Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

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]