Fascist Pigs: Technoscientific Organisms and the History of Fascism

The starvation events of World War I were repeatedly used in subsequent years to justify increasing support for the plant pathology research undertaken at the Biologische Reichsanstalt für Land- und Forstwirtschaft (meaning Biological Imperial Institute for Agriculture and Forestry, and henceforth abbreviated to BRA), the institution responsible for keeping German fields safe from menacing pathogens such as insects, funguses, and bacteria.[15] The BRA was founded in 1898 as a biological section of the Imperial Public Health Office, earning independent status in 1905 as a department of the Ministry of Interior.[16] Its first task was to study the living conditions of pests of cultivated plants, the basis for their elimination, and the development and testing of chemical means to defend crops.[17] Even if Germany would have to wait for the seizure of power by the Nazis and their Battle of Production to implement a plant defense law comparable to the U.S. Plant Quarantine Act (1912), the Canadian Destructive Pest Act (1910), or the English Destructive Insect and Pests Act (1907), the institutionalization of the BRA was well in tune with the pattern of professionalization of plant pathology in most Western countries.[18] Between 1880 and 1910 the majority of governments in Europe and North America were founding state-run services for the research and control of crop diseases.[19] In Germany it was also through the BRA that a service covering the different regions of the Reich was launched in 1903, responsible for collecting statistics on plant pathologies and for offering information and advice to local farmers.[20] The Plant Protection Service (Pflanzenschutzdienst) and its network of local offices (Hauptstellen für Pflanzenschutz) were connected simultaneously to the local structure of the Agriculture Chambers (Landwirtschaftskammern) and to the central administration, with the BRA in Berlin serving as the central node of the entire structure.

Although BRA scientists made big efforts to eradicate plant diseases in vineyards, pear orchards, and wheat fields, potatoes were their first matter of concern and their prime object of research. The botanist Otto Appel, who entered the institution in 1899 and would become its director from 1922 to 1933 as the most renowned German plant pathologist of the interwar period, based much of his early career on identifying and classifying potato diseases.[21] In 1919, invoking “the extraordinary role played by potatoes” in World War I, with financial support from the German Potato Cultivators Society, he was able to launch a Research Institute for Potato Cultivation (Forschungsinstitut für Kartoffelbau), which he directed until 1923, when he integrated it into the structure of the BRA.[22] Instead of breeding resistant potatoes and then distributing them to selected farmers, as was done in Italy and in Portugal, BRA scientists were to work closely with the well-established community of German commercial breeders, developing methods to identify immunity and establishing standards for the proofing of commercial breeders’ new releases. Such procedure only confirms the findings of Thomas Wieland on the tight relation between commercial interests and academic plant breeders at the University of Halle and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Plant Breeding.[23]

Appel’s work on the taxonomy of potato pathologies was complemented by his interest in plant breeding, which demonstrated the coincident interests of pathologists and breeders.[24] If in its beginnings the BRA counted mainly on chemical pesticides to fight crop diseases, there was a shift in the 1920s toward the breeding of resistant crops. That shift was apparent from the enlargement of the facilities in Berlin-Dahlem that occurred after 1920, when Appel restructured the BRA to include laboratories and experimental fields for potato breeding. Chemicals and pathogens then had to share place with potatoes themselves as major objects of research. By 1907 the BRA had 14 scientists. The number would climb to 73 in 1936, and to 93 in 1940.[25] Crucial in this expansion was the success in breeding potato varieties resistant to potato wart.

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