Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Such conflation was, of course, not automatic. It was, in part, attributable to experimental practices used at the University of Halle. Frölich and his disciples were the ones who established the standards for the classification of types of curl in Karakul pelts for commercial animal breeders.[48] For commercialization of the furs there was no need for any knowledge of the ways the curl developed; their value would be the same if the hair’s orientation was from tail to skull or the opposite, as long as the fur presented an attractive homogeneous pattern. But to make decisions about selections in a Karakul flock, such information was crucial. Frölich and Hornitschek emphasized that several selection programs had been undertaken trying to fix bloodlines of Karakul for different types of curl with no knowledge of the process of curl development, thus leading to different lines that were actually biologically identical. Their different furs represented only different stages of development of the same type. As they stated, “selection of Karakul following the character curl type can’t be solved by sheep raisers in their herd, and private initiative has no role in this class of tasks. Only scientific agriculture institutes may and should undertake such research work.”[49]

Since the 1910s, experimentalists had tried to prove that the main characteristics of the Karakul followed Mendel’s laws: brightness, color, curl, and tail shape. In 1917 Erwin Baur began to edit Bibliotheca genetica, the first publication dedicated exclusively to the discipline of genetics in Germany. Its first volume was authored by the Austrian geneticist Leopold Adametz on no other subject than Mendelian inheritance in Karakul sheep.[50] The research confirmed that the trait that gave skins their value—the curly hairs—were dominant, thus allowing for crossings of Karakul rams with ewes of other sheep varieties. Sheep farmers, after acquiring a pureblood Karakul ram, could produce valuable furs very quickly by crossing it with some local breed. The negative side was the inability to identify pureblood Karakul and the proliferation of rams and ewes sold as such when they were actually the result of recent crossings. To have a transparent market for breeding Karakul sheep, it was thus necessary to have genealogical certificates asserting the origins of the animals in question.

^{Figure 6.6 The register of the flock of Karakul at the University of Halle.}

^{(Frölich and Hornitschek, Das Karakulschaf und seine Zucht, p. 149)}

The scientists at the University of Halle were the ones who established such normalized certificates.[51] The records first used to experiment with the university sheep became the ones used by German commercial breeders, forming the base of the Society of German Karakul breeders. The files included information about genealogy (four generations), birth date, brightness score, curl score, mating register, and so on. Another crucial element of a ram’s file was a photograph. The procedure for taking such a photograph was standardized as to illumination, exposure time, distance, and other details. The curl type had to be recognizable, and the picture had to be taken 24 hours after birth, for from that point on the sheep secondary hair began to dominate and the curls to relax, greatly diminishing the market value of the skin. The recording practices that standardized the Karakul as a scientific model organism thus led as well to its standardization as an industrialized organism ready to be marketable.

Circulating Karakul I: Uzbekistan, Germany, and South West Africa

Without the genealogical books developed at Halle, sheep farmers wouldn’t know how to evaluate a ram or an ewe sold by a commercial breeder. Further, Halle breeders systematically crossed Karakul with other sheep breeds, advising farmers which cheap local sheep to cross with their expensive pureblood Karakul to still get the valuable furs. Pureblood Karakul were extremely hard to obtain, more so after the Soviet Union forbade any export out of its borders from 1920 on. Only by crossing Karakul with local breeds were Karakul farmers able to establish themselves in very different geographic settings.[52] This was why Gärtner insisted on the importance of Hornitscheck’s presence at Halle. It was only through the work done at Halle that Karakul could travel across Europe and sustain the German would-be settlers of the General Plan East.