Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

Part I of the book follows a traditional division by country: Italy, Portugal, and Germany. The order corresponds loosely to the chronological succession of the seizures of power by Mussolini, Salazar, and Hitler. Chapters 1–4 describe the intertwining of geneticists’ work with efforts to institutionalize the new regimes by rooting national communities in the countries’ soils. Chapters 1 and 2 highlight the role of new strains of wheat in the Battle of Wheat in Italy and the Wheat Campaign in Portugal, the first mass mobilizations in both regimes. By following the trajectory of the Ardito wheat, the geneticist Nazareno Strampelli’s most famous creation, it is possible not only to reveal how the fascist state reached different parts of Italy but also to reveal how Mussolini’s first campaign traveled to Portugal. When examining the Portuguese case, the narrative explores how new standardized forms of wheat contributed to the development of all-embracing corporatist state agencies, a critical subject in the new fascist social order: corporatism promised a society built on organic units and “economic solidarities” in contrast to the alleged artificiality of liberal ideology based on individuals as well as to the Bolshevik obsession with social classes.

Corporatism also figures in chapters 3 and 4, which deal with the German Battle of Production and the activities of the Reichsnährstand, the institutional form of the ideology of Blut und Boden and the organization responsible for organizing the peasant world with a policy declaration on every issue related to food production. The technoscientific organisms structuring the narrative are potatoes in chapter 3 and pigs in chapter 4. The research dynamics at the Imperial Biological Institute (Biologische Reichsanstalt für Land- und Forstwirtschaft, abbreviated BRA) coping with the multiple pests afflicting German potato fields (wart, Colorado beetle, late blight, viruses) is put in relation with the growing infrastructure of the Reichsnährstand in an exemplary case of co-production of science and the state: each new experimental system at the BRA corresponded to an expansion of the power and reach of the Reichsnährstand. As for pigs, the subject of chapter 4, the development by academic animal breeders of performance records allows us to follow their transformation into organisms embodying fascism through standards measuring their Bodenständigkeit (rootedness in the soil)—a major concept in Nazi ideology.

Part II of the book deals with the expansionist ambitions of the three regimes, placing Germany’s brutal invasion of eastern Europe in a continuum with European colonial history. Chapter 5 considers coffee, rubber, and cotton, three typical elements of colonial plantation stories, and delves into Italian occupation of Ethiopia, German imperial rule in eastern Europe, and Portuguese colonialism in northern Mozambique. The plantation schemes, which had plant breeders’ artifacts as their material basis, made massive use of forced labor to serve the imperial economy. Without ignoring the different levels of violence unleashed by the three fascisms, the text suggests that we can gain significant insight into the history of fascism by considering their empires together. I take seriously Heinrich Himmler’s intention of making Auschwitz the Agricultural Experiment Station for the colonization of the east, and I compare the work done there on a rubber substitute with the work done at the Portuguese Cotton Research Center in Mozambique and the work done at Italian coffee experiment stations in Ethiopia.

Chapter 6 is the most original in terms of methodology, for it takes a single technoscientific organism—Karakul sheep—and follows that organism’s role in the settlement of the frontier for the three fascist empires. As we shall see, the Karakul sheep’s ability to thrive under harsh environmental conditions and its high value in the fur market made it a perfect companion species for white settler’s imperial expansion. The Animal Breeding Institute at the University of Halle is dealt with as a center of circulation, establishing standards and producing the rams to be used not only in white settlers farms in German possessions in eastern Europe but also in Italian settlement schemes in Libya and Ethiopia, and in Portuguese colonization of Southwestern Angola. The various local Karakul sheep experiment stations located in frontier spaces are treated as experiments in colonial sociability, revealing the connections between sheep breeding and the genocides perpetrated by the three regimes.