Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The exterior design of the building was historicist, as was characteristic of the regime: columns on the main facade, engravings in stone, solid walls, porched terraces, and a traditional overhanging tiled roof.[104] Practical considerations such as the dimensions, the location, and the illumination of the laboratories were, of course, also taken into account, but Câmara bluntly asserted that he wanted to avoid “the modern style and its juxtaposition of containers, with no character, poorly adapted to our climate and being in all its manifestations an outrage to the beauty of the Portuguese landscape.”[105]

And in fact, in the pages of Panorama, the official illustrated magazine of the National Propaganda Secretariat (Secretariado de Propaganda Nacional), the Experiment Station was publicized as one of the best expressions of the revival of national architecture, and was thus included as part of the Good Taste Campaign launched by the Secretariat aimed at educating the Portuguese people to live like Portuguese.[106] Interior designs, private houses, hotels, state buildings, literature, street decoration, and music all had to express the idea of Portugal as standardized by the Propaganda Secretariat, which was directed by the former futurist intellectual António Ferro. From his office, decorated with a photograph of Salazar and with modernist furniture, Ferro directed his propaganda campaign. Everything was rural, but a streamlined rural as if seen through futurist lenses. While architects normalized the historical elements that made a house Portuguese, ethnographers standardized regional dances and costumes defining Portuguese folk culture and poets transformed historical figures into Portuguese national myths. This image of the alleged eternal rural Portugal was exhaustively reproduced in films, books, exhibitions, the press, theater, and radio.[107]

^{Figure 2.8 The National Agricultural Experiment Station, ca. 1940.}

^{(Fundo Mário Novais, Art Library of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation)}

The National Agricultural Experiment Station was a crucial element of this “futurism of the past.”[108] More than the architecture of its building, the institution reproduced fascist life at a scale even larger than the one of Ferro’s Propaganda Secretariat. The technoscientific organisms that came out of the station materialized that “futurism of the past” by sustaining and expanding large estates in Alentejo, by providing a basis for a campaign for bread self-sufficiency, by bringing together wheat fields and chemical industries, and by enabling the first corporatist structures of the New State.

^{Figure 2.9 A photograph (ca. 1947) of the office of António Ferro, the New State’s head of propaganda, combining streamlined Portuguese pre-modern traditions with modernist furniture and carpet. Note the portrait of Salazar on the cabinet.}

^{(Fundo Mário Novais, Art Library of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation)}

3 Potatoes: Pests, Plant Breeding, and the Growth of the Nazi State

World War I Famines and Potatoes

It is only appropriate that a discussion of things rooting Germans in the national soil focus on potatoes. In 1934, one year into Nazi rule, about 47 million tons of potatoes were harvested in Germany, whereas the joint output of all grains (wheat, rye, barley, and oats) amounted to 21 million tons.[1] In the 1930s Germany raised more potatoes than any other country on only 15 percent of its cultivable land.[2] When Reichsbauernführer (Reich peasant leader) Richard Walther Darré, the main ruralist ideologue of the regime, following the Italian example, launched the Battle for Production (Erzeugungsschlacht), in November of 1934, potatoes were given a crucial role in freeing Germany from world markets.[3]