In 1933, a law was passed renaming the first Sunday after Michaelmas (the Feast of Michael and the Archangels, September 29) as the day of a Harvest Festival (Erntedankfest). The festival, organized by Joseph Goebbels’ propaganda services and held on the Bückeberg, a ridge near Hamelin in Lower Saxony, attracted about 500,000 peasants in its first year, and about 1.2 million in 1937.[3] It celebrated rooted-in-the-soil peasants as the “blood source of the German people.”
Hundreds of trains carried peasants from farming communities into Hamelin, guided not by the Pied Piper but by the words of the Führer: “The future of the nation… depends exclusively on the conservation of the peasant.” From early morning on, the masses climbed the Bückeberg, where the stage had been set and where they would wait all day long for Hitler’s arrival, meanwhile watching the endless columns snaking up from the valley. It took more than seven hours to fill up the site. Not until early evening did Hitler’s airplane land in Hamelin, after which he was driven to the Bückeberg in a convertible. The climb—the “path through the people” (Der Weg durch das Volk)—was to become the highlight of the celebration. Entranced peasants (a majority of them women) were allowed to touch the Führer. One account describes the scene as follows:
“As—in the distance on the plain down below—the motorcade came closer, the uninterrupted “Heil!” of thousands and thousands of voices rolled like a hurricane from the hillside down towards the man who had managed to cast his spell on the German people…. He reached out everywhere to touch hands—which people, in their hundreds, were thrusting out at him from all sides—stroke cheeks, and ruffled hair. Close behind him came Göring, with a broad grin, Goebbels, Hess, and the others, all in the best of spirits and greeting people on all sides.”[4]
This gathering of more than a million people differed from the well-ordered rallies filmed by Leni Riefenstahl at Nuremberg, being closer to traditional peasant festivals. But the plans for the Harvest Festival didn’t lack for ambition. Indeed, Albert Speer, Hitler’s favorite architect, built for Goebbels a model of a grandiose amphitheater for the Bückeberg, with a 1,200-meter-long earth wall facing a great stone stage.
Although Speer’s amphitheater was never built at full scale, the Bückeberg did earn the status of Reichsthingplatz (Imperial Place of Things), the leading site among the 1,200 planned Thingplätze (Thingplaces) envisaged by Goebbels and his Thingbewegung (Thing movement).[5] The Thingbewegung organized völkish gatherings in outdoor amphitheaters where, besides propaganda actions, theater and dance were performed in thing style. These thingplaces were carefully located so as to materialize Germaneness in the landscape. The use of the old word ‘Thing’ was meant to evoke its ancient meaning: a gathering of living people and their ancestors, but also of rocks, trees, animals, and even gods—all the things that allegedly constituted the German community.
The agricultural produce displayed at the base of the stage from which the Nazi leaders made their emphatic proclamations assumed the status of things. Potatoes, wheat, and rye informed the national community of blood and soil. And as was the case with the other elements of the scenery, such as the standardized traditional costumes designed by Reichsnährstand officials, these cultivated things didn’t derive from immemorial practices, being instead of very recent origin. The things that allegedly brought into being the German community were the result of the scientific practices of German academic plant and animal breeders. Technoscientific forms of life were to root Germans in the national soil and settle them in newly conquered lands.
In recent years, historians of science as well as scholars of Science Studies have insisted on the use of the notion of ‘thing’, speaking particularly of “thick things” (“a phrase meant to invoke the multiple meanings ascribed to particular material artifacts, even those apparently subject to the thinning regime of modern science”[6]). Scientific things, it is argued, encapsulate a much richer world than the one associated with the thin scientific objects of traditional historical narratives characterized by their detachment from culture. Thick things have been instrumental in the production of historical accounts entangling modern scientific artifacts with political, economical, social, and cultural meanings, thus offering an enhanced general relevance to historical studies of science. Or, as Ken Alder puts it, “the things of the world are assembled as much according to ethical, aesthetic, and political prescriptions as in the service of any narrow utility.”[7]
The notion of scientific things has helped us in reimagining democratic practices as suggested in formulations such as Bruno Latour’s “Parliament of Things,” pointing to more inclusive constitutions recognizing that societies are made of associations of humans and non-humans.[8] In this view, the contribution of science to democracy has more to do with its ability to bring in new matters of concern—new things from which public debate emerges—than with science’s producing matters of fact offering undisputable guidelines for political action. This praise of the experimentalism associated with the democratic process seems an appropriate way of engaging with climate, genomes, or nanotechnologies in our present democracies; one that acknowledges the composite nature of our societies and that doesn’t separate nature and society.[9] Latour thus calls for taking for serious the etymology of the Icelandic Althing or the Norwegian Storthing as exemplary parliaments for current times, political spaces in which people assemble around things.[10]
Now, the problem is inclusive constitutions were also being performed at Albert Speer’s Imperial Place of Things. The things assembled there were also human and non-human, but instead of contributing to a more democratic society the collective involved by the long earth wall was fascist. The aim at the Bückeberg was to gather the constituents of the German Volk as envisioned by the Nazis. The inclusiveness of things also meant the exclusion of many humans—including “rootless” Jews, who allegedly were not able to establish the same relations with German soil. Nazi thingplaces were, to be sure, no parliaments, and thing talk has thus no inherent democratic virtues—a point that current scholars would have no difficulty admitting, but a point they haven’t noticed. Scientific standardized organisms, such as all the animals and plants discussed in this book, were designed as things embodying fascism. More than that, they helped fascists make the case that their reveries could be realized, putting aside liberal ways of organizing collective life. New strains that made Italy or Portugal self-sufficient in wheat for the first time in its history, even if for only a short period, constituted a powerful demonstration that it was possible to form a national community feeding itself on the produce of the national soil. Kok-sagyz plants coming out of Auschwitz to transform Ukrainian landscapes promised a European New Order in which “inferior races” would produce cash crops that would supply German industry. Nothing could be more distant from the promotion of democratic assemblies of things.
3
Mats Burström and Bernhard Gelderblom. “Dealing with difficult heritage: The case of Bückeberg, site of the Third Reich Harvest Festival,”
4
Konrad Warner, “Harvest festival, 1935,” in
5
Rainer Stommer,
6
Ken Alder, “Introduction to focus section on thick things,”
8
Bruno Latour,
9
Such views of democracy as experimental process owe much to pragmatism as advocated by John Dewey in