Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The claim for integrating nonhuman animals in the narrative is well in tune with suggestions by environmental historians to build historical accounts by paying attention to bison, dogs, or mosquitoes. Here, I suggest also looking in detail at the experimental practices that standardized animals, not taking them as stable entities. Had we ignored the work undertaken by animal geneticists at the University of Halle, we would not have been able to understand how Karakul traveled from Uzbekistan to South West Africa, or from Germany to Italy and from there to North Africa. The circulation of Karakul was enhanced by the experiments in hair development at Halle, but also by the trials on crossing with local sheep breeds and the research on artificial insemination undertaken in the experiment stations in Libya and Angola. More than that, experiment stations as exemplary settlements were experimenting with colonialism at large, materializing fascism dreams of Lebensraum and Grande Italia, and “Portugal is not a small country.”

Conclusion

In the fascist era, rituals followed a tight calendar. Nazis celebrated the 1933 seizure of power in January, the anniversary of the founding of the Party in February, National Mourning Day in March, the Führer’s birthday in April, National Labor Day in May, and so on.[1] Among the continuous succession of mass events, the notorious September General Gatherings of the Party in Nuremberg have rightly received more attention than any other Nazi ritual. Notions such as the “aestheticization of politics” and “political religion” have been fruitfully associated with these carefully staged rallies.[2] The rhetoric of the Führer, magnified by Albert Speer’s lighting effects and Leni Riefenstahl’s camera work, allegedly transformed the amorphous members of German society into purposeful organs of the national community.

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.