne im Deutschen Reich und Südosteuropa 1933–1945 (LIT, 2004); Jonathan Harwood, “The fate of peasant-friendly plant breeding in Nazi Germany,” Historical Studies in the Natural Sciences 40, no. 4 (2010): 569–603. In Black Earth: The Holocaust as History and Warning (Tim Duggan Books, 2015), an important book on the ecological dimensions of the Holocaust in which food is given central place, Timothy Snyder seems totally oblivious of such literature. Such absence explains his unfounded claim on pages 9 and 10 that Hitler had a problem with agricultural sciences. This assertion is supported only with quotes from Mein Kampf, ignoring the extremely generous support and funding of these sciences in the period.

52

Susanne Heim opens her important book on plant breeding and Nazism with the following statement: “Of the three terms that form the title of this volume, ‘calories’, ‘caoutchouc’ and ‘careers’, none carries undertones of the ‘blood and soil’ ideology or the romanticized view of agriculture that are often seen as the typical characteristics of National Socialist agricultural policies. And indeed, the subject under investigation in this book is not the backward-looking ideas of men such as Richard Walther Darré, wallowing in myths of peasants inextricably linked with their native soil.” (Kalorien, Kautschuk, Karriere, p. 1) The same tone is also adopted in a groundbreaking history of German agricultural sciences by Frank Uekötter, Die Wahrheit ist auf dem Feld. Eine Wissensgeschichte der deutschen Landwirtschaft (Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010). Such approach also limits the possible connections between Nazi plant breeding and other fascist experiences. Curiously enough, one finds a more developed sensibility toward the interconnections between agricultural science and Nazi regime formation in the more traditional institutional approach of Volker Klemm in Agrarwissenschaften in Dritten Reich. Aufstieg oder Sturz? (1933–1945) (Humboldt Universität, 1994).

53

Tooze, Wages of Destruction, p. 167.

54

Robert E. Kohler, Lords of the Fly: Drosophila Genetics and the Experimental Life (University of Chicago Press, 1994); Karen A. Rader, Making Mice: Standardizing Animals for American Biomedical Research, 1900–1955 (Princeton University Press, 2004); Angela N. H. Creager, The Life of a Virus: Tobacco Mosaic Virus as an Experimental Model, 1930–1965 (University of Chicago Press, 2002). For an overview of the history of biology as history of model organisms, see Jim Endersby, A Guinea Pig’s History of Biology: The Plants and Animals Who Taught Us the Facts of Life (Harvard University Press, 2007); Anita Guerrini, Experimenting with Humans and Animals: From Galen to Animal Rights (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003).

55

Tim Lenoir, “Epistemology Historicized. Making Epistemic Things,” foreword to Rheinberger, An Epistemology of the Concrete, p. xiii.

56

Rheinberger, An Epistemology of the Concrete, p. 7.

57

On the implications of model organisms for the writing of historical narratives, see Tiago Saraiva, “Oranges as model organisms for historians,” Agricultural History 88, no. 3 (2014): 410–416.

58

Staffan Müller-Wille and Hans-Jörg Rheinberger, A Cultural History of Heredity (University of Chicago Press, 2012), p. 136.

59

On industrialized organisms and their importance in history of technology, see Susan R. Schrepfer and Philip Scranton, eds., Industrializing Organisms: Introducing Evolutionary History (Routledge, 2004). On the relations between knowledge production in medicine and agriculture about reproduction, see Adele Clarke, Disciplining Reproduction: Modernity, American Life Sciences, and “the Problems of Sex” (University of California Press, 1998).

60

On the pure line, see Nills Roll-Hansen, “Sources of Johannsen’s genotype theory,” in A Cultural History of Heredity III: 19th and Early 20th Centuries, ed. S. Müller-Wille and H.-J. Rheinberger (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2005); Christophe Bonneuil and Frédéric Thomas, Gènes, pouvoirs et profits: recherche publique et régimes de production des savoirs de Mendel aux OGM (Quae, 2009). More specifically on cloning and plant breeders, see Tiago Saraiva, “Cloning and democracy: Standardized oranges and the Southern Californian experiment with cooperation,” in New Materials: Their Social and Cultural Meanings, ed. A. Slaton (University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming).

61

Tiago Saraiva, “Breeding Europe: Crop diversity, gene banks, and commoners,” in Cosmopolitan Commons: Sharing Resources and Risks across Borders, ed. N. Disco and E. Kranakis (MIT Press, 2013).

62

On the important differences between Johannsen’s concept of pure line and the varieties produced through self-fertilization by breeders in the nineteenth century, see chapter 1.

63

On the importance of the chemical metaphor for geneticists at the turn of the century, see Staffan Müller-Wille, “Leaving inheritance behind: Wilhelm Johansen and the politics of Mendelism,” in A Cultural History of Heredity IV: Heredity in the Century of the Gene, ed. S. Müller-Wille, H.-J. Rheinberger, and J. Dupré (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, 2008).