Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

It is, of course, possible to produce other fascist ontologies. Here is another one: horses, mice, dogs, birds, reindeer, and flies. This was precisely the ontology devised by Curzio Malaparte in Kaputt (1944) to describe the hunger, slaughter, and devastation that occurred across eastern Europe in World War II.[81] The contradictory and controversial novelist, an early enthusiast of the fascist movement who took part in Mussolini’s March on Rome in 1922 and who after falling from grace with the Duce was sent into internal exile from 1933 to 1938, found in nonhuman animals a literary way to deal with the apocalyptic reality unleashed by Nazi imperial expansion. Animals weaved together Jewish ghettos, mass executions, battle scenes, Nazi leaders’ lavish courts, and bombed cities in a text that blended journalism, history, and fiction. For his many readers, Malaparte’s cynical style and fantastic compositions—the white marble sheet of the iced Lake Ladoga in northwestern Russia, from which emerged hundreds of dead horses’ heads; the “anti-armored-car” dogs that terrified German Panzer divisions in the Ukrainian steppe; the Naples flies thriving on heat and corpses multiplied by a never-ending war—captured the scandal of the Third Reich more accurately than the works of conventional writers did. And it was through animals (mice) that Malaparte produced one of the first accounts of the systematic character of Nazi persecution of Jews across Europe.[82]

Mimicking Malaparte’s gesture, I have opted to bring into the narrative organisms with the power to exemplify different dimensions of fascism. The choice of technoscientific animals and plants was determined by their historical significance in constituting a fascist alternative modernity, by their ability to embody fascism. They form a bestiary combining historians of science and technology and STS scholars’ organism-centered narratives with political and cultural historians’ more general concerns with the historical nature of fascism.

I Nation

That the survival of the organic nation depended as much on weaponry as on food was the lesson learned from the food crisis of World War I by every radical right-wing movement in Europe. The Fascists’ argument was simple: Not only had dependence on cheap cereals from the Americas impoverished peasants, driving them out of the fields; it had also exposed European countries’ vulnerability in case of war. Geopolitical considerations were intertwined with the concrete bodily experience of hunger to make the case that the organic nation could grow only on the national soil. Characteristically, fascists championed a turn to autarky by increasing domestic production and supporting peasant populations.

What might be perceived as a traditionalist back-to-the-land movement made sense only because of science. As the chapters in this part of the book make clear, technoscientific organisms made the radical nationalism of Mussolini, Salazar, and Hitler plausible. A new class of organisms promised to increase the productivity of the national soil, now allegedly able to feed the organic nation and to free it from constraints imposed by the British Empire or the United States. Large-scale campaigns for food production, the first mass mobilizations of the three regimes, were based on new strains of wheat, potatoes, and pigs. The limits of fascism in improving peasants’ conditions and in countervailing urbanization are well known, but in the three cases considered in this book liberal capitalism disappeared from the countryside and was replaced by gigantic bureaucratic structures controlling the production, the processing, and the distribution of food.. By following the trajectories of new strains of wheat resistant to lodging, potatoes immune to late blight, and fat bodenständig pigs, the narrative explores how campaigns turned into state structures, illuminating the process of making a fascist state. The aim is to understand how fascist alternative modernity first came into being by cultivating the national soil with technoscientific organisms.

Chapters 1 and 2 consider the importance of the geneticist Nazareno Strampelli’s wheat “elite races” for the Italian “Battle of Wheat” (1925) and the Portuguese “Wheat Campaign” (1929) and for the institutionalization of the regimes of Mussolini and Salazar. Chapters 3 and 4 develop a similar argument for Nazism and the “Battle for Production” (Erzeugunsschlacht) launched in 1934, a year after Hitler’s seizure of power. Grain was also important in Germany’s food policy, but the technoscientific organisms through which I will follow the entanglements between standardizing life and Nazism are pigs and potatoes. I argue that these two organisms were at the core of a major effort by the Nazi regime to root Germans in the national soil—an effort that was aimed at transforming German society into a national community, a Gesellschaft into a Gemeinschaft.[1]