Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

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.

^{Figure 7.1 The 1933 Harvest Celebration at Bückeberg.}

^{(Achim Thiele and Kurt Goeltzer, Deutsche Arbeit im Vierjahresplan, Gerhard Stalling, 1933, p. 125)}

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]